: I remember watching that refugee ship from Halo Wars being destroyed just as
: it got fed up of waiting with hundreds of Covenant fighting in their
: position, and at first I couldn't help but think I just had thousands of
: people die to my poor command decisions. Even then, I thought I could do
: pretty well as a fleet commander. What was there to it as UNSC? Hammer
: together, move like water, reorganize swiftly.

: A few experiments of mine consisted in testing equal amounts of points
: between Covenant and UNSC ships. 250, 300, and finally 500. Being a Fleet
: Commander in the Halo universe is the worst job.

: It is true to to the canon in this way: You have to strike with as much force
: in unison as you can as UNSC, and the Covenant tear through things as if
: they were made of paper. If you think you can pull the same strategies as
: the Covenant when you're UNSC and expect to win, you're only going to see
: the horrors of warfare.

: Besides, in here? Everything counts. Boarding ships, command dice,
: initiative, exploding dice, terrain, even that lone stat you dismiss as a
: useless, unwinnable situation could become the chekhov's gun of that part
: of the story that changes its course in 180 degrees.

: My first experiment were 250 and 300, playing with myself (har har), picking
: up whatever advantages I could see from either side. Corvettes can resist
: well from time to time, but united strikes can kill them if you're smart
: on your approach. But the CCS Class Battlecruisers? They resist far too
: much, and delaying on destroying them will only mean defeat. You have to
: kill them as swiftly as possible, and try to have as few targets as
: possible, going for one-on-one. For all intents and purposes, the Covenant
: dominated the UNSC.

: Eventually, I realized the flaws of my experiments: UNSC were meant to fight
: at a distance, and doing what they had actually been doing in the war:
: Running. What's more, Stanford's strategies rely a lot more on boarding
: rather than naval strategies, which makes pelicans and Spartans even more
: important for victory. I was also playing on a tiny board, much less than
: what the manual states a game should be in (4' by 4'), so the UNSC were
: essentially lambs to the slaughter in this condition. They need space to
: move, escape, and hurt the enemy.

: Due to this, I hope they release a more fleet-focused Fleet Commander card in
: the future, most likely Preston Cole's, as he's more focused around
: spaceship strategies than boarding as Stanforth is. I think it'd be fun
: playing as him.

: On one hand, I think I understand peoples' fears on exploding dice that are
: around Spartan Games' games, which makes things enormously random, and
: many youtube players have commented on the same difficulty on making
: interesting games to show without having to make things seem cheap. On the
: other... well, I've learned through D&D as both a player and a very long
: time GM: NEVER TRUST THE DICE.

: So in my last experiment for the day, I had a 500 vs. 500 match, randomly
: rolled blockade, UNSC in the offensive. Capital ships were accompanied CCS
: Class Battlecruisers and accompanied UNSC Marathon Cruisers. Two other
: Marathon cruisers and four elements of frigates, and also a lone CCS class
: battlecruiser and two corvette elements.

: Things seemed to go well in the first turn. In spite of the Covenant getting
: to attack first and hitting the UNSC's capital ship and erasing the
: titanium armor, the UNSC decided not to risk the Covenant capital ship
: they had in front of them, so they fired in an unison... damaged it, left
: a pair of vulnerable token due to both the MAC gun barrage and a
: successful crit, but the ship resisted, so they launched a hail of
: missiles from a distance, using the distance advantage...

: The Capital ship of the Covenant was destroyed in the volley. In my mind, I
: could hear the numerous crews inside of the frigates and cruisers cheering
: in a thunderous unison upon seeing the behemoth torn apart by the power of
: the combined MAC guns and rains of missiles. Tactically, the UNSC had the
: upper hand now as their forces were divided, and couldn't operate with
: coherency with distance. For a moment, it seemed the UNSC would win a shot
: at this.

: It didn't last.

: The opposite wing of the Covenant decided to attack the UNSC flanks,
: ferociously destroying an element of frigates, and marathon after
: marathon... eventually destroying the UNSC's capital ship as well, leaving
: only one marathon cruiser and a handful of Frigate elements to fend off
: for themselves. The order came to form up, forming a single battlegroup,
: but things were dark.

: UNSC got to kill the other corvettes, and got to seriously damage the other
: accompanying the other CCS class battlecruiser, but the covenant attacked
: in the back, furiously performing coordinated strikes, cutting through
: ships once the titanium coating failed, destroying ship after ship, until
: they got to aim at the aft of the UNSC ships.

: Things turned desperate, to say the least. The Covenant in this game are
: absolutely deadly if they get up close with UNSC ships, and the fewer
: space the UNSC has to maneuver and less distance they have, they get
: turned into mincemeat. Eventually, I decided the only thing that could be
: done, more as a "what-the-hell" strategy. I deployed the
: remaining two pelicans onto the CCS, and made all ships hard burn away
: from the enemy. In the first turn, the pelican boarders and the CCS were
: put on a standstill, and I didn't hold much hope they'd survive. They had
: the UNSC ships with their afts straight for the Covenant to shoot at, and
: destroy the damaged ships.

: It seemed that the enemy would move in pursuit, but the dice had new plans.
: Standforth's dice had accumulated three thunders. Eventually the order
: came through.

: "Take it to them!"

: The two pelican crews moved forward as if in a psychotic frenzy, cut through
: the enemy as if the long-held-back fury against their alien enemies,
: shooting and killing them from inside the ship. Four security dice plus an
: extra two and two due to Standforth's special order. Eight dice against
: four of the Covenant. UNSC wins, boarding dice get rolled, totals added...
: thirteen.

: Critical core breach.

: Just an inch away from the 8'' blast radius, the surviving UNSC vessels can
: only watch as the Covenant ship and its cohorts are vaporized, alongside
: the Pelican crews that sacrificed their lives to destroy the Covenant. And
: finally, after almost an hour of violence, the battlefield remained still.

: Three surviving frigate elements, alongside a single remaining Marathon
: Cruiser. All of them damaged, little holding them back from a defeat taken
: in a swift moment.

: Four Covenant ships against five lost from the UNSC. By all rights, it should
: have been a big victory in comparison to everything that had happened. And
: yet even as I went on to make delicious ceviche when I stopped my task of
: being a fleet commander for a moment, I kept thinking about all of those
: lives I lost from the side of the UNSC and the heroism of those
: Marines/ODST that infiltrated the ship, and blew up the ship's generator,
: making the battle a victory for the humans. Although a costly one. This is
: too close to canon for my dreams to ever be a fleet commander.

: I can't wait to play this game with somebody else. I want to improve my
: strategy with the UNSC.

It's cool that you can have such a story behind your games.

I'd love to have some more tabletop games, but I just don't have room for more stuff these days :|