One on One

So anyway, last night I cracked open the Star Trek III version of the STSCS and set up a quick battle between those two old enemies, the Constitution class and Klingon D7. I used the Basic game which means the stats for the ships are about 1/3 those of the full version. I wanted to test whether this might be a workable system for fighting those small fleet actions of 3 to 4 ships per side. Because i was using the basic game, I dug out the ship sheets which require counters to keep track of power. First thing I discovered was that counters are a bad idea as every few minutes a counter would fly across the table due to a careless move. Future games will use the written sheet and i'm going to see if I can throw together a condensed version of the sheet which comes with the game.
Power allocation took a turn or two to get my head round but i was soon allocating those points out pretty quickly. I tried to keep to doctrine ie that the Klingon ship would come flying in hard, weapons charged and eager for the kill and with only minimal shields wheras the Federation ship was much more cautious in it's approach, trading speed for shields and long range weapons.
The range closed pretty quickly and in the second turn, the Constitution class scored a lucky hit with a torpedo which crumpled the Klingon's front shields, allowing two phaser hits to pass through and strike the undefended ship. These hits took their toll on the Klingon's engines, and although in the next turn he managed to return fire with disruptors, he struggled to put up much of a defense and the Federation cruiser knocked a couple of superstructure points off the D7. With the D7's speed reduced, the Federation ship easily stayed at long range and popped away with torpedoes until the Klingo was pretty much dead in the water.
This little skirmish proved that the game has some value and is worth me spending some time on, possibly with a view to organising a few games down the line a bit.