Battle of the Philipine Sea

as the Privateer Commander in Battle of the Phillipine Sea

Host : Lord Firefall's Lair (firefall24@centuryinter.net)

I first joined this game out of curiosity. This is the first time I had ever seen the Killing Floor addon, and wanted to check it out. I like playing the Privateers (one of my top 3 favorite races to play) so I chose them without thinking too hard about it. Since the original mission of this game was Most Tonnage after 30 turns, I almost immediately regretted that decision. I mean, the pirates are supposed to capture ships, not destroy them...so there would be very little chance of winning under these conditions.

This game started out with me at the bottom center of the standard map. The Borg to my right, the Feds to my left and up a little, and right above me was the Lizards (played by a rookie friend of mine.) I figured that the most important thing would be to steal some Fireclouds ASAP. They are one of the most powerful tools in the game. I made a deal with the Lizards to clone the first firecloud, since I could not. The lizards turned out to be the only ally that I made in this game, and aside from cloning for me in exchange for some MBR's and Chunnelers, I pretty much ignored him for the first 30 turns. I figured that he would make a good buffer between me and the rest of the players, and he would get wiped out due to his horrible starting location (pretty much in the middle of the map!) Here's a high level map...

Suddenly, I got lucky. It turns out that the tonnage counter is not compatible with the Killing Floor, so the primary mission was modified to "Highest Score" after 50 turns. Now personally, I think the high score method leaves something to be desired as a goal, because it can be very inaccurate (ie. the person with the higher score is not always winning, he just has a higher score.) In any event, the new goal gave the Pirates an excellent chance to win.

Playing the Privateers with the Killing Floor addon brings in some new strategies. A new twist on the old Wolf Pack routine was to tow a Firecloud into a pile of MBR's with Disruptors or Heavy Disruptors and set the fcode to NTP (no torpedoes). Of course a Firecloud only has 2 torps, not quite enough to kill and MBR since he only got to fire them once, although it would still be worth it. This was a nice trick, because I could tow the ship 160 LY, and bring other MBR's in from another 160 LY out, which means that the Fireclouds were getting attacked by ships that were 320 LY away! That allowed me to keep a bunch of MBR's working on the infrastructure and economy, yet still bring them in for fights when I needed them.

Anyways, while pestering the Borg was entertaining, I also sent a small pack of ships over to see what the Feds had to offer. I kept running into Loki's that were unescorted, so they would battle an MBR and actually get captured! I also grabbed a half-dozen KittyHawk's and even a Nova. Then he got smart and layed a bunch of minefields. In my opinion, this is the best way to fight the Pirates. Better than Loki's :)

After the Fed ships started to dry up, I started working more closely with the Lizards to help them get into the "winners circle". We worked the Birds for a while, then when the Crystal player suddenly appeared with a bunch of DarkWing's to aid the Birds, we used our chunnelers to split. It seemed like they didn't even notice we were gone for a while...heh heh...

After that it was just a matter of keeping our scores above everyone else's. It wasn't until the last few turns that we were sure the Lizards would stay in one of the top three positions. We chose to go after a Borg base that appeared to be his homeworld. The Lizards took it and created a nice lead in score over the Borg at the very end. Pretty good since the Lizards missed about 1/3 of their turns!

Too bad the game ended...the Rebels were in second place for a most of the game yet I never saw them. It would've been nice to have a few Rushes... Oh well.... maybe next time.