Common Gamer Afflictions #1 - AKA Losing Badly

Last night, I suffered from our most frequently encountered affliction; namely, I got absolutely stonked at games night.

Turn one, so far so good
 

Gaz and I set up a 800 points Dystopian Wars game with his trusty Brits against my Prussians.  This was my first  time running the Prussians and hoped to make use of their powerful guns and plentiful assault troops.  Ahem. . .

This was the table after the first couple activations; top to bottom I had:

Bombers x 2
Cruisers x 2 and Frigates x 3
Battleship
Frigates x 3
Cruisers x 2
Scoutships x 2

The Kingdom of Britannia had:

Destroyers x 4
Deadnought
Frigates x 3
Vanguard Sub
Frigates x 4
War Rotors x 2

Initially, I enjoyed some success with my scoutships doing a lot of damage to the war rotors and, later on, the frigates.  I tried to avoid the dreadnought in the first couple turns and swing everything on the left round to catch it in the flank.  Unfortunately, the Brits Destroyers and Dreadnought moved straight up and blew both bombers out the sky, as well as putting a lot of damage onto the two cruisers.

End of turn two - note the red (damage) numbers next to the battleship!
 

On the second turn, the Dreadnought got four of his turrets in range of the battleship and tore chunks out of it.  On my right, the Brit frigates carefully positioned themselves to hammer the scoutships and cruisers.  Finally, my battleship and frigates tried to salvage some honour by taking down the Dreadnought.  It didn't go as planned.

Wreck Row
 

On the third (and final) turn, The Brits tried to mop up the remnants of the Prussian fleet. Despite my battleship only having one hull point left, no Ack Ack or CC and zero assault marines, Gaz tried to sink it with his Destroyers.  Some terrible dice rolls saw the battleship still afloat, barely.  Lastly I tried to take out the Dreadnought with the Tesla Generator, but disappointing, it failed to activate.

Still, as far as heavy, HEAVY defeats go, this was fairly enjoyable.  Gaz is a great opponent, and I'm starting to relax at the club now (I'm still a bit of a noob there.)  As always, it's important to try and learn from defeats, so:

i)  There's a difference between knowing the rules and knowing the detail of the rules.  My first turn was hampered by Gaz playing a game card that made me discard my own hand of cards - I simply didn't think I was allowed to cancel this action using the Sturginium mechanic.  In turn 2, when I tried to trash Gaz's hand of cards, he stopped my straight away. So, know the details.

Next Time Tommy!
 

ii)  Squadrons of two medium class vehicles suck in Dystopian Wars.  In previous games, I suffered from having too few squadrons to activate, penalising me at the end of each turn (Dystopian Wars uses an alternate activation mechanic.)  However, having lots of small squadrons (I had 4 x 2 medium squadrons) is not the solution to this problem, as each squadron simply doesn't have the firepower to do any real damage with only two ships.

So, not an auspicious start for my Prussians.  Next time (apart from being fully painted,) the fleet should feature the Sky Fortress and hopefully some of the newly released ships.  We'll see what happens.