I have been working on learning from my mistakes, and while I did not win the latest game between me and my esteemed opponent, I managed to shrink the spread to a final score of 24-23 on a round 7 ring-out. I took pugnacious Eos' tertiary configuration to war against my opponent's gracious Clymene's tertiary configuration, taking the right strategic response to my opponent's choice of Titan (capacitors to resist the shock effects of those plasma drivers). I remembered to not give my opponent time to charge while I wasted time and charge closing. I remembered to do something clever on the first round (laser blade, plasma shotgun, both legs, both senior crew, both capacitors), and I even successfully executed a double-jump, double-body-slam ring-out. However, despite all of the plasma flying and the capacitors firing, it came down to my opponent playing an intercept reaction and preventing Clymene's left shoulder Sensor 1 system from being destroyed by the second body-slam that pushed Clymene off the board and ended the game. That prevented me from scoring 2 VPs, and swung the game from 25-24 in my favour to 24-23 in his.
Interestingly my opponent had two systems left in hand, the Extra Armour 4 mounted on Clymene's back, and the Deflector 1, and the ring-out could have been prevented by reacting with the extra armour. However, he was not confident that Clymene could have held onto that six point lead had he used it to prevent a ring-out. Clymene's left leg and that sensor system had both suffered heavy damage, as well as the front Extra Armour 3 package. While Eos had lost Their plasma shotgun, They were still armed with a rocket pod and laser blade, and that laser blade could have sliced off the sensor and the plasma driver mounted beneath it, removed the heavily damaged leg, or destroyed the frontal armour and gutted Clymene's specialist system (the plasma siphon, in this case).
There were a couple of errors in regard to the rules, that we realized afterwards and as I prepare this report. In round 3 Clymene's attacks should have turned Her around, leaving Her in range of Eos' plasma shotgun counter-attack; the recoil rule works like the impact, grapple, and drag rules except on the attacker relative to the target (rather than the target relative to the attacker), and until Clymene Tertiary is firing diagonally She should be turning 45 degrees with each shot. Likewise Eos should have lost shield tokens over Their left arm when Clymene's laser blade got blasted. That said, sometimes things get forgotten in the heat of the game, and games are about agreeing to a state of affairs. I had a lot of fun this game, and seeing that my opponent was able turn my ring-out against me by making a clever move cheered me immensely.
Clymene has no jump jets in this configuration, and set up to make sure She wasn't boxed in, or ambushed from behind. Eos has two jump jets in this configuration and decided to start like They meant to go on.
Eos starts swinging, but Clymene has the initiative, and the limbs to duck and dodge. Also, Clymene has the firepower to put some hurting on Eos and nearly takes off Their heavily shielded plasma shotgun, with a degree of finesse, using only two shots to avoid being knocked off the board. Eos' plasma capacitors show their quality, recovering the power lost to the shocking effect of raw plasma!
Eos doesn't want to get shocked again, and swinging right with a kick to a yellow habitat forgets that heavy damage to the plasma shotgun has rendered it useless without a crew member repairing or operating it! An opportunistic body-slam using jump jets ends up bursting shields and shattering Clymene's rear armour as She ducks, but up against the edge of the battlefield She deftly reverse and steps around Eos, through the blue habitat left in tile 63, who wrenches Themself around with an initiate-crew operated arm to try and stay out of the arc of that plasma driver mounted on Clymene's left arm.
Clymene still has the initiative and pushes Herself back and right, from tile 53 to tile 64, as Eos' initiate crew 4 works on getting the plasma shotgun's damage remediated enough to fire. Here is where the plasma driver's recoil pushed Clymene away, out of plasma shotgun range, and as it turns out Eos mysteriously takes less damage than one would expect; I think the first shot was blocked by the extra armour 1 and apparently the second shot was ignored. It seems to even out.
Now Eos seizes the initiative as Clymene uses initiate crew to detect a two-habitat yellow building in tile 14 (behind the pink and green building), swinging around with an arm, and jumping over the green and yellow building in tile 63 to close for a plasma shotgun blast! Too close, as it turns out, and Eos has to push additional power to the plasma shotgun to overcome the emergency venting of Clymene's plasma siphon! While this blasts the shields off of Clymene's left side, She uses the passive sensors embedded in the Extra Armour 2 package on Her right-hand side to scan and seize back the initiative!
Obviously not ideal for Eos, but They plow ahead, in this round plowing a kick into Clymene's left leg, shattering the extra armour protecting it, and doing heavy damage. They wind up for another kick, but Clymene's right arm plasma driver, operated by Her adherent crew, melts off Their plasma shotgun, and is blocked by the leg Eos was aiming to kick Clymene with. Close investigation suggests it's the left leg, so Eos should have lost Their Extra Armour 1 here instead of spreading the damage to the Extra Armour 2 system on the right leg. The adherent crew is not activated and goes back into Eos' hand...
Clymene staggers back north from tile 95, turning to fire the left plasma driver, bursting shields and damaging Eos' laser blade as They heave around to punch Clymene back, firing jump jets for one body-slam after another. The damage isn't enough, as Eos's capacitors fight against the shock of the plasma driver and the charge-thirst of the jump jets. Clymene is knocked out of the backfield, but She remains intact enough to claim the victory!
Now things would have gone slightly differently if we had followed the strict letter of the rules, with the game events diverging wildly had Clymene gotten turned around and hit with the plasma shotgun in round 3 instead of blasting to safety, Eos losing armour in round 5, and Eos' left arm shields being fully accounted for, but as mentioned these slips didn't detract from game-play. Mentioning them is important just in case ignoring these slips confuses those players who have been playing by the rules, and make them think they have been playing incorrectly. It was a fantastic game! We may even have gotten carried away...
Glory to Clymene, Her crew, and to Her plasma drivers!
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