Game #5 - Space Station Zulu
Turn 21 : Culling players.
You unleash HELL on the aliens in room M. The 10 of you kill 7 of them. You notice that noise grenades are by far the most efficient, and the fire torch is pretty devastating as well, though maybe less than grenade. Rifles work, but not as well as the noise grenades or the fire torch.
Once you have unleashed HELL on them, it is the alien turn... and they unleash HELL on you. Baudrg the Yarg dies first, then two yargs that enter the room at the same time as Xeorm die as well.
Out of redshirts, the real players die : Culise is snatched and eaten first, then Gubbisson then Strange Fellow, then NikktheTrick, finally Avernite. All the players have been killed by adults.
Two things mitigate this disaster : the aliens did not receive reinforcements, possibly because Pithorr attracted their attention in room N... sacrificing his life. In addition, 2 redshi... I mean Yargs are arriving in room O :
Then there are more in room P, and then a bunch of people room U (Stuckenschmidt and Velho discarded their useless weapons).
André is still pondering why he missed so many shots in room 7 :
And Jorlaan is trying to move away from the aliens in H.
This isn't going to end well, is it?
I ATTACK alien #1
Ugh... Argy... give 'em hell...
Turn 22 - The End
In room M, the combat turns desperate. 4 aliens are killed, but some of the larvas grow, and there are 7 aliens again. 3 humans and the two yargs that just happened to pass the door are killed. Demanvesel, Argyraspide and Xeorm fell ; only Captain Grimlock are still standing, totally outnumbered.
In the other rooms, everyone is coming to reinforce, even André moving to room U... but too late, too late.
... except of course Jorlaan, still looking for eggs in parts of the space station where no alien went :
There are 6 humans and 10 yargs left, plus 3 in the freezer, for a grand total of 19 friendlies. There are 25 adults in total (some more grew up in dock 1) plus 15 larvas, some of which will become adults soon. I consider the situation desperate, and you will all die eventually, so I can just as well stop here before it becomes tedious...
Thank you for playing SPACE STATION ZULU ! I hope you liked the journey. Please tell me, I like to know .
Any questions, please ask too.
If you want to play more games you probably never heard about before and where you discover the rules as you go, I am opening slots for GALACTIC GLADIATOR.
Thanks, Scribe-man, that was fun!
And it actually reminded me of a game I played, but I don't remember the name. It might have been on Commodore 64, or something like that. The basic principle was very similar, you're on a space station, but alone, and I think the enemies were robots, in that one.
o7
I salute our fallen heroes, dead in an hopeless fight against the alien menace.
Salute to my brethren!
It's a good thing I got killed early, because I ended up roaming around the US for a month with limited internet access shortly after.
Great idea with the split Zeitgame/Paradox groups, I think it worked really well, at least on our end. I pity you for the time it must have taken you to edit all the screenshots though...
Up until we had the bots, methinks it was winnable. Does the kind host agree?
Good job as always. I concur with Dayyalu, I think robots were the key to victory here. Those beautiful room-clearing bastards! But maybe it's for the best that it didn't come to that. Would I have been able to go through with sending Barty to his doom? In a way, I'm glad I never had to answer that question.
Quote from Dayyalu on 30 November 2021, 20h39Up until we had the bots, methinks it was winnable. Does the kind host agree?
Yes, the robots were keys, though it was still maybe winnable without them.
My comments on this (as per the Paradox Forum) :
Initially I waited for a set up where the Paradox group (with more reserve players) could reach the freezer first, while the Zeitgame group (to which I sent slightly different opening information) would reach the two extra robots first, and even if they beelined to the central room they would arrive second.
Then the Paradox group had 3 avoidable losses and your group had 1 and then got unlucky with the initial decisions (trying the wrong weapons, then retreating with losses) so you lost a bunch of players and a robot. The robot did wipe out a bunch of aliens though.
This slowed all of you down significantly.
Second surprise was how little both groups coordinated initially. I was proud of having two groups of players ignoring there was another group, but even as I dropped heavier and heavier hints no communication took place until the end.
Finally, the Paradox group failed at defending room U properly, losing one more robots and some players, while you guys went to an ill-fated expedition to room 7, losing yet another robot. An unlucky roll room P lost your last robot, without their autodestruction the game becomes much harder.
Still, I believe that if you had all been together you could still have prevailed at that point, but already it was far from sure.
Note that it is not anyone’s fault. I made the rules and even the “settings” of the game as obfuscated as possible, so all decisions had their logic - but it did not go as I expected. But then I expected things not to go as expected.
And yes, super long with the screenshots, especially since on each screenshot I had to put the name of the players, "allocate" the weapons and remove the weapon stat that appears from the moment a weapon is used at least once.
TL;DR: It was the Paradox guys' fault.
Three weeks later, the AAR & Review of the game is online.