First 'real' game!

I just finished playing our first 'real' game of Artemis SBS, and wanted to comment on how much fun it was. We've had a few rough games on the easiest difficulty, in a barren sector, just enough to get a bit of a feel for how the ship handles, and so we decided to crank the difficulty up a notch. (Just one!)

We had four people, so we ran with 4 stations (we tried helm doubling up on Comms, in hindsight, we probably should have given that to Science). Things started off a bit rough, as we had issues with our Science station, who kept saying "I can't find an I56". It wasn't until it disappeared off Long Range Sensors that I realized we were dealing with a ship that could cloak. I was on Weapons at that point. Seeing that this was was our first game off of Difficulty 1, I had to inform the Captain what we were dealing with.

Since this was the closest ship to one of our stations, it gave our mission a bit of added urgency. After two aborted attacks, when we lost sight of the enemy and it re-cloaked, we finally managed to destroy it, only to realize we were incredibly close to two other fleets of 3 and 5 ships respectively.

Making it through those battles much more cleanly, we were down to 2 ECMs, 4 mines, and 1 homing torpedo, so we headed back to DS3, which *still* didn't have a replacement Nuke ready for us! (Argh!) With two enemy fleets closing on DS1, and not enough time left to reach DS2 or DS4, we headed quickly to DS1 which had a single nuke waiting for us, and managed to fend off the enemy fleets before they could attack the station.

The overall consensus was, "Holy crap! It's a good thing we didn't crank the difficulty up another notch!", and "If we'd picked anything other than a Barren sector, we'd have been toast!"

Kudos to Thom. I just wish there was a Mac client. (Myself and 2 of my interested friends are Mac folks, and I'm the only one with a Bootcamp partition or Windows VM.) Personally, I'd love to take a stab at a Mac port, but despite nearly 15 years of development experience, comparatively little of it is games related (just a couple 2D games done as class assignments in the past few years), and I understand that that isn't something on Thom's radar. I couldn't guarantee quick (or even any results anyway).

I'm definitely looking forward to playing more. It'll probably be our regular fallback when someone can't make it to our weekly RPG sessions.