Summary
This starts a little personal, but I promise it’ll even out, and then we’ll get to battle reports!
I had a fantastic day and 3 great games against 3 great opponents, and playing with plastic ships is always the best time, but at about 6pm I had a disappointing shock.
I felt like I’d practiced, I felt like I had a good feeling for playing a fleet that would both hold points and take points and lead to some big wins, and it didn’t at all. My first game, I played the eventual last-place person, which rocketed me into position to play the eventual winner and the eventual second place (who is a previous continental champion and who writes an Armada blog and is internet famous) and between the two of them I got tanked down to 8th out of 10. I felt like 5th was likely, 4th was still possible, but not definitely not 8th.
Shocked, and kind of embarrassed, as several people commented on how well I was doing.
I woke up at 4am the next morning, as one does, to review my performance, I decided that these feelings were misplaced, because this was on me. I decided I wanted to get top ranking, I got the chance I wanted (to be the best, you have to play the best) and I came up wanting, that’s all. This realization was empowering. All that happened at this event was that I got told, in a very direct manner, that I hadn’t done enough work to reach my goals. And if my goal is to earn a ticket to Worlds, then what I’ve learned this weekend is what actions I need to take in order to reach that goal.
Now to take those actions, and get to Redmond.
Games
I’m not going to go into detail of what people brought, largely because I didn’t write it down. I’m hoping it will be in the Prime Data Spreadsheet before long. It isn’t as of this writing.
My Fleet
- Assault Frigate Mk.II B
- Admiral Ackbar
- Caitken and Shollan
- Electronic Countermeasures
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
- MC30 Scout Frigate
- External Racks
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
- Admonition
- CR90 Corvette A
- Ezra Bridger
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
- Jaina’s Light
- GR-75 Medium Transports
- Comms Net
- Lando Calrissian
- Shara Bey
- YT-2400
- 2x VCX-100 Freighter
- Gold Squadron
- Red: Ion Storm
- Yellow: Fire Lanes
- Blue: Sensor Net
Fun times: writing that out I just noticed this fleet is not what I had sent the organizer. My fleet builder hadn’t saved my last revision on Wednesday night. >.> Soooo…some minor cheatery. All my opponents thought I played the above fleet (because I thought it was what I was playing), and I played with the above fleet for the entire event, so the only cheatery was in reporting, so hopefully it’s a minor embarrassment instead of an actual problem. <.< (I’ve written to the organizer letting him know.) (and he wrote me back saying all good, it happens).
I came to this fleet because I don’t love Rieekan, Raddus hasn’t worked out for me, and Dodonna has been encouraging me to play black dice fleets that are very glass-cannon and tend to bleed points. I wanted some more durability, and I hadn’t played with Ackbar much.
From there, I examined the Prime data spreadsheet to see what people were playing. I wanted a Scout Frigate, because I think they are cool ships. Initial versions had a Pelta with IF, then Liberator with IF on the CR90, and then gone entirely. I also had fewer squadrons initially, and then a HWK and then it was gone, once I realized that the unspoken goal of my fleet was to subtly encourage my opponents to choose Ion Storm every time. With that knowledge, I dropped the HWK (didn’t need it if I won’t actually play the VCXs for Strategic), and added Gold and the YT.
Then, knowing that Ion Storm was the plan, Ezra joined in so I could move obstacles around to more useful positions for me. As well, the TRCs on all ships was a direct response to expecting Ion Storm all day, because TRCs make less sense on the AF over all.
And although I didn’t do all that well, I’m really happy with how this fleet worked out. I think it heads in a direction that masks a strategic weakness of mine — that I really like throwing my ships into a close melee and taking them off the table. The problem isn’t so much that it’s a bad plan, so much that I’m not good at angling double arcs into making it an effective one. With Ackbar, you just have to get massive side arcs on things, which is much easier for me. I think that future fleet revisions will be trying to make Ackbar work better for me.
Game 1
I randomly drew Alex Yuen, who I’ve played before in Warhammer 40k I believe. He’s a long-time staple of the community, and was even the fellow who gave me the ISD to crash into my Jakku board. He was playing a squad-less Empire fleet with a red/blue ISD, a close-range Harrow VSD, Demo, and a Gozanti.
His bid was 10 to my 9, and he choose first player and picked Sensor Net. I thought this was an odd choice, as I felt like I had enough VCXs in my fleet to prevent anyone picking Fire Lanes or Sensor Net, but no problem, let’s do it!
First turn I squadded my VCXs to pull the tokens closer so I could start gaining tokens. As you can see from the photo above, I deployed to try to circle him with my broadside fleet and I hoped to grab the tokens from him quickly as I could start pinging 4 of them a turn. My hope was also to try to block his ISD with his VSD so I didn’t have to tackle both.
By turn 3 my token plan was mostly working. He ended the game with a single token, but unfortunately I had misplayed a couple of them and only ended with 5. There were a couple times when I had a choice of which token to use, and in my rush I choose the wrong one and then the next ship was out of range of the remaining one. Or the VCX was to far away to bring it back to me.
Mid-game Harrow came in close, and unfortunately for Alex it got focus-fired to death before it could do more than 1 round of shooting. But because of Harrow being able to turn so well, it didn’t block the ISD like I’d hoped. So yeah, had to tackle both. >.>
At one point I bumped one of my ships with my hand while I was measuring movement, and turned a “I’m not sure if this will ram my own ship” into a “yeah, that’s definitely going to ram”, which really hurt. As well at another point I forgot to use an Engineering token on my AF. This turned out ok, as I used it the next turn, but it didn’t have to have gone that well.
Later, the CR90 spun around the back of his fleet and grabbed a token and put the killing blow on the ISD. That was nice, as I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get it until I had pinged all its shields down and had 5 damage on it from squadrons!
Overall, I feel like I played this game well, but made a couple small mistakes that came from nerves and mainly playing Vassal (where you can’t accidentally bump a model…). It ended 371 to 137 for me, which is a 9-2, an excellent score. And calculating it out now, the missed objective points wouldn’t have gotten it to a 10-1 so that’s nice to know.
Game 2
Bolstered by a good win, but rushed by the event schedule, I moved onto my next game against a now-local Mackenzie. He’s a really solid player, but I don’t think I’ve played him in any local event yet.
He had an ISD, a Corvus Raider and a bunch of bullshit Empire squadrons and that’s it. A bold fleet that did him really well.
He had a bid of 28 points, and hemmed over whether to go first or second and played a guessing game to guess what objectives I’d taken with the fleet I had on the table. He was surprised to hear my red objective was Ion Storm, one he hadn’t played before, so he immediately choose second and that objective, which pleased me as my plan had been to play that one all day.
I set up to broadside behind my obstacle wall, he deployed Corvus and then all his squads and then his ISD. I deployed my GR to the left, trying to bait him to deploy left, but it didn’t work so it was very nearly 20 points completely wasted in this game.
Turn 3 or 4 Mack made this move:
He deliberately flew it off the table. Which I loved. I love when objectives make people make choices they wouldn’t make otherwise. He decided that he was going to lose the Raider anyway, with very little effort on my part, and that letting me ping it for points wasn’t worth it for him.
In that same photo, you can see the AF trying to get away, at the top. A major mistake I made this game was not having enough squadrons to block his bombers from putting a bunch of shots into the side of it, and minutes later it was dead from those same squadrons. This is a weakness of the fleet that I mean to shore up — the VCXs are good at making people play Ion Storm, but very poor at protecting flanks.
I lost this game 128-269, which is only barely an 8-3 for him. I lost all but one of my squads and the AF, but not Admo or the GR, and I got a good number of tokens and only let him have 1-2 tokens.
Game 3
Lastly, after a solid win and an ok loss, I played on the second table against Shmitty, of Steel Strategy fame. I listen to their podcast, so I knew he was coming and I’d fortified myself against getting all fan-boyish.
He was playing a variation on a fleet he’s made a little famous by winning GenCon with it. A Liberty, a CR90, Yavaris, a Pelta, 4 X-Wings, Biggs, Jan Ors and a Y-Wing. He choose first player and choose my Ion Storm.
As you can see, he deployed with his Liberty and CR90 facing towards the edge, which spooked me into forgoing my usual sideways-past-the-rocks plan, and into heading straight forward. I feared that going for the sideways movement would end with me trying to take his Liberty on at the front. My thought was that I could still get a broadside if I turned up.
The GR-75 was used as bait, ineffectively, again. Again, I basically played without it, which was a silly idea. If I do this fleet again, I’m going to stop that.
One good thing about the straight-forward plan was that I found I liked going past the rocks, it felt good to try to stop my opponent from getting close to them by using my ships. 😛 So I’m wondering if a future plan has the fleet doing that more, but not in such a silly way. And then maybe using Ezra to move rocks when I get to far away.
This photo I took after it was relevant. At one point I flew my MC30 forward, expecting that I’d take a bunch of damage but then be able to fly it out and past at speed 3 because his Liberty front arc would get one shot and then fly past me. He used a very interesting maneuver where he hard kinked the tool at the 1, and rammed me at 2, which pushed his ship into a turn that wouldn’t have been legal without the ram. The use of this, was that he did nearly a 90 degree turn at speed 1! Which put his front arc on my 30 and destroyed it.
Ultimately both our fleets met at the same point, just past the rocks and I got a good number of objective tokens, but only killed his CR90 while he tabled me. The game was 89-400 for him, which was a 10-1.
Talking with him afterwards, he thinks I should have gone sideways instead of up, but sped up to meet his Liberty+CR90 past the rocks but still in a broadside. This would have left his squadrons+Pelta a little less useful, or force them to fly hard to meet me, and leave his fleet unable to bring all its power at one point. Instead I did that bad idea to myself. 😛
Conclusion
That’s about it, not much else to say. I’ve got some ideas for how to change the fleet up, while sticking with Ackbar, but I think I’ve got some research on the Prime data to do before I dig in. I’m not sure whether I want to go full Ackbar with a big ship, or to stick with the AF, and there’s a bunch of follow-on effects that will come from that decision.
I also remembered tonight that the Starhawk was my original hope for this tournament, because I was really loving playing it on Vassal. BIG STOMPY SHIP.
Also I need to play more, so I’m going to look into putting my neck out and maybe getting a Vassal game with a non-Duke person. It’s hard because the voice chat annoys my wife, so I try to limit it to once a week. 😛
Thanks for reading, and again huge thanks to James for running it. It takes a lot to sacrifice your time for your community and it it much appreciated!
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