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Armada Prime 2020 – Redmond, WA

Posted on February 23, 2020

The Prime in Redmond Washington was the other Prime close enough to consider driving to. Spokane was a little far for a day trip, Redmond is just a long day of driving.

I picked up fellow Vancouver Armadaites Duke and Matt starting at 7:30am and we drove 3:15 hours down the way to barely make it in time for an 11am event start time. I don’t love cutting it that close.

I pulled out the brand new Starhawk that I had opened up on the drive down and plugged it into my lovely display tray. Many ooohs and aaahhs were had. Even though Armada doesn’t have a good hobby culture, Star Wars nerds enjoy Star Wars swag.

My Fleet

Z7 Starhawk 1/torp/biggs (79/397/400)

Starhawk-class Mk.I (140 + 51: 191)
+ Kyrsta Agate (20)
+ Expert Shield Tech (5)
+ Walex Blissex (5)
+ Leading Shots (4)
+ Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)
+ Unity (10)
MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63 + 19: 82)
+ Lando Calrissian (4)
+ Ordnance Experts (4)
+ External Racks (3)
+ Admonition (8)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 5: 23)
+ Leia Organa (3)
+ Comms Net (2)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 4: 22)
+ Wedge Antilles (4)
Biggs Darklighter (19)
Jan Ors (19)
VCX-100 Freighter (15)
2 x YT-1300 (2 x 13)
Advanced Gunnery
Infested Fields
Capture the VIP

I’ve been iterating on a Starhawk list for a while, and this was the final. I’ve tried Mk. II, I’ve tried the Scout Frigate, I’ve tried a couple different squad balls, I had the tractor beams at one point, and completely different objectives.

On Friday afternoon I was agonizing over my Yellow. Days earlier I had Hyperspace Assault, because Admo is quite nice in there. But play testing against James, he easily choose it, and it lost me some deployment advantage and activations as well and I felt it wasn’t worth it. There are many good choices, but I wanted one I didn’t have to practice, thus Capture the VIP and a VCX. That was my biggest regret about the fleet, although there are many things I’m going to change for the next iteration.

Game 1

15 minutes after arriving, I was matched against Shmitty. Yes, the same Shmitty who is Armada-famous for writing for Steel Strategy. Yes, the same Shmitty who 10-1’d me from 4th to 8th in the Vancouver Prime. Yes, the same Shmitty who made me write this prophetic text to Duke at 6:30am:

While he tabled me last we played, I had no expectations going into this game. I had practiced with this fleet, I knew my plan, I knew what I was going to do. He is an excellent player, but even excellent players have bad days.

He tabled me again.

Set up. We played my Capture the VIP, after I choose to go second.

While I made a number of mistakes in this game, none of which were good, one stands out — I dodged Admo on turn 1. I did a little Z-like forward move out, because it was getting to far ahead of Unity and I wanted them together to give multiple targets his Starhawk could get a shot on. It’s so subtle as to not necessarily be noted as a mistake, but it is why I lost this game. (although I could have lost still, with having not done this).

This ended up putting Admo to far out to keep in the front arc of his Starhawk without putting myself into a double arc, so I put Admo in his side. This seems like a fine choice, until a turn later Admo is like 3mm away from being able to double-arc black-dice his Starhawk.

In hindsight, first turn, I should have just moved straight forward and accepted that he was going to 4-Red dice Admo and taken it on the chin.

That was, I think, the game losing move. But a couple other small things:

While trying to get Admo away at the end, I was worried about running it off the table so I turned in a bit, which brought it to close to his Pelta and gave his Pelta a final shot to table me. That was a really stupid mistake.
He had been ramming my flotilla with the 50-point VIP token, and I knew what he was trying to do, but I changed my game plan to react to this to slowly. I set a Repair dial, to get a Repair token, then next turn do a Repair command to get a hull back 1 turn to slowly.

Between these two things, I think I could have brought it to a 9-2 instead of a 10-1, which would have made a notable difference to my final tournament score (see “Results”, below). The score was 400-48, because I killed 3 YT-2400s. Interestingly, no one got the VIP token, because he killed the GR which dropped the token and then he tabled me, so there was no turn 6 and he didn’t get a chance to get it! He wisely decided to kill Admo and for-go the token.

Both our Starhawks rammed 3 times. It overhangs so much we had to take mine off. His had 4 hull left at the end.

Game 2

After getting spanked down to the bottom of the bracket, I prepared myself to play against my fellow 1-pointers. My opponent was a fellow named Chase who had brought a very minimalistic fleet:

3 ISD-IIs.
All with: Leading Shots, Proximity Mines and Gunnery Teams
Admiral Motti

That is a lot of hull. Apparently he got 10-1’d by an SSD that somehow managed to table him. Wow.

I choose second player and he picked Capture the VIP. I bait-deployed with my GRs and squads, as he only had 3 ships, so I put Admo and Unity in position to flank and make him bump himself. He did ok with Nav commands and managed to bring them around, but I got mostly what I wanted, which was to only take on one at a time.

I tried to flank and rear with Admo because I didn’t think it would be able to survive in his overlapping Gunnery Team front arcs, but this decision led to Admo chasing after speed 3 ISDs as second player, which ultimately left it not doing anything useful.

He tried to put proximity mines all around the VIP token, but because I had the VCX I dodged in to put it somewhere safe and picked it up and ran away with it.

I got one of his ISDs plus the VIP token and he got one of my GRs which ended with 175-24, an 8-3 for me. I felt like I needed a 10 out of both of these games to be get somewhere near 3rd or 4th or 5th pace overall, so while it was nice to win this one, the 8 left me out of any kind of position to achieve the goal I’d set out for.

One ISD down, 2 to…wow, it’s turn 5 and there’s just no way.

Game 3

Last game I got up to the middle of the pack. I was setting up and having social banter with my next opponent when I say something about not being much of “something” around here (I don’t remember what “something” was). I meant around this tournament, but he thought I meant the regional area of Redmond, so he responded “I’m not from around here” and I asked “Where are you from?” and he says “Abbotsford”, and I say “Andrew?”. 😛

He’s a local Vancouver-area player who I’d seen on the forums a bunch. He and I are pretty sure we’ve never met, but Duke says we have!

He’d brought 2 ISDs and an Onager Testbed, so very similar list as my last opponent, but with a longer stick. I choose second player and he picked my Infested Fields. I had learned from my previous opponent and did better with Admo, bringing it to a decent spot and allowing my opponent to shoot at it, in order for me to ExRacks+OE his first ISD. I was happy with that, but I’d managed to turn his fleet into a conga-line (no good for Imperials), so I went down the line and cleared the Onager and then the final ISD. Both the first ISD and Onager I got a lucky last shot that did exactly the right amount of damage to remove it. Efficiency!

At the end of this game I had an epiphany about getting tabled by some of the best players in the world, vs the middle of the pack players. The best players I think have a skill at bringing a sufficient “weight of fire” to a focus. In this game, Andrew was firing 10 damage Onager shots at my SH every turn, and every turn I had enough defense tokens to tank it. Other games, I’ve been chucking tokens left and right trying to stop damage from incoming!

This one finished 460-39 for me, a 10-1, and one that ultimately jumped me to the top of the list of players who had 19 tournament points (which there were a few).

Usually you go to events like this to play people who aren’t local to you, but I’m super glad I played Andrew so we could meet!

Results

There were 24 (25?) players at this event, and I came up 7th with 19 tournament points. Even though it’s a similar placing as my last event, this one felt better because it there were a lot more people playing, which means I had more competition for the spot.

I’m probably misremembering, but I think they started calling 19 points at 14th or so, and I was a little disappointed that I was going to be 13th. Then they went through 7 people who all got 19 points, and because I had such a huge MOV on game 3 I got first among the 19 point players. I got 3rd in the Rebel faction too!

This was my largest Armada event, and the largest event I’ve played in since I stopped playing Warhammer or Malifaux, so that’s pretty fun.

This was a great day of rolling dice and moving plastic space ships!

Other Fleet Stuff

I think I’m going to continue on the Starhawk train for Adepticon. That event is a month away, and while I could try a few different things, I really like the Starhawk and I think I’m pretty close to making it work for me.

Although Admo is a great ship, and has been a great ship for me, I think it doesn’t have a place in this fleet. It’s an excellent first player ship, and I’m vying for second. I got to choose first/second every time (with 397 bid!!) in this tournament, but Admo could have helped ensure I get given 2nd, but I think there are better ways for me to spend those points.

The Biggs+1300 ball was pretty effective, but as I only played 4 YT-2400s across all games all day, it’s hard to judge it. Several people who did very well with the Starhawk played with 2400s, so I think I’m going to head in that direction instead.

This lets me save points on Wedge as well. Wedge is a great Officer, but I don’t think I used him as well as I could have. I actually forgot him in my Shmitty game, which then ended up with him overlapping my 1300s which gave them way more movement than they’d have had with Wedge. 🙂

Capture the VIP was the right choice at the time, but is a lame objective that I think I can do better than. That let’s me get rid of the VCX as well.

I’ve got thoughts on some fleet changes!

Tournaments

Wet Coast GT Armada 2019

Posted on April 21, 2019

Someone pointed out that I had gone in a year from learning to play Armada (almost) at WCGT, to running the event there. I’ve wanted to run an event for a while, I had some ideas of things I wanted to try with it, and then The Outer Rimjob Podcast sent me some tournament swag and I’ve been trying to block out the time to arrange it since. WCGT was perfect, as my main stumbling block was having a space to play!

One of the things I wanted to do was to use a solitaire system to make “byes” more interesting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do this, which sucked because I had 2 byes today! 🙂

We started at 9:30 and had planned to play 4 games, where usually we start at noon and play 2 games. It was a special occasion and I wanted to mark it with a different format. I love the 2-game format, it fits perfectly with my schedule. But sometimes you just need an all-day event!

Here’s a couple photos from round 1, I didn’t take a lot.

This next photo is the deployment from my first game — I choose Fleet Ambush. I’m not convinced it was the wrong choice, but I got rolled in this game. 🙂

Everyone had a great time, and really enjoyed playing 4 games in a day. We were all surprised that it could be done without killing ourselves! I know from experience playing WHFB/40k that 4 games in a day is a super rough day, but I think being a little flexible about timing, starting a little late or early depending on when folks were around, setting expectations up front (and making sure the schedule is communicated well) and being hard about the game timing worked out really well. Most games ended before the end of the round!

ORJ had advocated for 2 hour rounds with dice down immediately at the end of the 2 hours. I talked with our local community about that, and someone with a lot of experience (who unfortunately didn’t end up making it) suggested that this could be abused by certain lists. We discussed it, and instead decided to go with “after 1:45, no new rounds can be started” and this worked out really well. We started early a couple rounds because people had time, and it just worked.

And then the prize pool! Top left and heading right:

Cards I made
FFG S4 dual-sided Yavaris/Suppressor
(next row) FFG S4 dual-sided Boosted Comms/Slaved Turrets
Outer Rimjob Lando Calrissian
Outer Rimjob Bail Organa
(next row) Outer Rimjob Cymoon
(next row) Outer Rimjob Kuat
FFG S4 Acrylic redirects

The acrylics are weird, because they’ve been printing them on white plastic for the last few seasons and now they’re back in the clear acrylic. I’m happy — the clear looks much much better — but it’s odd that they switched for a short period of time.

You’ll note the first in the list — what I did have time for, was making cards! Here are some photos.

Here are some links to my inspiration:

Front: https://alternativemovieposters.com/amp/rogue-one-star-wars-story-travis-ruiz/

My first inspiration was the movie image of the ISD over Jedha, then I went to Google image search to see what it looked like. While there, I saw this alternative movie poster that really drew me in. I’m not really good at drawing detailed images, but this one had a great mix of geometric shapes that I thought I could use to work from. While working on it, I blurred some of the edges because the strong pixel edges didn’t look great. At some point I added a drop-shadow to one of the things, and I immediately thought of Super Mario World and how it was built of layers of 2 dimensional objects. I also thought of Star Wars Epic Yarns (because I have a child) and felt scenes, which this really reminded me of. Or maybe of like paper art, where one layer is built on top of another. You see where I went. So I tried to texture multiple layers of 2 dimensional objects.

When I was done, I didn’t know what upgrade card it should be. I had originally wanted to make it double sided, with a rare neutral Imperial-box-only and a rare neutral Rebel-box-only card on each side. But when I was done, I didn’t want to draw another thing so then I needed a back, and a upgrade card this image would work with. Duke suggested Hardened Bulkheads, and it fits.

Back: https://imgur.com/gallery/9wowx

I took this and started drawing the outside yellow and the inside symbols in yellow. It looked a little empty and I didn’t want to exactly copy what was there, so I added some gradient lines in Rebel orange. Duke asked if I could do Imperial blue opposite, and I didn’t know there was an Imperial blue so I found it and added those gradient lines. Then the yellow symbols didn’t work, so I changed them to be the same colours as the lines and BOOM, perfect.

I had a bunch of them printed, so I’ll be giving them out to random folks for a while. Hit me up at rythos42 at gmail dot com if you want me to mail you one! (or if you live in Vancouver, come to Ages 3 and Up for an event :))

Tournaments

FoodBowl 2017

Posted on November 6, 2017

FoodBowl 2017! This is a great event for a great cause! 4 player Blood Bowl, 1,250 gold teams and it brings together the two disparate groups of Blood Bowl players in the Vancouver area, so we get to meet some new people. 🙂 Obviously, I brought Skaven which I thought were a good top pick — they have some great speed (since the current event rules nerf elves a bit, possibly the best speed) and great bashiness with the star players.

I sat down at a table with a gentleman I didn’t know, named Kristian, and then two others I did know followed suit – James and Pat. James has a hate on for me after he mercilessly killed my rat ogre in a previous season. You read that right, I don’t understand it either. 😛 Pat is good fellow to sit next to.

This game was characterized by Kristian scoring TD after TD with Skitter-skitter Stab-stab, a special character gutter runner. He scored 3 TDs, which is absolutely ridiculous in a game with 28 players and 3 other people dedicated to ensuring you don’t get to do what you want to do.

Near the end of the game, Pat had a choice between stopping me scoring or stopping Kristian scoring, and he chose to stop K because he knew that K would be vying for a top-TDs-scored prize with a start like his. Because of this I managed to get a TD, bringing me second place in this game! And then because of the final score calculation, I got 10 points (7 for second, 3 for 3 casualties) where Kristian also got 10 (10 for first). 🙂 This was a nice game. 🙂

We went for sushi after. Our game was about an hour over time, and sushi didn’t help.

Here are some photos.

Go forward my ratties!

Lined up again after a TD by SS-SS.

ECLIPSE!!! There was also a goblin fanatic on the table at this point which had been placed in James’ lines. James had maneuvered it away from him, but the fantatic got turned into a goblin as well, allowing the next person to simply move it 6 easy squares back to killing James.

I don’t know what’s going on this photo, but I like showing how crazy the center of the board gets in this game.

Game 2 I sat down at a table next to Rowland, Greg and Pat, all players I play regularly. In hindsight I should have sought out one of the 4 players I never played, but we were rushing a lot after sushi so it wasn’t a great moment of decision making. I also took fewer photos this game.

This was almost a no-score game. There was a sprinkler, making pick-up and throwing and catching harder. The ball was spiked, making pick-up dangerous. There was also a ball clone, meaning there were 3 balls on the table at one point. My valient gutter runner grabbed the ball, dodged tackle zones across the board…only to find he was holding the clone. It was here as well that Greg rolled quad-skulls, which is always something you can count on winning with.

My two ball and chain characters moved up and deftly avoided hitting an enemy who had set up in a perfect cage, and then one ball/chain hit the other. >.>

I spent most of the first half with only 3 players on the pitch, so it was a little boring, but I made do. When the half finally came around I tossed on another 4 and got to play again! I grabbed the ball again, ran it across the field and avoided getting hit a bunch…and found he was holding the wrong ball.

My injury pile.

Moments after the first photo was taken, another model got added to the pile.

Gutter runner cage!

I’d like to say that this story ended with me scoring and winning the game, fans cheering for the Cheddar City Alchemists in their brilliant pink uniforms. Alas, I did not. My ball was across the field. Instead, Rowland dropped a bomb on his ball, knocking it loose and allowing Pat to pick it up and score with it. >.<

I hope I can make time to play this event again next year, because it’s just amazing!

Tournaments

Antares – Wet Coast GT 2017

Posted on July 12, 2017

With the impending homecoming of my daughter, I bravely took to the tournament and hoped she would hold out until I was done rolling dice. 😛

This was an awesome event! Because there were only 3 people signed up, the TO arranged to change the format of the event so it was one large game on Saturday instead of a the 5-6 game tournament format that is common around here. They dropped the price by half and we got one more person to sign up and played a 4 person 2500 point game on a 6×8 table. 10,000 points, 95 dice in the bag. It took us about 8 hours to play, thanks to some exceedingly efficient dice pulling — the puller would draw 2, and then decide whether the first dice would affect the second dice, and if it didn’t, would give the second dice to be played as well. We often had 2-3 people going at once, which really helped speed the game up so we didn’t take all night, and also keep it fast paced and exciting!

Here’s a break, because there are about 40 photos in this post.

Musings & Meta Tournaments Work-in-progress

Blog Comments and Batter Drones

Posted on July 5, 2017

I noticed the other day that comments on old posts were closed, which is not a situation I want to be in — I’d like people to be able to comment on anything, at any time in the past! I just found the setting that was messing with that and turned it off, so hopefully its fixed now!

I needed more batter drones for big games of Antares. One of our guys bought an army online that had some drones done up like this —

It’s the metal spotter drones (of which I have a million extras) and the phalanges from the subverter matrix. Cut off the drone wings, glue on the phalanges, and be very, very patient.

The price of Wet Coast GT this weekend went down by half, because the TO decided to make it a one-day event. Unfortunately, with summer finally here in Vancouver, the event isn’t getting as much love as it should. So if you’re in the area and want to play a big megabattle, and get some swag, come on up to Vancouver (or down to us, or sideways)!

I’m still really hoping I get to go. My brand new daughter is still in the hospital, and isn’t allowed to leave until she shows she can survive outside of a medical environment. She just has to figure out “eating” and she gets to come home (she’s premature). If she does that before this weekend, it’s all hands on deck at home as we struggle to figure out what life looks like in this new world order!

If I do get to WCGT, I’m planning to bring my good camera and I’ll see about getting some quality photos up here next week. I think I also need to replace my phone camera lens, if possible – it’s become very hazy.

Featured Images Tournaments

Blood Bowl – Foodhammer MegaBowl Sunday

Posted on November 28, 2016

MegaBowl was a lot of fun yesterday! There were some definite hi-jinks in play, including Greg leaping a Slann into a boxed off ball, picking up the ball on a 6, throwing it on a 6 and catching it…on a 6. But for me, the highlight of the day was seeing my boards being played on!

I played an Undead roster of:

Count Luthor Von Whatever
Hack Enslash (no ref means Chainsaws were everywhere!)
1 Wight with Guard
4 Ghouls — 2 with Block, 2 with Wrestle
4 Zombies – 1 with Tackle, which I never used.

Here’s a photo of the middle of the board on turn 2 of my first game:

That’s a lot going on in a few squares.

Here’s the setup:

The dugout come out looking great, even though I enlarged the images by a bit, this was my biggest fear!

Every $5 you donated gave you $100,000 in Blood Bowl cards, and you had to give $50,000 to 2 different opponents (out of 3 people). This was a clever scheme to keep the game balanced while encouraging a little bit of screwing over your friends, but in the end it felt a little petty and arbitrary to exclude one person.

My team! I was planning to put a photo of my Luthor proxy/conversion up, but forgot to take a clear photo of him. It’s a Guild Ball Ghast model from the Morticians faction. I think the Guild Ball models are some of the best looking modern models I’ve ever seen, and I’m a little sad that I bought them and never truly got into it. This is the first GB model I’ve ever painted, and it’s not even for the faction I play!

I don’t plan on doing a version 2 of the board right now, but here are a few notes I took from playing on it:

The little “+”s that demarcate the squares, should be white with black drop shadows. This is what FF-Fields does, and it’s specifically so that the squares can be found no matter what the background is. The black “+”s looked fine on the snow background sections, but in the middle with the dirt they were very hard to see properly.
The rules hadn’t been finalized before I finished the board, so I didn’t know that the Line of Scrimmage on this board is straight across the lines of the dugouts, not at the center where I’ve depicted it. I would add another 4 lines to note this.
The rules have an oddity to them whereby you can’t cross the two squares at the very corner of each of the dugouts. I didn’t realize it until I played the game, but this is to prevent people from having an easy out around the corner – it’s much harder to block this passage without this rule. However, the rule is an “exception” to normal movement, and so could be forgotten. I thought to add a little spiked-thing or something, jutting out from the corner of the dugouts into that square, to help remind people they can’t travel that way.

A few rules issues that bugged me, but overall a great day of Blood Bowl!

Featured Images Tournaments

Malifaux – Henchman Hardcore and Enforcer Brawl

Posted on July 22, 2016

I had a free Sunday so I went to Wet Coast GT for just the one day. They were running Henchman Hardcore, an alternative Malifaux format where you get 20ss, must take a Henchman as your Leader, no summoning and the only Strategy is Turf War and the only Scheme is Assassinate. The goal is to run at the center and hurt your opponent — a decidedly “unMalifauxy” goal, in my opinion.

It’s not my favourite format, but it was nice to play Malifaux again. I took Kang and 3 Rail Workers and got my ass handed to me.

After that, we played an Enforcer Brawl with….9 people? Maybe 8? You get 1 Enforcer and one upgrade. You get 1VP for wounding an unwounded model (2VP if it’s more SS than you), 3VP for killing something (4VP if it’s more SS than you) and -3VP for dying. I took my Ice Golem because I haven’t really played with it a lot, and wanted to show it off! He ended up being excellent, as whenever he died I tended to get 2VPs for doing damage to someone for his explosive, which means I lost fewer points than others who died.

I won this event, but only because Mark won and Mark was the TO. Mark also played an Ice Golem, he just died a lot less than I did. 🙂

The next day CHOP! chat got excited about Malifaux again. I think the confluence of WCGT and the GenCon order stuff going up caused folks to get excited about it again. I pulled Taelor out of my to-do pile and put some paint on her. A few hours later, this was the result:

I was tempted to leave her albino after I had shaded basecoated her boots, pants, shirt and hair. She had this crazy goth look to her that I really liked. So I ended up leaving her skin less coloured than I would have otherwise, adding white to the Dheneb Stone when I highlighted, which took a lot of the pink out of the colour.

Otherwise I was just trying to copy this drawing. The pants really are that shiny — I tried to tone them down but have been unsuccessful so far. Still, I really like the contrast here.

Tournaments

NO FIRES: Blood Bowl Tournament in Vancouver, BC

Posted on May 21, 2016

I’m running a 1,200,000 credit Blood Bowl tournament on May 29th at the Fraternal Order of Eagles! It’s a charity event, with proceeds going to help the Fort McMurray victims. Details are available here.

As part of the charity, I’m also selling these Special Play decks:

$20, with $12 going to the charity.

If you’re interested, check out the details and get me a team list!

Photography Tournaments

OFCC 2014 – Photography

Posted on October 3, 2014

One more bonus post before I get back to painting stuff.

This photography setup was in the corner of the gaming room. A lot of lights and tripods and hangers and not shown is a very sturdy tripod with a camera on it.

Tournaments

OFCC 2014 – Day 2

Posted on October 2, 2014

Day 2 came early again. Tournaments are crazy because you stay up super late because you’ve got fun things to do, and because you’re excited for the next day and then you wake up super early because the organizers are trying to squeeze as much into a single day as they can. If you start at 10pm, run a 2800pt tournament with 3 games in it, with lunch and a mid-afternoon break, you’re ending at 9pm. It’s a tough call to make, and most people seem to be on the side of waking up early.

I only played one game on Sunday, because of our 5-person-4-person team. I thought of this only while watching Pete play my army — me sitting out the last game was perfect. As the worst player on my team, we’d naturally want to have our strongest players on the table at the end of the tournament when we would be playing against our strongest opponents. I didn’t plan it that way, but I was super happy with how it turned out! 🙂

After the jump, more photos!

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