A brief run-down of the competition and their fleets.
Cyrus
- Raddus drop Profundity with Overload Pulse CR90B
Graham
- ISD2, Interdictor, Demolisher, SFC
Kurt
- Mon Mothma AF, Admonition, Foresight, A-Wing Ball.
Jay
- Avenger Boarding Troopers Kuat, Demolisher, Imperial Ace Ball
Only five in the tournament. Based both on player skill and strength of their lists, I knew Cyrus and Jay were going to be tougher nuts to crack, while Graham and Kurt's lists struck me as weak overall.
First pull was against Jay, while Kurt got the by.
Game One - Dave (Rebels) vs. Jay (Imperials)
Jay took first player and after some reflection took my surprise attack, this would be the first time for both of us playing the objective. I deployed three obstacles between the station and his deployment to try to limit where he could place the ship, and he accordingly deployed the Avenger on the station itself.
For my raids I chose navigate, squadron and navigate. My plan was to slow down Demolisher from getting into the fight and double-team Avenger.
Mithel got a good engage on a number of my squadrons, but Lando with his ability to pull the red double hit when I needed it allowed me to finish off Mithel and Zertik on back to back turns, after which the squadron ball began falling apart. Notably, I was over matched, five squadrons to 4 and 87 points of crack Imperial anti-squadron aces against my more mixed load out of 67. But through combining Lando's ability to finish off squadrons at key moments with timely flaks from my ships, I was able to prevail and won with squadron battle with Shara and Tycho still standing.
In the center of the board the main event started when my non-flagship LMC80 drifted into close ranged of the Kuat. the Kuat had already taken a pounding at this point, but now was the moment.
Jay targeted my starboard arc, dumped Ex Racks, and got 10 damage out of the role with no defense tokens to spend. Ordinarily this would have straight killed the LMC80, but I had opened by boosting the starboard shields to 3 and so he came up one damage short. Furthermore, because he couldn't navigate that turn, he couldn't speed up to ram me and finish the LMC80 off and so ended millimeters from my front right corner.
All hail Auxiliary Shield Techs.
All hail Auxiliary Shield Techs.
I still would have won even if he had killed this LMC80, as I had the Avenger dead to rights with my flagship off its starboard side, but this meant it was going to be a 8-3 win for me instead of a 7-4 or 6-5. The Avenger went down.
The 1 health LMC80 would use MCEF to repair back up almost to full health and shields by the end of the game, but was effectively out of the battle at this point. Demolisher circled around trying to nail my flotilla, but couldn't produce the accuracy it needed to kill it. The most embarrassing part was that the Gozantis rolled extremely well and killed the Neb as it tried to hunt them down. But with all his squads, Avenger and his Gozanti's down, the end wasn't in doubt.
8-3 to me.
Game 2 - Dave (Rebels) vs. Kurt (Rebels)
I was feeling pretty good after game one, especially when I saw that I had pulled Kurt as my second opponent. Cyrus, clearly the best player of the four, had won his game, but with a 7-4 margin.
Kurt is usually an Imperial player and was trying out a built that he had difficulty against at some point in the past. The A-wing ball, containing Shara, Tycho, Green Squadron, and 3 Generics. Again I was overmatched, fighting into 78 points versus 67, and 6 vs. 4.
He took my Contested Outpost, and so feeling no rush, I deployed back, intending to make him come to me and attempted to prevent him from double-teaming either one of my LMC80s with his frigates.
Here is where we ended up:
This game was notable in the really bad luck Kurt had with his transports. I through a random side arc shot off the left of the left LMC80 with an accuracy and a crit. He made me reroll the crit into a double hit, which combined with an earlier single hit and running over an asteroid to kill the GR75, and through reducing his activations severely limited his ability to set up for a killer frigate assault. The other GR75 coming in from the left got stuck in a bad position, and after 15 minutes of trying to figure out how to maneuver it, Kurt settled on a course that bumped it into my LMC80, and then bumped it back onto the asteroid, insta-killing it. Two flotillas down.
Meanwhile, Foresight sailed into the midst of my left contingent, and was exploded. The broadside it dumped on the bow of my LMC80 all was engineered away the next turn.
He began his attack in earnest on the bow of my flagship, on top of the station itself, and looking to converge on it with Mon Mothma and Admonition. However, MCEF combined with Garm tokens and well-timed engineering tokens once again shone and kept the ship healthy through the deluge. My squadron ball quickly moved to intercept with Lando once again shining as a finisher.
Meanwhile, Foresight sailed into the midst of my left contingent, and was exploded. The broadside it dumped on the bow of my LMC80 all was engineered away the next turn.
He began his attack in earnest on the bow of my flagship, on top of the station itself, and looking to converge on it with Mon Mothma and Admonition. However, MCEF combined with Garm tokens and well-timed engineering tokens once again shone and kept the ship healthy through the deluge. My squadron ball quickly moved to intercept with Lando once again shining as a finisher.
With the squadrons tied up, it would come down to the ships themselves.
He was unable to pull the accuracies he needed out of Admonition, however, and while the double-arcs from both ships began penetrating the shields, they were unable to do critical damage.
The LMC80 sailed away, healing all the way, with Admonition ineffectively trying to chase down a GR-75. Meanwhile, the unthinkable happened and without a timely navigate up on the AF, Kurt sailed Mothma off the board.
10-1 to me.
Game 3 - Dave (Rebels) vs. Cyrus (Rebels)
At long last, the pairing I had sought to avoid. Cyrus was clearly the best player in the store, and he was fielding a fleet with a seemingly unbeatable gimmick: boarding troopers and overload pulse. In the round two battle of the gimmicks, Cyrus had 10-1'd Jay. To win the tournament, I needed to limit my loss to Cyrus to a 5-6, and hope to win in tiebreak, or outright win. My problem was that I didn't really have a good plan to beat his gimmick, as his burst damage would overpower my healing - and I was essentially counting on him not getting the Overload Pulse Crit, as with no reroll capability on the CR90B that was a firm possibility.
He took my Contested Outpost.
He was planning to drop off of Quantum Storm on the left or an Engine Techs CR90A on the right.
I decided to aggressively fork the two ships - threatening to first-strike one if he dropped on the other side.
I decided to aggressively fork the two ships - threatening to first-strike one if he dropped on the other side.
And so, on the top of round 2, he called in Raddus.
Profundity spat out the CR90B, which of course landed the crit, but at this point I thought I might have him. That CR90A is double-arced at medium range by the LMC80, and I have a navigate command queued up for the LMC80 to accelerate it to speed 3 and lead the MC75 - escaping the double arc.
However, the CR90A survived with one health, denying me the first strike, and allowing it to fire back and engineer shields around and make it a tougher nut to crack. I then failed the navigate over the MC75, it might honestly have never been possible, but a boy can dream.
Anyway, I was feeling pretty bad about my chances at this point. Realizing that it was going to come down to 120 Con-O points versus 109 he would get from sinking the Liberty, my Nebulon made a hard right and headed for the hills. And after killing my Liberty, the MC75 and Hammerhead gave chase.
Annoyingly, my Nebulon came within one damage of killing the Engine Techs CR90 A once again, denying me 59 points as it sailed off into the sunset. My Neb would not be so lucky, and was eventually hunted down by the HH and MC75 on round 5.
On the left, however, after a couple bad rolls I managed to kill his GR75 and nail all his squadrons (3 Z-95s and Blount), at the cost of only an A-wing. I actually dropped the flagship to speed zero to get all the con-O points possible, but I would need points from somewhere else. For some reason, he looped the CR90B and Quantum Storm towards the LMC80, which both in turn fell to my Squads and the ship itself giving me the margin I needed to win.
7-4 me, by a single point (60 point MOV)
This was the tensest match I have ever played, as it became pretty apparent to both of us after round 2 it was going to come down to a small number of points. Me missing killing a 59 point ship by a single health point twice further compounded by frustration. It ended up being a really sloppy game on my part, forgetting to attack with my Neb a couple times and with Lando on a critical turn. Thankfully it didn't end up costing me the game, and indeed, Lando's ability to modify a red die to an un-scatterable double hit was what got me the last flotilla of Cyrus's.
I think Cyrus probably made a mistake not dropping on my flagship, and made another mistake sending me sacrifices at the end for the win. But, I will say that I really don't know how to play against this particular gimmick, and my win seemed more based on my opponents missteps than creating my own win condition.
My forking strategy kinda worked, but winning against this particular combo would seem to be predicated on him not landing the overload pulse - either through missing the crit or having DCO on all your large ships. At any rate, not a fun fleet to play against, and a tough game.
But, with 25 points to Cyrus's 21, I was the winner of the $25 in store credit this day (plus a few custom art cards), which I used to buy my own Torpedo Frigate and further flesh out my fleet!
Overall Thoughts
If you are not playing Lando, play Lando. He is amazing and makes SFC's suddenly playable again. My little 67 SFC won all three matchups and in two cases was able to start bombing afterwards.
AST and MCEF shone in game 2 especially, and the comments around the store were that my fleet managed to be extremely tanky while not giving up firepower. Indeed, I came to really appreciate the flexibility of SW-7s, and only missed the expensive gunnery teams once in all three games. I am beginning to come to the conclusion that they are not really necessary on Star Cruisers - especially when MSU is still out of the meta.
It helps me that the Meta at this store is big ship focused, and nobody seemingly likes running heavy squads, as I think I would have struggled against a bomber ball more. I was surprised nobody ran an SSD yesterday.
In any event, with these two Star Cruisers, I managed to upgrade them extremely efficiently, maximizing the Garm effect, and effectively turning them into pocket Star Destroyers. Double-arcing in medium range, these ships gave as good as they got, and they could tank far more than your average Star Destroyer the way I had them kitted out.
I'm also completely sold on Surprise Attack as my new default red objective. It was super clutch, and I honestly think I could have played it a little better with a squadron raid timed to stop the boarding troopers.
In sum, an overall great day of games. With one exception everything in my fleet punched far above its weight, and with a couple modifications and I now have my Chicago fleet ready to go.
Get ready boys, there are going to be some speed 3 LMC80 flank deployments next month XD
