The tournament has long past so catching up a bit here, but back in January Fantasy Flight Game Center in Roseville had their regional. I took my somewhat worn dual VSD list with Motti has my Admiral. One of the VSDs is built to be a gunboat and the other a carrier to push squadrons. Mix in 2 Gozanties to get to 4 activations and then 134 points of wave 5 squadron goodness.
Between adding in a shuttle to my normal build, Mereek and a couple of TIE defenders were a great Wave 5 add. So much, I took out Major Rhymer entirely.
Round 1
Here’s the setup against Dong Lee, I think we were playing targeting beacons on this one as I recall. I decided early on to go right towards his Demolisher and then use the shuttle to pull the beacons along. I figured given that his Interdictor was slower, it’d be easier to keep it at range.
Demo had swung around the I’d landed a few hits on him so between my squadrons and my Gozantees I was able to take care of him and eek out the victory. (7-4
IIRC)
Round 2
For the second round I was paired up against Brent who was my partner for the Armada team tournament at Worlds earlier this year. Again, just like round 1, another Imperial player, tho in our cases, we were pretty much playing almost the exact fleets against each other. In all my years of playing Armada my very first mirror match.
We setup pretty much opposite so nothing like keeping the battle inside that 3×3 area. The differences in our fleet tho was instead of building up his VSDs Brent had keep his pretty clean and then added an Arq instead of a Gozanti.
We play Solar Corona which even across from each other like this was a pain because of the wide firing arcs. It wasn’t until later in the game where he was pointed into the sun and I was out.
His Arq started to race across and I was hoping I’d be able to focus fire it down quickly. That lack of a brace after all!
My die early on were kind of poor so his Arq lasted longer than it should have, meanwhile our squadron fight pretty much erupted in the middle of our two respective lines. It was mega bloody. Both of us have pretty good squadron games so it was really coming down to die rolls.
By turn 3 the Arq now gone, things started to go my way. While our hulls were 10s for all our VSDs, my VSDs had more features on them and that was starting to help matters as it was resulting in higher damage.
As the pivotal round. Time ended up getting called before we got to turn 6 and it’s very likely that Brent was have bagged one of my VSDs given when there damage counts where. So calling it there, I ended up winning with a 7-4 result.
At the end of 2 rounds, sitting with 14 points and 7th over all. oooooooo those special magic dice (that I wanted to win) where calling. I just needed to stay within the top 8.
Round 3
Last round of the day, I ended up playing against yet another Imperial player. In this case, he’s rocking few squadrons, a sort of anti squadron Gladiator with Ruthless Strategists, Demo on the other Glad and then a nicely built ISD.
I was player one and choose his Dangerous Territory. That lead to a pretty boring but somewhat predictable setup for the obstacles. I set my Gozantis so they could get 2 of the 3 since I didn’t anticipate they would be in the core of the action.
His Demo was on his ISD’s right flank. It was an interesting placement as that allowed me to keep it mostly out of the game and focus on the closer Gladiator and his squadrons first.
I worked the circle setting up my squadrons to do an alpha strike on his anti squadron Gladiator. In theory if that went well I could then push into his ISD. Tho going against a 14 Hull Motti I didn’t expect I’d get much accomplished.
I figured it’d be a close game, presuming I could keep both of my VSDs alive.
So the squadron battle was a little more brutal than I expected but I put quite a bit of damage into the anti squadron Gladiator and ended up blowing it up. Both of my Gozantis would be able to keep to the far edge and stay out of trouble while his Demolisher was largely out of the fight until about turn 4/5. I was able to move my squadrons from being in the squadron/squadron battle since I’d won that to now get them into position to protect my flank and most importantly put a hit or two into Demolisher.
As fate would have it, time would be called at turn 5. Both of us salivating at what would come in turn 6. I’d easily bag his Demolisher for another 100 points and he’d quite likely destroy one of my VSDs for about the same.
It ended up being a 6-5 victory for me, so all in all a very close highly dramatic game.
Ending up 8th over all, keep me right on my goal of being in the top 8 and picking up the sparkly dice!
W00t!
Meta-wise I was a little surprised at what all I didn’t see. I was really expecting to see more Peltas and uses of Sato. In addition the new rebel squadrons I was also thinking they would be all over and thick as flies. That just wasn’t the case. There was a lot of tried and true running out on the table. The Imperial/Rebel split was a nearly perfect 50/50.
In my case running a dual VSD list here in Wave 5?!!? How the heck are those things still viable? Well they are and I think that speaks volumes to the game design and the continued attention to detail with the various add ons and new admirals.
I very nearly picked up JJ as my Admiral with the theory of being able to maneuver better, it just never was that bad, cause I also very oddly never faced a single rebel player all day. Just a few MC30s on my flank and I’d probably have changed my mind!