So, I wanted to clarify something with Ion cannon and Ten Nunb.

Ten Nunb+Ion Cannon+Marksmanship

Is this what I think it is? An unavoidable, essentially (unless you roll all blanks), Ion shot?

Next is something with Target Lock action. I was in a match the other day in Vassal, and as we all know we like to just hit the CTRL+L key for target lock range when declaring a target lock. My opponent appeared to be within range three of one of my ships, but was unsure, and taking a focus token for his action would have been more beneficial than taking a target lock. so, he declared Target Lock on another ship of mine that was very clearly way out of TL range, practically in the completely opposite corner of the map, and would have been the equivalent of Range 6. When he declared, he hit the CTRL+L key, finding that he was, in fact, well within range 3 of the intended ship, and then decided to declare a focus action. I promptly told him that was extremely dirty and that he knew immediately without even trying that there was not a chance he was going to TL the other pilot. He agreed to then reverse his decision and just TL the original Range 3 ship.

Is something like this against the spirit of the rules, and would it be severely frowned upon by TO's, or is it something that is contextually legal to do and is not punished at tournaments? I have never run across something like that at a tournament, but you never know if it might happen. It's one thing to try to TL something that looks close to Range 3, another to purposefully do it to see if your within a specific range of something else, knowing you are well outside it's range.

So, I wanted to clarify something with Ion cannon and Ten Nunb.

Ten Nunb+Ion Cannon+Marksmanship

Is this what I think it is? An unavoidable, essentially (unless you roll all blanks), Ion shot?

any combination of only hits and blanks would result in a non-guaranteed Ion Shot. You have to roll at least 1 eye or 1 crit naturally to guarantee the ion hit.

...For just the low, low cost of 37 points... while that is totally doable, it's really expensive, and not terribly effective - just 1 damage and an ion is not worth spending that many points IMO.

As for your second point, yeah that is totally against the spirit of the game. In a tournament, you would only be able to put the range ruler between you and the ship you were trying to lock onto, so unless they were in line, it would be hard to get much information out of doing something like that. If someone was doing that blatantly, I would call them on it and/or get a TO involved.

For the first question, it is only unavoidable is you roll at least one eyeball or crit. Marksmanship is only going to turn an eyeball into a crit.

The second scenario that you describe isn't just against the spirit of the rules, it actually violates the tournament rules. For TLs, boosts, barrel-rolls, decloaks, if you measure for it you are committed to performing the action as long as it is legal. The only time that measuring doesn't commit you to an action is when you are deciding who to shoot, and in that case you are only permitted to measure from the ship that is about to attack.

EDIT: didn't read the thing closely enough. I thought that your opponent checked and changed his mind instead of declaring something out of range as a target. I don't think you'd get nearly as much information in an actual game as you would using Vassal from that tactic.

Speaking as someone with horrible spatial awareness, I am always measuring things that I think might be close that end up either way in or way out of range.

I'm not saying that's what is going on in this case but keep in mind that what is obvious to one viewer may not be obvious to all of them.

It's generally frowned upon to try and lock something that is clearly and obviously out of range in order to measure to something that might be. There's nothing in the rules that explicitly stops it. I've never had anyone do it to me personally, but my response would be "OK, no need to measure, it's obviously in range. No, really, that's not even close." Make him argue how the lock he's taking is probably out of range

On Vassal, claiming an impossible lock in order to get a full 360 measure definitely seems exploitive. There are other ways to measure that - if someone does it, I'd ask them to use the range check or put an actual range ruler on the table, rather than using the lock arc. It's not as convenient, but at least limits the ill-gotten information to just things along the line.

So, I wanted to clarify something with Ion cannon and Ten Nunb.

Ten Nunb+Ion Cannon+Marksmanship

Is this what I think it is? An unavoidable, essentially (unless you roll all blanks), Ion shot?

Pair Ten up with Etahn A'baht, and things could get interesting.

yeah, ive done that, don't have good lyuck with it, they focus fire etahn and hes gone soon. my defense dice rolls aren't very good, lol

The second point may seem a little snarky, but it is well within the rules. You can give a light comment in a friendly game, but people will use every legal tool available in a tournament. There's precedence for this in many other tabletop games as well. Know what can and cannot be measured.

Any arguments to Vassal are purely speculative as it is not an official platform for this game, and would be best handled outside FFG forums.

To the second point, I make a habit about not toggling ctrl L in a scenario like that. That's why there's a range finder tool at the top of the map. There are many times where people get more information on vassal due to the ease of toggling TL range than the game intended. Another example would be when checking for range of a friendly for an ability (ST, HR, Cracken, Garven, LW, HWKs come to mind) and toggle it to check for R1 (or R2 or whatever), and then find out that 3 different ships are in R1 or in range or whatever, that the player shouldn't know at the time.

But more often than not, these are innocent actions taken for the sake of time. But it sounds like in your case, the guy was blatantly trying to not only abuse the rules, but also abuse Vassal.

I did a thread before about your second issue.

Let me guess...the player was Zhan?

Pre-measuring is completely unenforceable on Vassal anyway, you can't stop someone from pre-measuring or even know that they're doing it, since you can't actually see what they're physically doing on their side of the screen. Pre-measuring rules don't port over to the digital realm very well.

I did a thread before about your second issue.

Let me guess...the player was Zhan?

someone else, whom i had played before. It's one thing to try to TL something that's just out of range, but entirely different to try and do it all the way from opposite map corners

I did a thread before about your second issue.

Let me guess...the player was Zhan?

someone else, whom i had played before. It's one thing to try to TL something that's just out of range, but entirely different to try and do it all the way from opposite map corners

There's a player named Zhan on vassal who does the same thing a lot. He doe sit so he knows where his dash will be in relation to other ships to make sure his donut hole is safe. If any players abuse this I'd give them one warning, then just quit if they keep doing it.

So, I wanted to clarify something with Ion cannon and Ten Nunb.

Ten Nunb+Ion Cannon+Marksmanship

Is this what I think it is? An unavoidable, essentially (unless you roll all blanks), Ion shot?

any combination of only hits and blanks would result in a non-guaranteed Ion Shot. You have to roll at least 1 eye or 1 crit naturally to guarantee the ion hit.

I still have a question about this. If Ten Nunb gets (for example) hit-hit-crit and I have an evade token and roll two evades, as his card says that one of his crits may not be avoided by defense dice, wouldn't the evade token prevent the crt?

So, I wanted to clarify something with Ion cannon and Ten Nunb.

Ten Nunb+Ion Cannon+Marksmanship

Is this what I think it is? An unavoidable, essentially (unless you roll all blanks), Ion shot?

any combination of only hits and blanks would result in a non-guaranteed Ion Shot. You have to roll at least 1 eye or 1 crit naturally to guarantee the ion hit.

I still have a question about this. If Ten Nunb gets (for example) hit-hit-crit and I have an evade token and roll two evades, as his card says that one of his crits may not be avoided by defense dice, wouldn't the evade token prevent the crt?

Page 8 of the FAQ covers this. Under 'Dice Results', it says that effects that add results to dice rolls are treated as dice results that cannot be modified. So evade tokens can't be used to cancel Ten Numb's crits.