So this past weekend I attended my first Armada Tournament at IBuyWargames in Woking, England, due to a last minute drop out we had 9 players and a 4/5 split, Rebels/Imperials. By the end of the day I was able to place 3rd.

I started off with a dual AFII list with a six fighters and a thrid support ship of some sort, and every time I cleaned the slate and looked at the list again I removed more and more fighters. In the end I decided to fly a ship heavy, squadron free build. The list gave me deployment options and activation options and it has teeth! Going into the tournament I was never really sure what to do with my Corvette, I've not figured that ship out yet.

• AFIIb - Garm Bel Iblis, Enhanced Armament
• AFIIb - Enhanced Armament, Gunnery Team
• Neblon Support - Salvation
• Corvette A - Jana's Light
• 300 Point bang on.
• Objectives - Dangerous Territory, Advanced Gunnery & Fire Lanes

Game 1
I was playing against a dual VSDI/II list, Screed, Warlord and Dominator, both tooled up, accompanied by a selection of tie fighters.

I was made first player and chose Hyperspace Assault. I deployed to the right, the AFII's a Corvette facing off against the lone VSD and placed Salvation all by herself on the opposite flank, angled towards the coming engagement.

The Hyperspace tokens were spread across the table quite evenly.

When the second VSD arrived from Hyperspace my opponent chose to go all guns blazing after Salvation but after deploying the VSD1 was just out of range of those tasty black dice. Salvation survived and kicked the engines into full and left the VSD behind.

Meanwhile the rest of my fleet circled and destroyed the second VSD along with Screed and Wulf.. I was able to use anti-squadron fire to take out enough points of TIE fighters to push the game into a 9-1 victory.

Game 2
Near enough a mirror match against Rebels. He was running Mon Mothma, AFII, Neb and 2 Corvettes along with a lone Tycho.

I was made second player and we played my Dangerous Territory. Deployment saw all 4 of his ships face my two AFII's and Salvation while my Corvette sat far off on the other flank ready to gobble up objective tokens. The game started with our main fleets jousting, my Salvation against his and my 2 AFII's against his single AFII, I tried to ignore the Corvettes. In the critical round of engagement I was able to land some choice critical hits on Mon Mothma's flagship, no more refreshing of defense tokens and all shields lost. Mon Mothma went down in flames and so did my Salvation. At that point my two AFII's turned their attention on the enemy Salvation and Corvettes.

the games ended with a single enemy Corvette fleeing and Tycho buzzing angrily around. I had lost my Neblon but with the objective tokens it was another 9-1 victory.

Game 3
This was against 'Grobb' on these forums and we had been discussing fleet lists all week so I knew what was in store for me. He was running Rebels with Dodonna, 2 AFII's, 1 Neblon, 2 Bwings and 2 A wings. I was made second player and we played Dangerous territory again.

I made some glaring errors with the obstacle placement here, bunching up too many in one side of the table creating a hot zone where we would have to fight, forcing my deployment which was also a bit screwy. I deployed my corvette in a face off with his Salvation, a story that will never end well. Otherwise we generally faced off across the table.

The game came to a head over the middle three turns. I had made the mistake of burning my Brace token to early on my lead AFII and with a single broadside caused enough damage to wipe my remaining shields, accuracy to remove Re-direct, and blast through all my hull. Lesson learnt - Brace is important! the next moment was when Dodonna and Iblis were side by side, pouring fire into each other, engineering commands all the time, and maneuvering to cause collisions so we stayed in place (epic broadside duel). Dodonna was able to throw out 2 accuracy (cancelling brace and re-direct, and 7 damage taking me to one damage remaining. A simple ram finished me off.

My Salvation put up a good fight but against 2 AFII's it would never end well, destruction came swiftly... I also managed to mess up my commands on turn 2/3 ending up with the wrong command on both turns.

The Corvette was playing a constant reaction game against Salvation and managed to run past the Neblon into the back field but with 2 damage cards and no shields. A flying mistake on my part saw Jana's Light leave the table on turn 6...

The B-Wings forced my move a couple of times while flying the Corvette, with no shields a little B-Wing squadron posed quite the threat.

Tabled - 0-10

Some general thoughts

• I spammed Engineering commands for most of the games and found i wasn't using them that regularly. More thought needs to go into how I use the dials.
• I always seemed to split one ship away from the rest of the fleet, with the advantage in numbers I can overwhelm a flank or weak point in the enemy line so why not keep everyone together.
• Can I squeak in 2 fighters or a 5th ship to give me that fifth deployment option?
• Was Iblis Worth it? Sometime I had more tokens than I knew what to do with. Other times I chose the wrong token and never used it.
• I used Gunnery Team once across three games, are people seeing much use from this card when using it?
• Jana's Light was a stupid call, I misread Dangerous territory and did not need the ability JL granted.

There is another event in London in September so I'll be attending that, hopefully I'll have learned some lessons...

Here is Grobb's quick run down of the event taken from the Y-Wing thread...

It was me who won in Woking , UK at IBuywargames yesterday with the above list. I think it should be noted it was a very casual tournament, with nine players many of whom had less than ten games under their belt. I myself don't have much more than that probably.

My two b wings were surprisingly effective. They achieved two things of note. In one game they actually made the difference of killing a vsd by dealing critical damage that Dodonna made structural to get me to the ten hp corrupter had with Motti, which in turn shut down a rhymer ball before it could finish my flagship.

In another just the positioning of them protecting salvations flank tipped my opponents hand as to his setup and tactics, which in turn helped me get all my fire power where I wanted it.

I would also add another game with another rebel player at that tournie, the last dice roll of the game was a b wing doing the last point of damage to a victory and giving its controller the win.

So a good day for the much maligned b wing I thought

Whilst I am here I would just like to thank Ian at IBuywargames for great fun day and the gent who came third after I had to face off against on the top table in the last round with him, for spitballing fleets with me over the week before on messenger, although I think we both ended up running our first suggestions

Dammit. I would have been able to attend this one if I knew about it in advance >.<

I find that the "take all ships and spam engineering commands" tactic from the beloved VGGG list isn't godly as people claim. Feels like it's the idea of the good performance most of the time vs great performance when you play well and bad if you mess up trope.

Interesting AAR, and it's always good to see how things play out. Of course, I feel the Imp player really really screwed up jumping his VSD way out in BFE based on that picture: however, it's hard to have solid opinions on things when you don't see a whole game play out as everything is so woven together you need 100% context to make real judgments on what's good or not.

We did both agree at the end of the game that it was over zealous to try and jump the Neblon and one shot it. My opponent said he should have dropped on top of my AFII's.

Additionally the spamming of Engineering was more due to taking no defensive upgrades and having a toolbox of tokens from Iblis, much less to do with the strategy behind how VGGG plays.

I've been thinking through my command stacks and I keep coming back to Engineering with Iblis. I have a fighter build that will spam squadron commands and a Mon Mothma list that I've not even started contemplating command strategy for.

How many times were you shooting with engineering commands showing, though? Perhaps, too, the issue is that you have no squadron so you're out 1/4 of your options...which to me are superior to concfire in most situations when you actually think about the results.

I guess it's about minimising mistakes. By focusing on one command that is relevant to the strategy of the fleet I can focus more on the immediate. And obviously there were plenty of times I was shooting while holding engineering. But I still had command tokens from Inlis so was able to re-roll that pivotal dice on each ship. I think being able to play and win without relying on the command stack is important, not using it as a crutch.

Squadron commands are the obvious exception here. They great and to a degree, better than a single concentrate fire command, agreed, but taking squadrons changes the entire strategy of the list so a moot point in this case. I never felt like my options were reduced because of a lack of squadrons.

My biggest mistake in the last game was burning defence tokens too early. That lost me my first AFII which then put me behind the curve.