First I will start off by saying I am certainly no novice player. I have a lot of games under my belt. Being our local tournament organizer I only play in a tournament if we are short players and need an extra player to make the number of participants equal. As a result I have only played in two tournaments. I finished 3rd in one and won the other.

The other day in league play I, as the Empire, had to defend a system from a rebel attack. This would be a standard 300-point, wave one game. Not having time to prep a fleet of my own I simply chose to field the Gencon Special (1 VSD with Screed , 3 GSD with Assault Concussion Missiles and one as Demolisher ). I decided to run them as the originator of this design suggested, and as he ran them for his Gencon victory, using nothing but maneuver commands to ensure I could shoot at stuff.

My opponent was one of the most skilled players at our FLGS. His fleet was a single Assault Frigate Mk B, two Neb-B Escort Frigates, 1 CR90A Jaina's Light , and a pair of A-Wings commanded by Mon Mothma . The Objective was Dangerous Territory and I was the first player.

I lost the game 295 to 0. One GSD survived but the rest of my fleet was destroyed. Both A-Wings survived and played little part in the battle. Jaina's Light suffered 3 hull damage, the Assault Frigate took 4 hull damage and one of the two Neb-Bs ended the game with 3 hull damage. The Assault Frigate had Advanced Projectors and of course the Gencon Special has no Xi-7 to counter that.

I may have rolled slightly below average, my opponent readily agrees that he rolled a couple of fantastic attacks. Still even with constant use of Maneuver Dials I almost never managed to get a GSD into position to unleash at short range. Mon Mothma made it very difficult to get telling shots at Medium or Long range and even made my few Short Range shots less stellar than they should have been. Between all of that and the Rebels managing to seize most all of the Objective Tokens I was shut down. Ironically I went into the game figuring my best chance to win was to try and table my foe (nearly got that turned totally around on me).

The Gencon Special is far from unbeatable.

(Really wasn't sure whether to post this here or in the Organize Play forum. Since it dealt mainly with a Fleet build I chose here).

You deliberately avoided taking any tokens? How did that come to pass? I'm just trying to envision it?

No, I headed for the tokens toward the center of the map, since it would also closed the distance to the enemy, but since the Rebel's went first with the speed 4 Jaina's Light they grabbed the one I had the best shot at. 1 of my GSD ended up about 2 or 3 milometers shy of one of the tokens but lost out on it by overshooting the next turn. A lot of near collisions on both sides and a couple of deliberate rams but for whatever reason things just didn't seem to work out. The Rebels got 4 of the 6 objective tokens and by the later game I was just trying to survive instead of going after the last two. The Rebels also abandoned nabbing the last two since they were now more interested in killing more Imperial ships.

How did he fly his nebs to avoid being broadsided?

I have seen it lose more games than it wins. No build is unbeatable, many times its player skill combined with match ups that win tournaments.

Still don't get it. With 3 gladiators, and a willingness to take damage, I don't see how you wouldn't get your 3 tokens.

But I obviously wasn't there, so I'm not going to be too bombastic :-)

I should have been taking pictures. I figured it'd be a "routine" game. By the time I realized just how badly things were going we were too far along for me to start a good documentation of events.

Mon Mothma on her own is a very hard counter to the GenCon Special and really any Creed-dependant Imperial build because of her ability to force a reroll on Screed's ability. Combine that with an initative bid and she absolutely can take on very powerful fllets.