I decided to make the trek from PA to the Stele Open on April 7 th and it was a great time. I had a really hard time trying to figure out what kind of fleet to bring and was unsure right up until I left my house Thursday night. But after talking with my buddy chuntsinger I settled on the following.
Faction:
Rebel Alliance
Points:
397/400
Commander: General Dodonna
Assault Objective:
Advanced Gunnery
Defense Objective:
Planetary Ion Cannon
Navigation Objective:
Intel Sweep
Assault Frigate Mark II B
(72 points)
- Toryn Farr ( 7 points)
- Flight Controllers ( 6 points)
- Electronic Countermeasures ( 7 points)
- Dual Turbolaser Turrets ( 5 points)
=
97
total ship cost
MC30c Torpedo Frigate
(63 points)
-
Admonition
( 8 points)
- Ordnance Experts ( 4 points)
- Assault Proton Torpedoes ( 5 points)
=
80
total ship cost
CR90 Corvette A
(44 points)
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits ( 7 points)
=
51
total ship cost
CR90 Corvette B
(39 points)
=
39
total ship cost
[ flagship ]
GR-75 Medium Transports
(18 points)
- General Dodonna ( 20 points)
- Comms Net ( 2 points)
=
40
total ship cost
1
Jan Ors
( 19 points)
1
Biggs Darklighter
( 19 points)
1
YT-1300
( 13 points)
3
X-Wing Squadrons
( 39 points)
I have one of every expansion, which in some ways limits my fleet building abilities, but I thought this would be ok. I did feel like I couldn’t find objectives that I loved and that it might have an issue bring down large based ships, but I thought I would give it a go.
Game 1: vs @Stasy
It was great to finally meet Stasy in person, we are from different parts of PA and he has been a great guy on the boards and on various twitch streams. He brought an Imperial Ozzel fleet that had 2 Arquitens, 2 Gozontis, and a Demolisher with expanded Launchers. He also brought a nice fighter contingent with 2 Lambdas, 2 Decimators, Valen Rudor and 3 Interceptors. He had initiative and chose to go first and picked Intel Sweep. Stasy had more drops then me and did a nice job delaying the deployment of his Demo. I placed Admonition down last and he put it took aim right at it with Demo. As I see it there were three big decision/events in this match, this turned out to be the first one, because, two rounds later Admo was dead to a Demo last first activation. The second big event of the match was when my Guppy hit an asteroid 1st or 2nd turn and drew a compartment fire crit, which means I couldn’t ready defense tokens. I did not have a repair command early enough in my command stack to get rid of it and his Arqes were able to chew away at it and kill it eventually. The third event that really turned the game to Stasy’s favor was when he was able to block my objective CR90B from getting a second token and evening up Intel Sweep. This secured him the 75 points for the objective and sealed things up nicely for him. The one thing that went really well from me was the squadron fight. My Biggs ball did a fantastic job and X-Wings with flight controllers and Toryn Farr is great. There were numerious times during the day that I was able to Toryn into 5 hits. In this game I dropped an 8 hull decimator with 2 X-Wing attacks. Overall the game didn’t go my way. 289 point MOV loss but it was a good time and Stasy was a great opponent.
Game 2: vs. Eric
This one hurt….bad! Eric brought a nice rebel fleet that was a Madine list with a fully kitted out Liberty, Admo, 2 GR-75’s one with expanded hanger bays and one with Toryn. He also brough a decent amount of squadrons with 2 E-Wings, an A-Wing, an X-wing and a VCX. He had the initiative and decided to go first and chose Intel Sweep. After messing up Intel Sweep in round one, I was determined not to let it happen again. This caused me to hyper focus on the objective and I managed to place my fleet flying right into the huge front Arch of a MC80 Liberty with gunnery teams. Eric was smart and sent his Liberty flying up at speed three and when second turn hit he managed to erase my CR90B(objective ship) and Dodonna’s Comms Net Flotilla in two shots. This secured him the 75 objective points and put me on tilt. I had managed to get my Admo at close range into the rear arch of his Admo, but was frazzled and didn’t see the shot and decided to activate my Guppy instead. My squadrons did work but, I gave away great shot. The game ended with just my CR90A surviving, the liberty did some crazy good anti squadron work. The final score was 429-53, 10-1 to Eric. He was a great opponent and we had a nice chat after we finished our game before the time was up.
Game 3: vs. Gerald
Welcome to the bottom table! My objective all day was to win a match, and I was running out of time. I was playing against Tan who was running a Rieekan list with a Liberty (Gunnery Teams, Mon Karren), Pelta (Shields to Maximum), Bright Hope and a Guppy. He also brought a Biggs ball with Jan and one less X-Wing then me. He was maxed out at 400 points, so I decided to go first since I had him out deployed. I choose his station assault and we were off. I figured I could kill at least one station to even out the objective and hope to get the second. He made a mistake by placing the stations down the center line of the table, with one within medium range of my deployment zone. His fleet was in a line coming across the table at me (Pelta to the right, Assault Frigate in the center and the Liberty on the right). I Deployed to have double archs from my CR90’s, and Guppy on the first station, with each of them running away from the Liberty and towards the Pelta, and place my Admo straight across from his Pelta. I managed to kill the first station in round 1 and then focused in on the Pelta. My admonition was able to go last-first and kill off the Pelta, which stuck around because of Rieekan. The Pelta and Guppy were able to focus fire on my CR90B and destroy it. My Biggs ball was able to handle his, mostly because of flight controllers and the game ended up as a 223-116 win for me. I lost both CR90’s and one or two squadrons. It was a fun game and Tan was a good guy that I enjoyed playing against him.
Game 4 vs @Audio Weasel
I had met Scott (aka Audioweasel) earlier in the day and had chatted with him during various twitch feeds in the past, so it was great to put a name to a face and then eventually play him. Audio was running a double MC30 (admo and foresight), Salvation (spinal), and GR-75 (with Jamming Field) Sato list. He also brought some nicely painted squads, a few A-Wings, X-wings, and VCXs. I chose to go first and selected Salvage Run, bad idea. I was unable to get to his VCXs before they moved all the tokens right to his ships and he swept the 80 points…bad start. My squadrons did a nice job eventually eliminating most of his squadrons, but I was unable to really do much against any of his ships. My Admonition had a nice last first activation against his Admonition, but I couldn’t get enough damage through. I lost my CR90B and a few other things, all the games start to run together when you are in round four. We were having a great time playing and talking I think we only made it through round 4, but at the end of the 2 hour limit it was a 170-48 point win for Scott. More importantly Scott is a great guy…you have to love an opponent who starts round 1 by asking two questions:
- Do you mind if I take pictures?
- Do you want a beer?
That’s right Audio brought a 6 pack to share with each of his opponents throughout the day. Great guy and his Sato put the hurt on me.
At the end of the day I was tired and I may not have gotten the results I wanted (sometimes because of luck, mostly because of mistakes made by me), but it was a fantastic experience. The entire day can be summed up in a conversation I had with a random Destiny player while cleaning up after game 4. He asked me why I would spend the money to play a game that he though could be better and easier on a computer. I had to think for a moment and then I had my answer. I had always heard about what a great community of players Armada had, but at my first real tournament I finally got to see it for myself. This was a room full of guys who played with tiny spaceships and rolled dice and laughed and had a great time. That is why I play Armada, between events like Stele or store tournaments, or even these boards, it’s about a bunch of dudes getting together and playing a game and having a great time.
Final thoughts on my fleet and other stuff:
- I knew I needed at least 4 activation, I thought 5 would be better. It worked OK, but a second GR-75 probably would have been better then a CR90B.
- Biggs balls are great, especially when activated with flight controllers.
- I need to play more. 1. Because it’s fun 2. I still haven’t played all the new objectives.
- Can’t wait for wave 6. After some discussions, I think it is going to bring a ton to the game.
- I need to buy more of the small based ships.
- The only 2 Assault Frigates in the field were on the bottom table for round 3…coincidence?
Additional thoughts:
- Relay is tough.
- As noted in game 2 Deployment can be everything