I'm going to try and get this written out before I've completely forgotten everything, this time. Nonetheless, I have a terrible memory for the specifics of games, much more so at Worlds where I've been pretty exhausted the whole time, so I apologize for anything I've forgotten or misremembered.
First, my list:
MM++ v5.3 (386/400)
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MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63 + 26)
+ Skilled First Officer (1)
+ Ordnance Experts (4)
+ Assault Proton Torpedoes (5)
+ H9 Turbolasers (8)
+ Admonition (8)
MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63 + 10)
+ Skilled First Officer (1)
+ Ordnance Experts (4)
+ Assault Proton Torpedoes (5)
MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63 + 10)
+ Skilled First Officer (1)
+ Ordnance Experts (4)
+ Assault Proton Torpedoes (5)
CR90 Corvette B (39 + 13)
+ Ion Cannon Batteries (5)
+ Engine Techs (8)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 30)
+ Mon Mothma (30)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 8)
+ Slicer Tools (7)
+ Quantum Storm (1)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 7)
+ Slicer Tools (7)
I waffled significantly on the 21 points that ended up being Slicers/Slicers/QS/6pt bid difference between 392 and 386. Other things I considered were Tycho, a Q7, or just a giant bid.
I changed up from my regionals 30/30/30/30/75/75/75 list to address two specific weaknesses I've run into: second-player scenarios where I had to draw ships into arc, particularly XI7 ISD2s; and against @Parkdaddy 's damnable Surprise Aces. The answer to the Surprise Aces is, of course, the two Slicers (two is significantly more valuable than one, because you can counter most counters that you're likely to see, including Leia and redundant activators.)
The answer to the player 2 scenario is a bit more experimental, but involves stripping nav tokens early with reckless attacks from the CR90B, and then aggressively slicing off nav commands with Quantum Storm. This significantly hamstrings the movement flexibility of pretty much every ship that I consider a major target--particularly the three large ships--and lets the shrimp set up double arcs with a very high degree of confidence despite being second player. This allows me to mitigate the shrimp's very strong preference for going first and its vulnerability to carriers with the same pool of upgrades.
So.
Round 1 (7-4 win)
Round 1 I played our own @Mogrok , who was a great opponent and a lot of fun to play against. He also lent me a speed dial for the day because I pulled a bonehead and left one of mine in the hotel room. He brought an ISD1, decked out Demo (with Tua/ECM), 2-3 (I think?) Gozantis, and a fighter screen. I'm pretty fuzzy on the game itself, and had a similar game the following day that I keep getting mixed up with this one. I remember he outbid me with a bid of 383(!). I think he took my Solar Corona, and deployed the ISD in a corner and Demo behind it, and the Gozantis scattered wide across the rest of the board, in hopes that I would have to come into his hammer if I wanted a shot at the ISD. I countered with a wide open deployment and very high deployment speeds (3-4 on all the shrimp), with Admonition on one side of the board to mop up flotillas before bringing up the cleanup blows from behind, while the rest of my force focused on the combat ships.
This game saw my Slicer Tools make their money by completely shutting Demo out of the game until the very end. Not having played against them very often, Mogrok did not take a nav token on Demolisher on round 1, opting to use his ET that round. This put him in threat range of QS , which jumped out after Demo and spent the rest of the game providing the untouched Demo with repair commands, severely limiting both its speed and maneuverability, while scattering every shot it took.
Meanwhile, my shrimp chased down the ISD from the other direction, doing as shrimp do. I got a bit overagressive with my CR90 against the ISD, and IIRC failed to strip the nav token with an ICB double arc before it went down in flames, leaving me struggling to pin down the ISD with MC30s without dying. I did eventually get it, but by the time I'd finished it I was grasping desperately for a chance at Demo .
I set up the last-round Demo vs Admo trying for a 10-1, gambling that he couldn't pop a moderately-damaged Admonition with his moderately-damaged Demo before I got my shot, and lost the gamble, dropping the game to 7-4 for me. I believe he got the CR90 and Admonition , and I got most of his fleet except Demolisher .
Round 2 (1-10 loss)
Okay. I will try to be as salt-free about this one as I can. I will say up front that my opponent played his fleet well enough that he was in position to take advantage of what happened. I knew coming into the tournament that if this happened to me, I would lose horribly and there was nothing I would be able to do about it, because it's happened before.
This match was against Yik from Toronto, and he brought a Rieekan Aces list with Gallant Haven , Yavaris , BCC, Adar on a GR75, and a Comms Net GR75. His squadron composition was balanced, and included Luke and also other things.
I won the bid and we played his Most Wanted.
The way I handle Rieekan aces is by charging directly into the carriers and blowing them up before they can put enough damage into my shrimp to kill them. Mothma goes a very long way toward making this possible, particularly by ensuring that I don't get one-shotted by Yavaris Luke shenanigans on my way in. Often I'll lose one on its way out the other side, but by then it's already done its job and is an acceptable loss. This matchup is always a damage race: I put out damage faster than he does, but am utterly unable to withstand his sustained damage, so if I fail to kill some ships early, the match completely falls apart for me.
So, I set up to do this. We deployed more or less across the board from each other. I had to take an open deployment, being significantly outdeployed, meaning that two of my MC30s would arrive in the combat area before the third. Yik deployed away from Admonition , wisely, meaning that the other two would dive into the squadron ball before Admo got into the mix. On turn 1, Adar put Luke into firing range of the lead MC30, which was bearing hard for Gallant Haven.
Luke rolled a hit/crit; Mothma rerolled into a hit/crit.
Well, it happens. The next turn, the Adar ship activated Luke early for another shot on the MC30.
Luke rolled a hit/crit; Mothma rerolled into a hit/crit.
Luke moved just ahead of the second shrimp, positioned so that FCT could put him into range of it regardless of where it navigated to . Yavaris moved, pushed him with FCT into range. Yavaris activated Luke.
Luke rolled a hit/crit; Mothma rerolled into a hit/crit.
Yavaris double tapped Luke.
Luke rolled a hit/crit; Mothma rerolled into a hit/crit.
By this point, the game was very obviously won and lost, but I had Admonition positioned to take a last/first pair of double arcs into Gallant Haven , so I was going to be able to at least make some points back to keep it to a 4-7 or so. I took four shots and a ram into the same arc on Haven, got one APT proc among those 4 shots, and it lived. It is difficult to express how extraordinarily unlikely this is, particularly on a Haven without ECM. Failing to kill Gallant Haven meant that I had to leave Admonition in position to try for a follow-up shot the following round or risk getting no points at all. She was overwhelmed by bombers and went down to the last shot of the last bomber in that turn. Gallant Haven survived the game, the rest of my fleet was cleaned up, and I finished the round with a 400 MoV loss, and 8 tournament points overall.
Round 3 (9-2 win)
This game was against @Eimi , who was super cool. I have to give her a particular shout-out for being such a great sport, despite the awful, frustrating things that Slicer Tools did to her during our game.
Eimi was flying an MC80 Command Pickle, Yavaris , and a pair of GR75s, with Rieekan and 100ish points of mostly-Xwing squadrons, with aces mixed in and also I believe Norra. She had never played against Slicer Tools, and brought no answer to them at all, so I did that thing that we all thought was going to happen all the time when we first saw Slicer Tools: I parked one next to Yavaris , and one behind the Command Cruiser, and just fed them engineering commands for 4 turns. We played her objective, but I don't remember what it was and I don't think it made much impact on the game. I pretty much dropped a shrimp in the MC80's front arc, last/firsted another through the side arc, and finished it off in a couple of rounds before moving on to tackle Yavaris and a flotilla. I ran out of time to chase down the other one, ending the game at a 9-2 for me.
Round 4 (7-4 win)
The first game of the second day was against a gentleman from Toronto whose name I just cannot seem to remember.
I feel like it was "John," and I don't think that's right, but that's what I'll have to call him unless his name comes back to me. He was here for X-wing, and was playing Armada because he was here anyway. He had brought a squadronless pulse tap list with Vader XI7 ISD2
Avenger
, Demo, XI7 Arq, and an OP Raider 2.
I won the bid and we played his Fire Lanes. Despite being new to Armada, John had a pretty good idea what was what, and also had what I consider the hard counter to my list: the ISD2 with XI7 and rerolls, so this was never going to be a walk in the park. I popped the Raider with a CR90 nose punch early on, but traded the CR90 to do it. My APTs were still cold, but so were his reds, so it ended up kind of a pillow fight. Took some 5 or 6 total shrimp activations to finally take down the ISD, which camped the Fire Lanes the whole time, leading to a relatively small MoV. Not much noteworthy happened in this game: I managed to dodge the ISD's front arc every time, he managed to keep a ton of dice on the Fire Lanes at all times, and I tackled everything but Demo by the end of the game... but not in time to win any of the Fire Lanes.
Round 5 (3-8)
I don't remember the score on this one... it was somewhere around 3-8. This was against Jesse, a player from the Northeast (I believe New York, as he said he was in finance). Being a bit on the anal side as precision is concerned, I very much appreciated his extraordinary precision of play, particularly with the pile of squadrons he brought. This was a very interesting game for me, because it was both the build an the approach that has apparently driven the entire eastern seaboard away from the game. After having played against it, I can certainly reiterate my stance that, if this is what and how everyone in your area is playing, I can certainly see it driving people away from the game. Despite that, I thought this was a really fun and engaging game, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, frustrating as it was.
Jesse brought Ozzel with an APT Demo, a FleshRaider, and 4 Gozantis, with Jendon, Vader, Maarek, an advanced, Saber and the rest of his points in Defenders. We played his Precision Strike.
I knew as soon as I sized it up what he was going to do: dance the flotillas around the edges of the board, relaying the squadrons. It's a squadron list that's very heavily invested into the anti-squadron game, but I knew that I would have a hard time chasing down all those flotillas while being pecked to death by the squadrons. It was never going to be a large MoV, so I got a brilliant idea as I was starting deployment: ignore the ships, kill the squadrons with flak, profit. With few aces, no scatters, and no mass activation options or rogues, I thought I might be able to overlap my flak enough to, if not kill squadrons, at least drive them away from my fleet, giving me some respite and allowing me to maybe pin down Demo and the Raider. I have very rarely tried this approach, and never against a fleet of Defenders, so this game was entirely seat-of-the-pants. I deployed in a relatively open formation that I immediately pulled in very tight during turn 1, with an MC30 and a flotilla flanking Mothma on either side, the CR90 kiting Demo , and Admonition hunting Gozantis.
It worked very poorly, thanks in large part to Jesse's truly immaculate squadron play. In a veritable hedgehog of arc lines and overlaps, I don't think he ever one time placed his squadrons into double arcs, he very rarely placed them into overlapping arcs, and he kept even Saber alive and effective the entire game with obstruction and good placement. He was appropriately conservative with them, and pulled Defenders back to the station for heals when necessary. I think my final squadron kill tally was 2 Defenders, and possibly the Advanced.
I ended up losing several of my ships, and killed 1 or 2 Gozantis. The only shot I really got was on the Raider, which, after eating an asteroid, still survived a CF MC30 broadside. His PS tokens pushed him over the threshold to a 2-8.
Overall, I ended up in 39th place I think. So, just low enough not to win any sweet lewt. I would like to have done better, but I did have a great time, and got to hang out with some of you clowns and meet a lot of new people, so definitely worth the trip (and my current suffering with Con Crud). Thanks to all my opponents, and to @ardneh42 Jon for not matching up against me with your damned ramming corvettes.
Edited by Ardaedhel