Hey, I finally got motivated to do a thing. It's mostly a handy repository of the Top 8 Worlds and Euros lists.

https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/keeping-score-worlds-and-euros-top-8/

Basically the summary is: activations. Take a lot.

Boy that's surprising.

Conclusion: If there is one thing we can conclude from the analysis of both Worlds and Euros, it is that we all love to jump to conclusions.

(your particular conclusions are broad and appropriate, but I didn't know which of the four Euros threads to post my in depth and highly insightful conclusion on.)

Good bye Wave Jive.

Bring on Wave S*x!

6 hours ago, Captain Weather said:

Hey, I finally got motivated to do a thing. It's mostly a handy repository of the Top 8 Worlds and Euros lists.

https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/keeping-score-worlds-and-euros-top-8/

Basically the summary is: activations. Take a lot.

Boy that's surprising.

Great article! Thanks!

1 hour ago, CaribbeanNinja said:

Conclusion: If there is one thing we can conclude from the analysis of both Worlds and Euros, it is that we all love to jump to conclusions.

(your particular conclusions are broad and appropriate, but I didn't know which of the four Euros threads to post my in depth and highly insightful conclusion on.)

Good bye Wave Jive.

Bring on Wave S*x!

CNinja!

Very true (and I won't pretend I don't jump to conclusions like the rest of us).

Basically, that was why I stuck to those three conclusions (and really points 2 and points 3 flow from point 1). Activation advantage is one of the most powerful advantages you can hold in this game, and its been reflected in the average activation count jumping after the introduction of flotillas from the 3ish mark to now where successful lists are running 5ish.

Flotillas are so omnipresent because they are the easiest way to get an activation. The fact that a lot of flotillas were run naked to me hints at this fact.

Squadrons being all or nothing again I feel flows from the above two; the more activations you have the better, flotillas are the easiest way to get more, flotillas work well paired with squadrons.

I don't think Wave Six from anything we've had revealed will change this fact (or at least not conclusion one), but we'll see how it shapes out.

So I went and updated the article with some additional data - basically Euros really, really seems to showcase the power of activation advantage.

TLDR: 6-7 ship fleets made up 20.2% of the field, but 62.5% of the Top 8.

I'm going to bring my response to your response here.

First off I'm glad I was able to spur you to take a more in depth look at the data for your article. Ultimately though, I'm saddened as it only seems to have hardened your stance on the importance of having a five plus activations.

To the perception that 3 ships had been pushed out, made extinct on the battlefield by supposedly higher activating fleets. Another viewpoint might be that people simply evolved their 3 ship fleet into 4,5,6 ship fleets, cashing in a corvette for a pair of flotillae to provide better flexibility for the fleet, rather than a desperate need to stay competitive in some sort of activation arms race.

As to the anomalies of why 4 ships underperformed and 6 ships over performed in top 8 finishing, it could be that the best players in the tournament selected higher activation fleets. Again this could be for a variety of reasons, personal preference, deliberate attempt to harness activation advantage, a desire to play without squadrons, etc.etc. Or it could be that 4 ship commanders got paired up against each other and cancelled each other out. The list of possibilities here goes on and on. All of this seems much more nuanced to me than a simple breakdown of percentages.

Therefore attempting to extrapolate from the data anything other than the majority of players took 5 ship fleets is quite precarious indeed.

If we look at the final match we see a 5 activation fleet versus a 6 activation one. And activations doesn't win the day. Rather, as others have already remarked, quality is the deciding factor here. It's what raw data can't really show us. You can only see it when you go to the game level.

I don't want to speak for tokra but I think it's telling that he's gone from 8 gozanti to 5 plus demo. Because if you play the activation arms race you eventually come to a place where quality is being wholesale sacrificed for quantity. That somewhere around 4-5 gozantis worth of squadron activations, every activation after that is mere padding. That padding did offer tokra a key advantage in that he was able to delay his engagement until his opponent was tapped, and thereby let his bombers have their way with his opponents ships. But after the engagement happens and both players once again are able to activate, something becomes readily apparent. You now want to do as much as you can in a single activation as possible I.e. Quality. Now I don't know if the euro winner is the same gentlemen that outlined these exact same arguments a while back in a podcast, but basically that contention was that you could slash activations nearly in half and gain a ton of quality in return, and it certainly is working out for this fellow here.

Back to the core argument and your stance on aiming for five activations. As we've seen, quality wins even in the face of superior activations, and I would argue that activations could be shrunk even further in favor of packing in even more quality, perhaps even past 3 activations, maybe all the way down to 2 activations. Like I said, until we get some well designed trials between low activation high activation fleets we just can't say for sure how powerful a factor activations are. As for me, I'll take quality over quantity any day.

Thanks for posting the lists. I was lucky enough to come 6th at Euros.

And I mean lucky. Bomber lists were the nemesis of my Cracken fleet! Thankfully I only faced a few.

Activation advantage was crucial in many of my games. The whole fleet was built to abuse 6 activations and token missions (fire lanes and sensor net). Only one person picked fire lanes in 7 rounds, despite going second in 6 games. No one picked sensor net!

I also noticed a lot of games ending in draws at 6-5/5-6 (including 3 of my games). Killing the flotillas takes effort and doesn't yield many points.

1 hour ago, Mundo said:

Thanks for posting the lists. I was lucky enough to come 6th at Euros.

And I mean lucky. Bomber lists were the nemesis of my Cracken fleet! Thankfully I only faced a few.

Activation advantage was crucial in many of my games. The whole fleet was built to abuse 6 activations and token missions (fire lanes and sensor net). Only one person picked fire lanes in 7 rounds, despite going second in 6 games. No one picked sensor net!

I also noticed a lot of games ending in draws at 6-5/5-6 (including 3 of my games). Killing the flotillas takes effort and doesn't yield many points.

May I ask what your red was??? This has been my experience as well as far as strategic goes. Strategic makes your blues and yellows so bad, particularly for msu, that they always pick your red, which is good against fleets with a big target, but kinda just meh against fleets with small ships only...

4 hours ago, SkyCake said:

To the perception that 3 ships had been pushed out, made extinct on the battlefield by supposedly higher activating fleets. Another viewpoint might be that people simply evolved their 3 ship fleet into 4,5,6 ship fleets, cashing in a corvette for a pair of flotillae to provide better flexibility for the fleet, rather than a desperate need to stay competitive in some sort of activation arms race.

So there will be a lot less snark in this one - but bear with me I still want to go through this. My main problem Skycake is that you're not really presenting any convincing arguments. I do agree that people have cashed in their 3 ship fleets for 4, 5, and 6, ship fleets. The data does suggest that. It's just incredibly confusing to me that on the one hand you're saying that they have done so 'because the flotillas provide better flexibility' while denying that activations are part of that utility. Yes, people have included flotillas in their fleet for other reasons, but this data suggests that people are fairly unilaterally trending towards more activations. The logical driver for this, based off the game's fundamental mechanics, would be activation advantage.

4 hours ago, SkyCake said:

As to the anomalies of why 4 ships underperformed and 6 ships over performed in top 8 finishing, it could be that the best players in the tournament selected higher activation fleets. Again this could be for a variety of reasons, personal preference, deliberate attempt to harness activation advantage, a desire to play without squadrons, etc.etc. Or it could be that 4 ship commanders got paired up against each other and cancelled each other out. The list of possibilities here goes on and on. All of this seems much more nuanced to me than a simple breakdown of percentages.

Therefore attempting to extrapolate from the data anything other than the majority of players took 5 ship fleets is quite precarious indeed.

Again this is incredibly confusing and is something of a non-argument. I presented data that shows that at Euros, 4 & 5 ship lists underperformed compared to their presence in the tournament, and conversely that 6 & 7 ship fleets overperformed. Your counter is 'personal preference, deliberate attempt to harness activation advantage, a desire to play without squadrons, etc. etc.' - again all of which if you look at them are spurious claims, or certainly don't counter what I presented.

I agree, I do think players taking 6 & 7 ship fleets were looking to harness activation advantage (and therefore it was something of a personal preference), the data actually shows that most of them that made the Top 8 in fact did play with squadrons.

I would also put to you that saying that all the 4 ship commanders got paired against each other and knocked each other out is so blatantly false in this instance. Stepping aside from the fact that 1 in 5 players was a 4 ship lists (and therefore the odds of them all knocking each other down at the right time is incredibly unlikely). Euros had the highest number of swiss rounds at a major armada tournament ever (I believe it was 6 or 7 rounds of Swiss). Put simply, there is just no way this happened - not with how swiss works. In fact if you look at the comments from the winner, he said that he played at the top tables for the entire tournament and he was exclusively playing 5-7 ship lists. If anything by your argument its more unlikely that the higher activation lists didn't knock each other down from the Top 8.

The only point here that I feel is correct is that there is more nuance than simple percentages, but again, this is what I have to work with, otherwise anything I say is anecdotal and conjecture.

It just boggles my mind that in the face of such extreme over and under performance, you're still reaching for essentially conjecture based arguments.

4 hours ago, SkyCake said:

If we look at the final match we see a 5 activation fleet versus a 6 activation one. And activations doesn't win the day. Rather, as others have already remarked, quality is the deciding factor here. It's what raw data can't really show us. You can only see it when you go to the game level.

I don't want to speak for tokra but I think it's telling that he's gone from 8 gozanti to 5 plus demo. Because if you play the activation arms race you eventually come to a place where quality is being wholesale sacrificed for quantity. That somewhere around 4-5 gozantis worth of squadron activations, every activation after that is mere padding. That padding did offer tokra a key advantage in that he was able to delay his engagement until his opponent was tapped, and thereby let his bombers have their way with his opponents ships. But after the engagement happens and both players once again are able to activate, something becomes readily apparent. You now want to do as much as you can in a single activation as possible I.e. Quality. Now I don't know if the euro winner is the same gentlemen that outlined these exact same arguments a while back in a podcast, but basically that contention was that you could slash activations nearly in half and gain a ton of quality in return, and it certainly is working out for this fellow here.

Back to the core argument and your stance on aiming for five activations. As we've seen, quality wins even in the face of superior activations, and I would argue that activations could be shrunk even further in favor of packing in even more quality, perhaps even past 3 activations, maybe all the way down to 2 activations. Like I said, until we get some well designed trials between low activation high activation fleets we just can't say for sure how powerful a factor activations are. As for me, I'll take quality over quantity any day.

So this is kind of a neat one. Notice that I didn't say activation advantage is unbeatable. Its not. Its hard to do, but a lot of factors allow you to do it. What I did say was that activation advantage gives you (based upon the data) a higher chance of winning or performing well.

Ben won the whole shebang with 5 ships and thats great, power to the dude, having played Tokra before - that's a seriously well earned win.

I also don't think you're wrong about Tokra dropping from 8 gozanti to 5 plus demo. It's just telling that Tokra still dropped to an overperforming activation bracket. He didn't drop from 8 to 4, he dropped from 8 to 6. He didn't sacrifice his activation advantage, he just lessened it to get a ship that couldn't punch.

What we have not seen borne out by the data though is this line - 'quality wins even in the face of superior activations'. Again, from the data, that is patently untrue. The higher into activations you reached, the better on average you were likely to perform. This is what I need to stress, the individual winner doesn't matter so much to me, it's the fact that on average at Euros 2017 if you had 6 or 7 ships, you were far more likely to make Top 8 than any other number of activations.

Again, you do you hombre, cut your activations down to 2 or 3 ships.

Tell me how it goes, and let me know when a major tournament is won by it.

2 hours ago, SkyCake said:

May I ask what your red was??? This has been my experience as well as far as strategic goes. Strategic makes your blues and yellows so bad, particularly for msu, that they always pick your red, which is good against fleets with a big target, but kinda just meh against fleets with small ships only...

Most Wanted. Helped in games where I could get the corvettes focused on one target. Really didn't help against Mon Mothma MC30s who just keep evading damage!

Agreed, the red was the weak link in the list. But still useful to add the damage, plus double points for the kill.

11 minutes ago, Captain Weather said:

So there will be a lot less snark in this one - but bear with me I still want to go through this. My main problem Skycake is that you're not really presenting any convincing arguments. I do agree that people have cashed in their 3 ship fleets for 4, 5, and 6, ship fleets. The data does suggest that. It's just incredibly confusing to me that on the one hand you're saying that they have done so 'because the flotillas provide better flexibility' while denying that activations are part of that utility. Yes, people have included flotillas in their fleet for other reasons, but this data suggests that people are fairly unilaterally trending towards more activations. The logical driver for this, based off the game's fundamental mechanics, would be activation advantage.

Again this is incredibly confusing and is something of a non-argument. I presented data that shows that at Euros, 4 & 5 ship lists underperformed compared to their presence in the tournament, and conversely that 6 & 7 ship fleets overperformed. Your counter is 'personal preference, deliberate attempt to harness activation advantage, a desire to play without squadrons, etc. etc.' - again all of which if you look at them are spurious claims, or certainly don't counter what I presented.

I agree, I do think players taking 6 & 7 ship fleets were looking to harness activation advantage (and therefore it was something of a personal preference), the data actually shows that most of them that made the Top 8 in fact did play with squadrons.

I would also put to you that saying that all the 4 ship commanders got paired against each other and knocked each other out is so blatantly false in this instance. Stepping aside from the fact that 1 in 5 players was a 4 ship lists (and therefore the odds of them all knocking each other down at the right time is incredibly unlikely). Euros had the highest number of swiss rounds at a major armada tournament ever (I believe it was 6 or 7 rounds of Swiss). Put simply, there is just no way this happened - not with how swiss works. In fact if you look at the comments from the winner, he said that he played at the top tables for the entire tournament and he was exclusively playing 5-7 ship lists. If anything by your argument its more unlikely that the higher activation lists didn't knock each other down from the Top 8.

The only point here that I feel is correct is that there is more nuance than simple percentages, but again, this is what I have to work with, otherwise anything I say is anecdotal and conjecture.

It just boggles my mind that in the face of such extreme over and under performance, you're still reaching for essentially conjecture based arguments.

So this is kind of a neat one. Notice that I didn't say activation advantage is unbeatable. Its not. Its hard to do, but a lot of factors allow you to do it. What I did say was that activation advantage gives you (based upon the data) a higher chance of winning or performing well.

Ben won the whole shebang with 5 ships and thats great, power to the dude, having played Tokra before - that's a seriously well earned win.

I also don't think you're wrong about Tokra dropping from 8 gozanti to 5 plus demo. It's just telling that Tokra still dropped to an overperforming activation bracket. He didn't drop from 8 to 4, he dropped from 8 to 6. He didn't sacrifice his activation advantage, he just lessened it to get a ship that couldn't punch.

What we have not seen borne out by the data though is this line - 'quality wins even in the face of superior activations'. Again, from the data, that is patently untrue. The higher into activations you reached, the better on average you were likely to perform. This is what I need to stress, the individual winner doesn't matter so much to me, it's the fact that on average at Euros 2017 if you had 6 or 7 ships, you were far more likely to make Top 8 than any other number of activations.

Again, you do you hombre, cut your activations down to 2 or 3 ships.

Tell me how it goes, and let me know when a major tournament is won by it.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the CURRENT state is about to change. When Disposable Capacitors come out and make VSD-IIs a thing again, I'm not sure showing up with 6 flotillas and one big ship will be enough. I fully agree with you on quality of activations being important, but i'm not sure it's just going to keep trending up and up as we add ships. The Rebels can field like 7-8 hammerheads in a list, but i wouldn't RUN 7-8 hammerheads. I think, with this next wave, we're going to see a lot more lists where people are spreading out ship types, even more so than now. Yes, a lot of Europe had lists with 4 gozantis and an ISD, but putting that against something with Demo, a quasar, a flotilla, a VSD, and a Raider is something i might give to the varied list. But it's all something we'll need to see when things shake out.

Again, not disagreeing with your post about "more activations = better" i'm just saying that we may hit a point of diminishing returns soon enough.

Sorry I was at work so I couldn't respond to this, despite seeing it half a day ago.

So again I didn't say that activations would continue to trend upwards indefinitely, as there is a definite limiting factor of points and, not so much diminishing returns, but rather the need to have something capable of killing ships (you could take 16 Gozantis, it just might be hard to kill stuff).

A better way to express what we're seeing is that fleets with greater than the average fleets activations tend to place higher. This means that competitive players are pushing for fleets with greater than average activations (I suspect this trickles down, but thats conjecture). This is all I have to say re: the article and my initial points. Everything from here is a response to two things I noted in your comment.

12 hours ago, geek19 said:

Yes, a lot of Europe had lists with 4 gozantis and an ISD, but putting that against something with Demo, a quasar, a flotilla, a VSD, and a Raider is something i might give to the varied list.

I just found this argument funny. So just going off the ships (and no other factors, like squads, upgrades, bids, etc). I reckon it's 40-60 weighted in favour of the varied fleet, but really the part that made me laugh was my whole conclusion was centred on activation advantage. Yet... you compared two fleets with the exact same number of activations? And then decided in favour of the varied fleet (which I probably would as well, sight unseen of any other factors). A fairer comparison would be say Alessio's fleet, a Liberty and 5 flotillas against Demo, a quasar, a flotilla, a VSD, and a Raider. Anyway it was a minor thing, it just made me chuckle.

12 hours ago, geek19 said:

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the CURRENT state is about to change. When Disposable Capacitors come out and make VSD-IIs a thing again, I'm not sure showing up with 6 flotillas and one big ship will be enough.

So my issue here is that you're making a very big assumption.

I don't know if Disposable Capacitors will make VSD-IIs a competitive thing again for basically two reasons. The first is that you still have to actually get in range, even if you have now extended that range to long. With relay, admiral lifeboats, and general junk activations, flotillas don't have to be anywhere near the D-Caps VSD to serve their purpose. The second is that VSDs are still a really outmatched platform. Yes, a D-Caps VSD, if it can get a bead on some flotillas should be able to pop it on average - but it's slow, without Jerjerrod it has a terrible turning ability, it isn't exactly cheap, and it wilts surprisingly quickly to a lot of things (Big ships, MC30s, Demo, TRC90s, Squads).

To use your own example, if the 6 flotillas + 1 Big ship out activates the D-Caps list, then its not hard to imagine that big ship forcing that VSD into a losing match up. Just my two cents.

4 minutes ago, Captain Weather said:

To use your own example, if the 6 flotillas + 1 Big ship out activates the D-Caps list, then its not hard to imagine that big ship forcing that VSD into a losing match up. Just my two cents.

Exactly, specially when the VSD can't shoot a single dice becouse of triple tapping.

Just now, Aresius said:

Exactly, specially when the VSD can't shoot a single dice becouse of triple tapping.

100% yes.

Big fan of your Euros list by the way. Tempted to give a variant a spin (I've just never used the Liberty much, so it would be nice to do so for a change).

Do you have any idea for a variant? I see rebel squadrons suffer too much against imperial anti squadrons, so i don't know if is better to switch to another tipe of squadrons like e-wing or biggs ball.

29 minutes ago, Aresius said:

Do you have any idea for a variant? I see rebel squadrons suffer too much against imperial anti squadrons, so i don't know if is better to switch to another tipe of squadrons like e-wing or biggs ball.

Imperial Anti-Squadron, especially when mass-activated is killer.

So I went back and had a look at your list. I toyed around changing some of the Liberty, but I think it works, and all of the other ships are basically stock standard.

I agree, the only thing I would change would maybe be the squadron composition. I think in its current iteration, I would probably drop the HWK in favour of a 6th A-Wing, I can see how it would be useful for freeing up relay and so on, but I don't know I just feel it would get focused down too easily (so its more of a personal preference thing). With Shara, Tycho, 6-Awings, and 2 VCXs its a pretty rock solid squad ball, a lot of it is really going to come down to more tactical level decision making.

If you wanted to explore E-Wings you could drop to Corran, 3 E-Wings, 2 VCXs, Shara, and Tycho. I don't know if that is better or not, you're giving up deployments and dice to make use of snipe (plus your anti-ship dice becomes more swingy). I'll freely admit though I've had very little play time with E-Wings.

Biggs Ball I don't see as being as useful in this particular list just because of its slow speed and other factors (red bomber dice again, etc).

7 flotillas and Yavaris! This is the answer!

it has been said a lot on other threads but I will say it again, it is alarming how spammy this game is becoming. Flotillas are being spammed already and results like these are not going to help with the perception of, "to win I must buy more flotillas."

I feel that we as a community need to start limiting the number of flotillas we are taking to avoid such an activation arms race. Playing with a super high activation count is a crutch. By vastly out activating your opponent, you are artificially making yourself a better player because you are delaying having to make any meaningful decisions in your game until after the opponent has committed. Do we want wallet dictated artificial skill to rule in this game? How good do you really have to be to line up multiple double arcs on the enemy flag ship if you know exactly where it will be before you move any of your actual combat ships? Much of the back and forth, risk/reward calculations of activating ships is avoided by simply following the script of "activate the least threatened flotilla until they are activated out and then move your important stuff." Spamming activations is playing this ship combat game on easy and is a discredit to the potential depth of game play armada offers. Most would agree that the most in depth, tactically demanding games are those between fleets with the same activation count because your decisions about which ship to activate actually has consequences...

FFG if you are reading this, I ask that you limit flotillas in some meaningful way. You have had your fun and made your money selling them, now please fix it so that people do not feel obligated to run 3 or more of them in order to place well in events. No matter which event you look at, that settlement is supported by the fleet lists that are doing well. If something is so good that 15/16 of these top fleets have multiples copies of this ship is that not proof that something needs to be done?

I see quite a lot of Strategic in the squadron mixup. Are folks taking objectives that are aided by Strategic, or are they concerned that in a Strategic vs Strategic matchup that they may favor the first player too much?

Separate question: Do you know if folks are bidding predominantly for first or second player? It looks like most of these fleets would prefer to go second - are any of them bidding for first?

Try to build a list who is caplable to kill 2 flotillas at long range in one turn from turn 2, and the problem is resolved

@jbrandmeyer yes i do my bid for go first, but i can handle even a second player game.

It is my opinion that the blue objectives are the weakest color as a whole. There are not really many scary, "of crap I can't play that, it will make my game much harder as first player," options that function well with fleets that are not squadron oriented. IE built to play Superior Positions, or if you have Strategic, Sensor Net.

Basically, if you plan on building to have strong missions and play as second player, the only threatening missions you can pick in the blues is Superior Position or Sensor Net. For this reason, if you are going to build to go second, you must have a bomber wing, or you run the risk of always and forever playing your weak blue mission which is not strong enough to consistently win you games against a competent first player.

I feel that the blue missions lack of teeth that don't involve squadrons further pushes the game toward squadrons.

Salvage Run is very predictable and can be countered due to it's predictability, Intel Sweep can be good or can back fire. Dangerous Territory and Nav Hazard are just not potent enough to truly punish First Player.

This is fascinating to read and digest as I am a novice without the assistance of owning any flotillas to test these games or strategies in person; I have however watched quite a few games involving them. I certainly hope @Space_Cowboy17 isn't correct, at least isn't correct for the game at it continues to grow as this would be detrimental to its health and probably usher in its demise.

I have often wondered how large capital ships cannot have weapons to more easily deal with these issues. Perhaps fighters are the best protection from enemy fighters and bombers, but what about their support ships? Shouldn't admirals of ships the size of an ISD or Rebel equivalent have at their disposal weapons that would easily dispatch these flotilla ships at even great range? Seems if were weapons were available, even if they were costly and only showed up in some fleets and acted as a scissors to the paper that is these mass squadron builds, and could pop flotillas like bubbles on the mat, then wouldn't flotilla use would quickly diminish? Perhaps that is something in the FFG works.

If I'm off-base, please forgive me as I admittedly have very little mat time with even remotely squadron heavy lists.

Carry on......now where's my tea?

The hope, I think, is that Admiral Sloane will fix much of the Flotilla issues, but that is only true if enough people take that admiral, which again creates a very predictable, uniform meta. Ships have no business having a scatter token... If flotillas could easily be killed because they only have evades and redirects, they would still be fielded, but would be much more of a liability then they are now, the ability to shrug off a huge hit with no damage is absurd and makes taking large ships an unreliable prospect, hence the current meta.

edge cases have been offered to use like Capt. Jonas, Quad Turbo Lasers, Home One, etc. but are not enough when flotillas now have the ability to contribute to the fight from well beyond weapons range via Relay and the activation advantage they represent.

Please give me an example of any modern, or ancient battle fleet where the majority of the ships present and active at the battle were small weaponless craft that were largely immune to damage and I will stop attacking flotillas so hard, but they have turned a game about titanic vessels clashing in the depths of space in to a game about out purchasing your way to a stall tactic fleet that wins because it has way fewer actual warships then the enemy fleet.

55 minutes ago, jbrandmeyer said:

I see quite a lot of Strategic in the squadron mixup. Are folks taking objectives that are aided by Strategic, or are they concerned that in a Strategic vs Strategic matchup that they may favor the first player too much?

Separate question: Do you know if folks are bidding predominantly for first or second player? It looks like most of these fleets would prefer to go second - are any of them bidding for first?

My list was based around Yavaris and Relay (although with the predominance of Demolisher I found I rarely used Relay as I had to keep my fleet together) - since I had strategic on the twin VCXs I built the list with the intention of going second (if I got first then I'm also very happy!) and both my Yellow and Blue Objectives were basically a given for me. I also had the Strategic there in case I did get given First player and I could pick from any objectives that had tokens I could move around.

Out of my seven games I was given Second player every time. Most Wanted was picked twice (only by MSU lists as anyone with a large ship avoided this like the plague!), VIP was picked three times (I think by lists with Demo in with the intention of killing my ship carrying the VIP; it worked once but I managed to pick up the token with another ship) and Salvage Run was picked twice (both enemy fleets had strategic but only one managed to get a token).

There was no way I was going to compete with a bidding war for First player so had to carefully synchronise my list and objectives to give me the advantage of going second. Every player I played against who had a bid wanted to go First player.