9 hours ago, bitsai said:The Tavson player surprised me by taking first player so he could corner 2 of my 3 rocks, so I put the one rock in my control in the center. The gas clouds ended up sprinkled fairly evenly around the remaining spaces. I elected not to straight-up joust Tavson + friends (again, not sure if this was the right call), so I split up into 2 groups (Finn + Bastian just right of center, Snap + Jess in the SW corner) with the idea of making Tavson commit to one side of the center rock and bringing in the other group behind him. Tavson and the SF's set up in the center.
We both spent the first several turns not commiting; Finn + Bastian hard-turned and then k-turned back and forth along my board edge, Snap + Jess crawled up the west edge with 1-speed maneuvers, Tavson stopped as much as possible and intentionally blocked the faster ships from zooming ahead. When I turned Finn + Bastian up the east edge, that's when Tavson and the SF's finally committed and zoomed in hard on them. Once I saw that, I moved Finn + Bastian as slowly as possible while bringing Snap + Jess over as fast as I could to help out, but the first engagement still ended up with Finn + Bastian at range 1 of Tavson (yikes), range 2 of the SF's, while Snap + Jess only had range 3 shots on the enemy formation.
First round of combat, Quickdraw used Swarm Tactics to give IN 6 to Tavson, who rolled (after a Target Lock re-roll) Hit, Hit, Crit, Crit. Finn rolled double blanks, then re-rolled with Heroic into... double blanks. I used his ability and spent 1 Focus for one Evade, but still ate Hit, Crit, Crit. The second Crit drew Direct Hit, and that was it for Finn. No one else did any damage.
After that, things devolved into a scrum behind Tavson. Nothing else died, and when time was called, I lost 66 (halved Tavson + Backdraft) to 67 (lost Finn, Bastian halved). Initially I chalked it up to bad luck on that very first shot, but in retrospect, even if Tavson didn't one-shot Finn he might still have died to follow-up shots from Quickdraw and Backdraft. Hence my questions to see what I could/should have done to create a better engagement for Finn + friends against this list.
One thing, on that Finn Heroic reroll, you could have (and probably should have) added his BLANK die and re-rolled all three dice. His ability and Heroic have the same timing window, so you can choose the order.
As far as the other stuff, I'll just ping those who know the squad better... @RStan , @GreenDragoon , @Mistborn_Jedi