I wanted to hear your stories of bad Choices that you could see being made before a game even started.

I've got a game tomorrow night against my regular opponent. It's 600pts and I have a Screed fleet, and I have 5 proximity mines to lay. I won the bid, took a look at his objectives and chose to go second. My opponent (Sato squadron heavy fleet) chose Blockade Run.

I can see it's going to go very badly for him when I block off half the already narrow width of the board with obstacles and mines then head straight at him on the remaining half with my triangles of death.

Anyone else got a really bad choice story?

FYI...you can't win the bid and then look at your opponents objectives before choosing to go second. When you win the bid, you then decide whether to go first or second. If you choose first, THEN you get see your opponents objectives.

I didn't know - but we swap fleets the night before we play because we both have busy lives, so it's become a habit.

15 minutes ago, flatpackhamster said:

I didn't know - but we swap fleets the night before we play because we both have busy lives, so it's become a habit.

Swapping fleets is not a problem at all. Just keep the objectives a secret from each other and you are good to go. Once you take a look at his fleet, you then have some time to try and figure what his objectives MIGHT be. Then you can decide whether to go first or second.

We've been playing like this for 9 months and I keep finding new rules.

I only found out that redirect works if you have 0 shields last week...

1 hour ago, flatpackhamster said:

I wanted to hear your stories of bad Choices that you could see being made before a game even started.

I've got a game tomorrow night against my regular opponent. It's 600pts and I have a Screed fleet, and I have 5 proximity mines to lay. I won the bid, took a look at his objectives and chose to go second. My opponent (Sato squadron heavy fleet) chose Blockade Run.

I can see it's going to go very badly for him when I block off half the already narrow width of the board with obstacles and mines then head straight at him on the remaining half with my triangles of death.

Anyone else got a really bad choice story?

The odd thing is, I've been playing since the game launched and after all these games I can't think of anything spectacularly bad. Had a match where a guy flew his VSDs the wrong way, but he was new. Had a match early on where a Nebulon maneuvered trying to avoid an ISD IIs front arc but ended up only moving to an obstructed shot at medium range. The opponent thought obstruction blocked the attack. He got super heated. lol We still think there should be a "silhouette" system based on command value that removes dice equal to the command values of all ships obstructing a shot.


Weird how after, like, 200+ games they start to blend together...

1 hour ago, flatpackhamster said:

We've been playing like this for 9 months and I keep finding new rules.

I only found out that redirect works if you have 0 shields last week...

I believe that is incorrect. You can use Redirect at any shield value. You can still use redirect if the hull zone that is being attack has 0 shields.

I like to think of it as the ships captain shouting to the officer "Angle the deflector shields to port!"

55 minutes ago, eliteone said:

I believe that is incorrect. You can use Redirect at any shield value. You can still use redirect if the hull zone that is being attack has 0 shields.

I like to think of it as the ships captain shouting to the officer "Angle the deflector shields to port!"

They didn't realise "any" also meant "0" I think was the point of the anecdote

I can think of times poor choices of objective selection ended badly; Fleet Ambush vs. KSD, Demolisher, Arquitens, and Comms Net is actively beneficial for me. Poor guy didn't stand a chance. But he was also really, really new to objectives

Was at a tournament once where a guy made his list last minute and had slaved turrets and gunnery teams on the same ship.

Nearly all of mine came from opponents who were just too inexperienced to know any better at that point.

In his first game, one of my regular gaming partners, decided to use his Nebulon B more or less the exact opposite way you should use them - by darting it forward and knifing it right in between his and my battle lines, exposing its flank in the process. Needless to say, my ISD snapped it like a twig in a single volley.

In another game, my opponent set half his fleet going at speed 1, the rest at speed 3. I think he was trying to set himself up to try and attack me from multiple angles at once (with the slow-moving bloc intended to keep me from just pinwheeling out to face the flankers), but his deployment was all wrong (I think he didn't quite realize how far Star Destroyers can project pain from the front) and the end effect was that he basically just fed me his fleet piecemeal, allowing me to slow-walk my own fleet and just focus my firepower on the 1-2 ships that were in range every turn.

One of my friends let my H9-equipped ISD get a clean shot off at his two sets of GR-75 transports, unfamiliar with what the H9s did. Needless to say, both sets of transports evaporated in a single turn.

Another game was the first time a friend of mine had faced down a Gladiator of any kind. He'd never seen the Demolisher in action, and I set it up separate from the other ships of the fleet (basically it was the Demolisher on the far left end of my deployment zone and everything else to the right corner), so he decided to put out a... I think it was a Liberty Cruiser, but it may have been an Assault Frigate, to chase it down, figuring it was a picket ship that I was going to use to harass his flanks, so he'd punish me for leaving it unsupported. Well, that didn't work out so well for him - he put himself in a position where I could nail him with a triple-shot at close range. I tore the ship he sent after it to shreds, which set up the Demolisher to rampage the rear of his fleet (the rest had pivoted away from the Gladiator so they could meet the rest of my fleet head on). Bless that little ship, the Demolisher proceeded to blast apart half his fleet, with the rest of my fleet basically left cleaning up the wreckage.

Worst mistake I ever saw was an opponent that deployed his fleet in two halves, facing each other, with ships going varying speeds. It was the most bizarre deployment I'd ever seen and it actually made me somewhat nervous, because I figured it was so unorthodox he must have had a plan for what he was going to do with it and I couldn't figure it out. Turns out it was just really bad planning on his part. I still don't know what he was thinking and he wasn't able to articulate it to me afterwards (by halfway through the game, even he recognized how badly he'd messed up), but it was just an absolute bloodbath. His ships kept getting in each other's way and he had at least two friendly-on-friendly collisions. Worse, the two halves ran into each other right as my fleet hit prime firing distance, so they more or less jammed themselves all into my fire lanes and proceeded to get absolutely taken apart. I'm not even sure I lost a ship that battle - it was that bad.

I one thought it would be a good idea to run only TIE Bombers, because they are cheap and dangerous for ships. My plan was to activate them with Flight Controllers to get rid of enemy fighters. Good plan!

Later while playing I realised that all my squadrons are heavy and my opponent could mail them down with 1 squadron and attack my ships even if engaged. I was never able to use the Flight Controllers. To make things worse it was my first game against a fleet with new objectives and new squadron from CC and it struck me by surprise what they were able to do!

The best I can say: You learn from your failures.

Bail-equipped flagship gave away first player to SSD, essentially providing it with last-first capability after Bail round.

Picking Fighter Ambush or Superior Positions as a squadronless gunline. The red is almost always better.

Picking Fire Lanes against Strategic.

Splitting your forces against Raddus (I’ve done it and had it done against me.)

Misjudging squadron threat range.

Using the Interdictor Combat Refit.

Nodding absently when we go over fleets but not understanding what Pryce does. (Not understanding any component of your opponent’s fleet can hurt, for that matter.)

Putting down major pieces like ISDs before squadrons and flotillas.

It did turn out to be a bad choice for my opponent. The combination of obstacles and mines created a pinch point which my front firing ships were able to exploit . Defiance got caught nose on by Relentless at medium range, spent it's defence tokens dealing with the attack and in maneuvering to bring weapons to bear overran a proximity mine, and ended up with a Compartment Fire face up crit.

Harrow's maneuvering startled us both, as I discovered that I was able to drop it directly in front of his speed 1 Pelts. The next turn it died in a hail of black dice. Ordnance Experts and Screed did enough damage to one-shot it.

He was left with Yavaris and Luke Skywalker, and I lost Harrow and one VT49.

My story of bad Choices -

I once brought a fleet with 3 Victory Is and my opponent turned up with 3 AFmk2s and Ackbar. Then I picked advanced gunnery.

My best,

Once started ISD (Thrawn) with speed 3 and no nav commands anywhere. That ISD flew like a dart out of the table at round 3.

oh if crossing the T of the fleet means crossing infront of the pointy end of an ISD, well that is always a bad bad idea ( it took me a while to understand that)