Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27029853-20170129150901/@comment-454133-20170225063016

Today I flew my silly Kath Min/Max fleet and had lots of fun.

Kath Scarlet + Swarm Leader + Gitterstim + Tail Gunner

Tansarii Point Veteran + Veteran Instincts + "Heavy Scyk" Interceptor + Tractor Beam

2x Cartel Spacer + Heavy Scyk

Had I been thinking, I'd have included Slave-1 and Long Range Scanners on Kath. Bah.

The cartel spacers serve as blockers, and evade token generators for swarm leader. The veteran fires before Kath with the tractor beam, to throw an opponent onto a rock or into a better firing position for Kath, and lower their agility. If Kath is fortunate enough to have mooned the target at close range, she could roll up to 7 dice against a foe with -1 or even -2 agility.

The theme today was vets & newbies: new players were paired with veterans to fly a fleet together. My partner hadn't brought ships of his own, so we just used my fleet for both games.

In both games Kath fought Zuckuss + Sarco Plank + Constable Zuvio. I know Zuvio had Cluster Mines + Spacetug Tractor Array and Sarco had Proximity Mines, and both had Pattern Analyzer + BMST, but I don't quite remember the rest. Zuckuss had Sensor Jammer and Mist Hunter + Tractor Beam and some other stuff, maybe Latts?

I should remember better since I flew the fleet later on, but bah. :)

So for the first game we played together and I walked him through my planning process and got his input. We worked together pretty well and he was a fast learner. The other team put Cluster Mines and Proximity Mines in front of the two quadjumpers, hitting two of my scyks. Had I been paying better attention I would have noticed that only Zuvio can do that, and not as an action, but oh well (we only realized it after the match ended). The scyks rolled relatively low and survived the bombs. Kath was rolling 5 to 6 dice each round thanks to the feeders, and doing decent damage. The cartel spacers blocked well too. When time was called we'd killed zuckuss and were working on one of the quads, but didn't manage to kill it (it was lucky against 6 attack dice, and we'd forgotten to reduce its agility).

For the second game we didn't have an opponent because of odd numbers, so instead we fought each other. The guy running the quadjumper fleet was pulled into another game and had me fly his fleet, whlie my former partner flew Kath. Now he got to put everything he'd learned into practice, and he did a very good job!

By round two (first round of combat) he'd thrown Zuvio onto an asteroid, and then nuked it; Zuvio never even got to drop his doomsday bomb on anyone. I managed to maneuver so that his Tansarii flew past Sarco and was lined up for a shot (with nothing in his own arc), but he guessed very well with Kath...

Kathy turned 3 through a debris cloud, pointed her rear right at Sarco, and then popped glitterstim for a full 7 dice doomsday attack. Sarco rolled blank on 1 defense die against 5 hits, and promptly died. After he got one-shotted, it was just Zuckuss against a fully armed and operational battlefleet, and I wasn't confident he'd do much. But my opponent needed to leave early anyway so we called the game.

He had a lot of fun, and did really well at learning the game mechanics and plotting strategy. And he was a good student; I enjoyed teaching him. It was also fun seeing him get a kick out of my fleet. That finishing death shot was awesome. ^_^

All in all a fun casual night!