Talk:Outrider/@comment-30220004-20161107171914/@comment-454133-20161107175612

My local game store ran a casual tournament where you design the fleet your opponent will use against you. There was some confusion about whether it was supposed to be all deliberately bad/joke fleets (which appears to be the original goal), or all viable fleets (which I suppose was the revised goal, after they thought about it). Thanks to that confusion, a couple people showed up with prank fleets that were truly terrible, and everyone else's was all over the map, ranging from okay to excellent.

One of them had a low-PS Outrider with a tractor beam, and loaded with various useless upgrades to make it more expensive. The best it could do was position itself to force enemies to collide with it, and/or tractor targets onto asteroids. (they eventually made him change fleets, because it was so helpless). Another fleet included a Stealth Device on a 1 agility ship, Extra Munitions and Munitions Failsafe on a ship with no munitions, etc. These were pitted against fleets whose players had gotten the news that their fleets should not be terrible. :D

BTW, I had gotten the news and brought a viable (but not tournament quality) fleet: a moderately equipped K-Wing with missiles/torps, Extra Munitions, Sabine Crew,  and  Guidance Chips; a moderately equipped K-Wing with mines and advanced slam and Bombardier, and a missile Z-95 with Guidance Chips. It did reasonably well against me, but I know how K-Wings fly and many people don't. ^_^  I did pretty well in the tourney (2nd place overall), mostly because I didn't have to fly one of the joke fleets (lucky!), and many people don't know how to bomb/missile especially well with k-wings. The fleet that gave me trouble was only a heavily loaded K-Wing and B-Wing, both of which which had too much ordnance to be effective before death. The K-Wings I'd made for him just wrecked these two fat ships.

The big surprise was the fleet of 5 HWKs, each with a different turret. It wrecked the (otherwise very dangerous) Protectorate Starfighter x3 fleet (which had stealth devices instead of autothrusters, making them very vulnerable to turrets). Everyone was dismissive at the start, but those HWKs did pretty well overall.

The lesson here is:  Be clear about the rules and goals of your tournament, and make sure everyone knows if you change your mind later. ;)