Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27029853-20170129150901/@comment-454133-20170611071841

Dragoon: hahaha!

Anon: I actually keep a notebook handy in case of huge games, so I can write down all the pilots in PS and initiative order, and adjust it as pilot skills change (e.g. crit reduces to 0). As you said, it's amazingly effective at keeping things moving, often doubling or tripling the speed of the game. I did that for this Epic game too, and it would have been much slower otherwise. We'd never have reached combat... O_o

Power Cells: Yea, limited is an easy mistake to make, and I should have looked at the card. At least he didn't spend both on one attack for 8 doomsday dice. Also the dice kinda betrayed him on the first shot, giving him only a single hit (which he converted to a crit with another card). I don't remember whether I evaded that one. His next doom-shot rolled 3 or so damage and I failed to roll any evades. I think that's the shot that ended Jonus.

Having had a night & day to relax, I'm feeling much less exhausted now, and the annoyance has faded. But I think I'm going to stick to smaller point Epic games unless I'm sure things will move very quickly. I also kinda want to have the players start closer together... we were playing on 2 mats lengthwise, so it took many rounds for us to reach each other. I understand the need for space once we start shooting, but I'd like to get to that stage much faster. Maybe play the mats sideways like my previous epic game. I'll probably play Epic again just because I want to try my C-ROC when it arrives.

Also I want to say, I like that player in general, I'm just very frustrated at the slowness. I don't want to badmouth him unnecessarily; he's a good guy.

On another note, I'm really impressed with TIE Interceptors in Epic. Royal Guards with Crack Shot are life ruiners, and Autothrusters keep them alive for a good while. For 25-26 points they're really efficient killing machines, and I could have gotten them for cheaper if I'd not worried about equipping Mk2 engines (Saber Squad would have shaved 2 points per interceptor). Those same 4 royal guards were also great in my Gozanti fleet some time back, probably doing the most damage of anything on our team, in both games. In Epic it's all about efficiency (since anything overly fat will just die to focused fire), and interceptors are delightfully efficient ships.

The TIE Strikers were also great, though I found them a bit hard to fly during the approach (it was challenging to not speed them ahead of the fleet with their ailerons). But once we were all clustered together in a mess of battle, they started to do really well thanks to the ailerons, becoming an asset rather than a liability. And overall they're great cheap 3-attack ships for 17 points (would have been 19 if I could have afforded more Autothrusters; I really should have swapped Jonus for Howlrunner). Also happy with the TIE/sfs; I'd have given them both Targeting Synchronizer if I'd had the points (and it also would have been nice to know if I can use it for primary weapon attacks, not just munitions, but oh well).

The TIE Bombers didn't do great because range and timing didn't go well for Deathfire (he didn't do anything but fire primary), and Jonus rolled green dice like a drunk. Jonus got off two ion torps and caused some ion'd maneuvers, at least (but only about 1 damage per torp, and I do lament bringing ion torps against almost all large ships). And Oicunn soaked a ton of damaged and officer'd up some buddies pretty well. He just wasn't impressive with damage output, again thanks to dice shenanigans from glitterstim.

With every ship on his fleet carrying stims, I figured the empire was here to clean up a drug smuggling ring. Glad to see them doing some good for once!

I think my opponent's drug use was overall quite effective (I imagine them like the raiders in Fallout: New Vegas -- stimmed to the point of frenzy, and hard to take down at first). He had 2 rounds of free focuses on both attack and defense, and during those two rounds he ended up shaving about 80-90% of my damage vs everyone but Dengar, thanks to his amazing talent at rolling green focuses. Only Dengar was excluded from that luck... must have missed the senior staff meeting or something. Glitterstim was a bit redundant with Expertise, which he had on every ship that carried stims (everything but the C-ROC), but on all future rounds that would have played half the role of the stims so I don't think it was points wasted.