Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27029853-20170129150901/@comment-454133-20170601070255

Tonight I played in a tournament and got 5th place. I wasn't expecting a tournament today (found out mid-day), and despite having several hours to prepare, I did no such thing and instead threw this together when I arrived. Procrastination!

Fenn Rau and Old Teroch, each with title + Autothrusters + top meta cheat card (no surprises here)

Kavil with TLT + Mindlink + R4 Agromech + Seismic Torpedoes + Spares

As you can see, the torps were the only creative thing here. After Dragoon told me about how someone used these to great effect to clear a path and mess with his opponent's planning, I decided to do the same thing. Mindlink is overt cheating, but it freed up actions for firing torps or barrel rolling or boosting into position, and this was very helpful. Don't hate me -- I didn't field Jumpmasters, so I'm really a good person, I promise! ;)

Unfortunately, I only remembered the torps on my first game. *grumble*  Thankfully they played a decent role that one time, though not enough to correct all my other mistakes. Worse, in that same first game, I forgot about mindlink when I planned my joust, and ended up really messing up Fenn (bumped and stressed, pointed the wrong way). I've never played with mindlink before except in small doses in low point games, because I only had 2 copies. So that first game was a bit of a learning experience -- information I knew, but didn't fully learn until screwing up.

Thankfully my opponent was a cool guy and nice to talk to, so the game wasn't boring even when I was clearly losing and had no options left. He had fielded the great Rear Admiral with VI, Hot Shot Co-Pilot and Gunner, and this proved to be really dangerous. Plus The Inquisitor with PTL etc, also a big problem. His fleet rather handily picked mine apart because focus tokens and autothrusters were easily bypassed. I forget the exact score, but it was something like 35 to 67 in his favor. I was only 2 damage away from killing that decimator though...

Second game, I did very well. Opponent fielded an Ion team. Dace, Kavil, and two basic Scyks, all with Ion Turrets or Ion Cannons. I was very worried about being walked off the board by ion tokens, and his Kavil seemed like a serious threat in that regard. Also Dace could turn 1 damage into 2 if anything got through, which was very bad for my protectorates. That said, my Autothrusters and focus tokens were actually working this round. Also apparently sensing that their misbehavior had hurt me last game, my dice suddenly lept into spectacular performance, while conspiring with his dice to throttle most of his rolls. I exaggerate slightly, but dice disparity did hurt him. In the end, I lost Fenn but wiped his team completely. 100 to 33 in my favor. And again, cool opponent. I liked the design of his fleet, too!

Third game was against a new player who'd only played maybe 4 or 5 games before me. I walked him through some things throughout the game and reminded him about cloaking etc, and he seemed to do pretty well. I did crush him though (it was a buy-in tournament for prizes, and I had my eye on those prizes, so I justified some slight evil like carpet-nuking his fleet). He had Whisper, Vessery, and I think a Royal Guard Pilot? Vessery presented himself as my first target, walking into a deathtrap at range 1 of both Fenn and Teroch, with Kavil in TLT range outside his arc. Next the Interceptor landed itself on a rock with a k-turn and I shared some damage with it with Fenn and Kavil. Amazingly, it lived through the round with 1 hull left, and I had to Twin Laser Tap him next round. Finally it was just a matter of dealing the remaining 3 damage to the cloaked phantom, which Fenn took care of beautifully (though the rest of the team had it in a killbox, so it was pretty certain to end that round anyway). 100-0 victory.

This was another cool opponent, and despite being new, he was picking things up quickly and clearly knew most of the rules quite well. He has rebel and empire ships (saving money by not diving into scum just yet, which is a good idea), and I hope he comes to game here much more in the future.

My whole fleet felt like it was working properly this time, partially because I was finally used to it (been a looong time since I flew protectorates, and this the the first time I've really put mindlink to good use). But also it's because my opponent was new and wasn't anticipating my tricks; previous opponents were wise to my strategy and gave me a pretty hard time, so I have some learning to do.

Fleet Assessment

In terms of my opinion on my fleet... I think it's pretty solid. Delicate, mind you, but that's what you get with protectorates. I really like Attanni Mindlink on aces, it's amazing on them, but I really need to learn to keep it in mind when choosing how to joust (I feel like I had it figured out by the 2nd and especially 3rd game). It really helps with positioning aces properly using their boost and roll, since someone else is able to propogate focus tokens. Kavil was also a star, being very accurate with that TLT. In the past I've had trouble keeping his arc off his victims, but after that fumbling first game it all came together for me and I was flying like not a complete moron. ;)

I won no ships... 5th place wasn't quite close enough (I think the first four players got ships, so I was 7 points away from glorious victory). But the people who got prizes deserved 'em, there were some great pilots out today. I did receive a strange pilot-sized card that has art on it, plus text for both R2-D2 and Integrated Astromech on it; plus an alt-art Tactician.

I'll close with a funny story. My third opponent who was still learning? His previous game wasn't going well in the final 5 minutes: the kid battling him had him down to 1 ship (his phantom) and she'd lost nothing. But then next round she picked her maneuvers in the wrong direction, and over the next two rounds flew her two most valuable ships off the board (including an upsilon shuttle). Ouch! Only then was time called... had she lasted a couple minutes longer, she'd have avoided going off, but instead she was down to a couple ties, and he killed one of them. So he went from a crushing defeat to a crushing victory. ^_^