5 Minutes to Win It: Advanced Gunnery

 5 Minutes to Win It

Advanced Gunnery

This will be the first article in the Objectives Series which is designed to quickly explain the objectives to you so that you can better understand them, either for fleet building, or if you see them in a match. 

 Fleets that will favor AG will be fleets that are built around large ships that have one particularly strong arc that cannot take Gunnery Team. The best examples are fleets that have ships like an MC80 Home One or something like an ISD Kuat Refit. If your ships have Gunnery Team, they will not benefit from this objective, so skip on it. Small dice pool ships are better served by other objectives, and this objective could hurt you a lot more than it benefits you in certain match-ups.   

 

Playing this objective is very straightforward as their are no additional objectives to worry about; just close with and destroy the enemy. There are two main strategies you can potentially use with this objective. 

 The first I call the bait strategy.  Place your objective ship in a position where it will appear to be isolated from the rest of your fleet for a few turns so that your opponent will try their best to kill it for the double points. Have the rest of your fleet setup for the chase and plan maneuvers for your objective ship to get it into a position to run out of the danger zone. I would encourage this plan for the MC80 HO fleet because the MC80 has a good amount of red firepower  that can score hits as it turns tail, potentially scoring a kill or two in addition to setting up the rest of your fleet for success. Place terrain in a way to set up a wall for the MC80 to hide behind as well to reduce incoming damage.

 

The second strategy I call the full speed ahead. This plays more into the Kuat style build, where your goal is to go head to head with the enemy objective ship and out firepower them. The rest of your fleet should be placed in support to prevent enemy ships from surrounding your objective ship and screening out threats like carriers. Try and place terrain away from the middle of the board so that you have room to maneuver yourself against the enemy fleet.

 

Any commander can use this objective, but it works best with commanders that go hand in hand with the right ships for the objective. Namely, I would say Ackbar for the guaranteed extra 4 dice a turn and Screed for doubling up those powerful black crit effects every turn.