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The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is: (Re)Building the Emperor Part Deux





“The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is.”

Part Two


Greetings! And welcome to Part Deux of my little Palpatine experiment! Below, you’ll find a pair of batreps that basically talk through my matches and my decision-making. Each batrep will be followed by some analysis, as well as some thoughts from my opponent. At the end of this piece, you’ll find version 1.1 of my fleet as it evolved (and why!) based on my matches. The batreps are a bit involved just because I wanted to give everyone as full a picture as I could. But if you’re mainly just interested in the debrief or in how my list evolved, feel free to just scroll on through. Happy reading!


Palpatine v.1.0 - Versus Sato (Match 1)

In my first match, I flew against my friend Ted, who was flying a Sato fleet that he had not yet tested. He featured a pair of Hammerheads, a combat flotilla, Salvation, and a Pelta, alongside a bunch of squadrons.

Ted outbid me, 399-400, and chose to go first. He chose to play my Contested Outpost.


Deployment: As we were playing Contested Outpost, I decided to deploy around it. I am badly outdeployed (10-6) and badly outactivated (6-3), so I clustered together with the Quasar on the outside. Not sure this was a good choice; I might be overcommitted to scoring the station with my Cymoon in the first round.




Round 1: My plan is to take the station and set up a defensive perimeter with my squadrons so Sato doesn’t come into play right away. An advantage I currently have is that my opponent’s squadrons are deployed far away from the Quasar, and they’re only speed 3, so I might be able to jump them before they reach me and wreak havoc. An uneventful round; we basically jockeyed for position. I banked a Navigate token on my Quasar to drop to speed 1 if necessary, a Con Fire token on my Cymoon to prep for Krennic, and a Squadron token on my Arqs just in case I want to activate the little guy first, but also need to move a squadron into position. I do not feel good about my positioning and will definitely get hit first. The real question is whether or not Sato will come into play; if he does, I am very quickly at a disadvantage. At the end of the round, I claim the victory token from the Contested Outpost.



Round 2: Ted used All Fighters, Follow Me! (AFFM!), and Palpatine called out Evade, as I plan to attack one Hammerhead, and I’m guessing we’ll be close enough next round that Evades will matter a lot less. I screwed around between deciding whether to activate the Quasar first so my nearly dead Phantom could get a shot off and I could soften up the Hammerhead, or just use the Cymoon and take the unobstructed side shot on the Torpedo Frigate while I had it. I chose to go with the Cymoon, and after my Linked Turbolaser Towers (LTT) reroll, I decided not to use my Con Fire token and Krennic, so I hit the Hammerhead with 6 damage, crit. He burned the Evade (courtesy of Palpatine) and used all of his other defense tokens to take one damage to the hull and strip his front shields. The Cymoon had no other shots, dropped to speed 1, and moved. After he activated his Pelta to push squadrons against my Phantoms (killing 1) and get within Sato range on my Cymoon, I activated my Quasar to finish the Hammerhead with Tempest, a Phantom, and my pre-set 2 hits from Varnillian. Vader hit Blount for 5 but no Accuracies, which meant Blount scattered. I chose to use my final Quasar squadron (a Phantom) to protect the front of my Cymoon (specifically from Malee) and do 4 damage to a Y-Wing. I have 1 final Phantom in a position where it cannot be tied down, but can force Blount to burn his Scatter token. Disappointingly enough, my last Phantom could not get to Blount. So Vader’s activation was wasted this round, unfortunately. I could not have predicted the rest of Ted’s squadrons approaching in a way that made it impossible for the Phantom to get there. So the Phantom doubled down on protecting the Cymoon and killed the damaged Y-Wing instead. At the end of the round, my Phantoms D’ed up with Cloak, and I scored the Station again.



Round 3: Ted burned AFFM! to use it, Palpatine called out Brace. I’ve got shots on both Salvation and the Pelta with my Cymoon, and since I plan on hitting them both, Brace seemed like the correct call over Redirect (as Salvation does not have one, and the Pelta does not have a lot of shields anyway. Plus, the Cymoon has a Con Fire dial coming up, as well as still having the token ready to go. Ted chose to activate his remaining Hammerhead and unload on the Quasar, who took 4 damage and couldn’t Brace it, and so had to Redirect it, taking 2 on the front and 2 on the far left side (furthest from danger). Cymoon did 10 damage with Con Fires and rerolls to the Pelta, burning the Brace and netting 4 damage total (I couldn’t score any Accuracies or Crits despite 9 dice). It then hit Salvation for 5 damage (with Crit) and two Accuracies (at close range, so no Evade). I chose to lock down the Braces rather than let him use and burn one, so it burned through his front shields and landed 2 damage on the hull - drew into a Point Defense Failure. The Quasar activated next, throwing squadrons at Z-95s and failing to kill any of them. However, after one Phantom hit Salvation for one damage, the Quasar was guaranteed to kill it (courtesy of a red die sitting on a single hit with Varnillian), then threw a couple of dice at the Hammerhead to do 2 damage. Ted’s flotilla threw 2 squadrons at Vader and killed him. (Vader was extremely disappointing in this game; his two attacks were effectively meaningless) The Arq hammered the Hammerhead, but did not have the double arc I thought it did, unfortunately. The Arq then turned inward to ensure a kill on the Hammerhead while also planning on cutting off the Pelta if it escapes the Cymoon. His squadrons got another Phantom, but could only knock the Quasar down to 1 hull. The Pelta then turned out to run from the fight. At the end of the round, I’m down to 2 Phantoms who reposition for maximum coverage. I score the Station.



Round 4: Palpatine called out Contain to pressure the Hammerhead. His Hammerhead activated first, used Boarding Engineers to draw out a Structural Damage on the Quasar to finish it, then threw only one damage on a bad roll at the Arq. The Cymoon went and threw 4 damage (with Crit) at the Pelta, doing 3 to the hull. The Pelta activated and pushed squadrons to kill one Phantom and attack the Arq with decent but mostly inconsequential damage. Arq killed the Pelta after doing some damage to the Hammerhead. Ted is confident that his Hammerhead can get away, I am confident it cannot; we are playing it out to see what happens. He chose to try and obstruct the Arq shots with the flotillas. End of the round, I score the Station.



Round 5: Palpatine called out Scatter because it was the only meaningful token left. Hammerhead activated first and tried to run. Arq ended up doing 2 damage to the Hammerhead, leaving it at 1 hull. Squadrons are now attacking the Arq. (At this point, I am seeing that it is possible I don’t table Ted after all. If that’s the case, I draw that result back to my decision to go all in on the Pelta instead of killing the Hammerhead and chasing the Pelta) Cymoon somehow has a Con Fire dial instead of a Navigate dial; must have gotten spun somehow. Cymoon is now out of the fight. To be honest, even with the dial, I’m not sure I’d have gotten enough yaw to turn back in and kill the Hammerhead. Squadrons attacking the Arq just about all miss. End of the round, Ted scores the Station with a flotilla. I left the Station behind so I could get the Hammerhead; the Hammerhead got to the edge of the mat with approximately quarter of an inch of space and just out of long range.


Round 6: Palpatine called out an irrelevant Redirect. The Hammerhead got to the edge of the mat with approximately quarter of an inch of space and just out of long range. He managed to chase down my Arq. So the choice to kill the Pelta ended up being my downfall. I win because of tokens, 307-271. But yeah, this was major user error. It should’ve been a table win for me, 480 (with tokens) - 190 (290 MOV, 9-2 win). Instead, I walk away with a 6-5. Again, a very costly decision to simply kill the Pelta as soon as possible, despite it really not posing a threat, and certainly not being able to escape my guns. I should have just burned down the Hammerhead before it could rabbit, and then I would have had time to kill the Pelta. Particularly as Ted ended up killing my Arq anyway.


What Did Palpatine Provide? He burned the Pelta’s Brace, which should have made it even easier for me to kill the Hammerhead and chase down the Pelta instead of attempting the reverse course of action. He killed the Torpedo Hammerhead’s Evade early, but the effectiveness of this was questionable. Calling out the Contain in order to pressure the Hammerhead in round 4 was...fine. I was happy to have the Hammerhead activate before the Pelta so the Cymoon could do damage to the Pelta. But it’s possible that if the Pelta moves, my Arquitens gets an Ackbar slash on the Hammerhead and the Pelta. This is likely a coin flip at the end of the day. That is to say that we didn’t play out both scenarios, and like with so many Palpatine-induced situations, it can be hard to gauge his impact on the match. But ultimately, my choice to attack the Pelta instead of the Hammerhead was the difference between a 9-2 win, and a 6-5 win.

Was His Impact Worth 35 Points? I’m not entirely certain, honestly. The other commander options for such a fleet would likely be Motti (for a net of 6 additional hull points and 11 more fleet points to spend), Sloane (squadrons are more dangerous and I net 11 more fleet points, but now I’m flying Sloane with MFC, which doesn’t make a ton of sense), or Thrawn (who nets me 3 more fleet points, and allows everyone to multi-task for 3 turns). Overall, I think, with this specific fleet and compared to other commanders, Palpatine in general will be more effective. With more play, I think I can do a better job of maximizing token pressure.

What Worked?


  • The Phantoms did pretty decent work. They soaked up some hits, forced tough decisions, and put some damage into ships.
  • Tempest did what I anticipated he would: he put a hit/crit into the Hammerhead, but whiffed on Salvation. He ate a bunch of squadron attacks and tied down Y-Wings.
  • The Cymoon did fantastic damage in the 3 attacks it threw, but only got to use Krennic in a meaningful way once (couldn’t use Krennic against Salvation, owing to close range).
  • The Arquitens did strong work, as did the Quasar.
  • LTTs did their job well.
  • Contested Outpost objective points won me this game.

What Didn’t Work?


  • Vader did not do his job well at all. He might need some form of dice-fixing, except there isn’t any. So I’ll keep him for now, but this match is a black mark on his record.
  • Krennic was limited in his effectiveness, though he did pretty well on the one attack he actually impacted.
  • I didn’t dice swap with Varnillian as much as I’d planned because the Quasar was kept at a decently safe distance. However, the swaps I did make ensured the death of Salvation in case my dice whiffed, which was of paramount importance if the Quasar was going to have any chance of surviving.
  • I did not get to use Kallus at all simply because of ace and ship placement; Malee and Blount were nowhere near my Quasar for the most part, and they were the only aces Ted fielded. So I wouldn’t say he didn’t work so much as his impact was unquantifiable.

Changes?

None yet. Too soon to pass judgement, though I am already looking sideways at Vader and Krennic.





Palpatine v.1.0 - Versus Raddus (Match 2)

In this match, the second outing of my fleet, I face down Gold Leader with his new and untested Raddus fleet. He’s fielding Mon Karren, Redemption, and has an MC-75 in reserve.

Dakota outbid me, 394-400, and chose to go first. He chose my Contested Outpost.


Deployment: I split up my fleet to make him choose between my Quasar/squadrons (which is camping the Station) and my Cymoon/Arqs. Not sure this will work against Raddus, as splitting my fleet this hard has never gone well before. But given that he’s flying Mon Karren, this lets me take his flank from either direction rather than lining up targets for him.



Round 1: Cymoon activated and took a Con Fire token (to fuel Krennic), Quasar took a Nav token (so he’ll be able to slow down and sit on the station or speed up and run - whichever is needed) and took the station at speed 2, and Arq took an Engineering token. Squarons move into position with Phantoms leading the TAs after Dakota moves his A-Wings aggressively, then I score the station.



Round 2: Palpatine called out Scatter at the top of the ship phase (I figured the faster I got rid of the A-Wing aces, the sooner my squadrons could attack his ships). Redemption pushed Shara and Tycho to attack a Phantom (no damage) and Tempest (3 damage), then moved to face off against the Cymoon. Cymoon obliged and did some damage into the starboard side after using Con Fire token and Krennic (only two damage, probably ill-advised), so one facedown to the hull after he used Evade (I had two Accuracies). Then Mon Karren moved forward after a side shot at the front of the Cymoon. My Arq took a little shot into the side of Redemption, doing a damage and burning his Evade. Then the Quasar went. Tempest did a damage into the port side of the Mon Karren, Vader did nothing (again, Vader?!), two Phantoms killed Tycho, and the Quasar did some flak damage to Shara. In the squadron phase, the two Phantoms attacked Shara and burned her Scatter, but couldn’t kill her. Phantoms all moved out of engagement with Shara at the end of the Squadron phase except for one to keep her locked down.



Round 3: Raddus dropped the MC75 directly in front of the Arq and very near the Cymoon. Palpatine called out Brace. Redemption activated first and hit the Cymoon, as well as flakked a Phantom. Redemption got out of the Cymoon’s front arc and healed a damage as well as a shield. To that end, I decided to let Redemption run away and focused my front and side arcs on the MC75. I forced the Brace burn (courtesy of Palpatine) and did some damage to the shields, but it wasn’t a great turn. The Cymoon then jumped onto an asteroid, eating a Structural Damage, but getting out of the MC75s front arc without jumping into the back arc. Mon Karren went next and unloaded on the Quasar for 3 damage with crit and several Accuracies. Quasar (luckily!) drew into Life Support Failure and lives. Side shot from Mon Karren into the Cymoon, which eats 2 damage when the healthy Redirect is locked down. Mon Karren then moved into range of the station. Arq did some damage to the MC75 but then had to ram and land on the debris field. MC75 did damage to both the Arq and the Cymoon, then rammed the Arq to stay in place. Quasar activated and a Phantom died taking out Shara, Vader did some damage as did Tempest, and a Phantom whiffed. Quasar did some damage then moved. Remaining, unactivated Phantoms shot Mon Karren: one did 3 damage (forcing a Palpatine Brace burn), the other did zero, then Phantoms repositioned and Dakota scored the station.



Round 4: Palpatine called out Redirect. MC75 activates and squashes the Arq, then rolls into some crummy dice (even with Ex Racks and Ordnance Experts), and does 6 damage to the Cymoon (which gets Braced, Redirected, and Contained). Quasar threw a bunch of squadrons and damage at Mon Karren, but couldn’t kill it (got it down to 2 hull), then moved on but couldn’t get out of the front arc. Mon Karren activated and couldn’t quite kill the Quasar with the front shot and so needed both shots to kill the Quasar. It moves onto the station. The Cymoon takes a front shot and whiffs hard on dice (no help from Krennic, because I have a Navigate dialed up), only doing 4 damage even with an LTT reroll. Shoots out of the back at the MC75, stripping its side shields, then moves to the port side of Mon Karren. (This was truly disappointing, and might very well lead to the Cymoon’s destruction, but I HAD to get out of range of the MC75 and risk Mon Karren putting the hurt on me with lucky dice). The last Phantom whiffs on his Mon Karren attack, Phantoms all reposition, Dakota scores the station at the end of the round (my Cymoon was a hair away from contesting it and ensuring a tie).



Round 5: Palpatine calls out (a largely irrelevant) Contain. Mon Karren kills two Phantoms with flak (this was a bad decision on my part; the Cymoon already has Mon Karren dead, so the Phantoms should have run instead of sticking around to ostensibly ensure the kill). The Cymoon killed Mon Karren, moved onto the station with speed control to spare, and we called it here because it was unlikely anything else would happen.


Final score is 276 - 223 (my 4 presumed Contested Outpost tokens versus Dakota’s 2 tokens), a 53 MOV (6-5 win). I don't know that I could have done much better than sacrificing my Quasar and Arq to get his LMC80, but if I had simply pulled my Phantoms out of flak range, my MOV is 81, netting me a 7-4 instead. So that was likely my biggest mistake of the match. Splitting up my fleet as widely as I did was definitely the way for me to go.


As promised in Part One of this series, other members of It’s A Trap will be offering their takes on my Palpatine fleet and our matches. Below are Gold Leader’s Loves, Dislikes, and outright Hates (much like Matthew Berry and his weekly Love/Hate column, all of Gold Leader’s Loves, Dislikes, and Hates are specific to my intentions, my fleet build, and the match!).

Dakota’s Love/Dislike/Hate:


Love:


  • Cymoon combined with Palpatine (especially with Accuracy tech; H9s might be a power move here)
  • Phantoms: advantage is that they can be spread out and be effective even without commands


Dislike:


  • Dakota would like a ship that can get in tight and hold down an enemy, and maybe the Arq is holding the fleet back. Replace it with a Gladiator Star Destroyer?


Hate (again, specific to my fleet):


  • Krennic, because the Cymoon will end up at close range so often.
  • Vader
  • It looks like I’m likely to be playing a lot of Contested Outpost, so maybe a Gladiator is also a good choice because it reinforces my control of the Contested Outpost…


What Did Palpatine Provide? He definitely allowed me to kill tokens earlier than I normally would have. I didn't necessarily target hull zones accordingly with my squadrons to leverage that, but Palpatine definitely forced some tougher decisions on Dakota. This was maximized when I also rolled into an Accuracy or two so he was forced to either burn a token or not use any tokens at all.

Was His Impact Worth 35 Points? It felt like it was. Motti would not have saved any ships that died, I wouldn't have leveraged Sloane any better than I leveraged Palpatine, and Thrawn would have been useful, I'm sure, but I only had one instance during which I would have liked to do two things at once: I would've liked to have sped up the Quasar past the front arc of Mon Karren while also commanding squadrons. But there are no guarantees the Quasar would've survived even with that boon, so I don't feel like I missed out on anything by choosing Palpatine. That sounds like faint praise, but it can be really difficult to gauge his impact because he's all about the psychological warfare as well as the actual warfare. As in, “You don't spend the token because you don't really want to lose it after only one use. But if it had been exhausted in the exact same situation, would you have spent it because you felt like you maximized it and discarded it on your terms?” Dakota said he had to make some decisions with defense tokens he didn't like, so Imma say yes to this question for this match.

What Worked?


  • Varnillian gave me some solid choices, particularly with swapping a rolled Accuracy with a double hit.
  • The Phantoms really pulled their weight again. They dispatched the A-Wing aces quickly and then started swinging at Mon Karren.

What Didn’t Work?


  • Krennic was of extremely limited use. This is only strike 2 for him, but I can't really imagine a performance in my next game that will convince me he's worth keeping in this fleet. I appreciate the dice control when I get it, but he's so expensive for such limited control that I think I can better spend those 8 points elsewhere.
  • Kallus did very little in punching Shara once, but I still haven't faced off against a particularly ace-centric fleet yet.
  • The Arquitens did basically nothing in this match. It fired two "eh" shots - one at Redemption, then one front shot at the MC75 - before it died to heavy fire. It didn't cost me much, but I either need to deploy more aggressively with it (in this case, inside the Cymoon instead of outside) or I need to swap it for something else.
  • Vader, sort of? He whiffed on a roll against Mon Karren when I needed him to hit for Palpatine, and then rolled a total of 3 damage against Mon Karren. But I think I misplayed; I think I should have thrown him against Shara from the start. I was worried about her counter and so chose to use Phantoms to take her out. But I should have leveraged Vader, his defense tokens, and his 8 out of 8 useful sides on blue dice to either vaporize her or burn her Scatter, and just use my Braces to mitigate return damage. So though I didn't love him after this match, I think I needed to use him differently, and I'm still adjusting to using him effectively.

Changes?

Originally, I wasn’t going to make any changes just yet; I wanted one more match with this fleet before I made any changes. But more time between matches (as well as writing up these batreps) mean I spend more time thinking, and the more time I spend thinking, the more likely I am to make changes. As a bit of a sidenote, that’s one of the things that drives me nuts about Armada: for me, personally, it’s harder for me to put any fleet build through “the scientific process,” taking my hypotheses through rigorous trials and documentation before drawing any conclusions, when there’s more downtime between matches. So, I made some small changes prematurely. After discussing with Gold Leader, if 1.1 isn’t further along the path I’d like to travel, I think I already know what v.2.0 of this fleet will look like. However, I did type the following immediately after this match: “I'm very confident that I'll be pulling Krennic in favor of something else. So much so that the longer it takes for me to get in another match, the more likely it is that I will replace Krennic a game earlier than I planned.”


So yeah. A lot of things worked the way I wanted them to. A number of the things that didn’t can easily be traced back to user error. So I now introduce v. 1.1 of my fleet, Master and Apprentice.


Master and Apprentice (90/400/400)

==================================


Cymoon 1 Refit (112 + 58: 170)

· Emperor Palpatine (35)

· Veteran Captain (3)

· Gunnery Team (7)

· Intensify Firepower! (6)

· Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)


Quasar Fire II-class Cruiser-Carrier (61 + 18: 79)

· Agent Kallus (3)

· Flight Controllers (6)

· Veteran Gunners (5)

· Boosted Comms (4)


Arquitens-class Light Cruiser (54 + 7: 61)

· Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)


Darth Vader (21)

4 x TIE Phantom Squadron (4 x 14)

Tempest Squadron (13)


Rift Assault

Contested Outpost

Volatile Deposits


You’ll notice that I’ve only made some very minimal changes. I will absolutely miss Gunnery Chief Varnillian. I like her SOOOOOOO much. But I needed to swap out Krennic: these two matches just reinforced my opinion of him. I like him a lot, but the fact that he does nothing for me at close range really limits my ability to use him. I’m fine with having to dial up Con Fires; it’s not something I do terribly often, so it forced me to play a more dynamic game and outside of my comfort zone. But the range thing was too much. But without him, I feared my Cymoon’s dice would be that much less reliable, and so needed more fixing. Intensify Firepower! is the obvious choice, as it helps every ship in my fleet, and not just my Cymoon. But swapping IF! and Veteran Captain (who I really like to fuel fleet commands if I don’t have another way of getting tokens) for Krennic is not quite an even trade. Krennic is 8, while the combination of Veteran Captain and IF! is 9. I can, of course, swap the Veteran Captain for Hondo, saving me a point, and therefore, keeping Varnillian on my Quasar. But I don’t like the notion of giving my opponent any advantages I don’t have to. So I decided to replace Varnillian with Veteran Gunners. I like them with a small dice pool, because the math is a lot easier to crunch as to whether or not a reroll is worth it. Plus, I don’t expect my Quasar to swing for big damage, but I need it to do SOMETHING. Veteran Gunners feels like a good choice here. If I miss Varnillian too much, I can simply go back to Varnillian, and swap out the Veteran Captain for Hondo.

And that’s it! Those are my changes! It mostly fixes the problems with this fleet as I’ve experienced them so far. It doesn’t fix Vader, but as I learned in my last match, I think I’ve just incorrectly prioritized Vader’s targets. I really like him, and I want him to work, so I’m going to keep him around for awhile longer. If I genuinely can’t justify him at some point, then I’ll obviously swap him out. But this is part of my process: I want Vader to work in this fleet (if for no other reason than my fleet name), so he gets more slack than other cards (like Krennic). But in the end, I’ll have to make a decision based on data. I just need more data points before I’m willing to give up the ghost on him just yet. More matches and analysis coming in Part 3!


-IratePooka

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