Recusant - What we know/thoughts & possible builds

Krennic's Cymoon vs ALL the TIE Bombers

Hello and welcome to one of my first of hopefully many normal battle reports.  These are intended to be fun-flled learning experiences for both myself and hopefully others.  The general format I'll try to follow is a bit of a background/rationale for each of the fleets and then launch into the turn by turn and follow with some lessons learned.

If you have any comments, questions, or advice please do not hesitate to offer it up. I’m obviously new and still working on providing a good reading experience to everyone and analyzing my own gameplay and mistakes.

The goal of my fleet (found below) was to leverage the raw dice power of a Krennic Cymoon and then I’ve been wanting to try some new RITR tanky Arquittens as a side piece. Not the greatest way to build a fleet but it's my blog and my plastic spaceships so I get to try what I want.  

In general, get some of the new SSD and RITR cards on the table. Piett is there because he was cheap, new, and I didn’t really think the fleet could drastically take advantage of someone else (that is probably wrong in hindsight).

Name: Piett Cymoon and Arqs
Faction: Imperial
Commander: Admiral Piett

Assault: Most Wanted
Defense: Contested Outpost
Navigation: Volatile Deposits

Arquitens Command Cruiser (59)
• Expert Shield Tech (5)
• Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
• Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)
= 74 Points

Arquitens Command Cruiser (59)
• Expert Shield Tech (5)
• Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
• Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)
= 74 Points

ISD Cymoon 1 Refit (112)
• Admiral Piett (22)
• Director Krennic (8)
• Gunnery Team (7)
• Spinal Armament (9)
• Quad Turbolaser Cannons (10)
= 168 Points

Gozanti Cruisers (23)
• Comms Net (2)
= 25 Points

Squadrons:
• Ciena Ree (17)
• Valen Rudor (13)
• Morna Kee (27)
= 57 Points

Total Points: 398

My opponent was trying a new fleet for him as well.  It was a Thrawn based Ruthless Strategist TIE bomber swarm from hell.  Seriously, the TIE bombers wouldn't stop coming.

Gladiator I (56)
• Grand Admiral Thrawn (32)
• Iden Versio (6)
• Ordnance Experts (4)
• Engine Techs (8)
• Assault Proton Torpedoes (5)
• Demolisher (10)
= 121 Points

Quasar Fire II (61)
• Governor Pryce (7)
• Ruthless Strategists (4)
• Boosted Comms (4)
• Squall (3)
= 79 Points

Gozanti Cruisers (23)
• Bomber Command Center (8)
= 31 Points

Gozanti Cruisers (23)
• Hondo Ohnaka (2)
• Comms Net (2)
= 27 Points

Squadrons:
• Maarek Stele (21)
• Colonel Jendon (20)
• Dengar (20)
• Mauler Mithel (15)
• 5 x TIE Bomber Squadron (45)
• Gamma Squadron (10)
= 131 Points

Total Points: 389

  

Round 1

My opponent elects to go first and selects my Contest Outpost. I turtle up in the corner after he delays deployment with a gozanti and his squadron swarm. Pryce is set for Round 2 (and my average-at-best plan/hope began to form). Setup looks like this.

People on the station are gonna see lots of pew pew!

Round 1

My opponent delays with Gozanti's, while I make a gamble and increased my ISD's speed to 3 to try and catch the Quasar in Krennic's red range before Pryce could trigger.  I knew it would be close, but I ended up just out of long range with the ISD. My feeble fighter screen moved into position to buy me a turn and my Arqs continued to fly around doing practically nothing.  Really out of practice with the Arq-kitten.  Thrawn on the Demo creeps forward to be a trailer and mop up after the bomber ball. And thus began the pain train....

End of Round 1: Everything's going to be just fine

Round 2

With the use of Krennic and some navigate tokens/commands, my ISD deletes the BCC Gozanti after it activates and pushes Mauler and friend and Cienna/Valen eat the dust.  My ISD slowed to speed 1 with a timely command and a token.  The rest of the round is Arq's not getting decent shots (ie none) and then Mr. Quasar goes and crushes most of the shields on the ISD with his swarm of bombers.

End of round 2: There's too many of them!

Round 3

The Quasar got it's squadron command off, crushed Morna who had hopped in to save the day on her previous turn, and then proceeded to dodge my front arc.  Morna died to a mob of fire but bought me the single turn I needed from the Quasar Bomber hate to actually get to use the ISD.  I then delayed with some Arq-kitten and gozanti movements.  I delayed with the ISD thinking "Demo is going speed 1... and even if it goes to speed 2 it'll still be at Medium range for mad Krennic re-rolls of death."  Well, there's this card called Engine Techs, you might have heard of it, that blasted a Demolisher-sized hole in that plan.  Thrawn inched forward on his Gladiator and had his APT's punch gaping holes into my ship and then ET'd right into close range double arc for the top of next round.

But then the ISD got to shoot back.  And what a shot it was. Close range with a con fire, 7 red and 2 blue roll in and a perfect 3 accuracies (thanks to QTC) and 7 damage without help from IF. Pop goes the Demo before it gets to double arc me next turn. I then whiff on the Gozanti but I'll consider that a win for Piett on his ISD as it limps away trailing fire, smoke, and 7-8 damage cards.

End of Turn 3: I'm still alive? This can't last...

Round 4

What I thought was a doomed ISD got lucky, the quasar had an engineering command dialed in since Thrawn was obviously going to be providing said Squadron dial this turn.  Alas, my ISD was saved...for a turn.  The Quasar took it's rage out on my pre-rammed twice gozanti and moved towards the station for some juicy victory points.

My ISD repaired and tried it's best to get out of dodge and away from the bombers. Arq's finished up the last gozanti and took some LTT shots at Dengar and Maarek.  I scared them away but didn't manage to kill them. The TIE bombers then positioned themselves quite nicely to be picked up by squadron commands from a relay in the following turn.

I forgot to take pictures so hopefully your imagination is up to the task.

Round 5

The Quasar used it's Squadron command to put the final nail in the ISD coffin.  The Arq-kittens then tried to nuke some a TIE bomber but fell just short leaving it at one hull.  The bombers tried to hurt the Arq's in return but Expert Shield Tech is real nice and no paint was scratched.  We called it after this since his fighters flew away to save their lives, he wasn't gonna kill my Arqs, and I wasn;t going to be able to kill any of his fighters.

In the end, I had 3 victoy tokens and 188 points of kills, coming to a grand total of 248 vs my dead ISD, Goz, and fighter screen and 1 victoy token for the Quasar, for 250.  BAM! 6-5 my opponent thanks to some dodgy quasar flying.

Good game!

What I learned:

A Krennic Cymoon can be a terrifying and devastating sight on the Armada battlefield.  Flown right it can put out an insane amount of damage.  However, the downside to my fleet build and ISD build this time was the insane amount of Rube-Goldberg token shenanigans to get everything working. Krennic and IF were fighting for Con Fire tokens and Piett wanted any other token to do his thing.  It also forced my activation order occasionally so I could get said Con Fire token to the ISD so Krennic could work.  To fix this requires either more Gozanti's, Yularen, Tarkin or dropping IF or Piett.  These are all in my future plans to try.  

Arq-kittens, well, I needed to fly them better and get them into the fight more.  But beyond that required practice I think the build was pretty solid.  Really hard to take down by fighter swarms and had pretty consistent damage when they got the chance.  I'm not sure if the Command Cruiser and the Aux Shield Teams are necessary though.  And if you want them, a better commander such as Thrawn or Tarkin could allow them to engineer the shields back while still either Con Fire or Naving.  

My Fighter screen did it's job.  Morna is probably too expensive for what she did, but she provided a bit of anti-ship capability in the event no squads showed up.  She's an easy points target to work on the token generation portion the fleet needs more of though.

Also, while the fleet hasn't yet fought a big hitter/haymaker fleet.  The lack of Defensive retrofit on the Cymoon makes it more squishy then I'd like and it really plays the game of "I will kill you faster than you can kill me!" Which is a dangerous game, since it's still probably going to die no matter what and that's a lot of points.

Otherwise, my opponent and I both made some mistakes but this was a first time trying out these particular fleets for both of us.  We both had fun and also had some Scotch....which increased the fun but also potentially increased the mistake count a bit.  Until next time