Clone Wars: Episode 3

 Game 3 of the Vassal Clone Wars

I rolled into Round 3 still at the virtual table 3, still riding my coattails from the Round 1 victory and licking my round 2 wounds.  Pretty sure I was only here because everyone else is still figuring out Clone Wars and eager to shoot each other as there have been lots of bloodbaths where lots of things die and the end score is 6-5.  Part of that may be due to the fact that the defense tokens of the Medium CW ships are only 66% about keeping them alive.  The other 33% of their 'defense' tokens are about hurting the enemy. Therefore, maybe more ship die than we're completely used to.

For this match I was paired up with none other than Green Knight himself, the brainchild behind the entire Clone Wars Tournament and also the superpower who pushed Vassal into the Clone Wars era.  GK is quite the good Armada player and brought a very Janky Obi-Wan flavored list.  If you haven't been keeping tabs on the lists, his list is below for your perusal.

Green Knight List

ALL the C70s!!

As you can see, there are exactly 8! read them 8! Armed Cruisers that make up this list.  There is a  Obi-Wan Lifeboat that is about as protected as you can get for an armed cruiser and I'm sure will not be in the fight unless it needs to be.

The remainder are clones of each other (haha! I'm so funny).  Cluster Bombs to counter enemy fighters and External racks to give each of them the ability to punch above their measly 46 point cost.  The ultimate plan I'm sure being to swarm a ship and then run away after getting their super shot off.  While one or two might evaporate, 2 is basically trading even for any Clone Wars medium ship.  

My list

It hasn't and can't change. 3 Boarding Trooper Acclamators who will trundle forward being covered by a deathless screen of Torrents powered by Jedi.

Seeing how far we can Board the ladder

The Game

We both had 400 points and after the customary roll-off, Green Knight (henceforth GK for ease) won and elected to go first. After some hemming and hawing, Minefields was selected.  I did my best to lay out the minefields to protect my flank.  I figured the agile ships wouldn't hit them but if I could funnel most of them into my forward arcs, it was the best I was going to be able to do. At least that was the plan when I picked this objective for my fleet, that, and no one had Strategic in the Clone Wars to turn it against me.

Finally, we setup our ships, me tucked into the corner by the station hoping that C70s wouldn't want to risk a minefield. And GK spread across the board in front of me with 2 flanking C70s as well as Obi-Wan and the rest going to skip through some red dice to get close and lay in the pain.

Mines should keep my flank safe...right?

Round 1

Nothing super exciting happened here. The calm before the storm really. GK's flankers all activated and shuffled around changing speeds and getting fancy with their Navigation to dodge all the mines.  I had 5 pass tokens courtesy of my massive activation disadvantage but I elected to use those later, when they might matter.  I turned to get away from the flanking force and speed, or rather trundled, at speed 1 towards the left corner of the map.  My fighters moved into position to get activated by both Bail and Nevoota should they need to be.

End of Round 1

Round 2

I knew I couldn't burn all my pass tokens in one round, at most being able to burn 3. So this and the next round seemed like the ideal time.  GK started with two flankers as I used my first pass token, then accelerated Bail to speed two and aimed back straight up the board. Final Flanker and another pass token, got the first of the straight ahead C70s moving.  

Implacable then accelerated to speed two as well and stayed within range to help all it's friends with Nevoota close behind after another pass token. No shots were taken but my opponent managed to end the turn with getting 3 ships into close range and most had double arcs for the next round.  Some of my Clams were going to start hurting but I should be able to catch one C70 in a juicy front arc.

Dice will be thrown, shields will be shaken

Round 3

The Green C70 directly in front of Nevoota activated first and with a Con Fire command threw sets of 2 and 5 damage using her external racks, exhausting all of Nevoota's defense tokens and Implaccable but taking a 3 damage salvo in return.  The Green C70 then rammed Implacable and was left to her fate, having fulfilled her duty.  Nevoota activated and with a Sqd dial used CNO to give Implacable her BT token and used her dial to launch her Clone Troopers on their boarding party on the Green C70, leaving her only with a contain after using tokens on the previous salvo from Nevoota.  

Two hot rolls later the Green C70 died to the front arc and the side arc with external racks ripped off most of the shields and put a hull damage on the right closest C70.  Nevoota then deftly darted (if a Clam could ever be said to do this) out of close range of the flanking C70, denying the important External Racks shot that would overheat her tokens.

The red C70 activated next and double arc'd Implacable. Unfortunately, even with External racks and a Con fire only 4 damage was done total over both attacks and she took 2 from salvo in return.  GK then maneuvered her onto the station and just behind Bail's leftmost Acclamator.

At this point I passed and one of the far right flankers darted past a mine.  So now it was Implacable's turn and she threw a couple pooints of damage at the C70 trying to scoot past and then the C70 squaring off against Bail.  Used her token and dial to fix her shields and hopped forward, nearly clipping Nevoota but slowing back down to speed 1.

Another flanker moved and i spent a pass token and we began to see that the flanking force wasn't going to be able to catch up in time to overwhelm my repair commands and overload my defense tokens.  

Finally, Bail activated and threw some squadrons into the C70 sneaking past the station. 2 or so damage was done and the Cluster Bombs were highly accurate, managing to not roll a single hit or crit.  Which I don't know what the odds are but that is abysmal luck.  The squads and the rear arc finished off that C70 while the front arc pumped a couple more damage into the left most C70 and stripped her evade and shields.  Finally, Bail slowed to speed 1 and maneuverd to keep a shot and trap the C70s charging down the board.

GK now had total control of the board and threw another 3 damage into Nevoota's rear, costing her her redirect to stop a crit from reaching the hull.  Then a good shot into Bail's front from the yellow C70 left Bail with a single front shield and after a ram setup a good top of next round for the that C70.  

Some squads shuffled into position around the station to be in activation range and catch any C70s trying to slip past the lines next turn.

Couple less C70s though some Acclamtor shields are getting thin

Round 4

The yellow C70, in the perfect position, kicked off the round and then completely missed the playbook that lasers have to hit things to hurt.  Another pair of 2 hit attacks rolled in and left Bail missing some shields.  Then it darted past and landed on the station to fix up it's damaged hull and things were looking better for it, not great, but better.  

After some waffling Nevoota activated next and used Bail and her cmd token to fix her rear shields for the impending damage that was to come.  She activated some V-19s and Anakin and tossed them at the yellow C70 dealing some damage but cluster bombs took Anakin down to 2 hull.  A rear shot for 1 and a front shot for 2 didn't do much other than get some tokens spent on the C70s and then Nevoota leapt forward at speed 3, now in front of Implacable and ramming the poor C70 still in all the front arcs.

Next, the closest flanking C70 activated, targeted Implacable and got a good 7 damage in that got braced, redirected and salvo'd costing Implaccable only her side and aft shields.  Then a ram kept her with double arc for the next turn, since it was doubtful Implacable could dodge Nevoota.

Bail activated next and with his BT and a fantastic roll sent the C70 that was still in the front arcs back to meet his other friends.  Throughout the game, GK was generally left with an awful choice of having to use the redirect to get some Obi-Wan damage reduction but then it'd be gone when the BT came OR not use it for Obi-Wan but move 2 damage around after it got BT'd.  It was not a great matchup for him in that regard.  Bail followed up with a external racks side arc shot and some more hot dice finsihed off the yellow C70 that was trying to sneak past.  Bail then continued forward and away from any future threat.

At this point the flanking C70s began to turn away and aim to clear the rear of the Acclamator formation.  Implaccable then went and with a fantastic roll got just enough damage out of the side arc to kill the C70 tucked close in.  It then rammed Nevoota and stayed in place guardng the rear of the formation.  

The final flanking C70 slowed and turned hard to stop from being in range.

Few less C70's out there..

Round 5

This was the shortest round as GK activated and moved his C70 out of the danger area and I had no squadrons commands to push squadrons to chase his ships.  At this point we called it.  Below is the final board state as no one was going to fly off the board or kill anything else.

not much different that last picture huh?

Final Result

Due mostly to GK's bad luck with dice the game ended 230-0, in favor of me.  This would give me enough points to come out with 22 Tournament points and take 2nd place on the European ladder, even as an imposter American hanging out over in Germany.  So onward and upward to face the other lists and experienced players.

I would like to think that my fantastic flying, great synergized list, and plucky navigating made the difference but I can not.

Looking back at the game, I think there were two major items that contributed to the final result of this game.  The first and most dominant was the selection of minefields as the objective and the resultant dispersal of GK's C70s during deployment.  When setting out the mines, my goal was to funnel his force into the dangerous front arcs of my Acclamators.  If those C70s got to my sides, I only had 1 External Rack powered shot to punish them with, otherwise, they would probably Obi-Wan redirect and evade anything else I could shoot them with.  My squads would be the lynchpin to handle any flankers.

What my minefield setup actually did though was split the swarm so they did not come crashing down all at once, which gave Implacable, Bail Engineering commands, and defense tokens time to do their job.  Especially since the C70 fire was distributed somewhat evenly over my 3 Acclamators (though Nevoota would probably disagree).

In effect this kept 3 C70s from ever truly entering the fight, so it was more like my full 400 point fleet against a fleet of 250-ish points that charged my most dangerous arcs.

The other contributing factor which must be mentioned was dice.  I think I had a double icon of some sort  (red or black) on any roll I made and generally only had a single blank, if any, on my rolls throughout the entire game.  Even after close range rerolls the double would come back up.  Other than Kraken lists, it doesn't seem like Clone Wars fleets have much in the way of dicing fixing other than LTT (which I had) and quantity of dice, which I was also using.  So one is generally left with some chance of the dice gods ruining your day.  GK's less than stellar (and far below average dice) and my above average dice definitely played a factor in the game.  I still think I would've won with the same setup, but the margin would've been much less and Nevootaa would've burned to the ground as she usually does.  

It was a truly a pleasure playing the organzier of this great event and GK was a truly gracious and fantastic player to play against.  Even managing to keep a sense of humor with this dice.  

Shamless Plug for his blog here: http://armadaihaveyounow.blogspot.com/.  There's lots of good thoughts and interesting tidbits to chew on, go give it a read.