Having done some playtesting with a Rieekan Ace fleet that I now judge "not good enough" due to time constraints. Learning how the fleet behaves and to make suitable adjustments with it before putting it down on the table against a stiff and serious competition simply is not possible. My goal is to score better than how it went in Birmingham with my Rieekan MSU back in 2017 where it got completely movn' down nd i landed on place 42. Things learned from that trip was:
- MSU is difficult to play. You have many movable parts that needs to come in at the right time and the advantage with having the superior number of activations dwindles the more you start to loose ships. Also with more moving parts comes the possibilities of more mistakes being made when fatigue starts to set in.
- Its easy to lose small base ships in this day and meta with Kuat's being a thing and average damage being higher than in eralier waves. Loosing 2 ships/turn is not uncommon.
- I managed to beat my own list after the tournament with an imperial hodgepodge consisting of Motti on a VSDII, demolisher, 2 Gozantis and a lot of TIE-fighters and IG-88.
*Assault Frigate MK2B
Rieekan, Boosted Comms, Electronic Countermeasure, Flight Controller, Adar Tallon.
*Hammerhead Torpedo Corvette
External Racks
*Hammerhead Torpedo Corvette
External Racks
*GR-75 Medium Transport
Toryn Farr, Comms Net, Bright Hope,
*GR-75 Medium Transport
Bomber Command Center, Boosted Comms,
*Squadrons
Luke
Wedge
Biggs
Dutch
Nym
Gold Squadron
Dagger Squadron
HWK-290
It all comes down to 400pts, with a maxed out squadron wing of 134pts.
Some photos where taken from the games.
Game 1
Rieekans opposing list were "the good one", with an ISD, GSD Demolisher, 2 Gozantis and a Arquitens. No Squadrons so a walk in the park you might think.Setup
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| Setup was solid, but mistakes were made :) |
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| Only sending one squadron after Demolisher is not a great idea while the rest mill about among the rocks |
Game 2
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| This game went better, but it was the "In-my-mind-bad-list" list. |
The plan with the hammerheads is that they shield the more important parts of the fleet and when they die they get zombied by Rieekan. This, I realized, in hindsight is a bad way of constructing a list. It's generally a bad idea to include things that have the role of simply being a meatshield, ie. give points to the opponent, and that don't use the hammerheads to their full potential.
Also this list likes being second. And that is also anathema to what a torpedo hammerhead wants.
Only testing a list 2 times does not show the true potential of the list, but as I mentioned above, time to waste is now a luxury I can not afford due to being a parent.
My squadron game has not been on edge and this time it was abysmal at best so I'll spare my brain the headache of having to trudge through possibly 5 games all in one day with having to think about the optimal positioning for Biggs or if its worth sacrificing Jan just to get Nym to land one more hit into a ISD and how to spread out your squadrons so Mauler can't get to all of them.
So in short. This list gets shelved untill I can pick up the squadron game again.
"Bring what you know how to fly" are important wisdom regarding this game. I have seen people netlist and loose badly, not having the knowledge of the lists strenghts and weaknesses and how to fly with it. What comes naturally is the Ackbar list from GothCon. But with a few adjustments from last time. That is a list I have a clear idea of how to fly. Just needs to make some suitable changes to it.