Grand Moff Tarkin - Ain't Tarkin 'Bout Love
Ain't Tarkin 'Bout Love (45/391/400)
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Kuat Refit (112 + 56: 168)
· Grand Moff Tarkin (28)
· Defense Liaison (3)
· Darth Vader (3)
· Early Warning System (7)
· Leading Shots (6)
· Assault Proton Torpedoes (4)
· Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer (5)
Gladiator I-class Star Destroyer (56 + 17: 73)
· Skilled First Officer (1)
· Ordnance Experts (4)
· Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
· Assault Proton Torpedoes (4)
· Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer (5)
Gladiator I-class Star Destroyer (56 + 17: 73)
· Skilled First Officer (1)
· Ordnance Experts (4)
· Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
· Assault Proton Torpedoes (4)
· Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer (5)
Gozanti-class Cruisers (23 + 9: 32)
· Parts Resupply (3)
· Phylon Q7 Tractor Beams (6)
Hondo Ohnaka (24)
IG-88 (21)
Most Wanted
Abandoned Mining Facility
Infested Fields
Okay. So, unconventional, I know. Lots of choices here that maybe sort of defy reason when I say, "This is my tournament fleet." There's some history here, but I won't get into it all because I'm guessing people are mostly uninterested in reading my dissertation on how I spent a year building, scrapping, rebuilding, and tweaking my Tarkin fleet. Suffice to say that I decided before the last tournament season (which ran from 2019-2020 before it was prematurely ended by the COVID pandemic) that my ride-or-die commander was going to be Grand Moff Tarkin. At the time, he was a whopping 38 points and was not showing up on the competitive scene hardly at all. There was one fleet archetype that featured him: Tarquitens. A fleet in which Arquitens would run around and Concentrate Fire at will, courtesy of Tarkin giving them the ability to Navigate with tokens. It's a great idea, and requires great skill to fly effectively in any sort of competitive setting. To that end, I wanted to sort of figure out a way to "unlock" Tarkin for competition without simply putting together another Arquitens fleet.
The thing about Tarkin is figuring out how to optimize the tokens he's handing out every turn. If you're not, then why bother paying for him instead of some other commander who is cheaper and more consistently useful for you? Now, things have changed a bit since I built and competed with this fleet. Armada 1.5 has dropped. We've seen some rules changes, but we've also seen a lot of significant changes to upgrade cards. One of the biggest is that Grand Moff Tarkin now costs only 28 points instead of a massive 38 points. That's a nearly 25% drop in point cost! But there were some other cards that I had included with this fleet that are now either non-existent (Strategic Advisor) or not necessarily as mandatory for me as they were before (Comms Net). So when the 1.5 changes dropped, I had gained something like 14 points off my original list of 396. What to do with all those points?
The thing is, I felt my fleet was fairly well optimized already before. To start, Tarkin fed Engineering to all of my ships in the first round so my Gladiator Star Destroyers could use their Engineering dials + their Tarkin tokens to gain an extra shield on the port and starboard hull zones. The Kuat is happy to bank the token because it'll be in the middle of a skirmish and need to move shields around if nothing else at some point. Later on, Tarkin will likely start alternating between tossing out Navigate tokens (so my ships can speed up for an attack run or escape, jumping from speed 1 to speed 3 as needed) and Engineering tokens (my ships are really only effective at knife-fighting range, so I'd better be prepared to eat return fire). The Gozanti have always served as an additional deployment/activation (more relevant before the 1.5 changes introduced us to pass tokens (outside of the Super Star Destroyer). But with Comms Net, it would also pass a token that only a single ship wanted, such as tossing a Squadrons token to the Kuat so that I can use Vader when the opportunity arose.
Equipping 7th Fleet Star Destroyer to each of my 3 combat ships generally help ensure they have an easier time approaching their prey. I can eat a minimum of 2 damage and a maximum of 3 damage (depending on which ships my enemy shoots) per turn, which can make a big difference. Especially when you consider that each of my Gladiators has 2 extra shields and my Kuat has Early Warning System (EWS) equipped to remove dice from incoming attacks. It took me awhile to figure out that these defensive upgrades are not designed to keep my ships alive *period*; these upgrades are equipped to keep my ships alive long enough to go on their attack run and eliminate enemies. It's a shift in thinking that really changed my tactical approach to matches with this fleet and helped me see more success. The Skilled First Officers made my Gladiators much more flexible in case circumstances called for a change in my command dial stack, and I originally featured Strategic Advisor (SA) on my Kuat so I'd have 5 activations instead of 4 (my playtesting over the course of a year showed me that 5 was the optimal number of activations for my fleet to be effective at any sort of competitive level).
What are my changes to accommodate 1.5, and what do I hope to accomplish with this fleet? Well, with SA no longer in play, I've got an extra 4 points as well as an empty upgrade slot on my Kuat. Let's start there. I thought about a lot of different choices for this, but decided on something simple: Defense Liaison. It's not a card I would have considered in the past for a highly coveted Officer upgrade slot on my Kuat. But given that my Kuat always wants to be either Navigating or repairing with Engineering commands, and I will always have tokens (courtesy of Tarkin and my Gozanti), this felt like a really strong choice. It gives my command stack flexibility, as well as keeping me from falling victim to Slicer Tools or anything else that might mess with my command stack. I've lost games because I had set the wrong dial two turns prior, and while my dial game has gotten stronger, there's not much I could do if someone hit me with Slicer Tools or Cham Syndulla. Now? They're mostly wasting their time hitting any of my ships with that nonsense.
Which brings me to my Gozanti and my squadron game. My squadron game is simple: if I'm facing a squadronless fleet, my Rogues can fly in and just harass whatever I need them to harass. Hondo is a genuine threat with 2 blue Bomber dice, while IG-88 is likely to land the occasional hit with its black die attack, but can also Scatter as needed to escape any flak. If I'm facing off against someone flying squadrons (much more likely), then Hondo delays my opponent's most dangerous squadron (almost always a bomber of some sort, such as Anakin or Maarek) with his excellent ability, and IG-88 tries to snipe units that I need destroyed (sometimes that's a bomber, sometimes it's someone like Shara who will be a terror and work in tandem with another squadron to lock down Hondo and keep him from doing his job). Much like my defensive upgrades, these squadrons aren't meant to keep me alive; my squadrons simply buy my ships enough time to rip apart their prey before my opponent's squadrons can take me down.
What about the Gozanti? Well, originally, it was just a barebones Gozanti fielding Comms Net. But with the abundance of points and new upgrades, I thought about what would best serve my fleet. I messed with a couple of different builds, but settled on the above. I knew I still wanted the ability to toss tokens, as I go through them pretty quickly and Tarkin (believe it or not) isn't enough. Especially because he's not particularly flexible if my ships need different things. But Comms Net meant my Gozanti never got to use its own tokens, or even really its own dials most of the time. So I had to think about what my Gozanti was doing most often with its tokens. The answer is that it was trying to make up for any gaps in Tarkin's token coverage. It was almost never Squadrons (as my Kuat could simply bank a Squadrons token in the first turn, and Rogues can take care of themselves in the Squadron phase...occasionally, I'd use a Squadrons command to get in an alpha strike and surprise an opponent, but it was rare), and I don't often use Concentrate Fire commands. After all, my Glads each have Ordnance Experts equipped, and my Kuat boasts Leading Shots. So it's mostly Navigate or Engineering. The Gozanti just gave out whatever Tarkin didn't. So I decided to pay one additional point for Parts Resupply. Now Tarkin doesn't necessarily need to hand out Engineering tokens during a round of engagement, and can instead hand out something else. And yes, I'm paying a point more than Comms Net, but I'm also freeing up my Gozanti command stack so it can use its own dials instead of always having to take the token and throw it. In short, with Parts Resupply instead of Comms Net, my Gozanti can now use its dials as well as its tokens. What to do with them? Well, the Gozanti still needs to stay close to my ships so it can actually toss the tokens it brought. But what other purpose can it serve? I thought about fielding Emperor Palpatine (the officer variant) and the Suppressor title so that anyone who fired at this little flotilla ended up exhausting a couple of its defense tokens. The flotilla is much less likely to fall victim to an attack of opportunity at this point. But such a build didn't gain me anything unless someone actually attacked it, right? So I decided to try an upgrade that generally doesn't see play: the Phylon Q7 Tractor Beams. It's true that it won't affect a lot of ships that I see, and there may be a lot of matches wherein I don't use the upgrade. But you know what it can do? Given the new importance of tokens with 1.5 rules and upgrades, it can either zap a Navigate token off a small ship, or slow that ship down. Why does that matter? Well, there are plenty of small ships (such as Gladiators, CR90s and MC30s) that love to hit and run. My Gozanti now says, "Nah, don't do that. Why don't you stick around instead, friend? Eat some black dice from my buddies over there." I don't know that it will necessarily work, but it's worth a shot, given that I couldn't come up with any better options for my Gozanti with its Fleet Support slot already spoken for.
My objective suite has proven fairly effective. Most Wanted is boring, but tried and true. I've messed with a lot of other Assault Objectives, and there have been times that they have each bitten me in the butt. This one? Not so much. Abandoned Mining Facility has turned what would have been 7-4 wins into 9-2 wins because of the obnoxious number of victory tokens I can generate using Tarkin while still fighting whatever I need to fight. Infested Fields was suggested to me by one of the folks over at CGYSO, and its been a staple for this fleet ever since. It generally doesn't net me a ton of points, but it always gets me at least one victory token more than my opponent, and forces them to work around obstacles I set in their way.
Ultimately, I've not yet been able to test how this fleet will work with the minimal changes I've implemented, but honestly, I've still got confidence in it as a competitive fleet. Can't wait to get back to organized play!
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