General Grievous Fleet - Wolves Amongst Sheep

 General Grievous Fleet - Wolves Amongst Sheep

Let's start with the list itself, shall we? Quick note: If you're familiar with the most excellent Armada Fleets Designer app, then you'll be familiar with the format of the fleet list. If not, then you should know that the numbers in the parentheses next to the fleet name are as follows - number of points invested in squadrons/total number of fleet points/maximum number of fleet points.

Wolves Amongst Sheep (89/400/400)

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Providence-class Carrier (105 + 15: 120)

· Rune Haako (4)

· Intensify Firepower! (6)

· Expanded Hangar Bay (5)

Battle Refit (52 + 26: 78)

· General Grievous (20)

· Slaved Turrets (6)

Battle Refit (52 + 6: 58)

· Slaved Turrets (6)

Transport (47 + 8: 55)

· Bomber Command Center (8)

3 x Belbullab-22 Starfighter Squadron (3 x 15)

4 x Hyena-class Droid Bomber Squadron (4 x 11)

Most Wanted

Planetary Ion Cannon

Infested Fields

I was thinking: I want things dying when I've got Grievous so I can use him. But if too many things die, that's usually a decent indication that I'm going to lose. So how does one strike the balance needed for Grievous to be more than a fun curio? That's what I'm going to explore, as he's the Separatist commander in whom I'm most interested.

I've got a couple of fleet ideas with him, and I already posted one up. This is a bit of a departure from previous ways I've thought about him because I keep getting locked into builds that were so similar that they might as well have been basically identical. I was tweaking ideas I hadn't even tested yet! So rather than tweak, I decided to swerve.

The cheaper all of my assets are individually, the more net gain I stand to accumulate over the course of the game. I'm functionally trading up with each loss I register. Is the theory, anyway. This is the first Grievous fleet I've built that doesn't feature at least one or two ace squadrons. I was thinking that was the best way to build so that there was always SOMEONE who could stand to refresh or recover a defense token. But that's points, obviously: points against my fleet total, and points for my opponent to score.

I really, really dig the Belbullabs, and normally, I want to hide them amidst Vultures and Tri-fighters. But as long as I have so many squadrons, I always end up including bombers. Because my Vultures are pretty useless against a squadronless fleet, and my Belbullabs aren't much use either. Except I don't really have a way of protecting the bombers. So am I gonna get stuck in slogfest while my ships get torn down? I end up with a lot of squadron contingents that just end up being kinda all over the map. So I decided to keep just the Belbullabs and the Hyenas: if my opponent has no squadrons, I can bomb them. If they do have squadrons, they may find it difficult to get my Belbullabs while my Hyenas are running interference. And they can't afford to ignore my squadrons, as then I'll just turn the bombers loose on their ships. But every time they kill a squadron, one of my ships refreshes a defense token. Again, it's just theory at present, but I think this can force my opponent to make bad choices.

If my Hyenas get the chance to throw some dice at ships, that's terrific! But if not, my ships will need to be the ones who kill off other ships. In other blog posts on It's A Trap as well as in some fleet discussions on this blog, I've talked about leveraging defensive tech not in the hope of infinite survival, but in the hope of staying alive long enough to approach and kill my opponent. So my ships are going to really have to lay down the firepower. My Providence will be the biggest target, so I decided not to make it my flagship. Instead, it has Intensify Firepower! to help out dice across my fleet, Rune Haako to fuel Intensify Firepower!, and Expanded Hangar Bay so I can push a fifth squadron out of my seven total squadrons. The rest of the fleet consists of Hardcells so that I can push more firepower at my opponent. One of them is a Transport so I could outfit it with Bomber Command Center (BCC). It's a totally irrelevant upgrade if my Hyenas never get to their target, but if they do, I REALLY don't want to be sabotaged by cold red dice for which I have no reroll option. The other two Hardcells are Battle Refits so I could put Slaved Turrets on them. I thought about Linked Turbolaser Towers (LTT) again, but points were an issue, and since I've already got IF! equipped to the Providence, I thought that adding dice with which to attack made more sense. Yes, sometimes, I'll wish I had the rerolls. But for the times the rolls come up anywhere from decent to great, I'll be happy I've got the extra Slaved Turrets die (and, sometimes, another extra die from a Concentrate Fire dial). I originally thought about putting Grievous on the Transport Hardcell, but I worried it was too big a target with BCC also equipped to it. So I put Grievous on one of the Battle Refits and spread out the points in the hopes that my opponent will, again, have to spread firepower instead of being able to pop one big, tactically-valuable piece of my fleet.

Can you guess who in this picture is my opponent and which is my unhappy ship?

My objectives: I struggled with my Assault Objective for this fleet. My heart wants to go with Opening Salvo, but I worry about that being turned back on me to my chagrin. So I took the easy way out and picked Most Wanted because it gets me more dice while also ensuring that only one of my Hardcells is at risk of getting trampled by the objective. I took Planetary Ion Cannon because, that's right, it's more dice thrown at my opponent, and this one can't be turned against me. And finally, my safe choice of Infested Fields because I have the squadrons to be go-fers. But I will absolutely be reevaluating my objective suite once I've gotten around to trying this fleet out. Because while I'm confident I can deal out some death and destruction, I'd feel more confident if my objectives were more centered on scoring points. Just one more way for me to win the game. Also, given that my commander profits from my assets exploding, my MOV (Margin of Victory) is absolutely a consideration.