Luminara Unduli vs. Bail Organa Battle Report

 Luminara Unduli vs. Bail Organa Battle Report

I got to test out version 2.0 of my Hell Kite fleet pretty quickly after developing it in the wake of the first version getting stomped! That almost never happens, so it was supremely satisfying to go into the match knowing exactly what I wanted to do differently! I played against my friend Josh via Tabletop Simulator - he's messing with different Republic fleets he might bring to Adepticon, and since he had never flown his fleet before, I chose to fly something other than Grand Moff Tarkin as well. So we had ourselves a little Republic on Republic match.

I don't care how handsome your mom says you look in your school photo, Bail - I'm taking you down.

Since it was still fresh in my head, I decided to use the new version of my Hell Kite fleet. Josh was trying out a double Venator, double Pelta fleet headed up by Bail Organa. We know a lot of those fleets are led by Admiral Tarkin, but we're tryin' some stuff.

Given how much damage one of Josh's Venators could do to me (both were sporting Intel Officer, External Racks, Ordnance Experts, and XI7s), it was that much more important that I do a better job of kiting with my own Venator than I did in its inaugural run earlier in the week. Josh had the bid by one point and chose to go first. Just like Chris earlier in the week, he picked Fire Lanes because he was confident he could contest it. As I mentioned previously, I was pretty confident that Fire Lanes was not the objective for this fleet. But I wanted to fly it one more time to see if I could leverage it for gains I otherwise would not have gotten (namely, an opponent overreaching to score a token, thus leading to their timely demise). 5 of the 6 obstacles were left of center on the board (from my perspective, anyway), so I placed 2 of the 3 objective tokens on the left side of the board as well. I thought that I'd either leave that third and final objective token on the far right side of the board as bait for Josh or I'd send Lumi over there in exile to babysit it from round to round.

Josh was clearly out-deployed, but still deployed one Pelta of his two Peltas at center facing head-on. I deployed one *generic* Consular Charger left of center, pointed toward center, in such a way so it could score both objective tokens from the word go. I then deployed my 3 V-19s and 3 Y-Wings off of the Charger while he deployed his remaining Pelta and 2 Venators. His ships were deployed basically straight-on to the right (from my perspective) of the initially-deployed Pelta. I considered the possibility of kicking Luminara out wide to draw off the far Venator, but decided it wasn't worth it. I knew with Bail's help, it would be easy for those Venators to get guns on my main group, so I might as well keep everyone together in the area where they have the most space to kite, shoot, and run. So everything I had got deployed closer to center and pointed left so they could stay ahead of Josh's Venators.

Now, this is where I make probably my two biggest mistakes of the game. The first is that I am so focused on doing a better job of kiting with my Venator in this game as opposed to my last one that I neglect to set a squadron dial in my first 3 commands. Foolishness. It's true that this is only the second time I've flown this fleet, and I should also note that I absolutely hate playing online. I'm much more of a tactile person and so I overlook and forget things I am less likely to overlook and forget when I'm playing in-person. But that's not an option with my friend from North Carolina, so we are playing on TTS. Josh is flying squadronless, so it's not like my squadrons won't be able to move. But it's just an unnecessary complication, and also means I will possibly be missing an opportunity to rob Josh of an activation by using squadrons in the ship phase instead of the squadron phase. So that's mistake number one. Mistake number two happens at the end of the first round.

For the record, I always start with the grass Pokemon.

All of my ships spend the first round setting up command tokens and getting into position so they can start firing on the rapidly approaching enemy. I know the Peltas will be trailing, and I also know that based on angles, I can absolutely outrace the outside Venator (his flagship). Which means my primary targets at his non-flagship Venator and the Fire Lanes tokens, my secondary targets are his Peltas, and my tertiary target is his flagship. Basically, if Tranquility is not already on fire and his flagship trails far enough behind the rest of his fleet, then I'll consider shooting at it. So my targets are set and I feel decent about my positioning. I'm not ready to start blowing through command tokens just yet, so I don't place my SPHA-T token at the end of my Venator's activation. And that's my second big mistake of the match. I should've known based on speed and approach vectors that I could've been taking that big shot as early as the second round. I don't know that it necessarily changes that much in the game, but I'm fairly confident that it does.

By round 2, it's clear that my Tranquility would have had a big SPHA-T shot on my primary Venator target and it's a missed opportunity for me. More so because I take my long range shot at him with Tranquility, and he does more in return with Salvo and Intel Officer than I do with my initial attack. It's not awful to eat two damage instead of one when I've got full health and shields. I'm certainly not going to sacrifice my Brace for it. But my SPHA-T shot would've made it a much palatable exchange. I continue to control two of the three objective tokens, but that's about to change. Rather than stick around to try and contest the tokens and get caught by his charging Venators, all of my ships bump up their speed and begin getting guns on targets. In order to maintain my distance, I'm stuck settling for single arc shots instead of double arc shots, but I can't take double arc shots if I'm dead, so it's a no-brainer. Meanwhile, I fly my squadrons patiently. They eat a  little bit of flak, but it helps to have "Axe" in the mix to eat some of that damage. Josh's ships should hit my little squadron cloud at around the same time I'd be maximizing my attacks on him. I'd have to rely on good placement given my slip and lack of squadron dials. And at this point, the engagement was going to be too close for my Venator to start dialing up squadron commands. I'd need the extra clicks of yaw from the dials to maybe survive the encounter.

Round 4 is when things get really messy. Tranquility does a really terrific job of surviving as it skirts around close range of Josh's Venator. And, as I anticipated, his flagship is wide enough that it's almost a non-factor in the fight. But also as I anticipated, Josh knows how to get those things turned so that their guns are still a threat, even if I wasn't terribly worried about them upon deployment. At the end of round 3, my primary target has flown straight into my Y-Wings and "Axe." None of my Y-Wings land a hit/crit, and one of them blanks completely. And the result is that the Venator survives with one hull left and will start the shooting at the top of round 4. It's clear now that Tranquility is doomed, so I sort of have to reconcile myself with that. It means that in order to win, I'll need to get at least one of his Peltas, if not both of them. In round 4, his Venator double arcs my Tranquility, with his first shot being the beneficiary of External Racks. Oof. Luckily, I've budgeted my defense tokens as well as my shields. Also, I know if I can survive this volley, that Venator will activate and use an Engineering dial to get a couple of shields back. Ultimately, after both attacks, Tranquility is left with 1 shield and 7 hull. I still need to eat some shots from the Peltas and perhaps from Josh's flagship, but I'll get to fire my SPHA-T shot this round if nothing else.

Josh's non-flagship Venator is walking wounded and under the guns from my 3 Consular Chargers. And none of those Chargers is in danger, so they can afford to stick around where they are. Additionally, Josh had no choice but to belly-flop my squadrons, so I know that my squadrons will get a crack at it too if needed. So I start by regaining a couple of shields, and then I decide to throw my Venator's SPHA-T side shot at the closest Pelta.

I roll an Accuracy and some pretty decent damage, and so I use Clone Captain Zak to tack on an additional die. At this point, I really love my roll and decide to burn my Concentrate Fire token to reroll a blank die as well as use Clone Gunners. I roll more damage, and now his Evade and his Brace are locked. Since my Tranquility is equipped with XI7s, the Redirect just can't do much about it. I figure Tranquility is about to die anyway, so why not go down swinging hard? While I'm happy with my Venator's activation, now his Pelta can activate and use Projection Experts to toss some shields over to his mortally wounded Venator. I'm not thrilled about it because obviously it's harder to kill now. But I know it was still the right decision because despite surviving the first Pelta's attack, Tranquility is not getting another attack in this game. One of my Consulars does decent damage to Josh's Venator, but can't finish it off. Josh's second Pelta activates and immediately throws 2 shields over to the walking wounded. Woof. Again: I'm confident that I'll get this thing, it's just that the longer it lives, the more dice it's taking me to finish the job.

Sure enough, I manage to kill the Venator with my last Charger (I believe it was the one carrying Luminara), and then Josh kills Tranquility. We enter the squadron phase, and my squadrons are now happy to unload on the wounded Pelta. They roll exactly what they need to finish off the Pelta, blowing it up just before the end of round 4. So, a bit of a bloodbath! At this point, I think the outcome of the game is basically decided, and the rest of it plays out the way I anticipated, with the exception of the score box. I manage to get Josh's second Pelta between my Consulars and my squadrons. His Venator charges hard, but it never gets closer to any of my Chargers than long range. I don't fire a single shot at it because I don't want to eat the return fire from Salvo when I have no chance of killing it. My squadrons stick around long enough to help kill the second Pelta before they start running to ensure none of them get picked off by some Venator flak. One of my Consulars manages to get far enough around to score to objective tokens, meaning that I end the game with 7 tokens while Josh ends the game with 9. Sure, that's 30 points more that Josh has, but it won't be the difference, so I'm not worried about it.

However, once all of the math is squared away, it turns out I only won by an MOV of 77 points. I double-checked my math because I figured it couldn't be right - yes, he got 30 points more in tokens than me, but I killed one of his Venators and both of his Peltas, and all he got was my one Venator (which is worth only 1 more point than the Venator I killed). I figured I had done better than a 7-4 win. But it's true: I hadn't. It's uncommon to have a win that feels like a loss, but this one sure did. I didn't think I could've flown *that* much better, and the best I could secure was a 7-4? More than anything, I was disappointed in the possibility that maybe this fleet just isn't viable in any sort of competitive way.

Ultimately, I really liked the way so much of my fleet performed. But not landing double arcs really extends the game, and the longer the game goes with my ships in red range, the more likely I am to lose the Venator. And it's clear that the 132 points that an opponent earns by killing my Venator are enough that I'd like to, you know, not lose it in the first place. Also, this definitely confirms that Fire Lanes is a bad pick for my fleet. Josh didn't take any of the bait I set for him, so he scored 30 points more than me off the objective while not compromising his position at all. I like objectives that give me points, but I just couldn't find one that I really thought would work well for me. Normally, when I struggle with selecting an objective, it's the Navigational Objectives with which I struggle! I almost never struggle with a strong Defense Objective pick! First time for everything, I guess...so Fire Lanes is out and Planetary Ion Cannon is in. It doesn't give me points, but it gives me some area control and a couple more attacks. Plus, if nothing else at all, it's an objective that cannot be turned against me.

I don't know that this fleet necessarily deserves more chances based on what I have in mind, but I enjoy flying it enough that I want to give it a try. Expect more reports in the near-future!