Admiral Trench Fleet - Act of Providence
Act of Providence (117/397/400)
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Providence-class Dreadnought (105 + 58: 163)
· Admiral Trench (36)
· Rune Haako (4)
· Flight Controllers (6)
· Hyperwave Signal Boost (3)
· Invisible Hand (9)
Transport (47 + 14: 61)
· Bomber Command Center (8)
· Projection Experts (6)
Transport (47 + 9: 56)
· Parts Resupply (3)
· Projection Experts (6)
5 x Hyena-class Droid Bomber Squadron (5 x 11)
2 x Tri-Fighter Squadron (2 x 11)
5 x Vulture-class Droid Fighter Squadron (5 x 8)
Precision Strike
Contested Outpost
Infested Fields
I've flown Separatists maybe 4 times total since they dropped however long ago. Also, I've never before built a Trench fleet. So even though I'm sure you looked at the list and are already doing it, Imma say it here: take everything I write here with a grain or 7 grains of salt. Okay! With that out of the way, let's get to it!
As of the moment in which I'm writing this post, I still owe y'all an Adepticon post (or two, depending on how it shakes out). But since that'll be a minute to do it justice, I'm writing this for Thursday. But the inspiration for this list grew out of Adepticon and my experience there. In short, I went 2-2 on the day, earning only 19 of a possible 40 points. It was extraordinarily disappointing. Especially given just how much experience I had with Tarkin under my belt. I felt really good about making a little noise going in, and instead, I got ROFL-stomped in round 1, and that sort of set the tenor for the day. There'll be more about that in my Adepticon piece, but the reason I mention all of that is because that was the last hurrah Tarkin and I would be sharing for quite awhile. I still think he's an excellent and underrated commander, but it's time for me to move onto some other stuff since it seems I might have gone as far as I can with him. Again, more on that in my Adepticon 2022 recap when I get it up!
I've flown my Tarkin fleet a ton these past two years (relative to "a ton" of playing during the pandemic, anyway). As that fleet only features two squadrons (Hondo Ohnaka and IG-88) and has for quite some time, I've effectively been flying squadronless fleets. I don't know that I've ever actually flown a fleet featuring 134 points of squadrons. Probably the closest I've come was my Piett fleet, TIE One On, featuring "Howlrunner," Valen, Gamma Squadron, 4 TIE Bombers, and 4 TIE Fighters. That's eleven squadrons and 107 points. Nowhere near a full complement of squadrons. Admittedly, this fleet list up above is only 117 points of squadrons, but there are still 12 of them, and it feels a little different than a command SSD just dropping TIEs on someone's face. Also, that fleet was a lot of fun, but not particularly successful. So given that most of my fleets since I started playing this game something like 4 or 5 years ago are very light on squadrons, I've decided to play squadron-heavy fleets for the foreseeable future. Though I'm likely to lean pretty heavily on Republic to make this happen, as they are my favorite faction, I thought I'd try something different for a little perspective.
This list only features 117 points worth of squadrons because of the support apparatus I tried to build around them. But it's still 12 squadrons, and that ain't nothing. I knew I'd be flying a Providence and settled on the Dreadnaught so I could equip Flight Controllers. If I'm going to have any success at all with this fool's errand, I need as much room for Hyenas as I can spare. So I really need to facilitate those Hyenas getting to their targets instead of getting bogged down. To that end: Flight Controllers. Also, even though I suspect I will be very limited by this title and it won't work the way I plan, I've equipped Invisible Hand to give the droids it drops an additional AI die. So if it's my Vultures (which is currently the plan), they'll get 2 base dice, 2 more from AI, and 1 more blue from Flight Controllers. 5 dice (at least 2 blue and 1 black) with a Swarm reroll isn't something to be casually dismissed. I've got a narrow band of influence with that title, of course, so there's a good chance this doesn't do what I want it to. Nonetheless, Imma try it.
So I've got Invisible Hand with Flight Controllers. Originally, this was going to be a Grievous list in an effort to save myself points as well as keep the Providence alive by sacrificing Vultures. I considered a double Providence list. Then I decided I wanted to try something a little more foolhardy. Especially given that I've already got one or two Grievous builds I enjoy; so why build another? (For the moment, anyway...) So after considering various Separatist commanders, I was thinking about how TF, Mar Tuuk, and Kraken all want ship-heavy fleets to better exploit their abilities. Which left Dooku and Trench. I've got a Dooku list I'm looking forward to trying out already. And, again, it occurred to me that I'd never built a Trench list before. So I decided to equip Admiral Trench. He's pretty expensive, as y'all know, so building around him proved difficult for me.
Originally, my squadron contingent featured 5 Vultures, 5 Hyenas, and 2 Belbullabs. I figured that the Belbullabs would be good squadron killers, especially when amongst my Vultures and Hyenas to maximize their Screen ability. Plus, they'd let me out-kick my coverage a bit by providing me with a little bit of Relay. But ultimately, they proved too expensive once I decided to roll with Trench. So the 2 Belbullabs were replaced with 2 Tri-Fighters. I thought about replacing all of my Vultures with Tri-Fighters, but I figured it would knock down my total squadron numbers and so I'd like to try it this way first. Honestly, I suspect that I'll end up replacing the 5 Vultures with 3 Tri-Fighters, thus netting me some more points to spend, but knocking my total squadron contingent down to only 10 instead of 12. But for the moment, I'll try it this way. Since I'm not taking another Providence, I thought I might include Hyperwave Signal Boost. Its use is so niche and my squadrons already have to be in position for it to work. But as long as I'm trying out new stuff, I might as well try all the new stuff, y'know?
From here, I add two Hardcells because that's all I can afford. I already know that I don't just want Trench to help with Squadron commands, but with Engineering commands too. If Invisible Hand dies, everything pretty much falls apart: I can't push squadrons, I don't get much meaningful fire from my remaining ships, and Trench is dead. So it's kinda important to keep Invisible Hand alive while simultaneously acknowledging that its the linchpin of my fleet and thus has a gargantuan target painted on its hull. I briefly considered painting a big bull's eye on my model but decided that was a little too flippant for me. So I've got two Hardcell Transports. Originally, I put Parts Resupply and Projection Experts on both of them. But then I remembered that this is a squadron fleet featuring bombers with red dice. So bomber rerolls are kind of mandatory. At this point, I swapped out Parts Resupply for BCC on one of the Hardcells. My scheme is to have my Providence run interference for my Hardcells, who will help heal Trench's flagship with Engineering tokens and Projection Experts. I'm stealing from my friend Josh, who has been running a double Venator, double Pelta list with Bail. It is extremely difficult to kill even one of those Venators when all of his ships are happily in range of one another. So while I doubt I'll be quite as effective, I'm hoping I can do everything in my power to keep Invisible Hand on its feet and swinging at my opponent. But with only one Parts Resupply out there, I worried a bit about my token economy. Then I remembered my good buddy, Rune Haako. Not sure how many Separatist fleets I've built without him, but I can promise there aren't many! So I put him on the Dreadnought and that rounds out my fleet at 397 points!
My objectives are chosen somewhat haphazardly. That's because I was thinking so much about the fleet itself and tinkering with it that I didn't really give much thought to the objectives. I don't love all of the objectives in the usual "squadron objective suite of terror" for this fleet. I worry about enemy fleets that also feature a lot of squadrons. So I did go with Precision Strike (because with Trench, I can also make much more use out of the gifted Concentrate Fire tokens than most other fleets), but then I went with Contested Outpost and Infested Fields. Honestly, these last two are sort of cop-outs. I say that because I don't think either of them could net me quite as many points as the other "squadron-centric" objectives if I were playing them well. But at this point, I'm not used to fleets featuring this many squadrons, so I'm on a bit of a learning curve. I thought I'd start with whether or not I'm headed in any sort of positive direction here before committing too hard. If the idea works with objectives that are easier to grok and control like Contested Outpost and Infested Fields (after all, I won that last objective with only 2 squadrons on a regular basis), then maybe it's worth examining it a little more seriously. For now, I've decided to run with some objectives that are a little bit lower maintenance so I can focus on learning how to coordinate so many squadrons and see if my initial concept holds any water.
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