Grand Moff Tarkin Debrief

 Grand Moff Tarkin Debrief

This handsome MFer...

I thought I'd write up some thoughts in the wake of using Tarkin for so long before finally putting him down for a bit. As a quick reminder, below is the list I flew at Adepticon last month.

Ain't Tarkin 'Bout Love/II (45/399/400)

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Imperial II-class Star Destroyer (120 + 60: 180)

· Grand Moff Tarkin (28)

· Reeva Demesne (4)

· Local Fire Control (4)

· Electronic Countermeasures (7)

· SW-7 Ion Batteries (5)

· Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)

· Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer (5)

Gladiator I-class Star Destroyer (56 + 18: 74)

· Skilled First Officer (1)

· Ordnance Experts (4)

· Auxiliary Shields Team (3)

· Assault Concussion Missiles (5)

· Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer (5)

Gladiator I-class Star Destroyer (56 + 18: 74)

· Skilled First Officer (1)

· Ordnance Experts (4)

· Auxiliary Shields Team (3)

· Assault Concussion Missiles (5)

· Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer (5)

Gozanti-class Cruisers (23 + 3: 26)

· Parts Resupply (3)

Hondo Ohnaka (24)

IG-88 (21)

Most Wanted

Abandoned Mining Facility

Solar Corona

Couple of things I want to share off the bat that I knew going into this unconventional build:

1. More than one person has tried to convince me to use Demolisher. I have stubbornly refused. Not because I think Demolisher is bad or because I think it's OP. Honestly, it's a great title, but it's also not OP. The reason I didn't fly it was because it's already a proven concept. We know Demo is great. So I didn't want that. One could argue that my losses at Adepticon were on me then for not optimizing my fleet. I grant the premise that I could have built something better. But it also wouldn't have been what I wanted to fly. That list up above is what I wanted to do well with. I could never do as well as some other folks with fleets they've built, but I think I'm a decent enough Armada player to take something someone else has built and do well with it. That wasn't what I wanted. Which takes me to the next bulletpoint...
2. ...I didn't fly Tarquitens (Tarkin commanding several Arquitens which can then use Tarkin's tokens for Engine Techs while dialing up Concentrate Fire) not because I don't like it. I think it's an incredibly clever way to use both the ship and the commander! And I've seen it flown immaculately by players better than myself. So, again, it's a thing that I already know works. Call it stubborn or whatever, but I wanted to find something with Tarkin that hadn't yet been found. Something new that I could enjoy.

In short, I asked some people for insight and advice and others offered it unsolicited. Both of the above bullet points were mentioned more than once and I appreciate both points because they both make a ton of sense! And ultimately, I do think that either choice would've been more effective than what I ended up flying. But I needed to do it myself before I came to the same conclusion. I'm still convinced a build like the one above could do better work, but I've flown it enough that it's time to put it down.

So what have I learned about Tarkin?

1. I leaned pretty heavily on Eric's Tarkin post in Cannot Get Your Ship Out as I was developing my fleet. Not necessarily because I followed every rule he laid out, but because if I was going to break rules, I needed to understand them before doing it. In any game like Armada, some "rules" (and here, I'm referring to rules of best practice) can be bent, some can be broken, and some are there for damn good reason. Breaking rules of best practice "just 'cause" can be fun, sure! But if I'm attempting to do it for more than just fun, I need to understand those rules so that my reason for breaking them is sufficient.
1. For instance, one of the best-known Rules of Best Practice (hereafter referred to as RoBP) is that when including at least Gladiator Star Destroyer, that GSD should have the Demolisher title on it. Because the title is amazing and makes the ship that much more effective. While that would've been true in my Tarkin fleet, it also meant it would decrease the effectiveness of my running the Seventh Fleet Star Destroyer title. And since I really liked the way the fleet ran on 7th Fleet, I made a choice. I didn't break the rule "just because;" I broke the rule because I had a goal in mind and thought that the fleet benefited more from 7th Fleet than from Demolisher. One could argue the point, but honestly, I'm not that interested in the debate.
2. To quote Eric (I swear, John, I'm not trying to replace you by stealing Eric's writing!): "So to really get use from Tarkin, you need a fleet where his token creation is consistently useful and rarely wasted but where you are doing something a more focused commander can't." This is really the crux of Tarkin's use, right? Because the Empire has a bunch of good commanders that specialize in a way that Tarkin can't. So though he's now much more reasonable at 28 points, why am I taking him if I'm only going to use him for one thing?
1. I like Tarkin's flexibility. It was what made this fleet so much fun to fly. Navigate tokens let me change my speed by up to 2 either way when combined with a dial, which often allowed me to start fast and slow to a crawl as well as do the reverse. It sometimes messed up my opponents' dial math, thus affecting their choices as to which rounds they anticipated engagement. It also allowed me to hit the accelerator to get out after delivering an ordnance payload. But his Engineering tokens combined with all of my defensive tech could be gross too. Engineering dials and tokens combined with 7th Fleet and either ECM or Auxiliary Shields Team meant that some ships should've been killed twice over before they finally fell (or sometimes got away!). I didn't always need it, but sometimes, just being able to burn a token to move 2 shields was enough. Though I had rerolls built in for each ship, there were times when I *needed* to trigger ACM or get an accuracy or something. Being able to toss out Con Fire tokens for the reroll from time to time worked very well. Squadron tokens were an extremely spare choice for me, but there were moments when I wanted to activate one of my GSDs first, but also wanted to lock down an enemy squadron before it could activate. Giving everyone a squadron token so the GSD could activate, then use its token to tell Hondo to put someone to sleep, then attack its prey before the prey could escape was really clutch from time to time!
2. I agree with the assessment that if one is consistently wasting Tarkin's tokens, one is likely better off with another commander. But it was also my experience that sometimes, what's good for the goose is not, in fact, good for the gander. Sometimes, using Tarkin to hand out a token that benefits only one ship instead of all four in my fleet is actually the way to go because I *need* that token in order to have the most impact. It feels really crappy, honestly, to have Tarkin hand out only one meaningful token in a round. And the argument could be made that I *shouldn't* be in that situation in the first place or that there are cheaper, more efficient ways to get that token where it needs to go. But you know what? That's not always the case, in my experience. It shouldn't come up often or I think you're playing it wrong, but there are moments wherein the best move you can make is one that doesn't give out tokens that everyone in your fleet can use.
1. I think a good example is the one above regarding activating the GSD and using the token to activate Hondo. It may feel like a waste because I'm handing out squadron tokens to everyone when I only have 2 squadrons. IG-88 tended to die early when faced with *actual* squadron resistance, so if IG is already dead, Hondo is the only squadron that can be activated. Those are some wasted tokens. Or if I'm currently on my attack run, maybe my ISD and other GSD are better served to be set up with a Con Fire token to ensure the best attacks I can leverage. So how is Tarkin not wasted in this situation in which he only hands out one meaningful token instead of four? Have you ever been facing down Maarek and wished you had enough squadrons to lock him down and stop him from bombing your ship to hell? Have you ever been certain that your GSD can fly on by its prey after attacking and will survive as long as it's not pursued by enemy squadrons? Because I have absolutely been in those situations. And in those situations, having Hondo confront Maarek and say,
   
   
   is huge. I mean, absolutely and utterly clutch. Hondo may not survive, but I just traded 24 points to save myself 74. I'll take that deal! Understand the RoBP so that bending or breaking them makes sense for you at the moment that it needs to happen.
3. Depending on your plans, Tarkin by himself is not necessarily enough command token generation. Sounds kinda dumb, but it's true. Part of this has to do with whether or not one takes the Sovereign title on an ISD. But part of this has to do with timing windows.
1. My best example of this has to do with my ISD-II and ECM. Tarkin hands out his command tokens at the top of the Ship Phase. Which totally works for refreshing ECM as long as I can keep the token and don't need to spend it. But what if I do need to spend it? What if I know I'm going to eat more fire this upcoming turn from some circling CR90s and I already Braced a big shot from a Liberty earlier this turn? So now I've got a choice: either burn the Engineering token now to shuffle some shields around in order to better survive the circling corvettes and hope the Liberty doesn't roll any Accuracies next turn, or I save the token and risk taking that much more damage from the corvettes right now. Neither is appealing, but I'm sort of forced into the choice because by the time Tarkin can replace the Engineering token I spent in the former instance, the window in which to refresh ECMs has passed.
   Timing windows.
   Ultimately, it's that kind of circumstance that led to my equipping my flotilla with Parts Resupply. Before the CW factions and upgrades dropped, my flotilla had Comms Net so it was just as flexible as Tarkin. But that also meant it never really got to use its own dials, which sucked. Great for activation padding, squadron activation (if I could afford the dial!), and token generation, but it wasn't behaving like anything more than a support ship at basically any given time. My ships are always happy to shuffle some shields around because they can all tank decent damage with their current loadouts. So Parts Resupply felt like a smarter move for me than Munitions Resupply. Sure, sometimes the flotilla died with Engineering tokens still on its upgrade card. But more often than not, that's because the flotilla died earlier than I planned. And sometimes, Tarkin was happy to hand out Engineering instead of relying on the flotilla. But that was usually because of timing windows (again) and needing to activate the ISD or GSD first and Engineer before getting shot (which meant my flotilla couldn't activate first in order to hand out that token) or because things were going well and my ships didn't need any other tokens from Tarkin anyway.
   One of the difficulties I run into the GAR fleets is that the ships often want to be doing more than one thing at a time, but there are only so many ways to push squadrons as well as steer better. Oh, GAR has a bunch of them! But there are still only so many ways to make it work. Sometimes, Tarkin wants to hand out more than one kind of token. But since he can't (and I can't change the tokens distributed via Sovereign, because I committed my fate to 7th Fleet), having a little extra token support is really handy and allows for more flexibility in my choices.
4. While I don't think Tarkin wants to be a specialist, I do think Tarkin wants to build toward a specialty. That is to say that while a commander like Ozzel starts and ends with Navigation, I think Grand Moff Tarkin wants to pick a primary specialty and then have a secondary one. In the case of Tarquitens fleets, he specializes in Navigation (thus facilitating the use of Engine Techs and better navving), but can secondarily specialize in Engineering (shuffling shields to the exposed hull zones of the kiting Arquitens) or Concentrate Fire (thus boosting the effectiveness of the native Con Fire dial commands). It goes hand-in-hand with what Eric says about having a plan for those tokens, but I'm just trying to take that analysis and advice a step further. In the case of my own fleet, my Tarkin specialized in Navigation (helping my ships to control their approach and then GTFO once they had unloaded on my opponent) and had a secondary specialization in Engineering (keeping my fleet alive and kicking on conjunction with all of my defensive tech, thus keeping my defensive tech relevant - 7th Fleet helps me more if all of my Star Destroyers are still alive, yeah?).
   
   
   
1. If one builds around having Tarkin on his flagship Sovereign, the token specialty becomes less relevant simply because your tokens can be whatever you want them to be. But Armada is a game that has always rewarded planning over reacting. When I first started playing this game, I struggled a lot with my command dials. I wanted to use Concentrate Fire, but had difficulty planning when to set that versus setting any other command. So I flew my LMC80 with a Tactical Expert so I could set other dials while always have the option to switch to a Con Fire dial. My friend Biff identified the upgrade as a crutch, and in my case, it absolutely was. It stunted my learning how to set dials because at the time, I was flying squadronless. So I only ever had to pick either Navigation or Engineering since I didn't need a Squadron dial and I could always just decide I'd had a Concentrate Fire dial the whole time. It wasn't that the upgrade card didn't work; it's that it was holding my fleet back from reaching a higher ceiling (as well as lowering the ceiling on my abilities as a player). I'm not saying that's always the case with Tarkin and Sovereign. I'm not saying that at all, as I love the combination! But I think Tarkin's ability to hand out whatever token you choose from round to round (as opposed to someone like Thrawn or Admiral Tarkin, who have to set what their choices will be upon deployment) is reactionary *enough* in most instances. I think he works best while taking that flexibility into account and then plan around how each ship will be able to use the same token that's been handed out to everyone. Not an absolute rule by any stretch, but at some point, so much effort has been put into changing how Tarkin impacts your fleet that I think you're back to wondering why you've chosen Tarkin instead of just selecting a different Commander for your fleet.

Honestly, I could probably talk about Grand Moff Tarkin for hours. And I suspect that, at some point, I'll return to using him because I adore him so. But he's earned some downtime in my binder while I try other things. There's a very good chance that in trying a bunch of other ideas with other commanders, I'll put together something new for Tarkin that I really want to try. The odds of that will also probably increase with every new Rapid Reinforcements pack (7th Fleet on an Imperial Venator? Don't mind if I do!).

But for now?