Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Battle Report : The Tie Swarm versus Echo

Today a quick battle report for my first encounter with the terrible Echo.

I played my usual Tie swarm, an 8 Ties variant, with 4 Academies and 4 Obsidians.
Across the table was :

Echo, veteran instincts, recon officer, advanced cloacking device, fire control system 40
Holwrunner, predator 21
3 Academies 36
97 pts for the PS bid.

Bothanspy decided to take the initiative.

I deployed the asteroids mostly close together in my opponent half of the table to disrupt the holwrunner formation and reduce the decloacking options of Echo.

He deployed his mini swarm in the middle of the board, probably to switch from one side of the table to the other depending on my deployment. I had clear movement lanes so did the same, to see where Echo would go. He deployed Echo on my left, close to the board edge.

First turn:
He went to my right to pass the thicket of asteroids and echo advanced to cloak.
All my ships went as fast as possible toward echo.

Turn 2:
I wanted to maximise my firepower in case Bothanspy made a mistake and advance echo in front of the swarm so I kept going toward Echo (plus is miniswarm was also headed to my right flank).
He decided to change course with echo with a 2 bank to the left then a 4 forward to  switch sides, while the mini-swarm reoriented toward mine.

There I stopped taking picture as the fight was joined. Suffice to say echo flanked me (you can see his moves in green in the turn 5 picture), while I blocked and concentrated fire on holwrunner, then the other ties.
He took down 2 ties, while I destroyed Howl and an academy. 4 dices is nothing to sneeze at, but even with focus against 3 agility you will usually need at least 2 shots. Due to his unique moves he was unable to concentrate fire as much as I did.

At the end of turn 4, I had 6 ties left, with 2 down to one hull and 1 down to 2. He was down to echo, 1 academy on 1 hull and 1 academy on 2.

Turn 5 (before shooting):

I moved my ties to cover echo  most obvious approaches and still keep a couple of guns on his 1 hull academy. He decided to close the range with a 4 forward, but had to go through an asteroid.

Firing first Echo destroyed a damaged fighter while I destroyed the 1 hull fighter and took one shield off echo (asteroid means no focus!!).

Turn 6 (before shooting):
Echo is good at range but not so good in a furball, as he has to move quite a lot to decloak. I jammed as much fighters around him as I could while keeping 3 fighters on his remaining 2 hull tie.

He did manage to decloak but lost his action to a bump and could only target an undamaged tie. With no action, even with 5 dices, he only dealt One damage.
Returning fire, I stripped another shield of him and took another hull off the academy.

Sadly we had to end the game there due to time, with a modified win for me: 45 to 38.

I would probably have stayed in the lead for 1 or 2 more turns as I would probably have killed his academy and he has to destroy 2 of my ties to go retake the lead, but after that, I don't see how I could have killed him (bare poor flying on my opponent part or luck of the dice). With 4 damaged ties it would have been pretty difficult. 4 agi is just hard to take down with 2 attack ships, and that's if you even manage to have him in your sights.

Time to reload!
Ica


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