Star Trek Attack Wing Tournament

     So today was the Tholian web scenario of the Wizkid's Star Trek Attack Wing op tournaments. It comprises of three games per player, where you earn the points from your opponent's fleet that were destroyed by the end of the game, so a full win is 100 points but you can still come away with 70-80 odd points and still lose.

     The Tholian web scenario sets two fleets fighting while the Tholians slowly build a energy web around them. At the end of each turn the web gets slightly tighter and the game ends when one fleet is completely destroyed. Any ship that touches the web, in anyway, is destroyed.

    

     I'm not going to list my fleet in detail because it wasn't good enough for anyone to want to copy, or for me to re-use exactly as it was, but the important bit of the build were the three ships themselves and what I had expected their jobs in the fleet to be. My initial attack ship was my named Keldon class with a level 7 captain on, his job was to take out the shields on what ever my target ship was going to be that turn. My next ship was an un-named Keldon class with a level 5 captain. It's job was take out shieldless ships with an upgrade card that allowed it to do extra attacks on ships with no active shields, also useful on cloaked ships. My last ship was a pure damage absorbing, shield carrier, in the form of a name Kraxon and a level 3 captain. It had the ability to take damage on its own shields that was actually targeted on another ship and then rebuild shields each turn. Any shooting attacks it had was then a pure bonus.

     My first game was against Steve with his Klingons. This was the first game I have ever played with my Cardassian fleet and, I'll be honest, not having a proper look at the maneuver dial before I started playing turned out to be a big mistake in this game. 

     We both played the first two games playing like a proper Klingon fleet should in this game, charge at each other and joust, K-turn and both go back and do it all over again.

     The downside was that it turns out Cardassians can't K-turn . . . With the web closing in and my ships having to spend 3 turns just to get back to where I wanted to be the more maneuverable Klingons just took me apart.

       So the first win was a walk over to Steve. He got the full 100 points, while I came away with nothing.

     The second game was against a new player called Gary. He was playing borg with ships he had only bought that morning so was in the same sort of position I was trying to learn his fleet. The initial few turns showed that I had leaned my lesson about my maneuver dials with my fleet doing a big curve around the field rather than heading straight in.

      Two round of concentrated fire later and I had taken out his sphere, while he had done minor damage, spread over all my ships.

      Then just at the point where all my ships were on the verge of blowing up he made a massive mistake. I had to turn away from his last remaining ship and start the three turns of trying to turn somewhere useful, and instead of seeing what I was going to have to do and capitalising on it, he moved in front of my fleet, allowing me to carry on shooting. Then as I carried on turning his ship stayed in my firing arch.

       The result of the game was a complete borg lose, my ships were all damaged but none were destroyed, so 100 points to me and none to Gary. The fact it ended up this way came down to 2 important mistakes on his part; he didn't concentrate his fire and take out any of my ships and he didn't capitalise on my terrible maneuver dial to get free shots up the rear of my ships.

      The last game was against Mark and his Dominion fleet. Two very evenly matched fleets, even to the point his Keldon was built almost exactly the same as mine. We both spent the first two turns doing big sweeping curves around the board to try and help our turns later on. Our initial class left his Keldon blown up and two of my ships sharing damage. Then the turning saga began.

     I forgot to take a photo of the end of the game because it got really strange. In the penultimate turn a few bad maneuvers meant that I lost two ships to be web and Mark lost one ship to it. Then a last turn of terrible shooting on a board that was now limited to about a half a foot by a foot meant that the web went straight through both of our remaining ships causing a draw. 100 points the both of us in a game where the players involved only killed one of the six ships on the board. I'm not sure if that means it should have been a Tholian win?

     I came 5th out of a field of 8, which isn't that bad considering I took an untested fleet and one that wasn't designed to be a tournament winner, but I did come away with the prize for most sporting player, which is actually really nice. Below are the pictures of my prize ship, Tholian One.

Thanks for reading.