Breaking the game!
Last night one of the loca players, John, set an interesting challenge.
He felt he'd found a nigh-unbeatable game-breaking squadron for 500points and my task was to try and beat it to prove him wrong!
The build he's gone for surprisingly is the defiant in a massive rookie horde of 12.
It comes in a shade under 500 points and utilises the following cards:
He'd also taken one of the new cards (supply shortages) which immediately gave me a boom chit (which is massive vs small numbers of twin engine planes, it meant he only had to shoot down one plane to bug me out). As this is a "remove" card in the deployment phase, he only ever had these three cards in hand, immediately drawing back up whatever he had used because the defiants have no native traits other than the always-on "sluggish".
The key thinking behind the defiant horde is thus: there's huge amounts of them, with FP2 360 turrets that attacking them from any angle gets you shot back. interlocking fire will add anywhere from 6-11 dice for return fire and if you want the defense, go with defensive tactics to get a deflection shot instead which gives you excellent odds of dodging (even with rookie pilots).
This gives a reliability of returning a huge amount of chits back to the enemy for attacking you whilst having a really high bug-out threshold thanks to having 12 planes on the board.
Turrets don't care about advantage and can chuck out consistent dicepools en-masse with their end-of-activation shot. After reading through the cards, looking at the build it seemed solid.
As an interesting experiment I figured i'd take it on. Knowing the chit-fest I was walking into, I plumped for an elite twin engine force of 110's to try and limit my board area and give me excellent durability. (Bombo schenk, R5 with "aggressive" skill, R3 and R2 in BF110c)
I also went with defensive tactics (figured the deflection shots would hlep keep me in the air), radar support and superior armament.
I knew that diving in head first would get me swarmed and killed so I opted for a flanking push to try and minimise the initial swarm's ability to get on me.
We both ended up deploying very conservatively, him using the conservative deployment to climb up to advantage (man those 110's are slower than I remembered!) but it worked ok for me, allowing me to dart for the right flank, leaving a good chunk of his swarm unable to engage
I got into a few angles to get good shots in but the dice failed me (both of us were using the standard dice from the box which are horribly balanced) and the sheer volume of fire from the defiants finally dragged down on 110 and secured the game.
The twin engine rules meant i'd taken the equivalent of 16 chits before my first plane succumbed to the onslaught which leaves me thinking that no single engine squadron would have the ability to take on this defensive horde
As an experiment I really enjoyed it, I think John has probably found the "unbeatable" list.
For my part, I'm thinking I need more speed, I'll probably try it again with p38's or mosquitos because the swarm is dense you need the speed to get away from it whilst nibbling off the edges.
I'd love to see how others would approach this challenge! Answers in the comments below please :-)
He felt he'd found a nigh-unbeatable game-breaking squadron for 500points and my task was to try and beat it to prove him wrong!
The build he's gone for surprisingly is the defiant in a massive rookie horde of 12.
It comes in a shade under 500 points and utilises the following cards:
The key thinking behind the defiant horde is thus: there's huge amounts of them, with FP2 360 turrets that attacking them from any angle gets you shot back. interlocking fire will add anywhere from 6-11 dice for return fire and if you want the defense, go with defensive tactics to get a deflection shot instead which gives you excellent odds of dodging (even with rookie pilots).
This gives a reliability of returning a huge amount of chits back to the enemy for attacking you whilst having a really high bug-out threshold thanks to having 12 planes on the board.
Turrets don't care about advantage and can chuck out consistent dicepools en-masse with their end-of-activation shot. After reading through the cards, looking at the build it seemed solid.
As an interesting experiment I figured i'd take it on. Knowing the chit-fest I was walking into, I plumped for an elite twin engine force of 110's to try and limit my board area and give me excellent durability. (Bombo schenk, R5 with "aggressive" skill, R3 and R2 in BF110c)
I also went with defensive tactics (figured the deflection shots would hlep keep me in the air), radar support and superior armament.
I knew that diving in head first would get me swarmed and killed so I opted for a flanking push to try and minimise the initial swarm's ability to get on me.
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| The swarm!! |
The twin engine rules meant i'd taken the equivalent of 16 chits before my first plane succumbed to the onslaught which leaves me thinking that no single engine squadron would have the ability to take on this defensive horde
As an experiment I really enjoyed it, I think John has probably found the "unbeatable" list.
For my part, I'm thinking I need more speed, I'll probably try it again with p38's or mosquitos because the swarm is dense you need the speed to get away from it whilst nibbling off the edges.
I'd love to see how others would approach this challenge! Answers in the comments below please :-)
Good report: I really like this game.
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