The Clash At Epsilon Indy: Sunday Tournament Results

This past Sunday at Evolution games The Clash At Epsilon Indy went down.  Spellduckwrong once again was our T.O. and Uber Vanguard. We had 10 players this time around and again we had a decent mix of Kurak Alliance and Zenian League fleets. If you are curious as to how the battle log went and any trends popping up I am pretty sure Spellduckwrong has the full statistical work up over at the Spartan Games Community, or will be putting it up soon if he has not posted it.  I am sure you are a bit curious as to who our top finishers are though.

So this time around the winners were....

1st. Dave Wangen aka "SMD_Vogrin", Directorate
2nd.  Austin  Proux aka "Demomaster", Sorylians
3rd Josh Linde aka "SeerK" , Rense System Navy

That is right I placed this time round.  Booya!  I played Demomaster in round three and it was rough.  We had hold the Waygate for a mission and he had almost maxed out his tier three choices.  I had so many small ships to deal with it was borderline ridiculous.  I ran two different lists, as is customary when tournaments take place in this particular area.  I ran the same list in round one and round three, both times against Sorylians.  I am still confused with why many on the interwebs hate on the Sorylians.  They are a solid faction with a lot of variety and killing power.  In fact, the frigates have earned my number 2 spot in most hated ship in the Kurak Alliance.  Right behind the Hawker light cruiser....I mean Frigate.

Those of you curious about what I ran , here you go.  The tournament, and me thinks our future ones, was 900 points.  you can bring two lists.  Both lists must use the same primary Fleet.  I, of course, ran RSN.

List 1

Spectre Battleship x1
-1 turn
Special Forces
+2AP


Cerberus Heavy Cruisers x3

Cerberus Heavy Cruisers x3

Bulwark Frigates x3

Bulwark Frigates x3

List 2

Banshee Dreadnought x1
-1 turn
+1 shield
Special Forces

Spook Cruisers x3

Spook Cruisers x3

Bulwark Frigates x3

Bulwark Frigates x3


I was trying to go for a balance between number of activation's and fire power.  This can prove difficult for RSN fleets.  Many Kurak Factions outnumber and our gun you .  The real weak points in both lists were the three ship squadrons of Bulwarks.  In groups of three they loose effectiveness for some reason.  I think I may do two minimal squadrons and use the tac card that allows you to combine like ships to make one uni then have a squadron of Works Raptor corvettes to add some scout to the list.

I am finding it is very handy to have scout to redeploy units.  You can use a valuable unit to bait your opponent into bringing his big guns into whatever location you want basically.  The real trick is not to make it to obvious that is what you are doing.

I am also finding it very annoying that Sorylian frigate squadrons can contain 5 frigates and have pack hunter as an option.  This seems a little unnecessary to me.  The dice pool is pretty big and not duplicated by any small ships in the Zenian League that I am aware of.  Makes the Frigate squadrons very deadly to cruiser sized vessels, in fact it makes them kind of deadly to larger vessels as well.

The one game I used the list two in was actually against another RSN player.  It was very informative match though.  I think from now on my spooks will be traveling in packs of 6.  Operating in concert, my two squadrons manged to inflict quite a bit of damage despite my lackluster rolls in the first two turns with the torpedoes.  I hammered a squadron of Cerberus Cruisers with the torpedoes until I reached beam range and then dropped the cloaks and went full bore.  One heavy did manage to survive until the bitter end though.  I always for get what its like to be on the receiving end of a Cerberus squadron.  Spooks on their own are not bad but lack the one two punch when you have just one squadron.  The two squadrons ganging up on one target really was effective, especially once I reached beam range.

I have to say I am never running my big ships without escorts of some kind ever again.  It really never occurred to me how much fire they actually draw.  The Siren is also pretty robust for an escort so that helps.  My big ships took a fair bit of fire being all by themselves.

I am still working with good ways of taking down point defense to really make my torpedo attacks count.  Since there is a lot of cloaking shield equipped ships out there.  I have not been using a lot of SRS craft for the same reason, at least when on the attack.  That will be the experiment for the coming weeks until the next tournament.  Well that does it for my current thoughts post tournament

Next time I will be continuing with the Ships Of The Rense.  The Argus is up as our first Tier 1 vessel.  I also plan on doing an unboxing of Rivet Wars.  Evolution games gave me their demo copy to open up and read up on so Farseer Re-rolls and I can give the game a whirl.  More on that next week.


Until then crush the alliance and as always



REMEMBER DRAMOS!!!!!!!!