I have been a pretty big advocate of the mantra of “always be navigating” with the qualifier that you are not commanding squadrons. However, a few recent experiences have caused me to doubt that mantra, particularly with my playtime with the republic. The republic is probably the faction that is most in need of better yaw given by the navigate command but I started experimenting with con fire commands to help up some of the republics' ships' firepower that all started with this ship.
Acclamator II (71)
• Clone Gunners (4)
• Thermal Shields (5)
• External Racks (4)
• Swivel-Mount Batteries (8)
= 92 Points
I really wanted to try and get Clone Gunners to work, and it has gone over much better than I thought it would. Using con fire with swivel-mounts gives me 2 black dice at range and Clone Gunners for accuracy gave me 6 dice one always being an accuracy. With the consistency of black dice helping out the inconsistency of red die I did not miss not having re-rolls to often and it gave me the command I needed to trigger Clone Gunners. This became 7 dice at medium range and jumped to a staggering 11 with ex-racks at close deleting pretty much anything that was not using ECM and both con-fire commands and swivel mount are add effects that get around thermals.
So yes acclamators are pretty hard to turn and have pretty abysmal yaw, but you could still navigate with Bail, or get some extra Yaw with Take Evasive Action! (this card has really started to grow on me) I have also found something as I have really worked with acclamators is you can get used to the bad yaw and adapt to it. The victory’s lackluster does not come from its yaw but rather its speed it can’t get away. But a few nav tokens can take care of the speed jumps when necessary or you can even start to see what turns you need to take what actions the turns you will take your big shots con fire and when you need to get out of combat navigate. Now the game is not played in a vacuum and I think that is why the “always be navigating” mantra took hold because no matter what navigating is always good, where things like con-fire, and engineering can sometimes more or less be wasted commands. However, always being good does not mean always being best.
I think playing with Clone Gunners has really helped me see when the best turns will be to resolve a con-fire command will be. Sure you can resolve them with just the token, but the extra die is far more valuable than I think most people realize. The more dice you roll over the course of a game the more likely you are to hit your averages and spending a token just to trigger an effect if you don't need it will not help your dice average out over the course of the game.
Let's look at an ISD-II for example both the red and blue die have a 0.75 chance of causing damage for an average damage of 6 from the front arc. Now let's assume we have LTTs and also assume that we will always re-roll a red die that does not produce damage and assume that at least 1 red die we roll will not produce damage. (this is not a bad assumption) so we can take the 0.375. chance of a non-damage face and 0.75 damage average of a red die multiply them together (this is more than 1 because of the double hit on the red die) then add our re-roll for damage 0.75 our average damage with red dice and we get about 1 so this gives us (7*0.75)+1=6.25 this means or average damage was increased by about 25% with the re-roll, this assumes we are going for damage and just ignoring accuracies, not always a good idea but in the context of increasing average damage it will do. Now let's take that ISD-II and add a die to it that gives us 9 dice with an average damage of 0.75 per dice so (9*0.75)= 6.75. So adding one die gives you about a 0.5 average damage increase over just re-rolling a single die. (I am fairly confident in my math, but if you see mistakes in this math please let me know!)
I want to say I am not advocating not taking re-rolls and just going the more dice route because I think both are needed and that is why I think the con-fire command is so much more valuable than I used to give it credit for. More dice increase your average and re-rolls/fixing increases your consistency. This is why I have recently started gravitating toward the more dice route with upgrades like spinal and enhanced armament, and is just another reason Clone Captain Zak is so good. However, I supplement it with things like Intensify Firepower or having con-fire tokens on hand for bad rolls using munitions resupply. Ships with double turbolasers can do both taking Spinal and LTT.
MC80 Battle Cruiser (103)
• Gunnery Team (7)
• Nav Team (4)
• Point Defense Ion Cannons (4)
• Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)
• Spinal Armament (9)
• Mon Karren (6)
= 140 Points
I also think it is worth knowing the average damage of your ship and then using cards like veteran gunners to re-roll when you roll below what your ship's average is. Again I am not saying to forget about dice fixing, but I think that the power of extra dice has been undervalued and I think because of that a well-timed con-fire command has been undervalued. We have all had games that could have swung one way or the other if there was a damage or two more or even an accuracy so I think the player that learns when to con fire to boost average damage will win those games more often than not.
The mantra “always be navigating” I think is a fairly widely accepted idea in the community and in general the most widely accepted ideas are generally the least questioned. I was just kind of messing around, but I think I am liking what I have found. At the end of the day my argument is not “always be con-firing” nor is it to never be navigating, but rather to have a well thought out plan know how your ships move and do the “best” command at the right time and not just a “good” command all the time.
I am sure this AMM is going to be a bit controversial if you see I made a mistake please let me know and keep it civil. I am glad to provide regular content for a community that enjoys a game I love and to help improve myself as well. Until next time have a great week!
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