Welcome to the fourth edition in my series of articles encouraging you to find different ways of playing STAW. I started with the obvious High Quality Attacking (HQA), before moving onto the less popular (and less effective) Defence Dice Stacking (DDS) and Repeated Attack Cancellation (RAC). I don’t think either DDS or RAC are tactics that will consistently beat HQA, mainly because of a) the cost and unreliability of DDS in a 50/3 meta and b) the difficulty of creating multiple reliable RAC ships. For the record, both DDS and RAC get better outside of 50/3 and in scenario play.
The question this poses seems to be “is there a way of beating HQA that isn’t just better HQA?” and the answer is “yes, usually”. DDS is a very obvious and straight-forward way of playing the game (so is HQA) and whilst RAC takes a little thought, it is still a way to play the game that relies almost entirely on list building as your main source of victory. The glorious thing about STAW, what discerns it from other similar games, like M:tG, is that it is not just a case of comparing lists or decks to see who wins (and yes Magic players, I know that you don’t just compare decks and that there is more skill than that involved) you have to actually fly the fleets against one another to see who wins.
So the fourth way to play tries to maximise your ability to fly right, at the cost of perhaps creating weaker combos: I call that style “Multiple Movement Upgrades” (MMU for short).
The Basics
The list is based on a number of relatively simple ideas. First, there is the principle that in a 50/3 game you are likely going to be facing 2 or 3 other ships with your 2 or 3 ships (Shuttles docking account for it not being 3 all the time) and as such you want to engineer a situation in which you have more of your ships firing at their ships than can be fired back upon. Secondly, in order to engineer those kind of situations, you want to purchase upgrades that allow you to move more than once per turn, preferably after you have moved yourself in order to guarantee that you stay out of range or arc. Third, given that your ships are likely on the fragile side, you are forced into making the choice of moving out of a position where you can fire into a position where you cannot fire if staying in a position to fire would cause your ship to be destroyed. Ideally you want to be able to move last and fire first, so high captain skills are a must with this kind of list. GenKhan is a particularly good choice since he will tie the highest CS on the board and if he is on a relatively low initiative ship (Borg, Species, Mirror) then he can guarantee moving last. For clarity, if given the choice between moving last or firing first you want to take moving last in MMU.
With a few important caveats, I’d consider the 2015 World Championship Winning build to be an example of MMU: the two main ships involved were Scout 608 (the now infamous Scout 608 that could potentially move 3 times per –activation) and the Queen Vessel Prime, with Weyoun 6 and Romulan Pilot, allowing potentially 3 moves per activation). Joseph Van Der Jagt’s second place build also had two ships with movement upgrades (in this case Admiral Forrest coupled with the now retired Indy Federation Fleet Captain) – whilst both of these fleets did MMU in as much as their fleets could move multiple times per turn, they also had High Quality Attacking (either Mag Charges or Picard 9) and high durability (Borg Ocatahederon or Bioships) too, so it wasn’t an ‘all-eggs-in-one-basket’ affair.
As with a lot of the other different ways to play, if you want to skew fully in this direction, I'd suggest cross-faction:
I.K.S. Ning'tao [I.K.S. Ning'tao] (22)
Chang [Chang's Bird of Prey] (4)
In'cha [I.K.S. Negh'var] (5)
Synon [IKS Ch'tang] (5)
Total (36)
Scout 608 [Scout Cube] (24)
Khan Singh [GenKhan] (4)
Full Reverse [Alpha Hunter] (2)
Dispersion Field [Scout 255] (2)
Sakonna [Gavroche] (3)
Improved Deflector Screens [Gornarus] (5)
Proton beam [Scout 255] (2)
Magnetometric Guided Charge [Assimilated Vessel 64758] (3)
Total (45)
U.S.S. Hathaway [U.S.S. Hathaway] (22)
Benjamin Maxwell [U.S.S. Yeager] (4)
Adm Maxwell Forrest [Enterprise NX-01] (3)
Cochrane Deceleration Maneuver [U.S.S. Enterprise] (5)
Thruster Array [U.S.S. Montgolfier] (3)
Type 8 Phaser Array [U.S.S. Hood] (2)
Total (39)
Fleet total: 120
The Ning'Tao gets its manoeuvrability from sensor echoes that thanks to Chang 7 it gets twice a turn and can come about after doing one of them. Synon allows you to do a "3" sensor echo too if the need arises. It is a very fragile ship, but the flexibility it has with movement allows you to get out of arc until you are in a really good position to fire.
Scout 608 is a toned down version of the World Championship Build, but retains a lot of the movement shenanigans that it had previously. Gen Khan guarantees that it'll move last.
The Hathway is probably the weakest of the three ships here, but Forrest's fleet action allows for extra movement as does the Thruster Array. Cochrane Decelration Maneuver gives you that one shot come about if you really need it and Ben Maxwell lets you change your dial if you mess it up one turn.
None of these three ships are particularly hardy or shooty, but the firepower is enough that if you can outmanoeuvre your opponent it will cause him problems if all three ships fire on the same target.
Tactics:
As with many of the other builds in this series, if you take away the upgrades then the fleet becomes a lot less tricky to deal with, the scout in particular would be an ideal target for activation phase attacking or Decker damage. You want to try as much as possible to get shots in when you can, since this fleet will dance and dance and dance to deny you a firing solution. The upside is that this is a complicated fleet to play with quite a high skill ceiling. If someone doesn't know what they are doing, or takes a wrong move with this fleet, then you can make them suffer.
As always all comments are welcome, so thanks for reading!
NEXT TIME: Durability and Repairing
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