The Road to Schaumburg

The Road to Schaumburg


With the Schaumburg Prime Offensive, Adepticon's Firestorm Armada tournament, coming up, I will be playing 900 point games about as often as I can get away with it. At 900 points, I have quite a few choices of fleet, even once I know that it's going to be Relthoza, probably with a squadron of Ba'Kash allies. My first attempt ran the following list:

1 battleship with extra PD and extra wings, but no other upgrades.
1 carrier, no upgrades.
3 cruisers, no upgrades..
4 Drone frigates.
4 Nidus frigates.
3 Ba'Kash cruisers, no upgrades.

As you can see, the list is extremely spartan (pun only about half intentional), but it does manage to squeeze in 6 activations. My opponent, one of the best in my local area, ran a list of Sorylians consisting of:

1 dreadnought with a single escort and a flight of interceptors.
4 regular cruisers.
2 squads of 5 frigates, I think.

Only 4 activations, but each one packs quite a punch! The mission was Ambush, and he won the roll-off and chose to ambush me. I never really had a chance to push through to his side of the table to score the scenario points, so we basically hammered each other's ships to scrap in the middle. It was bloody on both sides, but he clearly had the better of it early on. The final tally, after both our admirals were gone along with the vast majority of everything else, had him ahead by 5 points, I think, which is technically a draw. This is one of the few times that Firestorm's scoring breaks down, as I had significantly more of my Maximum Fleet Value still intact. One of his frigates escaped, but everything else was destroyed, while I had all 3 Ba'Kash cruisers and 2 of the Relthoza ones survive. I don't mean to suggest that the battle was mine, because it wasn't,  but that's a very strange battle log result.

Lessons learned:


  • I still suck at using the Tier 3 ships, especially against full size squads of Soryllians! Mine got chewed up pretty fast, especially the Nidus squad that I had neglected to hide in the shadow of one of the larger vessels.
  • Ba'Kash regular cruisers are a worthy investment. Respectable guns all the way around, they can still fire beams and torpedoes with the plating closed, and the extra 2 AD from Packhunter for a full squadron is excellent. I should consider running them all the way with the plating closed unless I really, really need the scatter guns. Weapon shielding is a high priority upgrade for spare points. 
  • I've got to figure out how to keep my carrier alive! It was the first ship I decloaked, and not coincidentally one of the first ships to go down. That's a bad idea when it's as fragile as it is for a Tier 1. The carrier is also a big target because of how nasty a large wing squad can be, and the easiest way to get rid of it is to kill its parent carrier. When playing 40k a few versions ago, I used to use pathfinders as a lure, knowing that this is a unit my opponent absolutely, positively has to deal with, and a variation of the same theme should work for the carrier.
  • Definitely a good idea to hold the Relthoza cruisers back, rather than charging them in with the rest of the fleet. They pack a good punch, but some of it is the torpedoes, and even with the cloak and stealth they can't take much of a beating. If they enter the fray a turn later than the rest of the armada, their effectiveness is much greater. 


Advantages of this list:

  • Six activations.
  • Quite a bit of firepower.
  • Ba'Kash cruisers.

Disadvantages of this list:

  • Minimal upgrades, and can't afford more than one Nidus squad. I don't think mismatched frigate squads work as well as matched ones.
  • Having extra squadrons means more battle log to give to my opponent.

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