Out of the Basement Tournament Coverage Part 1

Nathan's Tsunamis barrel through my fleet.

I've been doing a lot more blogging than is usual as of late, mostly about all of the painting that I've been doing for the Out of the Basement Firestorm and Dystopian Wars tournaments that were coming up.

Well, my good buddy Geoff and I drove up to Edmonton on Friday night, stayed with our bud Jordan and met Alem and Curtis (who are also from Calgary) for the event, so we had a decent showing from our local club. It was a great event.

Day One: Firestorm Armada

Saturday was the Firestorm tournament. I was less excited about this one but looking forward to it all the same. I hadn't really had a chance to get a full game of Firestorm in yet under the new 2.0 rules and was, to be honest, quite eager to cut my teeth on the new rules system. 

I had originally planned to take my Ryushi fleet to the tournament but after the brutal week of non-stop

The view of the battle from the command deck of my Manta.

painting that I'd done for my French (SO happy to get that French fleet finally finished, it turned out quite good), I just couldn't face the prospect of another week of exactly the same kind of schedules in order to finish the Ryushi in time.

So instead I took what was a fairly gimped Aquan fleet but at least it was painted. I managed to get a fair amount of practice with it too. In the first round I faced off against Nathan's Aquans. We joked it was the fishbowl. It was cool to see how a fellow Aquan player set up his fleet and how his tactics differed. For more info on his fleet compositions I highly recommend checking out his and his buddy Lang's site The Jaded Gamercast. I suffered a minor defeat against Nathan's much better constructed fleet, though my propensity for rolling hot 6s was surely making him want to flip tables near the end. ;)

Jason's Terran battleship.

My second round was against Jason's Terrans and man that was an educative game! We played a reserves mission so my Manta and Medusa decided to take their sweet time hanging back in reserves right up until I had but one Tsunami heavy cruiser pretty much literally left surrounded by Terran ships. I finally paid the points on the battle log to ensure a bonus to my reserve roll and sure enough both the Manta and Medusa showed up at the same time. Man did the tides ever turn as soon as they arrived! I made short work of the Terran fleet as soon as they showed up. I also learned that nuclear torpedoes are horrific as are Aquan Short Range Spaceships. I managed to eek out a draw from what was initially a horrific defeat. I was quite proud of that one.

My third round saw me faced off against my bud Alem and his beautiful RSN. I opted for a more central brick deployment strategy whereas Alemn went for a right flank setup with some harrying forces on the left. He set up a nice little killing field where I just waltzed right into it. Fortunately I was weathering the storm fairly well by the time I got into my optimal ranges and

Alem's RSN Dreadnought was a terrifying sight to behold.

was definitely putting the hurt on him by the time the game round had stopped. I can't remember the exact score but I think I'd suffered a minor defeat against him, though it was a very close game.

Overall the Manta and Medusa are just a disgusting choice to take together. while the rest of my fleet was pretty gimped and allowed folks to capitalize on the short squad sizes to increase points in the battle log, the dreadnought Medusa and, lets face it, mini dreadnought Manta were definitely heavy hitters that sustained the brawl throughout the games. Energy Transfer is such an amazing ability and really allows one to negate the weapon attack dice depletion that one normally sustains with a few points of damage.

Overall I was quite pleased with the tournament as I was with my performance, given my lack of familiarity with the current rules system and my fleet in general. I think I ended up somewhere around the lower middle end of the pack.

I did win the Best Sportsman award though! So that was nice to come home with a medal. :)