The Star Trek Attack Wing (STAW) Resistance is Futile (RiF)
Organized Play (OP) Event for Month Two: Unimatrix Zero will be held at Fairfax
Games and Comics on Sunday, November 16, 2014 starting at 1 pm. The store opens
at Noon. Please arrive early to get your blind booster pack and decide which
ship/cards to use. The contents of all
five blind boosters are listed online.
We can’t find the link anymore, so the next blog post will have them all
listed. I recommend deciding ahead of time what you will use with your fleet(s)
for each of the boosters, so that you are prepared no matter which ship you
receive.
Customization:
Point 1 I have some
reservations about the new suggested tournament format as it applies to Borg
fleets. I’m concerned that it isn’t reasonable to restrict something like a
Tactical Cube to less than 60 points. I agree that 80-90 point cubes are
brutal, but can you really get your points’ worth out of a cube at 52 points?
Unimatrix Zero seems like a good time to test the theory, so I’m implementing
the updated suggested tournament format and I am NOT altering it at all.
Clarification: In talking to Bob, I realized that we had different
interpretations of this rule. I thought that the ship build maximum was
increased by 8 points (to 58 points) for any ship over 43 points. Bob believes
that any ship over 43 points gets 8 additional points (51 point ceiling for a
43 point ship) for captain, upgrades, and resources that are applied directly
to the ship. In considering the point, it makes sense that WizKids was probably
thinking along the same lines as Bob. After all, ship costs are always even numbers,
so why did they pick 43? And 43 is the first number that exceeds the 50 point
ceiling when 8 points are added to it. Therefore, the ruling for November is
that we will have a 50 point maximum per ship and any ships over 43 points may
take up to 8 points in captains, upgrades, or resources.
Point 2 It has been my
experience that most players that come to the Fairfax Games and Comics store
have Borg ships/cards and I don’t think
this scenario will play as nicely with only one fleet. Based on the
personalities of the people that come to my store, I’m betting they would want
to tailor separate Borg and Rebel fleets. Therefore, I will NOT be implementing
the Alternative Gameplay option of Players Bring 1 Fleet. I repeat, everyone
should bring TWO fleets: one Borg and one Rebel.
Point 3 You will only have one
blind booster for the competition. However, you are free to organize the
options from that pack into two separate configurations: one for the Borg fleet
and one for the Rebel fleet. You will NOT be allowed to make changes between
rounds, though. So, if you play the Borg Fleet in Round 1 and Round 3, your
blind booster ship needs to be in the same configuration in Round 3 that it was
for Round 1.
Point 4 In the Alternative
Rules, there is a bullet point that says that the Borg Fleet may take an action
to discard a mission Token from a ship in order to remove one normal damage
card. This makes no sense. All Borg ships have Regenerate. Even if the ship is
NOT a “Borg” ship, if it is in the Borg Fleet, then it gains the Regenerate
action. My read of this text is that you have to have an action to take and you
need to spend a mission token. Why spend your mission token when you can just
use the Regenerate action? There’s only one circumstance that I can think of
where this makes any sense. If the ship has two actions available to it, then
it could spend one of them to use the ship’s regenerate and the second one to
enact this special regeneration (which costs a mission token). Thus, you could
reclaim two hull points in one turn, but you’d give up 8 fleet points in the
process. At this time I am disinclined to allow this rule to be used. If
someone has an argument for using it, I will reconsider.
Point 5 Ranking and pairing.
Yikes! Let’s just make it a little more complicated, since we don’t have enough
confusion as it is. J I would really very much appreciate it if people
could sign up prior to the event, so that I can try to have all the pairings
worked out for the first round before arriving at the store. The three players
from last month’s event will be ranked 1-3 this month. If anyone else shows up
who played in the previous tournament, I will rank you (against each other)
based on your overall standing in those three games. So, the highest you will
be placed is 4th. If you have not played in any of the last four
events at this store, that’s OK, too. Please note that these initial ranks are
for the purposes of deciding who will play which fleet starting out and they
have absolutely no effect on your ultimate standing for battle points/fleet
points in the Unimatrix Zero Event.
Point 6 As you can probably
tell from above, I’m planning to give the pairings guidelines from the original
rules a shot. However, I reserve the right to dump those rules in a heartbeat
and use the Alternative Player Matching rules released on 9/26 if I determine
that they will be easier, or make more sense.
Point 7 Going back to the point
about registering ahead of time…The rules for fleet building in this OP are
unique. You won’t be able to go to a website like
Dracos and have it do
the work for you. Also, it’s been my experience that people don’t really check
the math on their opponent’s builds when they are looking them over. To promote
fairness, I encourage players to
email me
their lists ahead of time, so I can vet the builds. I’ll check to make sure the
right number/type of upgrade are used and that the SP adjustments are factored
in correctly. This will allow me to assure all the players that the vetted
lists had no oversights.
Bob is on the board of directors for a local wargaming
convention called Nova Open. You’ve probably heard him talk about it. Well, one
year, this kid named Tony won the first place at the main tournament. (There
are several tournaments for different systems going on simultaneously each
year.) After he won, it turned out that he’d done his math wrong and he was 3
points over the limit. As a result, he received the nickname C3PO (for 3 points
over, I’m not sure what the C was supposed to stand for. Maybe “clearly”. J)
Anyway, a lot of people said it was no big deal and three points didn’t make
that much difference when the point total was 2,000. But other people said he
cheated and it there were sour grapes and a lot of nastiness. The next year, he
came back and won again, but with a list that was exactly three points under
the total, just to thumb his nose at his detractors.
Well, three points isn’t a big deal when the total is 2,000,
that’s true. But it makes a very big difference when the total is only 120. I
don’t want anyone claiming that someone cheated and I don’t want anyone kicking
themselves later for not taking an SP credit that they were due.
A-
