Tournaments | trekcc

Kris Sonsteby (LORE)
Tournament Report - 2E - Online Event (Return to Farpoint)
2014-08-04 - 12:00 AM
He's Joking Around... it Feels so Good When He Jokes
Introduction
With the reanimated Return to Farpoint series rolling into online sealed territory this month, I signed up for some warp speed Dangerous Missions encounters amidst a bevy of fresh faces. Absent the standard HQ reporting restrictions, I painted a blue build black and gold as I rode a Borg Cube all the way to the top.

Round 1	Chris A. Mead	FW (+20)View opponent's Report View original Report
The Crippler was testing Starfleet, but was forced to return home for reinforcements after losing T'Pol to an Unscientific Method and Bashir Founder to Magnetic Field Disruptions. Staked to a two turn lead caused by his lack of range, William T. Riker pushed me past A Klingon Matter on the ground to notch the victory. FW 70-50.
Kris took longer than I did to put together a crew and get flying, but had a huge advantage when he did because of his 10 range Borg Cube vs. my gimpy Enterprise. 6 range! Ugh. Anyway, I have decent dilemmas so I held him off long enough to get a good space solve for 45 (and 5 from his Guinan), but that was all I could manage. I'm going to copy Kris' technique between rounds and add some random Borg drones and the Cube just so I can actually fly places sometime this year.

Round 2	Andrey Gusev	FW (+35)
The Giant Killer was also employing TNG, and had me on the ropes after solving Investigate Coup in one attempt despite getting tagged with a Houdini Mines. Once I worked my way through space, I held him up at Kressari Rendezvous with So Many Enemies long enough to knock out Geological Survey for the win. FW 70-35.


Round 3	J	FW (+30)View opponent's Report View original Report
Shattered Vinyl was packing Bajoran, but was stone walled at Deliver Evidence on successive turns by Foresaken and Unscientific Method. Clearing a Dangerous Liasons at Investigate Sighting was the turning point, as from there I shut him down with a Telepathic Invasion to take both the game and the tournament. FW 70-35.
A very close game against Kris, and a pleasure to finally play him. It seems that I have been missing out in all this tournament where I did not get to face him. Things started heavily in my favour. I had my Bajoran Ship in hand and played it turn one, while Kris had to pay to download his ship. I also got out to attempt on Turn 3, though Kris' dilemmas were good enough to hold me out on each attempt and only give me one under, eventually being out early started to really pay off. Kris did eventually go out and I managed to shut out his first attempt at a planet with one under, a Skeleton Crew on top, and one bouncing. But given that he had a Borg ship with huge range, he went home and then to space the next turn with 9. This is where things started to shift. I gave him 3 but my first two dilemmas failed to set up the solid final D. The last one needed 2 Science and 3 Security, which exactly how much he had there, so I just needed either of the lead offs to take out one of those. Instead they were like paper-machet, and he solved space on his first attempt - for 30 points. I finally solved my space on my next turn and then went to planet. This evened us up with one space solved and minimal dilemmas under each planet. Mine had two under. I did make a poor choice, in retrospect, on this mission attempt. Blended managed to stop my Sisko and Jeffrey Pierce but left me with Bareil. The best result here would have been keeping Sisko who has the best cunning and 2 Diplomacy, but keeping Bareil was not bad as Kira can gain Diplo off him to solve the mission. The next was Chula: Pick One to Save Two, which I had faced at the first mission. This time I chose to stop my three guys rather than return one because the remainder could not solve anyway. Then the final dilemma, Huodini Bomb, hit and killed. Had I returned any of my choices to hand, I would have solved that and kept my dude alive while getting 3 under the mission. Still it only killed my most worthless guy: Macius. Kris went with a nine man crew at his planet, but I knew they had the skills times a lot. I had the option of trying a few dilemmas (and had an Unexpected Difficulties to make those options better) or just throwing Temporal Misalignment to ensure the stop this turn and then give him an auto-win the next. I did go with this latter option as it gave me one more shot to win and I had a good super crew plus a cheater card in my hand (Team of Ambassadors). Plus, I felt that putting any more dilemmas under the mission would make it an easy solve for him on his next turn. I sent 6 were almost any 5 could solve and gave him 4 to draw spend. Kris gave me one dilemma but showed me his alternate choice, which I could solve easily. The one that he gave me would stop just one person (random selection) unless I had Intelligence or Telepathy (I have neither in the deck). So it came down to a 50/50 on the random selection. I could get the skills from anyone, but to get the attributes with just 5 personnel I needed to keep my 3 Cunning 7 dudes and have him stop one of the three Cunning 6 dudes. He chose Dax to be stopped, and that was that.

Closing Thoughts
Ship range, or lack thereof, has played a critical role in tournaments since the dawn of Second Edition and once again proved to be a deciding factor in this gig. In an environment where the dilemma choices were unilaterally less than ideal, how you got to your missions was much less important than when.