Operational Exhaustion and a bit of X-Wing theory crafting...

Operational Exhaustion

Been thinking on this quite a bit recently as we continue doing more with the same number of people…  Well for now at least.  Turnover WILL occur at some point, although we have avoided it thus far…  Mostly due to the fact that there has been zero movement at the University to this point.  Some things SHOULD be moving now, but nothing yet.  I just think that my current organization is running the risk of Operational Exhaustion…  We are doing more and more, but we have fewer people to do the work.  And the old way of having people volunteer to take on the extra work…  The younger ones especially telling on this.  They’re getting VERY quiet.  And not volunteering for anything else.  Waiting on things to break free or just break.  When even the most optimistic told me that he now agrees that our organization is at its breaking point…  And that we cannot easily absorb another loss…  Kind of disheartening since I put in a LOT of work building up the team and do not want to see it all fall apart…  But, I need to keep my own Department protected and as it seems my own career will be moving in a direction I had not expected at this point.  I was looking at moving on and wanted to be sure that I was leaving things prepared for my successor…  But we’ll see if the latest plan hatched works…  Restructuring things, and different reporting lines…  Oh, and more importantly, getting my actual title.  IFF it happens of course.  The other thing I was gearing up for has not been posted yet…  I’ll probably still apply, but I am hoping this only provides the incentive for the College to make the changes I need to stay.  I know previously it was deemed “not worth the effort”, so we’ll see if they have changed their minds…  So back to wait and see as the first week fo the Semester is hitting and I’m exhausted…

Getting in some theory crafting on X-Wing…  I think I’ll be playing Rebels again…

3B ten (100)

Ten Numb — B-Wing	31
Veteran Instincts	1
"Mangler" Cannon	4
Hera Syndulla	1
B-Wing/E2	1
Ship Total: 38
Blue Squadron Pilot — B-Wing	22
Fire-Control System	2
Heavy Laser Cannon	7
Ship Total: 31
Blue Squadron Pilot — B-Wing	22
Fire-Control System	2
Heavy Laser Cannon	7
Ship Total: 31

This one is fairly simple…  I’ll swap in the Collision Detectors and Seismic Torpedoes to clear obstacles in place of the FCS…  Ten is just there to force through hits as his Criticals cannot be dodged…  Well, one of them at least.

Unnamed Squadron (100)

Dash Rendar — YT-2400	36
Push the Limit	3
Heavy Laser Cannon	7
Kanan Jarrus	3
Engine Upgrade	4
Outrider	5
Ship Total: 58
Lothal Rebel — VCX-100	35
Fire-Control System	2
Autoblaster Turret	2
Hera Syndulla	1
Anti-Pursuit Lasers	2
Ship Total: 42

This one is a simple 2 ship build.  Super Dash and the VCX-100 present a LOT of Hull to chew through.  The Autoblaster Turrets cannot be dodged, and he base 4 Attack is pretty brutal…  o essentially, line up the Emperor and try to take it down quick?  This might well be what I fly next time if Wave 9 is not out.  The 3 B-Wings are amusing, but not overly competitive I think….  This one looks like fun.  And of course being a big fan of Rebels (the show)…  This looks like it will be fitting…

Wave 8, hoping for Wave 9 for next Month's X-Wing...

So, spending a bit of time thinking on the state of the game at the moment…  Honestly I am REALLY hoping to have Wave 9 available to play for the next event on the 11^th of September.  Right now, it’s a bit stale I think.  The Palp Aces are simply too good.  Yes, Joel’s Dash/Miranda build did well but I think it was a bit of an anomaly with it doing pretty well against the Whisper/Decimator builds or the Defenders that some of us were flying.  I’m not entirely sure that a standard Palp Aces build would not be able to simply tear apart Miranda too quickly.  Seeing the Emperor assist Whisper to regularly ignore a 4 hit attack is a bit disheartening, and while Joel’s Miranda build used the Homing Missiles to throw out a 5 Dice Attack usually with Focus and the built in reroll as HM does NOT eat up the required Target Lock on launch.  With the inability to spend Evade tokens, you SHOULD be able to push through a few damage, but that assumes average or better rolls of course.  I suspect now that most of us have seen this now, the bum rush of the PS 8 Miranda might well be what happens.  Getting in close or arc dodging as the Missiles are locked to the Front arc…  Dash is good, but lacking Regen, and seeing the regular dismissal of a single 4 Dice attack these days?  So, I’m thinking that as things stand now, there ARE a few things that are top tier, but that tier is dominated by the Imperials and the Emperor is a BIG part of this.  Without a range restriction, his power is REALLY good.  I’m edging toward it being too good honestly.  Yes, it takes 2 Crew slots and IS 8 points, but…  Just looking over it with say, Soonter Fel or the Inquisitor?  If you use it to save one point of Damage?  That’s the equivalent of ~ 10 points. Probably more as with the Emperor at this point, you are typically looking at a Token Stack meaning that you need only one Dice with ANY paint on it to completely ignore a lot of Attacks…  Usually with 3-5 Agility Dice, you can expect at LEAST 2 results.  With Focus AND an Evade token combined with the Emperor just setting a Dice to Evade, you can very easily ignore an obnoxious number of hits… 

So, on to Wave 9…  This seems to be a VERY anti Ace Wave.  There are things like the Lancer Pursuit craft that can just assign Tractor Tokens and/or Stress?  Black Market Slicer Tools (BMST) to use an Action to convert a Stress to a Damage Card assigned to the Ship?  Yes, please.  So, as a result, E-Wings go even further down the “playable” list as Corran Horn with PTL was about the only one seen…  But Fel and the Inquisitor will be less likely to use their PTL which is at this point the standard upgrade for them?  These I think will become less used.  But in general the Aces that we are seeing now will I think get used a lot less…  The ARC-170 might well see the return of the Stress Hog…  It will be a bit more expensive than the Y-Wing variant, but it will be a LOT more useful in the modern game…  And Stress is one of the things that killed off the Aces in the past…

Small based ships with 2 90-degree Firing Arcs are here now, so Arc Dodging has become a LOT more difficult…  There are also a few more things like mods that give you a Barrel Roll action…  And now there is a Torpedo that REMOVES Terrain during the Action phase and potentially damages everything in Range 1…  This might be fun against Swarms coming through the Asteroids…  But there are now ways to get Damage through outside of the Shooting phase and since they are not things that can be defended against, the current obnoxious Defense that the Palp Aces bring to the table get bypassed… 

Looking at flying my B-Wings again…  But it is going to be difficult currently.  HOPING to have the Wave 9 stuff to get the upgrades I think will push them over the edge into the top tier…  OK, out of the bottom tier at least J  I think they will surprise the heck out of some people…

More random tales from the desert...

So, more on the whole first combat deployment…  Going with another “Kelly’s Heroes” or maybe “M.A.S.H” theme… It gave me a fairly warped view on how the Army worked.  I was wrong of course, there is SO much bureaucratic BS everywhere…  Well, except in the confusion as we prepared to actually play in the desert.  In general, I found that the attitude most units had toward resupplying Engineers was just a small step ahead of “just give the stuff to the enemy” …  So, we got creative.  My Squad Leader was former Airborne with the 82nd so he had a very good idea how this sort of thing worked…  We made ourselves available to the Supply SGT so we had the first crack at anything that was, say…  Just laying around the port…  In the truck it went and we’d figure out what we ended up with later.  How we got the desert camouflage uniforms and a few extra pairs of the desert and jungle boots…  Whatever happened to be coming off the boats, the Navy guys just wanted it off their pier and they did not care WHERE it went as long as it was clearly Americans taking it off the pier…

Worked with bigger things as well…  The ACE is/was essentially an armored bulldozer.  It was determined that we needed one…  Of course, lacking such a thing, and since none of us were trained in the operation of such a vehicle…  So, we went to the port.  The Navy was offloading some, and there was a Soldier from a unit that had moved to the front leaving him behind.  So, we talked to him and he asked to come with us to the front…  Anything to get off that port.  Being detached in the wrong service meant “issues”, so… We said, no problem, we were of course short per usual and it was no problem.  The ACE we decided to snag was CLEARLY marked USMC and we were clearly Army…  And the Navy boys just wanted the damn thing off their docks, and they did not care that we were clearly stealing it....  So, we went to the front with a vehicle we stole and a driver who was probably AWOL if we were concerned with the technicalities… 

Our weapons were more of the same sort of thing…  Our unit got issued the M-16A2 just before we deployed, so we zeroed the weapons and everyone was firing them for the first time.  These were the first ones with the heavier barrel and the 3 round burst.  Mine had the 203 grenade launcher, but that was a fairly standard thing, our Platoon had 7 of the things.  But back at the port, we found a warehouse where there were weapons…  We went in and a crusty old Marine Gunnery SGT was in charge…  He found out that we were Engineers and he set us up with extra M3 Grease Guns, 1911’s and we grabbed a few M-16A1’s…  We wanted the lower receivers so we could use the fully automatic fire with the heavier barrels of the A2’s…  Oh, and tracer ammo for the M3’s…  .45 cal tracer ammo J…  Fun stuff, and that’ll come up later…  But there we were literally wandering around this giant warehouse of weapons with shopping carts…  This was NOT the norm elsewhere I was to find out of course, but here…  Well, it worked.

This sort of thing REALLY helped me later when I ended up going Airborne myself and for my second combat deployment.  The “Make do with what you have” combined with “if you find it, it’s yours” WRT resupply…  Got pretty good at improvising and adapting to rapidly changing situations…  In my last chat with the Faculty Director of my organization he said that I was “Unnaturally calm in stressful situations”, but I’m fairly sure he had no idea WHY I was that calm in a University setting…  Not like anyone is shooting at us.  I slept through incoming artillery knowing there wasn’t anything I could do in anything I could do in any case…  13-ton aluminum vehicle loaded out with 2-3 tons of ammo and explosives, so if we got hit…  Well, it would be quick and no worries about just being wounded…

Ah, old Army memories...

Before I joined the Army I had read several books and movies that really stuck out in my mind back then.  Specifically, “Catch-22”, “M.A.S.H” and “Kelly’s Heroes”.  I remember thinking that there is NO way that the Army was like that…  And yet when I actually joined…  Mostly my first combat deployment was boring…  I got a killer tan and played a LOT of cards.  I stopped counting after 10,000 games…  So, a fair bit of boredom.  I did also get a killer tan in the ripped up BDU shorts and T-Shirt that I wandered around in regularly…  Unlike most of the folks from the wee damp islands my ancestors came from (Scotland, Ireland, England for the most part) I tan REALLY quickly and well…  So much so that when my youngest was born the poor Nurse mistakenly assumed I was Mexican as she commented that “She’ll look Mexican like her Father” ….  My reply of “Do I know him?” of course probably cleared it up, but…

Yeah, there was some of it that was…  More interesting I guess.  My Bronze Star was a “Catch-22” award as far as I was concerned.  Standard procedure when a set demolition failed to ignite would have been to have the Demo Specialist (me) walk down range with a Det Pack (basically a satchel pack full of explosives) and manually set the charge to “clear” the charge by blowing it up manually…  We had Cav Scouts with us, they set the charges and since they were pretty fearful of the blasting caps, likely they did not seat them fully…  So, when the time fuse burned down it did not ignite the caps which would have set off the HE charge (C-4) …  Now, a bit more about the charge…  It was a charge set in an ammo bunker that we found to be booby trapped and contained several tons of ammunition and chemical rounds (Soviet 122mm stuff).  So, NO WAY I was walking downrange knowing that.  I yelled over to the TC of one of the Bradley’s, had him get me a range to the bunker door.  So, knowing it was 300m, I told them to button up and loaded a grenade into my 203.  NOT the preferred method for setting off sensitized explosives, but a grenade in the bunker DOES work.  So, when the CO found out they were left with the choice of punishing me for disregarding established procedure, but doing it in a way that a) worked and b) was FAR safer to all concerned or rewarding me with a medal.  For the record, unlike CPT Yossarian from the book/movie I did NOT in fact show up to the award ceremony nude…  No ceremony, just the note on my record and a neat little medal…  Never even put the ribbon on my uniform.  THAT pissed off the last 1SGT I had in Germany.  I wore my greens to my best friend’s funeral and he got offended that I had what he felt were too many awards on my uniform.  So, he checked my records…  Well, he was surprised to find I was not even wearing all the awards I was authorized and that pissed him off.  Whatever, it illustrated the difference between a young SGT from a line combat company and an older 1SGT in rear echelon companies his whole career…  

Weird memories surface as I get my resume set for yet another potential job search and I start getting serious about getting back into shape...  Guessing I was about 190 in that picture, I was 205 when I was in the best shape of my life before attending the "Ft Benning School for Belligerent Boys"...  No clue what I weighed on completion of that course, they stopped weighing us when they realized that much weight loss that quickly was "less healthy".  I did weigh 238 on reporting to Basic and weighed 168 on graduation...  NOT wanting to lose THAT much THAT quickly again, but dropping some 30 or so pounds would probably be good... 

Titan Fall League Month 1 AAR

Titan Fall League Month 1 AAR

So…  I flew the 2 Defenders and TIE Bomber…  First game went really well against a Rebel Regen list.  Was one I lent to one of the older players who wandered in without his stuff, and that made it 12 players, so worked out perfectly…  But it does show how my old Regen list has been left far behind.  Poe was hard to pin down, but with the Defenders going fast and boosting a lot, once I got behind the T-70, that was it.  The Y-Wing died first of course as low Agility vs Juke just doesn’t work well.  Miranda with the TLT was harder to track down, but even she just couldn’t move quickly enough to make a difference.

Sadly, that was the LAST time I saw my Agility Dice roll ANYTHING. 

Plus side, I was in the lead…  Minus side next opponent was Tyler.  He flew Whisper/Decimator with Vader AND the Emperor…  Brutal list.  I might have actually made it a game had I rolled even a single Evade over the course of the game, but…  So, it was quickly over.  The EU on my Defenders was good, but I think that the Countess at least kind of needs the PTL upgrade rather than the Juke in this list…  SO many times I would have focused up I think after a Boost or Target Lock to get really high quality shooting  Evade is free and kind of a given, so Juke is nice if I am rolling average…  I did not.

Third game was against Will…  His list was VERY similar to mine.  Countess and Col Vessery with x/7 and Juke backed by Jax in his TIE Interceptor with PTL and AT…  Initial engagement went REALLY well as Deathfire dropped the Proximity Mine ON Jax…  Got 2 hits.  Craptastic.  Needed 3 to kill him and then it would have been a VERY different game…  But alas…  My dice were every bit as cold in this game.  Steele was great, and did a lot of damage…  But it was not enough as Will’s Evades were solid.

Was kind of an odd event…  Top 4 were 2 Whisper/Decimator (Emperor) builds, Will’s Defenders/Jax build and Joel’s Super Dash/Miranda build…  Miranda was kitted out with Homing Missiles and Proton Torpedoes for those potential 5 Dice quality attacks that can do things like ignore Evade tokens…  There was a Z-95 swarm with the Concussion Missiles, but that one I think has likewise been surpassed by the current builds.  TIE Swarm was here, and it was solid, if not enough to deal with the Emperor guiding his Aces…  Another Rebel build with B-Wings, E-Wing and an A-Wing?  I think it needs a bit of work, but solid potential there…  One Brobot build, again solid but…  With only 2 ships it lacks the volume of fire to take down a VERY well protected Ace, and they do eventually get worn down.

No Dengar, in fact NO Jumpmasters at all.  I think the ONLY S&V was the Brobots…  A few Rebels but mostly Imperial Ace builds…  Including my own of course J…

I think I fly Rebels next time, so time to get in some time on the B-wings again…  Haven’t flown them since my earliest days in the game…  Solid ship, but SLOW…

X-Wing League theorycrafting...

The more I think about the current meta in X-Wing the more I am looking at doing something REALLY silly like this:

3B ten (100)

Ten Numb — B-Wing	31
Veteran Instincts	1
"Mangler" Cannon	4
Hera Syndulla	1
B-Wing/E2	1
Ship Total: 38
Blue Squadron Pilot — B-Wing	22
Fire-Control System	2
Heavy Laser Cannon	7
Ship Total: 31
Blue Squadron Pilot — B-Wing	22
Fire-Control System	2
Heavy Laser Cannon	7
Ship Total: 31

This one makes it something that might well be able to take down the 2 major architypes I am seeing  these days…  Dengaroo and Imperial Aces would I think both kind of hate to see this…  Ten Numb just automatically hits on a Critical.  Hera would allow him to be REALLY agile, and frankly actions are not that big of a deal…  I LIKE them on him, but if you were able to 2K twice and be able to get in 2 unexpected hits on something and thus dodge the counter attacks…  The FCS is solid, but frankly I’m excited to see the Seismic Torpedoes and Collision Detectors…  I can see fielding those on all 3 of my B-Wings (Detectors) and just bring the Debris Fields…  So, I can simply ignore the terrain with all of my ships just to mess with things as I dodge and barrel roll into the middle.  Thinking the Seismic Torpedoes will be a REALLY good answer to some of the more annoying Ace and Swarm builds with a 50% chance for a free Damage BEFORE the shooting even starts.  No dodge, no defense and it can clear the field for the “less maneuverable” B-Wings as I get rid of the cover that is saving those annoying nimble ships…  But with the FCS/Heavy Laser combo is pretty good for hunting down Large Bases or Aces in the longer game.  This is NOT a one and done build.  The B-Wings are pretty sturdy ships, and can take a Torpedo/R1 shot from most anything and still get in at least one shot…  Usually more of course.  Jousting with say, a TIE Swarm?  No.  Just Don’t do that…  In general of course…  With the Seismic Torpedoes and some decent play?  Maybe…  I DO think that this is still a losing match for the B-Wings, but at least they’ll know they were in a fight.

:-)  Might be something REALLY unexpected to bring to the fight Sunday

Titan League next week and more X-Wing stuff coming...

So, missed Gen Con this year, so didn’t pick up the wave 9 stuff that they had on hand…  So guessing that they’ll hit the stores “soon”…  Have a few pre-ordered, but not entirely sure they’ll be here by the weekend…  So I’ll

DeathfireRyadStele (100)

"Deathfire" — TIE Bomber	17
Plasma Torpedoes	3
Proximity Mines	3
Long-Range Scanners	0
Ship Total: 23
Countess Ryad — TIE Defender	34
Juke	2
Engine Upgrade	4
TIE/x7	-2
Ship Total: 38
Maarek Stele (TIE Defender) — TIE Defender	35
Juke	2
Engine Upgrade	4
TIE/x7	-2
Ship Total: 39

Not thrilled about losing the Extra Munitions…  But Juke on the x7 Defenders is AWESOME…    So we’ll see how it goes…

Wave 10 announced at Gen Con, looking neat…  More interested in the Armada stuff though to be honest…  Will see about getting back into that game…