GenCon FT Tournament Fleet Results

I'm sorry to only get around to this now, but it's been a busy time
since I got back from GenCon.

The rules for the GenCon FT tournament can be found on my web site,
along with the layout of the various fleets used this year, at:

http://www.vex.net/~agoodall/ft.htm

After the tournament, I collected the fleet sheets. Unfortunately, I
didn't keep detailed enough notes to state exactly WHO played WHOM with
WHAT fleet. However, I do have some observations from the fleet sheets.

First off, no one picked any of the ESU fleets. This somewhat surprised
me. Earlier this year I asked people for their impressions of the
various FB1 and FB2 fleets. It was the opinion of several people that
the ESU were the strongest of the FB1 races using cinematic movement,
with the NSL coming second. The FSE were apparently the toughest to play
and the NAC were sort of in the middle. In spite of this, no one played
an ESU fleet in the tournament. 

The favourite race was the NSL. Of the ship record sheets that I have in
my possession, 12 are NSL, 8 are NAC and 5 are FSE. It should be noted,
though, that one NAC fleet was custom designed (using fleet book ships)
and one of the FSE fleets was from the final round (where Dean and I
chose the same fleet for both players). Another player used a homegrown
fleet but I don't have notes as to the fleet he used (Sean Schoonmaker
might remember, as he played against it). Note that this is only a
little over half of the total record sheets from the tournament, though
I have the majority of the first and second round sheets.

The favourite fleet was, without a doubt, the NSL
Battleship-Battlecruiser Fleet. This made up a whopping 46% of the
chosen fleet designs (after removing the one FSE fleet sheet from the
final round). The fleet designs chosen break out like this:

NSL Battleship-Battlecruiser: 46%
NAC Superdreadnought: 21% (includes 1 custom fleet)
FSE Battleship: 13%
FSE Carrier: 8%
NAC Battleship-Battlecruiser: 4%
NAC Battledreadnought: 4%
NAC Carrier: 4%
NSL Battledreadnought: 4%

The NSL Battleship-Battlecruiser fleet one 64% of the games. In at least
one of these cases it was up against another Battleship-Battlecruiser
fleet. The NAC SDN fleet won 50% of the games it was in. The NAC
Battleship-Battlecruiser and NAC Battledreadnought fleets won the one
game each that I have records for. The FSE Battleship fleet lost the
games I have recorded, as did the NAC Carrier fleet. The FSE Carrier
fleet was played by one player who won two games but did not make it
into the semi-final round. 

I'm not sure that this gives much useful information, other than the
fact that the NSL was the most popular fleet choice, but were not
overwhelming in game terms. There were concerns raised that the narrow
battlefield gave an edge to carrier fleets, as there was less room for
outrunning fighters. A similar, but smaller, concern was raised with
regard to SMLs. The SMLs are less of an issue as there were plenty of
fleets that had one or two salvo launchers. There might be a point with
regard to carrier based fleets, though so few players chose carrier
fleets that it's hard to tell from the results. The one player with the
FSE carrier fleet did rather well, but did not make it into the
semi-final round.

With essentially 14 participants, the cut-off score for the semi-final
round was 3779 from a combined total of round 1 and round 2. The score
was Offensive Points + Defensive Points, where Offensive points was the
total of all the ships and fighters that a player destroyed, and
Defensive points was the total of all the ships and fighters that the
player had left of his own fleet.

Kevin Walker, the eventual winner of the tournament, scored 1571 and
2400 points for a total of 3971. Mike Miserendino, who came in second,
scored 2113 and 1822 for a total of 3935 points. Sean Schoonmaker was
the most consistent player with a total of 1927 and 1928 for 3855
points. Adam Stein scored 2075 and 1704 respectively to get into the
finals with 3779 points.

There is one thing that I noticed, strategically, that was commonly
missed. Players didn't seem to concentrate enough on the make up of
their opponent's fleet. The battle ended at the end of the turn where
one player lost half of their point total in destroyed ships and
fighters. An inspection of the fleets shows that there are several ways
of destroying more than half of an opponent's fleet. However, few people
seemed to pay attention to this. For instance, I saw one case where a
player destroyed an opponent's battlecruiser. Taking out a heavy cruiser
and a destroyer would win the player the game. Instead, the player
concentrated on taking out the opponent's battleship even though that
still wouldn't be enough points. In other words,
"battlecruiser-cruiser-destroyer" was the optimum combination for
killing the opponent, "battlecruiser-battleship-destroyer (and in one
case, cruiser!)" was not. 

Another thing I noticed was that too few players kept their smaller
ships out of harm's way when they became damaged. Since you only get
points for destroying enemy ships, heavily damaged, crippled ships don't
count. Once a small ship has been crippled (or as it's getting that
way), it's in your best interest to keep it out of the way. I saw far
too many players throw their escorts into the fray instead of keeping
them at long range, where they could snipe but not act as easy point
targets.

Just a few points for those who might care.

Allan Goodall - agoodall@canada.com
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