SAC-38 has been posted
Game ID 4586430
Rebels
Beat 37, 36-1, and 36-2
I’ll refrain from commenting on m fleet until others have faced it. :3
Hmm.
Stats on my challenge so far:
1 Star Fun
3 Stars Difficulty
0 victories of 4 attempts by Spartancrusader
1 victory of 18 attempts by Rebellion, with the response “Worst challenge ever!”
0 victories of 3 attempts by Aevolve
First-try victory by Yurch
Any feedback on it?
Saw a packed set of cruisers in a corner deployment with a low overall count. I assumed a tankfleet or fighter rush of some sort from that, so I went with a siege team (similar to 28) as my exploratory fleet. Didn’t assign a rating… I always forget.
I think it’s probably a little heavy on stuff that can’t hurt cruiser shields, but individual flaws aren’t always relevant in SAC. The next player has to fight off the frigates of 36 combined with the antifrigate hate of 37 and 38.
Yeah, I ended up with a substantial amount of anti-frigate gear, including the scattered frigates across my line to dick with formations.
As it is, though, as long as my Cruiser Laser ships can survive (or do enough damage for the laser ships to finish the deed with plasma) I should be set. :3
39 going up.
A slow, useless pile of armored steering wheels. Somehow manages to beat both 36’s, 37 and 38.
._. They beat the frigate rushes?
I gotta see this.
The painter escorts seize on frigates which lets the fleet get by a little easier.
The air defense is the miserable part. Even armored empire AA frigates get assassinated in short order, so there’s not much option other than armor/repair for the cruisers.
I don’t really like the result. 40 is gonna be real easy. 
40 already happened.
GOD MY OWN FLEETS ARE IRRITATING.
Edit: 40 is up.
And the “my own fleets are irritating” bit is when I realized how godawful OBNOXIOUS my combined EMP/AA support frigates are.
Doing that with an Imperial fleet is very impressive.
It looks like SAC is moving from frigate rushes to the land of heavily armored tanks.
SAC-42 up, cowards ahead.
42 appears to be malformed.
This.
It crashes GSB when I try to play it.
I can’t load 42 either.
I don’t undestand why.
Anyway, reposted as SAC-42 (re) Cowards Ahead, it should work now.
Oh, wow. I was not expecting it to just be a flood of missiles.
Edit: How do you get them to run away like that? o_O
Set the engagement range to the double of the range you want.
You know, I could just repost SAC-36 as SAC-43. It defeats SAC-42. 41 and 40.
The other option, a missiles vs scrambler dynamic, isn’t terribly subtle either. A plasma/scrambler team would easily clear the last three, which of course would be subsequently run the hell over by anything moving faster than 0.25. We end up with frigates or fast cruisers either way.
This is one reason why I’m so interested in getting scramblers to degrade with damage and other methods. As of now, if you dilute a missile fleet with too many other ranged weapons, you lose ability to overwhelm scrambler defenses. This can turn missiles into a bit of an albatross for combined arms forces… there’s no middle ground with scramblers involved.
Unless, of course, someone pulls off a super disciplined EMP beam fleet that somehow keeps scramblers knocked out.
Ultimately I want to see more general purpose fleets in SAC. How would we get there?
I was thinking of setting up a tournament. Anyone who entered a fleet in the tournament would need to both post the fleet as a challenge and keep an unaltered saved deployment of the fleet. Then he would try his saved deployment against as many other entered fleets as he wanted. He would report the fleets his entry had defeated here in a thread in the forum. The entries would be ranked by the number of other entries it had defeated at least once. People could enter as many fleets as they like. Successful fleets would have to be able to defeat a wide variety of enemies. This would tend to encourage general purpose fleets I think. Although we have seen examples of one dimensional fleets that can defeat many others. I also think that larger resource budgets tend to lead to more general purpose fleets as it becomes easier to cover more contingencies without sacrificing critical combat capability.
Maybe we should make the new tournament 50,000 points and 100 pilots. This way, it’s less fighter-laden, and you get to see some really interesting cruiser/frigate action.
In SAC-1, the ratio of pilot to points was 1:200. I’m thinking that if we had a tournament at 1:500, there would be less fighter swarms.
At 1 pilot for every 200 points, it’s almost asking for a sizeable fighter contingent. But at 500 points per pilot, fighters become ‘too cheap,’ so the battle turns into more of a frigate and cruiser action.
Maybe 500 points per pilot is extreme. Anything over 200 though would help thin out the fighters. Say, 200 pilots, 60,000 points, for a 1:300 average.
Battles which are set up to be cruiser-frigate heavy are a lot of fun. Taking the fighter element more or less out of it, but not removing it altogether; that makes for a different kind of battle than some of these ‘fighter fests.’
SAC-1 wasn’t a downright fighter fest, but it was leaning that way.
Anyway; I’m all for a new tournament, whatever the specifics.