Screed Dictor & Demo vs Screed Cymoon & Dictor

Andy brought another Screed list as a counter to my own. This time, he had a Cymoon with Avenger, Needa/TRCs and Quad Cannons, an Interdictor with Overload Pulse and all the bells and whistles, a pair of token passing Gozantis, and a squad ball consisting of Ciena, Valen, and Jonus. I had the bid, took first, and picked his Contested Outpost. I moved the outpost and then he moved it again to make it mostly out of play. Here is the setup:

In the first round, I landed on an asteroid with the Interdictor, taking the crit that prevents long range attacks. An inauspicious start. I split the Dictor and Demo to make Andy choose between the two with his Cymoon. He managed to keep out of range of the Dictor regardless of my crit. Here is the opening of round 2:

In the second round, I rammed my Demo with the Gozanti to prevent myself from getting into Cymoon range. I then turned in with the Dictor and repaired the crit with a repair token from the Goz. Lastly, I sent Jonus in to range one of one of the opposing Gozantis and then hit that Gozanti with Demo, knocking it out. I thought I could Engine Tech out of range of the Cymoon again, but alas, that was not to be. The Dictor Overload Pulsed my defense tokens and the Cymoon was able to get the six damage to kill me thanks to Screed and the TRC. My squadrons hit the Cymoon in return. Here is the opening of round 3:

In the third round, I came in behind the Cymoon to give chase. My own Gozanti was eliminated. My squadrons did work. In the fourth round, I eliminated his second Gozanti with a Jonus assisted shot. The Cymoon was down to just a couple of hull by the end of the round. My Ciena finally went down as well. Here is the opening of round 5: 

In the fifth round, I finished off the Cymoon. We called it at that point as we had lost count of the rounds and thought that it was the sixth. Andy was able to collect two station tokens. I managed to win by just 40 points, so it was quite close.

I felt like I messed this one up in a couple places. First, the Interdictor positioning at the end of the first round was not good. I landed on the asteroid simply out of carelessness and had I done almost any other maneuver, I would have been in range of the Cymoon at the top of the second. My other mistake was being way too greedy with Demo. Instead of popping a near worthless Gozanti, I could have headed for the station to pick up points that way instead. I blame Jonus. I was itching to use his ability and ended up trading way down.

On Andy’s side, he was fooling around with his Grav Shift and felt like pushing it out of play instead of back toward his position. I made him choose between the Dictor and the Demo and he chose the Demo, which was probably a good move as his Dictor was out of place to brings its Overload Pulse to bear. MMJ and Boba just put out a lot of damage so that’s tough to soak up. Had he pulled the station back and managed to get two more rounds of the outpost, he would have scraped by with a second player victory due to a tie. On the other hand, he would have had to slow down a lot, which would have made for a totally different game.