On SHNN chat tonight, TheHutts commented that there are at least 3 Daala variants. These 3 won tournaments recently:

Daala w/Raxus Primes won LowerHuttaCon (Daala in her Prime)
http://www.bloomilk.com/Squad/139645/daala-in-her-prime-v2-0

Daala w/12 Snowtroopers won Indiana Regional
(couldn't find the link to Lou's squad)

Daala w/21 Snowtroopers and only the Snowtrooper commanders won PA Regional (Bare Bones Snowtroopers)
http://www.bloomilk.com/Squad/138208/bare-bones-snowtroopers

The Raxus version took a Sled, which could be an option in either other variant as well by dropping a couple troopers.

There was also a variant with attacking Dignitaries with Super-Stealth backup.

I wanted to open this thread for discussion about which variants seem strongest in which circumstances.

I think Bare Bones has an advantage over the other two due to the extra troopers, but it has more bad matchups. Without Pellaeon, Dooku's Chain Lightning becomes a big problem. They are more susceptible to Celeste Morne turning them into a Rak-horde. By maxing out at 16 instead of 20 attack, uber-high defenses become harder to crack. (Even tougher if you add SSM on top of that.) But the Raxus build maxes out even lower than that.

What all of them do is match up well versus "traditional" builds. In what I'm calling a traditional build, you have 2-4 threats of cost 20-50. You often have some sort of "balance" in that you have some pieces to handle various situations:
1. Some pieces might have evade/stealth or parry to have defense against shooters or melee
2. Some pieces might have direct damage to avoid high defenses
3. Often there is one piece that is a heavy-hitter, capable of 100+ damage in one turn
4. Often a mixture of shooters and melee to get around an enemy that is good at melee defense or good at shooter defense... attack them using their weakness, not their strength.

And none of that matters to a Daala squad.
1. The troopers often charge adjacent and shoot. No evade. No stealth/cloaked. No parry. Only LSDeflect or Defense work, and those cost Force points.
2. Direct damage is fine - it can certainly kill the troopers, but it's generally less efficient (cost-wise) than using plain attacks.
3. The 100dmg heavy hitter wastes much of the potential damage because he's only killing one or two troopers.
4. The defense of a Daala squad is numbers... essentially it's Damage Reduction by making the enemy waste a 30 dmg shot on a 10 or 20hp point trooper. The mixture of shooters and melee doesn't matter, since the individual troopers have no defense anyway.

Deathshots have their own built in defense to mass kill effects (like Repulse or Unleash the Force) because once they kill the guy, the force power stops.

Raxus tops out at 13/30 by my math and is a pretty set build which leads to predictability. I think that Snow have a few more options, but get fewer troopers if they go with any other tech because of the need of the 2 commanders. Add in the fact that Pellaeon takes up his own 16 (and he needs to have at least 1 guy to swap out) and that cuts the number of troopers down even more.

I have been working on a few builds, but keep coming up with one of the two classic trooper problems. Not enough troopers or not enough tech/CEs. And there is enough stuff out there that does pretty well against them.

The real weakness in as much as it is, is that besides charging fire, there isn't any movement breakers. It isn't too difficult to figure out where your opponent can get to (even on a charge), so I think after people play against daala more, the meta will figure out some solutions to keep it in check.