I have the luck of living in a town with 5 Assaults and decided to play in 3 of them.

First tournament was 14 players, second 9 and last 13 players.

The obligatory list:

Royal Guard Interceptor, Push the limit, hull upgrade 28

6 Academy Ties 72

The main idea behind this swarm list is to deny high value targets to the opponent.

If by the second turn of the engagement you are down 2 ties and you've taken out biggs, then you're already ahead point wise, and this means that they need to kill more than 2 of yours for every one of them you kill.

On the other hand, if you're playing some kind of Howl swarm, then even if you've dealt slightly more damage, you should still be down Howl + 1 Tie (30pts), while you've destroyed one of them (25/27pts). You then need to kill more than one of them for every 2 ship you loose.

One other advantage of having 6 ships with PS 1 is the ease of flying. Having the same PS, you can choose the order in which you move them and moving usually first means you know the board and can plan accordingly. This means the list is less tiring to play than a standard howl swarm over the week-end.

Why the Royal Guard? It's actually a late addition to the list, as I usually play some variant of 8 Tie swarm. The main goal for this ship was to have an edge in the end game, where his maniability and high PS make it a formidable opponent. It's also easier to focus fire 7 ships than 8.

With reliability in numbers and blocking power, the list is very good against any 3 small ships rebel builds, and has no real nemesis (till blount...). Biggest problems are against other high agility ships as it can quickly devolve into who rolls better.

The list went 9-1 over the week-end, but I'll gloss over most of my wins, to concentrate on my single "lucky" loss.

It was a 9 player tournament, and my opponent of round 3 was fielding:

Krassis, recon, HLC

Holwrunner

3 Academies

I focused fire on Howl on the 2 first shooting turns, taking her down, but Krassis murdered me. I made a mistake and tried to take down the academies to come back in points, but he rolled great evades and I did almost nothing while he took my swarm appart.

Luckily for me, my strength of schedule allowed me to play in the final 2 for a return game. This time he could roll evades to save his life and my Etan+Ten Nub combo took appart his defender+miniswarm.

This defeat allowed me to pratice against the krassis+mini swarm list, which really came handy in the third tournament, where I won with 2 ties left to 1 Tie against another opponent playing the same list. This time I decided to focus Krassis early on when holw was still at long range to get a few damages in, killed holw in the next phase and finished Krassis, before going hand to hand with the 3 escorting academies.

Tie swarm for the win!