Here's a thought: learn how to predict what your opponent is going to do and pick your maneuvers accordingly.

I think you're trivializing the Power of Choice that comes with DeCloaking.

And for that matter, Advanced Sensors with mobility-actions.

Even if you predict what your opponent intends to do and attempt to punish them for it, if they see the punishment coming they can change their mind.

The Decloak function has a range of 5 from one side to the other.

Decloak with the Barrel-Roll action has a range of 9 from one side to the other.

And that is all done prior to executing their chosen maneuver.

Phantoms, moreso than any Hypermobile ship previously instilled in the game, do not have a position, so much as they have a Probability Cloud.

You've got a lot of positions to cover, Mr. Predictor.

Honestly, I see a lot of parallels with the Fettigator argument. Unless you're playing without asteroids and other ships, not every option is going to be open to you at any given time. What's even more important, however, is the point you glossed over: with the Phantom, you have to plan two moves ahead every time. If one of those moves doesn't pan out, the other may be completely useless to you, or worse. The ability to be even more reactionary than usual with the decloak is extremely valuable, I won't say it's not. But what happens when the direction you were planning on decloaking and K-turning becomes closed off to you? Sure, you can decloak in a different direction, but that hardly corrects your chosen maneuver. There's a chance you'll still find some way to avoid firing arcs, but then you probably won't have anyone in yours. Considering the Phantom's high price, that's a very expensive missed opportunity.

and K-turning becomes closed off to you?

First who would K-turn in a Phantom? you are just begging to throw away a 30+ point ship doing that

Second that being said I agree with you, you have 3 possible points for the standard decloak (Echo has 6 but the point is the same the numbers are a bit bigger) forward, left, right most of the time, either right or left is a "useless" option that leaves you with 2 Options

Then you have asteroids/other ships you cannot overlap either of them with the decloak and you cannot have the template overlap asteroids, that could rule out another of the options.

Then the question is just down to what the maneuver is because the opponent obviously would try to avoid bumping with a now exposed Phantom as well as avoid asteroids.

It isn't as much prediction as it is deduction, you just look through the options on what you would do in your opponent's shoes to make the best move and then either have an arc covering that area or put your ships there so he can bump. Also it should go with out saying to leave yourself with arcs covering his less maneuverable ships so if he flies into your arc with the phantom you shoot it and if he doesn't you shoot his other ships

Here's a thought: learn how to predict what your opponent is going to do and pick your maneuvers accordingly.

I think you're trivializing the Power of Choice that comes with DeCloaking.

And for that matter, Advanced Sensors with mobility-actions.

Even if you predict what your opponent intends to do and attempt to punish them for it, if they see the punishment coming they can change their mind.

The Decloak function has a range of 5 from one side to the other.

Decloak with the Barrel-Roll action has a range of 9 from one side to the other.

And that is all done prior to executing their chosen maneuver.

Phantoms, moreso than any Hypermobile ship previously instilled in the game, do not have a position, so much as they have a Probability Cloud.

You've got a lot of positions to cover, Mr. Predictor.

The trick will be to evaluate how many positions in the Phantom's probability cloud are advantageous for the Phantom, and preferentially deny those. Like Lagomorphia said, if you can force an opposing Phantom to choose between arc-dodging and taking a shot, you're in a really good position.

Honestly, I see a lot of parallels with the Fettigator argument. Unless you're playing without asteroids and other ships, not every option is going to be open to you at any given time. What's even more important, however, is the point you glossed over: with the Phantom, you have to plan two moves ahead every time. If one of those moves doesn't pan out, the other may be completely useless to you, or worse. The ability to be even more reactionary than usual with the decloak is extremely valuable, I won't say it's not. But what happens when the direction you were planning on decloaking and K-turning becomes closed off to you? Sure, you can decloak in a different direction, but that hardly corrects your chosen maneuver. There's a chance you'll still find some way to avoid firing arcs, but then you probably won't have anyone in yours. Considering the Phantom's high price, that's a very expensive missed opportunity.

It's a critically expensive one even if all that happens is the Phantom misses a shot--realistically it's almost half of your list and you're counting on that offense to win the game for you. But it's even worse if the options all lead to getting attacks; in a game a while back, I k-turned Echo planning a left decloak with port rotation (planning to flank and destroy the X-wing that was tailing me). But it turned out when I was actually able to measure that the two left decloak options both had templates just nicking asteroid corners, and the forward-left would have dumped me directly on to an asteroid. And the right-rear option was blocked by a B-wing.

So I had only two decloak options, both of which were bad. I elected not to decloak at all, choosing the extra dice from the cloak instead of dodging an arc but ending up stressed and pointing in the wrong direction. As I've said elsewhere, four unmodified dice don't go nearly as far as you'd like them to, and that's how I lost (IIRC) 40 points' worth of Echo in a single round in a game I thought I had wrapped up… and I'm not a bad pilot, and I was fairly in practice with the Phantom at the time.

A friend of mine (RogueThirteen on BGG and elsewhere) likes to say that my the time you can actually shoot at each other, any given ship has between 0 and 1 good moves. The Phantom has a lot more options than most ships, but usually there's still just one spot you'd really like to be and one orientation you'd really like to have. In my experience forcing a Phantom to compromise by giving up at least one of those usually means a win.

and K-turning becomes closed off to you?

First who would K-turn in a Phantom? you are just begging to throw away a 30+ point ship doing that

Second that being said I agree with you, you have 3 possible points for the standard decloak (Echo has 6 but the point is the same the numbers are a bit bigger) forward, left, right most of the time, either right or left is a "useless" option that leaves you with 2 Options

Then you have asteroids/other ships you cannot overlap either of them with the decloak and you cannot have the template overlap asteroids, that could rule out another of the options.

Then the question is just down to what the maneuver is because the opponent obviously would try to avoid bumping with a now exposed Phantom as well as avoid asteroids.

It isn't as much prediction as it is deduction, you just look through the options on what you would do in your opponent's shoes to make the best move and then either have an arc covering that area or put your ships there so he can bump. Also it should go with out saying to leave yourself with arcs covering his less maneuverable ships so if he flies into your arc with the phantom you shoot it and if he doesn't you shoot his other ships

It's a worst case scenario, but there will be times when you want to K-turn. That does not, however, mean that only K-turns have the potential to put you in a SNAFU. It was just the example I used to underscore my point.

So I had only two decloak options, both of which were bad. I elected not to decloak at all, choosing the extra dice from the cloak instead of dodging an arc but ending up stressed and pointing in the wrong direction. As I've said elsewhere, four unmodified dice don't go nearly as far as you'd like them to, and that's how I lost (IIRC) 40 points' worth of Echo in a single round in a game I thought I had wrapped up… and I'm not a bad pilot, and I was fairly in practice with the Phantom at the time.

Something like this happened to me too in my Imdaar game, I had Rexlar with 2 Hull left, Dark Curse with stealth and an untouched Whisper against a Shieldless Lando(with VI+Luke) and a Shieldless Bandit a minor miscalculation with the end result of a decloak meant Whisper bumped the Bandit, was left with no cloak, no focus and Whisper couldn't blast that bandit at range 1 to recloak and get another focus, so Lando oneshotted Whisper, Dark Curse at range 1 whiffed on the Bandit, who then rolled a single crit against Rexlar which got through his 3 dice and was a direct hit. It was a 79 point swing in one turn that had that one bump not occurred I probably would have won, (Whisper and DC should have been able to kill Lando in 1-2 turns even if he killed off Brath with Lando that round instead of shooting at a cloaked Whisper

Phantoms are far from unbeatable early game. The high PS phantoms need to die fast or they won't die.

Low PS phantoms will be much much easier to kill and be high priority targets.

No matter what Echo does any of the high PS turrets and Firesprays can shoot before him by taking Vet Instincts, denying him cloak before shots go off. He can afford maybe a round of that maybe.

Whisper lacks the crazy mobility of Echo, but makes up for it in Shooting before almsot everything and having crazy focus actions, but even she can go down fast.

The last game I played against her in she died to two attacks. A PS12 shot from a CR-90 and a PS 12 shot with Chewie, both courtesy of Roark. That isn't standard play obviously, but just having Roark on the field left her hamstrung.

I have shown different solutions to the problem on rebel side in another thread. I will post some of them and they're not all that expensive too most of the time.

1) Roark Garnet, if possible with ion Turret and if you like with intel officer depending on what other ships you run. Roark messing with the initiative has to be a priority target for phantom players for anyone getting an arc on the phantom will get the boost that turn. And even Z-95 can do some damage against a cloakless phantom.

2) Lt.Blount with ion pulse missiles. Maybe also Deadeye or anyone with an action or TL for him. If he gets an arc a single time the phantom is hosed. Or just take multiple Bandit squadrons with ion pulse and munitions failsafe.

3) Gold Squadron with R2-A3 and ion cannon. Double threat again for the phantom. If the Y-Wing ever gets an arc he's stressed. If it gets too close there are chances to get ionized. Both of those things can spell doom for a phantom.

There some other counters to the phantom, a lot of them have been mentioned already here and certainly there are some that we have not yet thought about.

But i don't even think it's that bad that rebel lists need to adapt to something else than just swarms. Maybe we will also need specialized lists like a rock paper scissors system. If you play them you will beat Phantoms but be weaker against swarms or other rebel builds. The same goes for imperial lists. After all they also need to adapt to the phantom.

Soooo for curiosity. If I were to take two phantoms and say, Carnor Jax.

If I were to get Carnor Jax within range 1 of one of these enemy targets, they couldn't use focus or evade actions against HIM, or at all, even when the phantoms are attacking?

Soooo for curiosity. If I were to take two phantoms and say, Carnor Jax.

If I were to get Carnor Jax within range 1 of one of these enemy targets, they couldn't use focus or evade actions against HIM, or at all, even when the phantoms are attacking?

Yep

Curious to try this out:

24: Roark w/ ITC

31: Wedge w/ Swarm tactics

23: Red Squadron Pilot

21: Blount w/ IPM, VI

Total: 99

It shoots at 12/9/9/8 or 12/12/8/4 (depending on whether I want the ITC firing last or not). With 2 ion sources, one of which is a turret, it covers the bases for anti-phantom goodies.

But it also packs 4 ships which I like. The raw damage potential isn't fantastic, but it's acceptable for such a high PS rebel squad. Plus it's 99 points for a shot at initiative.

Could trade VI for Deadeye on Blount, but I don't want to dump all his upgrades on that one IPM shot.

Thoughts?

Interesting Sekac, I would look at swapping the Red to a Rookie with R3-A2 to potentially hand out some PS12 stress so the Phantoms can't ACD.

Interesting Sekac, I would look at swapping the Red to a Rookie with R3-A2 to potentially hand out some PS12 stress so the Phantoms can't ACD.

Yeah that'd be an option too but I prefer to have at least 2 ships moving at the same PS. If everyone activates at different times, I tend to get in my own way a bit. But that's just personal taste.

I do like stressbot, but this list isn't designed to be purely anti-phanny, but an all-comers list with phantoms in mind.

But what happens when the direction you were planning on decloaking and K-turning becomes closed off to you?

If you play the Phantom correctly, you should never have to K-turn with it.

See post #29.

But what happens when the direction you were planning on decloaking and K-turning becomes closed off to you?

If you play the Phantom correctly, you should never have to K-turn with it.

That's completely discounting the fact that you have an opponent. If you play the game correctly, you'll know situationally when K-turning is better than not K-turning.

But what happens when the direction you were planning on decloaking and K-turning becomes closed off to you?

If you play the Phantom correctly, you should never have to K-turn with it.

When there are lots of ships on the board and you're always in someone's arc, K-turning a Phantom is a bad idea. But refusal to ever execute one just because you're in a Phantom can make you predictable. That's fatal.