(Ever have one of those excellent ideas at one in the morning and when you wake up the next day you aren't so sure anymore?)

At the time of this writing the boards and experience are telling me to deal with Falcons in two ways:

1) The TIE swarm or 2) If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

How about 3) Fly away from them for an hour?

It isn't nearly as fun as taking one down but you could escape with a tie instead of a loss. (Better for you; not so good for them.) Maybe more realistically a modified win for them that would hurt their chances to take the tourney. This could also get in their heads, since you are planning for this and they aren't, and hopefully cause them to make a mistake that you could capitalize on.

Has anyone tried this? What are the reasons that this wouldn't work? Should I go back to bed? Am I being a poopy-head?

Yeah... have you seen how much of the board that a range 3 turret can cover? And how fast the YTs are? The falcon kills just one of your ships, and your whole plan is foiled.

There's a much simpler and much more effective solution to EVERY Falcon build though: shoot it until it is ded.

It's not technically unsportsmanlike as long as you don't delay on picking maneuvers, etc.

Yeah... have you seen how much of the board that a range 3 turret can cover? And how fast the YTs are? The falcon kills just one of your ships, and your whole plan is foiled.

There's a much simpler and much more effective solution to EVERY Falcon build though; shoot it until it is ded.

What are the reasons that this wouldn't work?

-A 4 forward from a large base ship covers the same distance as a 5 forward from a small base ship, so the small ship is not significantly faster.

-The board is a square, so you have to make turns at some point. Doing a bank or turn maneuver while the turreted ship makes a forward maneuver will still have you in arc.

-You would have to have basically all of your ships run away, giving the turreted ship many choices of target.

-You would have to avoid both the turreted beast and its escorts for an hour.

At the time of this writing the boards and experience are telling me to deal with Falcons in two ways:

1) The TIE swarm or 2) If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I can't speak to your experience, but the boards are wrong on this point. There are a lot of ways to deal with Falcons, all of which boil down to FTS Gecko's "shoot until ded". (There's even a whole thread's worth of them, lost somewhere in the dim mists of late last week.) And z0m4d made the very relevant point that the moment your opponent loses a ship comprising 50-60% of his or her list, the game becomes close even if it costs you 50-60% of your list to do it.

How about 3) Fly away from them for an hour?

Even presuming this works--which it probably won't, for reasons others have outlined--it would still be a bad idea. "Not losing" isn't the same thing as winning, at least not if you want to perform well in a tournament . (Outside a tournament, no one wants to play a game that may result in a 0-0 tie, so you're probably better off just asking your opponent to play something else or finding a different opponent.)

I've got a bad feeling about this......

At the time of this writing the boards and experience are telling me to deal with Falcons in two ways:

1) The TIE swarm or 2) If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I can't speak to your experience, but the boards are wrong on this point. There are a lot of ways to deal with Falcons, all of which boil down to FTS Gecko's "shoot until ded". (There's even a whole thread's worth of them, lost somewhere in the dim mists of late last week.) And z0m4d made the very relevant point that the moment your opponent loses a ship comprising 50-60% of his or her list, the game becomes close even if it costs you 50-60% of your list to do it.

I wouldn't say the "boards" are wrong, just his summary of it. You, and others, recognize that there are other ways to defeat the Falcons. Heck, even I, who thinks 3PO MF Falcons are too easy and make for a dull game, will acknowledge that if you just fire away repeatedly at the Falcon it will die.

Urgh pacifists they need a good beating the lot of em.

Violence solves all problems!

That's what tv taught me and tv would not lie.

I wouldn't say the "boards" are wrong, just his summary of it. You, and others, recognize that there are other ways to defeat the Falcons. Heck, even I, who thinks 3PO MF Falcons are too easy and make for a dull game, will acknowledge that if you just fire away repeatedly at the Falcon it will die.

Indeed, it's been debated to death elsewhere about how to take down a Fat Falcon. The consensus is that there's a huge (HUGE!) array of builds out there that can do it, but not many that can both take down a Falcon list AND a Phantom list reliably.

Which is kind of a silly argument, really. Because we have a balanced game, and in a balanced game nothing should be able to "reliably" take down multiple competitive lists anyway.

Thanks everybody. I will be returning to pointing my guns at the Falcon instead of away from it. (And sleeping at night ...)

could always unload a crap ton of missles and torpedos for the "Alpha Strike" manuever.

could always unload a crap ton of missles and torpedos for the "Alpha Strike" manuever.

You could always miss with them too!

Feel free to run away from it... while piloting a firespray with engine upgrade and outmanoeuver. Just because you're running does not mean that you can't shoot backwards. Han does it all the time while running through the Death Star

Firespray plus a couple of defenders means that falcons never out of your arc.

Also, thanks for posting other options here. I couldn't find a thread that wasn't bemoaning the situation.

Oh you want moaning I'll give you moaning I played last night and my friend broke out his falcon he took chewie and 3OP and every turn did evade as his actions.

Took bleedin forever to kill it.

Oh you want moaning I'll give you moaning I played last night and my friend broke out his falcon he took chewie and 3OP and every turn did evade as his actions.

Took bleedin forever to kill it.

Really? To read these boards, there's no problem at all. "You just kill the Falcon, durr," as though a skilled player with the Falcon has no say in it whatsoever.

Oh you want moaning I'll give you moaning I played last night and my friend broke out his falcon he took chewie and 3OP and every turn did evade as his actions.

Took bleedin forever to kill it.

Really? To read these boards, there's no problem at all. "You just kill the Falcon, durr," as though a skilled player with the Falcon has no say in it whatsoever.

They obviously must be talking about Han then.

Oh you want moaning I'll give you moaning I played last night and my friend broke out his falcon he took chewie and 3OP and every turn did evade as his actions.

Took bleedin forever to kill it.

Really? To read these boards, there's no problem at all. "You just kill the Falcon, durr," as though a skilled player with the Falcon has no say in it whatsoever.

Of course a skilled player has a say in it; a skilled player has an effect on how well any list performs.

The question from the OP, though, wasn't "how do I deal with a player at least as skilled as I am?" but rather "is just running away a reasonable strategy when facing the current Falcon lists?" And in response to that specific question, it seems reasonable and on-topic to answer "no, just shoot it until it dies".

More generally, the questions about Falcons recently have been things like "Who else is for banning Threepio?" and "Fat Falcons are really stupid, aren't they?" And I don't really regard those as reasonable questions to ask in the first place, since they presume way too much about the game.

As I said in another thread recently: if you (meaning not you, R2ShihTzu, but a more general "you") want to argue that Falcons can be a negative play experience in ways that are unusual or even unique to it, I'm all ears. I may not agree with you, but I'll certainly listen, and we can talk that point over. But if you want to argue that the Falcon is broken, and specifically that it's a major threat to the game now but not six months ago, then it's much harder to have a meaningful conversation.

(It's a bit like talking about Expose, actually. If the person I'm talking to has a good grasp of the game and an open mind, then we can talk about how much an action is typically worth in comparison to an extra die and how many cases there really are where it makes sense to use Expose as an offensive boost. But if my conversation partners are starting from the position that four dice is more than three so obviously Expose is good, then when I reply I'm just going to hammer on the idea that (1) Expose is a bad upgrade and (2) there is no second point.)

Actually this is a better idea that you might think.

One important part of flying a Falcon list is stying close to the sides. This limits the number of dirrections they can be attacked from. (No matter what people say, no Falcon is happy when your entire list is shooting at it.)

If you fly away from it (which is actually pretty easy if they are just slowly looping arround the edge) you will force them to chase you. If you can quickly turn arround and charge it when it comes after you things should go pretty well for you.