I come from a mainly 40k background, and the principle methods of winning in that game when I played were mobility, target saturation, and target overload. These elements together provided a large army which was able to dictate your opponents movement and ability to react to situations.

It seems to me that this can be carried over to an extent to x-wing. Obviously the scale of the game is much smaller, and the maneuverability of most fleets are relatively similar. However, as the number of threads indicate, there are ships that use this very well (yes, I'm talking about the phantom), and builds that use a deathstar approach (the falcon). My thought process is that if you limit the movement and ability to use their undoubted talents, than you'll increase your chances of beating them.

Looking at what we can use, I'm looking at ion and stress. It seems that ffg has similar thoughts, as these are becoming more available through turrets, abilities, torpedoes and missiles.

Is this a viable tactic to build a squad around? I've had a few thoughts on this and I've come up with the following:

Blue squadron - flechette, ion cannon, FCS

Blue squadron - flechette, ion cannon, FCS

Bandit squadron - ion pulse

Gold squadron - ICT, flechette, R3-A2

Plenty of stress and ion being flung around, with choice of weaponry on B-wing making them a Swiss army knife with weapon choice being used depending on where you find them. The Bandit is a threat, then an annoyance, and the gold can potter around the board stacking up stress if that's best as maneuverability is not as necessary with the turret. The main downside being the crummy PS2 across the piece - although as they're all the same, than you can chose which weapon to fire first...

Any thoughts?

I like the ion stress combination, I think it is a bit under-used. I can understand why as it is 2 ships to control 1. Probably not as effective against TIE swarms.

For the most part people who post here focus on firepower and hit-points. You will see allot of jousting comparisons.

One thing I will point out is you have a very low average of pilot skill. The Ion and stress effects are nice but they need to shoot in order to make that effect. Your squadron is at risk of having ships destroyed before they can have their effects.

I've been running a Gold Squadron with R3-A2 and an ion turret and hes pretty much my unsung MVP. Total lockdown on a target for mulitple turns. Its awesome. Unfortunately, as Marinealver said, that lows PS will annihilate you when going up against high PS lists, which is all the rage these days. You just wont have TL on the turn they're in R2-3, and after that theyll be at R1 or everyone'll be K-turning, and stress will prevent you from getting those locks. Honestly, just wait for the ion torpedo to drop and that turret many think will be a stresser (or is it a cannon?). THEN the board control madness will begin in earnest.

As Bipolar Potter mention above, you will have trouble getting TL with your ships due to the low PS of your pilots. Something that could alleviate that problem is if you can manage to squeeze in Dutch Vander into your list.

I have found board control to be less viable then I would have thought. That being said Scum and Villainy is suppose to be all about control.

The problem with board control is that it usually isn't deadly enough, at least not in a tournament environment. Funny as hell to play with but takes too long to achieve victory.

I'm a mostly Imperial player and I have many stress inducing options available to me. I try to bury targets in multiple stress tokens. Let them choke on their anxiety.

I believe all ion tokens are removed at once, so layering ion doesn't work like layering stress does. I think you could being one or two ships with Ion and that might be sufficient.

Multiple ions are good for big ships.

I think the challenge of this list would be to keep highly mobile ships in arc. Remember, too, that R3 A2 only works in primary arc, so it's not going to be using the droid much if it's stressed.

Tangent: there's something very fascinating to me about the use of "deathstar" in the OP. The term was used for so many years in other games to represent the uber unit that I feel like it's come back home...I'll add that I don't think the Falcon is a deathstar in that context, though. It's more like a horde . Low damage output but eventually overwhelming because of its staying power.