But it will, people won't run a turret as carefree because now they have to deal with ships that get bonuses against them. It will shake up the meta enough that YT/Deci builds wont have as easy of a time.

returning to a varied meta is hardly the same as warping it into a meta with two classes of ship

But it will, people won't run a turret as carefree because now they have to deal with ships that get bonuses against them. It will shake up the meta enough that YT/Deci builds wont have as easy of a time.

returning to a varied meta is hardly the same as warping it into a meta with two classes of ship

Thing is though with more and more SC finishing it shows that this "meta" is purely forum whine and non-meta lists are taking top spot.

with more and more SC finishing

SC?

But it will, people won't run a turret as carefree because now they have to deal with ships that get bonuses against them. It will shake up the meta enough that YT/Deci builds wont have as easy of a time.

returning to a varied meta is hardly the same as warping it into a meta with two classes of ship

Thing is though with more and more SC finishing it shows that this "meta" is purely forum whine and non-meta lists are taking top spot.

While I'd agree, there were literally 3 players without turrets at yesterday's local tournie

Maybe it's forum-whine, maybe they're still hyped about their (not so) new toys, but the meta's there all the same

I've been doing my best to discourage it and doing pretty well in terms of win ratio, but I'm afraid I haven't changed anyone's mind

Scum certainly will at least change one person's mind (he's a sucker for the Aggressor)

with more and more SC finishing

SC?

Store Championships

But it will, people won't run a turret as carefree because now they have to deal with ships that get bonuses against them. It will shake up the meta enough that YT/Deci builds wont have as easy of a time.

returning to a varied meta is hardly the same as warping it into a meta with two classes of ship

Thing is though with more and more SC finishing it shows that this "meta" is purely forum whine and non-meta lists are taking top spot.

The results that I'm seeing seem be supporting the idea that fat turrets and Phantoms are the lists that need to be beat right now. Most of the store championships seem to be being won by one or the other (or both in the case of Decimator + Phantom). The instances where this isn't the case are getting threads created heralding the win by a non turret or Phantom list so are more visible than all of the tournaments that are won by variations on the expected lists.

Depending on what people are winning with, it may be a sign that the meta is shifting, not that there never was a fat turret meta. If there's a high number of Expose Decimators running around, lists full of B-Wings are going to start being a lot more successful.

As soon as Fel pushes, you know he's pulling a 2 move. Assuming you're using more than just a single big ship then a combination of rocks, your ships, his ships and the need to shed stress can cause him to either bump, or have no effective shot. Either way, you get to hit him, and he chooses between no tokens or no attack, and you can shoot whatever you like.

Just think about where you're choosing to engage him, and think a turn ahead when picking dials. He's only a crazy arc dodger when he has actions, and he only shoots well at range 1.

This on top of whatever answers you choose to build into your list as standard.

well, you're actually going to have to try and use that forward facing arc that almost every other ship has to worry about to do anything. *gasp*

i know this will be a foreign concept to many, but i guess it's finally time for you to have to adapt and evolve...

stress and ion mechanics with the rest of the list could also help.

No need to be hostile. I don't even play the Falcon these days, I'm just saying that Soontir can reliably guarantee that Han has to roll three hits to have a chance at damage. I don't think it's the end of the world because Han still has escorts that can burn down Soontir's tokens or hammer him after he spends them. I'm actually liking the fact that Falcons will have to plan their moves more carefully.

We'll still see people that just have Han drift in lay circles and shoot at whatever's closest but now there should be a clear divide between good Falcon players and bad ones. How they handle Soontir will be a reliable way to tell, because Soontir stands a very good chance of beating the bad Falcon players (not on his own, of course).

A couple things I've gathered from this thread:

A) Why insist on referring to ship "squads" as "lists?" I get that it includes the ship and all upgrades, but saying "flying your 'lists' around" just... well sorry, it sounds dumb. Makes more sense when discussing the actual construction of the entire squad, but not when referring to the actual ships during play.

B) I don't get the hostility towards turret ships... it's as if some people forget the Imperials have an absolute behemoth of a turret ship in the VT-49, and when upgraded and gelled well with the rest of the squad I think I would put it on par with any other large ship build.

C) I get that I'm pretty new to the game, but can we chill with the excessive use of acronyms? Seriously, "SC" for "store championships?" Dial it back a notch, gang.

D) I don't have the base Interceptor set with Soontir, but from what I gather, he'll have 2 automatic evades from action + this new upgrade card coming out... But even I can surmise some ways to drop him from my very limited experience. First thing coming to mind was have Blount hit him with an IPM, then swarm him with ships, maybe block him with the Z-95 even, and go bananas with Range 1 attacks and missiles. Can't be that bad, right?

But never mind me. Seriously, I'm still trying to teach myself not to crash into my own ships because I failed to consider movement order. I don't know nothin' about your fancy AT's and SC's and what have you.

Ten Numb, Veteran Insticts, Mangler Canon

Unless you roll all 3 blank red dices, Uncle Soontir will received a critical hit, no matter he is at range three, behind an asteroid, with Auto-Thrusters and Stealth Device, and even Ten is drunk in his cockpit

a) moves after Soontir and has the potential to outmaneuver hin

b) does cost exactly as much as Soontir (35points usually)

c) does pretty much guarantee a hit. If you are really keen on it you could add in Accuracy corrector for a 100% crit!

Nearly all the rest, like keep him in arc with turreted ships especially will not work, and even if it works, you will not have the offense to punch through normal Soontir who was already a pain to hit without AT.

This "learn to fly your turret ship" is all wishful thinking really. If it was that easy to do we would see Dash without Outrider a lot more, and any big ship that moves before Fel, or lacks movement options can pretty much forget it to get him in arc outright.

Dammit. Typed a long response and it got eaten when I hit submit.

B) I don't get the hostility towards turret ships... it's as if some people forget the Imperials have an absolute behemoth of a turret ship in the VT-49, and when upgraded and gelled well with the rest of the squad I think I would put it on par with any other large ship build.

People that hate turrets usually don't care what faction has the turrets. More big turrets is a bad thing, no matter what side they are on.

Ten Numb, Veteran Insticts, Mangler Canon

Unless you roll all 3 blank red dices, Uncle Soontir will received a critical hit, no matter he is at range three, behind an asteroid, with Auto-Thrusters and Stealth Device, and even Ten is drunk in his cockpit

This is the first and only counter to Soontir anyone mentioned here because:

a) moves after Soontir and has the potential to outmaneuver hin

b) does cost exactly as much as Soontir (35points usually)

c) does pretty much guarantee a hit. If you are really keen on it you could add in Accuracy corrector for a 100% crit!

Nearly all the rest, like keep him in arc with turreted ships especially will not work, and even if it works, you will not have the offense to punch through normal Soontir who was already a pain to hit without AT.

This "learn to fly your turret ship" is all wishful thinking really. If it was that easy to do we would see Dash without Outrider a lot more, and any big ship that moves before Fel, or lacks movement options can pretty much forget it to get him in arc outright.

You are seriously negative about what will work. All of the big turret ships have options for dealing with him. All of them have the potential to move after him and arc dodge him. Han w/VI+EU+Gunner(or Luke)+3PO+MF will be able to tear Soontir up. He'll be consistently throwing dice at Soontir while Soontir is trying to keep the Falcon in his arc. Even if Han only gets Soontir in his arc half the time he'll still handily win the race of attrition.

You don't see a lot of Dash without the Outrider title because there hasn't been much benefit to it. It is easier to not have to worry about your own firing arc. Autothrusters is giving people a reason to bother. If people can have success flying Buzzsaw Shuttles with EU, something with a dial as awesome as the Outrider shouldn't have any trouble.

We're talking about a ship that has got three (maybe four) health, is extremely vulnerable to blocking and stress effects, and is more or less stuck on green moves if he wants to get the actions needed to make him the monster you make him out to be. You seem to want hard counters for Soontir instead of just accepting that you'll need to adapt your tactics. Hard counters are a bad thing in my opinion because they make certain match-ups close to unwinnable for one side.

If you want a Soontir counter how about:

Wes Janson w/VI+EU+R3-A2.

He's 36 points, moves after Soontir and once he gets him in his arc can stress him without needing to hit him. If Soontir doesn't use PTL to avoid getting stress stacked on him, Wes has paid off without ever needing to use R3-A2. If Wes gets a chance to double stress Soontir, the X-Wing's slow dial will allow him to keep Soontir in arc and double stressed until he pops.

The way I've considered how strong AT actually is for interceptors vs turrets is a bit different to how I have seen most people discuss it online. AT means, essentially, that the interceptor gets one more evade vs turrets than it would have previously, so the way I consider it is this: how often does a turret ship- Falcon et al- do 2 or more points of damage to an interceptor? This will now be 1+ points of damage instead of 2+. My personal experience is that this happens quite often during the course of a game. You only have to have this happen 3 (or at most 4) times during the course of a game and the interceptor is dead. This also assumes that no other ships are damaging the interceptor, which is also not true in my experience.

AT definitely makes interceptors stronger vs turrets, there is no question about this- but this is exactly what it is intended to do. People have said it is undercosted, but once again the general consensus was that interceptors were too expensive for their effectiveness when facing turrets, so it seems that this was also intentional. Against non-turret ships it only does anything at range 3, where you wouldn't expect to do much damage- all it is doing here is protecting against gross statistical outliers.

If AT makes interceptors ridiculously powerful- which I don't think it will- there will undoubtedly be corrections down the line to pull it back. It seems way too early to make this call, though, imho. Certainly I don't think it is reasonable yet to be saying that Rebel lists are now useless, when Rebels have (at least seemed) to have an advantage over Imperial lists through the last few waves.

Keep calm and Auto-Thrust.

The way I've considered how strong AT actually is for interceptors vs turrets is a bit different to how I have seen most people discuss it online. AT means, essentially, that the interceptor gets one more evade vs turrets than it would have previously, so the way I consider it is this: how often does a turret ship- Falcon et al- do 2 or more points of damage to an interceptor? This will now be 1+ points of damage instead of 2+. My personal experience is that this happens quite often during the course of a game. You only have to have this happen 3 (or at most 4) times during the course of a game and the interceptor is dead. This also assumes that no other ships are damaging the interceptor, which is also not true in my experience.

AT definitely makes interceptors stronger vs turrets, there is no question about this- but this is exactly what it is intended to do. People have said it is undercosted, but once again the general consensus was that interceptors were too expensive for their effectiveness when facing turrets, so it seems that this was also intentional. Against non-turret ships it only does anything at range 3, where you wouldn't expect to do much damage- all it is doing here is protecting against gross statistical outliers.

If AT makes interceptors ridiculously powerful- which I don't think it will- there will undoubtedly be corrections down the line to pull it back. It seems way too early to make this call, though, imho. Certainly I don't think it is reasonable yet to be saying that Rebel lists are now useless, when Rebels have (at least seemed) to have an advantage over Imperial lists through the last few waves.

I think people are overreacting to AT a bit, interceptors will still be vulnerable to turrets, just not as much as before.

You can make Fel almost immune though - At,Stealth device, focus evade focus and you're throwing atleast 4 defensive dice with 2focuses and an evade token to burn. Even with gunner/luke the odds of getting through that are super low.

But on the other hand, constantly stressing limits that wonderfull dial and opens you up to getting blocked against decent players. And his damage output will be far from impressive if you're using your tokens to turtle all the time.

The other interceptors wont even be as good, they might just be playable again. I'm looking forward to trying lists with 2 interceptors, but i highly doubt we'll see 3/4 interceptor lists become succesfull.

And they all get destroyed by Whisper/Echo unless they're Soontir or drop PTL for vi (usually not recommended, debatable on Turr).

B) I don't get the hostility towards turret ships... it's as if some people forget the Imperials have an absolute behemoth of a turret ship in the VT-49, and when upgraded and gelled well with the rest of the squad I think I would put it on par with any other large ship build.

People that hate turrets usually don't care what faction has the turrets. More big turrets is a bad thing, no matter what side they are on.

I think it depends a bit on the package that come along with that turret.

The decimator is a big gooey target that goes down quick and depends very heavily on not being blocked to survive. Meaning the enemy has a direct way of out flying said gooey target.

Dash has his donut hole, flying against it doesn't feel like banging your head against a brick wall.

Phat Han just rolls around shooting stuff reliably and reliably avoiding damage. If the falcon had exploitable weaknesses (other than just brute force weight of dice with swarms) then that night not be such a dull thing to fly against.

Guys, on anything but total blanks, Soontir is not taking damage from 3 dice turret attacks - and that's only if they hit all 3.

And Turret ships will not be able to keep him in their arc. It may happen one turn out of ten if you really outguess him. If not, forget it!

It may well be that Rebels have some non-turret ships that can deal with him, but stop acting as if turret ships would still work on him, because they don't. Dash would be an exception with HLC, but needs to hit all 4 to have a chance to hit and also will have trouble keeping Soontir out the Donut.

Also you act like if turret ships have infinite time against Interceptors, but they die fast too since you get 2 interceptors for one turret ship. And even if it hits an interceptor once every 10 shots (that's what has been calculated for a 3 dice turret with Focus TL) it would still need to hit it two more times. And even if it did THAT, so what? Soontir costs 35, Han or whoever costs 55+!

There are solutions to kill an AT Soontir, but hell no, it's not with a Turret that you will do it, except you block him of course! You could say, AT are working as intended...

If Fel's doing that then he's just done a 2 maneuver with no boost and no barrel roll. That's the opportunity cost of turtling up, and if he wants to shoot effectively he'll potentially have to risk spending one of those Foci as well, otherwise he's tossing 3 red dice with no mods. Not exactly heavy hitting. Even token-tanking like that he's only slightly more dodgy than Echo with Recon Spec - who loses an Evade but gains 2 shields for +1 effective HP.

What is this "will not be able to"? Last I heard, this was a game of choices. Something is always possible. Slow playing the large ship while using your escorts to restrict Fel's movement will get you at least 1 turn of being in arc, and then the Rebels have K-turns.

And ultimately, you're using the wrong tool to do the job. Turrets cannot be (and should not be) good against every ship in the game. Otherwise (as we've seen) they will simply be played to the exclusion of other ships. Use your turret to kill everything else in the Fel list, and use the small ships to distract/bait Fel.

Next, no-one runs double-interceptor lists. It's 70pts on 6hp.

You point about the Falcon being more expensive is actually in its favour. Play an hour timed game. Sacrifice all your small ships to kill everything except Fel. Keep your 50pt Falcon alive. Run away at the end of the game. Win 65-50. Move onto next round.

I think people are overreacting to AT a bit, interceptors will still be vulnerable to turrets, just not as much as before.

You can make Fel almost immune though - At,Stealth device, focus evade focus and you're throwing atleast 4 defensive dice with 2focuses and an evade token to burn. Even with gunner/luke the odds of getting through that are super low.

I can confirm Fel is still vulnerable. Last epic match I played I had AT & SD on him, and 4th time(!) I try to kill 1HP Wedge with him I decide to use Focus on attack as I was quite griefed already.. Well, it did not help, but after that CR90 shot Fel with Single turbolaser on R3 getting 2 crits and 1 hit, I rolled seven green (doubling AG like Single Turbolaser says, we did not count SD before doubling), I used AT on blank and focus on the only eye so only one critical would go through (double damage of course) losing SD on the process. Then CR90 shoots with quad laser getting only one hit. I look my autothrusters card, and roll... all eyes...

I conceded after that.

A game of choices? Yes, if the Soontir player is incompetent you will get him im your arc if you are not incompetent. On equal terms it's just not happening however. Even with han on PS11 and with EU you will not be able to get him into arc more than once in a while. You are moving too fast and overshoot him, or you bump him.

Let me be clear about this:

A good Soontir player can and will 1v1 Han Solo who costs a good third more. And the same happens to any turret ship in the game unless the stars are completely aligned against you. Namely it gets 3 hits and you roll completely blank, and that 3 times!

I think are wrong about double interceptors, we will see them and they are not a bad choice even competitively. Probably some of those people will switch out their second Interceptor for an Advanced however when that gets fixed.

The thing about rather having an expensive ship than a cheap one is just wrong if the cheaper one trumps the expensive one. Also you can't run from the interceptor, it's as fast as the Falcon and can cut the corners, eventually you will need to turn! This tactic will in a tiny percentage of cases only.

people seem to be forgetting that Soontir is actually really cheap. with PTL, AT and TC he is only 34 points!

this means you can actually fit howlrunner and 4 APs in a list with him (for example). all the naysayers are acting like Soontir is going to be all you have in your list, but a miniswarm or souped up Decimator, or any other combination of nasty, will be there backing him up the entire time.

Sontir Fel (27) Royal Guard Tie (0) Push The Limit (3) Stealth Device (3) Autothrusters (2) is a total of 35 points. This will be the ship that you will see the most once the scum come out. I've played dozens of games at this point with this 35point Fel in it and he performs every game. Often never taking a hit, Fel will wear down most any squad. The benefit to Fel35 is the highly maneuverable actions he gets at a very high Pilot Skill. So while he gained protection from the turret holding him down it left very little to counter him. This holds more true to the Rebellion then the Empire. The Empire has the one Turret in the game that can take Darth Vader as a crew to punch through those Critical Hits on an otherwise impossible to hit ship. This leaves the Empire with the most maneuverable ships in the Phantom and the Interceptor also the best chance for a turret to remain in the game with a Deci/Vader. The Rebels have the A-Wings but lack the barrel roll to keep pace with the Interceptor and those 2 attack dice will never get through the 4 evades of a Fel35. They also lack the PS to get out ahead of the Whisper and Fel with all but one of their maneuverable ships. Corran Horn with Engine Upgrade will gain more popularity on the Rebellion side as it can at least keep toe to toe with a Fel35.

So even with the release of a new faction I expect the top tables to be full of grey ships.

I don't know why some people insist that an interceptor is impossible to get into the forward arc of a large ship. A large ships forward arc covers 3x the area of a small ship. It's massive and not hard to cover that much area forcing the interceptor into flight lanes you want it to go. Furthermore gunner or Luke at range one on Han does a great job at removing those focus or evade tokens from interceptors even outside the arc with auto thrusters. 4 atk die with rerolls and focus/focus lite that fires 2x is a going to land at least one hit each turn. And seriously stealth device disappeared from the meta for a reason ffg created several ways to strip stealth device without even needing to land a single hit on fel. You can still create a fat Han list with lt Blount and another ship and still be highly competitive vs every list in game.

I don't know why some people insist that an interceptor is impossible to get into the forward arc of a large ship. A large ships forward arc covers 3x the area of a small ship. It's massive and not hard to cover that much area forcing the interceptor into flight lanes you want it to go. Furthermore gunner or Luke at range one on Han does a great job at removing those focus or evade tokens from interceptors even outside the arc with auto thrusters. 4 atk die with rerolls and focus/focus lite that fires 2x is a going to land at least one hit each turn. And seriously stealth device disappeared from the meta for a reason ffg created several ways to strip stealth device without even needing to land a single hit on fel. You can still create a fat Han list with lt Blount and another ship and still be highly competitive vs every list in game.

Have you actually played a handful of games with your purposed list? Have you played against the Fel35 with any list?