Alright, so we know the raider is coming out, and that might even up the stakes a bit.

But, before then, it seems near impossible to beat the rebels in an epic dogfight game. The transport alone is capable of disrupting the actions of every enemy ship that gets near it, and it doesn't even have guns. The tantive can pile on a few attacks on top of that too.

In a 400 point team game (200 per player) the tantive can effectively neuter half the enemy force, with the ability to kill 2 ships per turn. All the while having to dodge the blasted thing, lest you get punted. We concentrated fire on the aft knocking it out with only 3 ships left to continue fighting. On top of that, the other half of the 400 points was 4 dagger with HLC, Biggs and a red squad x wing

The HLC train was enough to wipe out an oicunn, jendon howl mini swarm. I don't know how anyone can break that. Maybe a phantom.

However, did see an ion torpedo land 5 tokens on the Biggs/dagger swarm

A loaded Tantive costs far over 100 points. Assuming the game is balanced well, it should be able to hold its own against similarly costed lists. I don't play a lot of epic, but it stands to reason that a 120 point Tantive can beat a 120 list on its own, and that a 200 point empire list should be able to beat a a 200 point rebel list with a huge ship.

What the heck are you doing? My impression (and it seems a lot of other people's) is that the Corvette is so starved for energy as to be virtually useless. My plan, if I were to play an epic game and try to be competitive instead of just throwing a bunch of ships on the table to have fun with the huge honkin' ships, would be to take exclusively high agility TIEs, phantoms and Interceptors mostly, and ignore the corvette except to stay out of its way and concentrate on everything else.

The transport I give you is very good, but it hardly seems overpowering.

I've only played a handful of Epic games, but ion is great for controlling Energy supplies, and 4 dice attacks chew those ships up, and the CR90 can struggle to hit high Agility ships.

I have completely the opposite experience. Fighting the epic ships leaves the rebels at little chance. Sure the transport can cause stress and chaos, so stay away from it. The tantive on the other hand, not a big problem. Just make sure you bring the right stuff. Counterintuative, epic battles do no ask for many ships and huge tieswarms, but for heavy hitters and upgraded ships. Tie bombers with ordnance, defenders, high agility interceptors and than some even bigger. Usually - ok the 3 times i tried - the tantive is down before it can even make a dent.

Once the raider comes out with the Advanced fixes, I half way expect Maarek Stele to be able to take out a corvette all by himself. Just get in behind it in the blind spot and hammer away, some of the crits on the corvette are simply brutal.

Having played in the TC Epic and bringing a list with a CR90 with 2 single turbolasers and 1 quad, Han Solo crew, Weapons engineer crew, Sensor Team and Engineering Team, I can tell you I regret my choice dearly (I would have brought a transport instead). So far, I'm 1-2. I've had to fight this abonimation of an imperial list:

6x bounty hunter + counter-measures + recon specialist

5x Obsidian squadron

the fighters are virtually impossible to gun down, even using all of the CR90's tricks because the main weapon can oscillate between 5v4 to 5v6 and the turbos all go 4v6. I have a little more chance against bounty hunters, except if they trigger the counter-measures, but they have so much health that they WILL get close to the corvette and gun it down eventually.

Another list was present (I haven't had to face it yet)

5x OGP + HLC

Kagi + counter-measures + enhanced scopes

and a mini-swarm of fighters iirc.

Again, the HLC barrage can wipe almost anything on the board. As a rebel, you can hope to bring just about the same amount of B-Wings with HLCs, but it costs a little extra and has less health, though you can concentrate fire much better. Kagi built that way just frustrates the hell out of a CR90's efforts to punch through AGI 1 ship.

I took a fully loaded bomber, a loaded vessery, OGP with a heavy laser and rec spec. I had so many dice to throw. I got to lay a proton bomb on the fore section of the corvette, but never got any weapons off. Vessery did ok, and my two RGPs did too. The shuttle didn't get to buzzsaw anything, having landed 2 damage each time.

The corvette could strip all my token of I got close. Made me start taking movement actions, and not modifying my shots.

This is the first time I've heard anyone call the CR-90 over powered. It sounds like the Imperial side didn't go into the match with a list designed to deal with a Huge ship- that does make things tougher.

When I think about trying to take on a Huge ship, my thoughts are always about big guns and ion effects. Hopefully both. I'd kit out at least 100, maybe 150/200 points as a bomber squadron. Put several Tie Bombers with Ion Pulse Missiles on the board. How about an Ion Defender with Prockets? How about 2 of them? No Huge ship wants to see that!

The trick to taking out a Huge ship is to do a lot of damage to it at once. The other thing to keep in mind is that every Ion token on a Huge ship is a point of energy it needs to expend before it can do anything productive. Put 6 Ion tokens on a Huge ship in one round (3 Ion Pulse Missiles), and not only have you done a bit of damage to it, but it's also going to be out of the fight for a minimum of 1 turn. During that turn, you can pour damage onto it. Damage it can't "recover" until it regains energy. Energy it can't gain until it burns off the ionization you gave it.

I'd have the rest of my list protecting my bombers. You're dealing with HLC B-Wings, Biggs, and others? They won't enjoy running into 200 points worth of Eyeballs and Squints. Not even a tiny bit!

Once you take out the Epic ship, you should be able to mop up the fighters at your leisure.

Depends on what you bring to the table and how you fly. I ran a transport and CR-90 both pretty loaded out with X-wing escort. Went up against 3 Bounty Hunters, 3 TIE Interceptors, and 4 Shuttles with HLC and EU.

I ending up tabling the Imperial player with out losing a ship. I did end up using both the transport and CR as a battering ram. I can see the ship being able to just steamroller the smaller ships as a bit of a problem.

Still pretty proud of that match

I have used epic rebel ships two or three times... and I prefer small ships, Big ships are far more difficult to move, eat asteroids, etc.

The first time I made a 300 point rebel list, only with small ships, we won by far. I also have to say our rivals were waiting a Tantive based list, so their ships and upgrades, etc, were made to deal with huge ships, not a lot of small fighters.

This was the list:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B71lY-ssqBI_aFU3ZFdFdllNMXdVZEJZOEFIQVZKWWJtSE1R/view?usp=sharing

The key was to protect Biggs all the time, and obviously use Ethan to make about 2/3 of the list make criticals. The 4 A-Wings were the flankers, very dificcult to hunt down and every turn concentrating fire on ships like Lambdas and Firesprays

After about 2 and a half hours of game, Imperials had 107 points left in the table, and Rebels had 210, with Biggs still alive!!. High skill pilots and the extra crits made to ships about to fire at Biggs, made him to survive better against enemy attacks, and the use of R2-F2 and Experimental interface was very very effective.

Epic ships overpowered?

That's the polar opposite view to almost everyone else. The Corvette needs to be set up very carefully to be worthwhile. The Transport's pretty good but hardly game changing.

Still, I hope you're right that the epics are pushing overpowered, because they can't be spammed and them being overpowered means they're very likely to show up in the format that exists for the purpose of them showing up.

Question: Are you allowing Biggs to draw fire off of them? Because he can't do that.

How about an Ion Defender with Prockets? How about 2 of them? No Huge ship wants to see that!

I'm pretty sure a CR-90 commander would be overjoyed to see TIE defenders with proton rockets, because it means whoever's working on Imperial Ordnance Allocation isn't doing a good job of assigning ordnance to ships. TIE defenders only get one extra die out of a proton rocket.

The cr-90 is designed to take out other epic ships it's not well designed to face fighters, a handful of HLC equipped defenders with Jonas will mince an epic ship quickly as will a properly equipped bomber wing.

Not getting hit by it really isn't that hard, hell my friends killed more of his own ships with the transport than he has mine.

Now that the Corvette starts with full energy they are a bit over powered most people I hear say they are under powered dont know of the new rule change, for some reason put Single Tubro Lasers on them. thats the biggest mistake IMO. dont fly Roak to boost it to PS 12 and fly them around the board instead of charging into the fight. All the 200 pt matches I've taken it to all I had was the Corvette, Roak and Chewe and only lost Chewe once

Corvettes are awesome and here is a video to show how awesome 3 on 1 table can be yes that was a plug please forgive me

Fighting AGI 0 and 1 ships, it's fine. Fighting AGI 2 ships - I hope you're not in a hurry to kill masses of them. Fighting AGI 3-4 ships, don't even try, unless your whole squad focus fires on it and you let the CR90 shoot at ps4 if and only if its target is token-less.

Equipping interfering-type upgrades is fine in limited quantities (1?), otherwise, just run them on a transport and save yourself 70 points, better spent on regular ships.

If the bombers are so great now you have to wonder what they are going to be like if they buff/upgrade ordnance.

Good in epic not In normal play, but when the raider hits you'll have less to invest in bombs and torps so prob won't be a big issue.

The trick to taking out a Huge ship is to do a lot of damage to it at once. The other thing to keep in mind is that every Ion token on a Huge ship is a point of energy it needs to expend before it can do anything productive. Put 6 Ion tokens on a Huge ship in one round (3 Ion Pulse Missiles), and not only have you done a bit of damage to it, but it's also going to be out of the fight for a minimum of 1 turn. During that turn, you can pour damage onto it. Damage it can't "recover" until it regains energy. Energy it can't gain until it burns off the ionization you gave it.

Interesting thought. In my experience the CR-90 rarely gets a chance to use the Recover action. Reinforce almost always saves you more damage than regenerating shields will. If you are flying against a few decked-out fighters, or if you are lucky enough to have a turn where their ships don't have shots, I can see the value of using your precious energy to get some health back. But usually the enemy has swarms of ships, and canceling one [hit] from every attack will go a lot further than your 3-4 shields will.

As an aside, 6 ion tokens is overkill. Unless the ship had some energy saved from the previous round, the most a CR-90 can gain in one turn is 4. At the end of the activation phase, ALL the ion tokens are removed. I should point out that Tibanna Gas Supplies will still grant it 3 energy, because those are earned in step 3, "Use Energy" not in step 1, "Gain Energy," thus ion tokens do not affect it. So it seems to me to make more sense to use one or two Ion Pulse Missiles per round.

As an aside, 6 ion tokens is overkill. Unless the ship had some energy saved from the previous round, the most a CR-90 can gain in one turn is 4. At the end of the activation phase, ALL the ion tokens are removed. I should point out that Tibanna Gas Supplies will still grant it 3 energy, because those are earned in step 3, "Use Energy" not in step 1, "Gain Energy," thus ion tokens do not affect it. So it seems to me to make more sense to use one or two Ion Pulse Missiles per round.

BRB, updating the "common misconceptions" thread.

I had plenty of ordnance to sling at it, across 3 ships. Jonus didn't oan out, asteroids had me flying at bad angles for an attack run. Partly my fault, I deployed less than efficiently. Had 2 straight turns of bumps out of the gate.

Also, prockets on the defender are a great choice. Nobody ever makes fun of the 5 dice a phantom throws at range one. It's a good use of three points, and pairs very well with the white 4k.

We dont get to play often, so the game probably could have been handled better. I had a whole mini swarm worth of ordinance that didn't get used.

And no, we didn't use Biggs on the cr-90

Interesting thought. In my experience the CR-90 rarely gets a chance to use the Recover action. Reinforce almost always saves you more damage than regenerating shields will. If you are flying against a few decked-out fighters, or if you are lucky enough to have a turn where their ships don't have shots, I can see the value of using your precious energy to get some health back. But usually the enemy has swarms of ships, and canceling one [hit] from every attack will go a lot further than your 3-4 shields will.

And back!

Oh, absolutely! As a rule, I'd rather spend my action reinforcing. But if I know the pressure is going to be off the huge ship for a bit, I would think hard about recovering back to full shields. And the most common mistake people make against Huge ships is taking that pressure off for a turn or two. In many ways, Huge ships are like super Corran w/R2: you can't stop attacking it, or else it will eventually render all previous attacks on it null.

How about an Ion Defender with Prockets? How about 2 of them? No Huge ship wants to see that!

I'm pretty sure a CR-90 commander would be overjoyed to see TIE defenders with proton rockets, because it means whoever's working on Imperial Ordnance Allocation isn't doing a good job of assigning ordnance to ships. TIE defenders only get one extra die out of a proton rocket.

Sure. And once we have some good Tie Advanceds, I'd prefer them for the job. But in the mean time, that extra die on Procket attack negates the extra defense from a reinforced Huge. Is that worth 1% of a 300 point epic list? To me, it is.

The effectiveness of huge ships will be different at 200, 300, 400 points. I can easily see a Corvette seeming underpowered at 200 points, where they don't have much starfighter support. Getting into that blind spot is easier. At higher point values, a Corvette can have a significant starfighter escort that can tie up the opposing force for longer, buying more rounds of fire from the big guy.

At 300, I've found the Corvette to be formidable, but not overpowered.

How about an Ion Defender with Prockets? How about 2 of them? No Huge ship wants to see that!

I'm pretty sure a CR-90 commander would be overjoyed to see TIE defenders with proton rockets, because it means whoever's working on Imperial Ordnance Allocation isn't doing a good job of assigning ordnance to ships. TIE defenders only get one extra die out of a proton rocket.

Sure. And once we have some good Tie Advanceds, I'd prefer them for the job. But in the mean time, that extra die on Procket attack negates the extra defense from a reinforced Huge. Is that worth 1% of a 300 point epic list? To me, it is.

Once. With the Defender you'd be much better off putting those points into cannons or Ion Pulse rockets.