Once the VSD gets into battle, if you plan your commands out and choose the repair command dial each turn it seems nearly impossible to defeat.

I am only playing with the core. You really need to pour on the firepower, but the rebel ships seen to be lacking that right now. I tried attacking the aft, but 6 rounds is short imho.

Am I missing something?

What commands are you using? Do you have any X-Wings?

If the only command the VSD is using is engineering, then they won't be doing much damage. Depending on what objective you're using you may not even need to kill the VSD.

If all its doing is Engineering dials and tokens, it's not boosting its offense to take you down. Dodanna's Pride and Luke Skywalker let you directly deal face up damage cards through the shields, even if it is repairing them, and they're both especially brutal with Dodonna himself letting you look at 4 and pick. If they start spending engineering points on discarding damage cards, they're not spending them to bring shields back up, so your normal fire can start getting through. Knock out the fighter screen first(don't forget ships attack every fighter that's in range of a given facing when they do anti-squadron fire, make use of the 2 die your Nebulon has), then use squadron commands to get those X-wing, particularly Luke, piling on the hits.

Another thing to remember, is using an engineering token and command, are different actions. You get 4 engineering points, then 2 engineering points, not 6 engineering points. This means that you can only repair 1 Hull per turn, and one shield, not two hull.

Once the VSD gets into battle, if you plan your commands out and choose the repair command dial each turn it seems nearly impossible to defeat.

I am only playing with the core. You really need to pour on the firepower, but the rebel ships seen to be lacking that right now. I tried attacking the aft, but 6 rounds is short imho.

Am I missing something?

No, not really. But such is to be expected with such limited components available.

Another thing to remember, is using an engineering token and command, are different actions. You get 4 engineering points, then 2 engineering points, not 6 engineering points. This means that you can only repair 1 Hull per turn, and one shield, not two hull.

No, you get 6 Engineering points. You can only execute each Command per turn. You can while executing a Command Dial combined it's effects with a Command Token, which counts as a single instance of resolving the Command. By virtue of the fact that you must trigger them together, as one effect, and not seperately it makes no sense to assert that you are going to resolve the effects of one for 4 points which you spend discarding the excess and then 2 points which you spend seperately.

by turn 4 or so the number of shields i can repair is not enough. while I win most games with imperials I do so with 2-3 points left. one more round and I lose. I think rebels truely need to go speed 4 round and and then start trimming down and using YAW increase to make sharp turns.

Think of it like this...VSDs are the might Tiger Tanks of WII, and the Rebel ships, well they're shermans, head on assault is suicide you need to flank and get behind them.

Once the VSD gets into battle, if you plan your commands out and choose the repair command dial each turn it seems nearly impossible to defeat.

I am only playing with the core. You really need to pour on the firepower, but the rebel ships seen to be lacking that right now. I tried attacking the aft, but 6 rounds is short imho.

Am I missing something?

With no navigate dials, your VSD movement will be really easy to predict, and the Rebels will be staying on your sides and back. If they're on your sides and back, you'll have fewer dice to roll and no concentrate fire dials to use to boost your damage. Your TIEs will also be getting ripped apart if you're not using squadron commands at all. If you want them to tie up (pun intended) some X-wing squadrons, they'll have to move into range of the X-wings without getting an initial attack. The X-wings and other Rebel ships will then have a chance to wipe out some or all of your TIEs before the TIEs even get to fire, and you may not even get to take advantage of the Swarm effect.

Mind you, he does have a point. Playing a 180 point game with Wulff Yularen pretty much guarantees 6 engineering points per turn if you pick the engineering command every time. If we assume those six tie fighters can do a decent enough job tying up the X-Wings for a few turns, the Corvette and Neb B likely don't have enough firepower to down the VSD in six rounds.

Now that doesn't mean a Rebel loss, mind you. If the Neb B and Corvette stick to long range and focus their firepower on the tie fighters instead, they can easily win on victory points. And if the VSD never uses the Maneuver command, it'll be really very easy to keep out of it's forward arc. It's side and rear have poor firepower.

Also ramming is fine. If they are going speed one get as close to their board edge as possible and go along side it until you get behind them and drastically drop speed. I plan on playing more rebels in the upcoming weeks until wave 1 hits.

spam engineering works if you miraculously manage to get a rebel ship in your front arc with that navigation chart

otherwise:

1.) your ties are going to get mulched and then you can do literally jack **** to those X-wings

2.) your 73+ point monster is going to be hitting as hard as a CR-90A or worse

3.) you're just one bad crit away from getting wrecked (the "can't ready defense tokens" for example, or going down to speed 0 which would mandate your repair token be replaced with a navigation)

The rebels can simply stay away or circle around, support their X-wing squadrons, and win on dead Tie fighter points alone in the intro scenario.

Core box level of points isn't really balanced. 300+ points will be the sweet spot.

1.) your ties are going to get mulched and then you can do literally jack **** to those X-wings

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Unless you actually mean that your VSD can lift up those X-wings and defecate on them. And I seriously want to see an upgrade card that does that

Thanks all for the comments!

The TIEs did a good job of blocking the x-wings for 3 rounds.

As I look back on it, maybe the table was too long on the y-axis thus taking away a round of movement in essence.

I will be playing again tonight so will see if the dice are warmer.

Cannot wait for new ships and larger games. Not much of a tourney guy, so the "standard" game for me will be 500 per side.

You HAVE to take a commander, so Imperials are forced to take Tarkin right now. Meaning if you take both Tarkin and Yaluran, you can be pretty flexible turn one, you can take whatever token since there will be no shooting. Turn one I usually take Nav token for reducing or increasing speed when needed. Turn two I take either con-fire, or a repair depending on how aggressive Reb ships are pushing into me. As for my Tie's I will hold them back as long as possible, waiting either to catch a couple X-wings not with their pack and swarm them, then take a squadron token to move and shoot. Or wait for Luke to appear and then all of my ties are in Luke's face, either keeping him "engaged" or killing him. That black through shields is to monster to ignore, regular X-wings you can bounce around on your shields and there not all that scary only chucking one red dice. Something else I found to work is allow the corvette to think it's flanking action will work, then use that Nav token to reduce or increase speed, while it's still one turn out from completing it's flanking attempt. It will probably be right in the crosshairs of at the very least your front arc, maybe even the side arc allowing to put a lot of hurt on it, or destroy it outright. But every game experience is different, and different people tend to run different strategy's.

It is tough to take down a Victory, that's for sure. The 6 round limit for the game can certainly allow a healing Victory the ability to survive to the end, and if you toss in Tarkin, you can really go nuts. Keep in mind that you can still lose though. If your opponents take out all of your TIEs you may lose on points. If you aren't doing Squadron actions with your TIEs, then you aren't using them very well, and probably will end up losing them somewhat early. The squadron value of 3 for the Victory is being wasted if you repair too much.

1.) your ties are going to get mulched and then you can do literally jack **** to those X-wings

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Unless you actually mean that your VSD can lift up those X-wings and defecate on them. And I seriously want to see an upgrade card that does that

One of us is using their VSD very, very wrong. How do you kill X-Wings with a VSD?

1.) your ties are going to get mulched and then you can do literally jack **** to those X-wings

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Unless you actually mean that your VSD can lift up those X-wings and defecate on them. And I seriously want to see an upgrade card that does that

One of us is using their VSD very, very wrong. How do you kill X-Wings with a VSD?

apparently with laxatives and a jackhammer

Another thing to remember, is using an engineering token and command, are different actions. You get 4 engineering points, then 2 engineering points, not 6 engineering points. This means that you can only repair 1 Hull per turn, and one shield, not two hull.

That's not true. Spending a token and a dial together counts as one command. You get 6 points.

I would consider playing with a single core box more like a demo than a full game experience.. the VSD is tanky as hell, if you go with engi command + token from turn 3+ its pretty much a quite boring game from there. On the other hand, playing with objectives and having the rebs chosing propably means two agile reb ships running out the VSD..

As long as you are playing with 180 pts and one core, I highly recommend to drop that competitive playstile on both sides by a few degrees, or to houserule a bit, to force the rebells to encounter the VSD (even on their terms) and the VSD to not playing turtle for 6 rounds. Once we get our hands on wave 1 stuff we can all get back to the competitive shenanigans ..

I really think wave 1 and 2 are going to open up the game a ton, especially for the larger point games.

I can see having a couple VSD tank it up with an ISD in the middle dishing out damage. Throw in all the fighters and you have yourself a Star Wars space battle!

Played another couple of games...

Xwings did do a number on the ties, but rebels still could not take down the VSD. It had no shields, but only on damage done to the hull.

Right now 6 rounds will not yield mass carnage.

I had the vsd go down once in the learning scenario. I was teaching my cousin how to play, and I figured I would try and win with style points. He came at me head on with both ships, and I figured he was about to get wrecked, when the dice...oh man the dice. Plus I decided I wanted to try to win without either engaging his fighters or using repair commands.

So the moral is if dice really favor you, and your opponent decides to arbitrarily hamstring himself, the VSD can be taken down!

1.) your ties are going to get mulched and then you can do literally jack **** to those X-wings

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Unless you actually mean that your VSD can lift up those X-wings and defecate on them. And I seriously want to see an upgrade card that does that

One of us is using their VSD very, very wrong. How do you kill X-Wings with a VSD?

psst...his post wasn't about how the use of the VSD, it was about how the use of "literally."

Although, to be fair, even Webster's has now included a defintion for "literally" that means "figuratively." So literally doesn't literally mean literally anymore.

This language is stupid.