Hello all,

A fellow player at my store and I recently challenged each other to play something outside of our respective comfort zones at the next tournaments. I've been playing since the beginning but my main list for the last few months had been VI Dash + a 2/3 A-Wings. A quick look through my collection and online (including this site) made me realized the wealth of options I had at my disposal.

I ended up going with a TIE Swarm, for a few reasons:

1) The structure of the list is completely different than my Dash list. 3-4 for more ships and no clear focal point meant a clear departure from my normal list. This was important . I didn't want to just sub out Dash and A-Wings for the similar, but slightly slower Han + Z-95s. It also has the major advantage of not being reliant on upgrade cards to win.

2) I've always thought the swarm was cool. Nothing looks quite so intimidating as a horde of TIE fighters buzzing across the table. For whatever reasonm I had not yet had a chance to play it.

3) I've heard it was a challenge and wanted to see if this was true.

So with this in mind, I took the following swarm to a standard 3-round dogfight tournament today:

Howlrunner

Winged Gundark

Nightbeast

4x Obsidian Squadron Pilots

I chose it because, out of the pilots available, it was the canonical Obsidian Squadron (check out Wookiepedia if you don't believe me). It also had the advantage of not requiring any upgrade cards, which just seemed awesomely simple to my somewhat obsessive self.

Anyway, after three rounds of competitive play, here are a few thoughts I have on the swarm. Hopefully those of you considering swarm play will find it illuminating and those veteran TIE Swarm players here on the forums can give me some tips.

So anyway, the TIE Swarm...

1) It is powerful. Devastatingly so. The amount of damage that can be done by 5+ TIE Fighters with focus tokens and rerolls from Howlrunner is pretty crazy. In one game I took a full health Kath Scarlett down to one hull with one round of firepower. Granted, there were some bad rolls on my opponent's part, but it still shows the damage potential of this build. However this damage declines rapidly if Howlrunner is destroyed or your forces are scattered. Which leads us to...

2) It is hard to stay together after the initial engagement. On the first pass you should be able to stay together (so long as you are using a proper formation - I feel like this has been covered elsewhere so I won't go into it in great depth). However, once the opponent starts getting their ships in your way - and don't for a minute think that they won't try to block you - your formation is going to break one way or another. It's important then to make sure that you maximize the damage you do on this first pass.

3) It hates AOE effect weapons (like bombs or dead man's switches) and asteroids. This is is mostly because they function like blockers i nforcing you to either break up your formation or pay a very steep price (my first opponent of the day was packing two proton bombs - and I found myself completely wrecking my formation to stay out of range one of the bombs. Asteroids are slightly different in that they can be minimized by deploying your own asteroids cleverly and being aware that a smart opponent will build a dense asteroid belt of their own and then try and force the initial engagement to happen there. In all three games, I deployed my obstacles (the three smallest asteroids) in the corners. In my second game, my opponent built a fairly dense field and then tried to bait me into flying through it. However he approached a bit too quickly and I was able to set up an angle where I could K-turn and force him to come through the asteroids himself into my guns.

4) It is hard to play but also somewhat forgiving. What I mean by this is that what you lose when you screw up is usually offensive production. Bumping happens. Maybe not for top of the line TIE swarm pilots, but definitely for me. However this was rarely as devastatingly crippling as you might think. Several times I ended up bumping several TIE Fighters together. Usually the worst that would happen would be that I'd lose one TIE fighter (1/7th of my fleet) and have no shots the next turn. More often, I wouldn't even lose the fighter and would have a few actionless shots that turn. Compare this to the unforgiving Phantom (or interceptor) which if you screw up and end up actionless you risk losing a large chunk of your squadron in one shot from the enemy. By having all your points and offense spread out in multiple ships, you increase the chance of a screwup, but you also decrease the chance of any one mistake being gamebreaking.

5) it is mentally exhausting. I'm usually a really fast player. With my Dash lists I was usually done, for good or ill by not later than the 50 minute mark against most opponents. With the TIE Swarm, there was not a game that finished in under 60 minutes. Fortunately, we were running 75 minute rounds and I never went to time. Still, this amount of play, compounded with the increased complexity of managing 7 ships had me pretty fried by the third round, where I made a lot more mistakes. However, that said...

6) It is fun! The TIE Fighter is such a solid little ship. It has a pretty darn good dial and pretty good action bar. I had forgotten what a joy they are to fly. Not A-WIng good but still pretty nimble. Taking advantage of the TIE Fighter unique pilots abilities was also a blast. Winged Gundark make not get a lot of love, but he hits pretty hard at range one. Nightbeast and Howlrunner are pretty well documented, but suffice it to say I agree with the community consensus that they're pretty great. Finally, there's nothing quite like the moment when you line 7 ships up for a shot on one opponent. Very gratifying!

Overall I can definitely see myself playing this and other swarm lists more in the future. I want to try the 8 TIE Swarm, the black squadron swarm and all the other iterations I've heard about. I also want to try against different opponents.

Anyway, I hope you all found my ramblings useful!

Made me want to play it, so: mission accomplished I'd say.

It's good to hear people are giving some love to the tie swarm. It's a cool list and a ton of fun to play against. Plus who doesn't want to see that on the table!

I think people stopped playing it because of 2 changes in the game: 1) the phantom was released and 2) the tournament structure changed to the Margin of Victory.

The phantom was able to deftly bounce around a swarm making it difficult for too many shots on them, especially since they don't win any PS battles. The Margin of Victory seriously killed the swarm because it's too easy to lose a ton of points and still pull out a win because there are just so many ships (losing 58 points on a Fat Turret build is game over, it's just half over with a swarm).

All of the things FFG did to try and minimize the swarm and it was ultimately killed because of Margin of Victory.

As a swarm player, I'm glad to see people playing it again.

Excellent write-up!

It is great to see discussion of the Swarm in today's meta. As I've written in a separate post, it does feel under-represented, especially given the Phantom's recent decline in popularity.

I've been playing TIE Swarm pretty consistently for the past year or so. I believe there are a few things that separate the great Swarm players from the good ones:

1. Howl Management. Many have written on the importance of keeping Howl alive, so I won't repeat any of that here. To that end, my build includes Hull on Howl and a Black Squadron Pilot with Draw Their Fire. However, post-merge Howl management is imperative. Great Swarm players are generally able to position Howl so that her effect benefits multiple TIEs and that she gets her action to continue to stay alive. This often requires Howl to pass up shooting opportunities, which requires patience on the part of the Swarm player.

2. Ship Preservation. In today's MoV-dominated tournament scene, ship preservation is imperative to remaining competitive. Every ship you lose hurts you in the overall tournament standings. Because of this, great Swarm players find ways to cycle their damaged TIEs in and out of the fight so that the opponent is usually fighting fresh TIEs. When an Academy is reduced to one hull with a weapons malfunction, bug out, fix the crit, and come back in later. Remember - it is not about making sure all your ships fire, it's about making sure the right ships fire.

3. Teamwork. Great Swarm players run their Swarms as a team, especially post-merge. For example, rather than K-turning everyone, two Academy's may go on blocking duty to set up one great range-one, focused, Howl-modified shot on a B-Wing with no return fire. Depending on the board situation, the time remaining, and any number of other variables, use your Swarm deliberately to maximize your damage output while minimizing the risk to the overall Swarm.

Some of this might seem obvious, but I hope it is useful nonetheless. Best of luck!

I also tried out a 7 tie howlrunner + dark curse swarm this weekend as part of a minitournament with friends . I was having a ball - I managed to take down Whisper + Echo (new phantom rules) without too much of a problem, absolutely destroyed a moderately porky Han + Corran, but then came up against 2 sigma phantoms with stygian particle + sensor jammers and soontir with autothrusters. I was gradually plinking my way through Soontir, but every time I shot at the phantoms (and there were lots of shots, even uncloaked) the sensor jammers immediately wiped away one of my two possible hits (three at range one) and he usually had a couple of evade tokens, so all he had to do was roll a single evade. As he was moving after most of the ties he was able to cloak if a significant number had shots on him, meaning he could immediately cancel one hit and use at least one evade token on the other, with four defense dice if I did manage to get three hits at range one. I'm really not sure how swarms are doing so well in tournaments when it's so incredibly hard to get a hit though on a cloaked, evade tokened up, sensor jammered 4 dice phantom.

Does this make sense to anyone or am I missing something important?

Remember that a sensor jammer doesn't help if you have a focus token - the defender modifies your dice first, then the attacker - you you roll, then he knocks one hit (if any) down to a focus, then you reroll one dice from howlrunner (which can't be the one he's changed because of the jammer's rules) then you apply your focus token - which knocks the jammer-modified one back up to a hit.

Sensor jammers are nasty but not so much against TIE swarms - focus is about the only **** action they have, so you should normally have a token.

Droofus - glad you liked it. Welcome to the TIE squadrons.....

I've been trying with an elite TIE swarm recently - the six named pilots in two 'v's - one each of Black Squadron and Obsidian Squadron pilots. If I had a seventh TIE I'd be tempted to try the pure obsidian squadron list. My list:

• Mauler Mithel - Veteran Instincts
• Backstabber
• Dark Curse

• Howlrunner - Veteran Instincts (But thinking about swapping this to Determination)
• Night Beast
• Winged Gundark

And yes, on the occasion you find yourself up against Y-wings or B-wings, it's terryfying how much damage the little buggers can do. Getting in a range 1-2 space in front of them is like feeding your ship into a woodchipper.

I've yet to really master flying the swarm - invariably I end up with an action-denying car-crash in the second turn of engagements. This is arguably an advantage of flying a lower skill swarm - with the TIE all-stars your lowest skill pilots are PS5, so you get blocked by generic pilots easily (actually, at PS3, even obsidian squadrons get blocked by most cheap generics. I guess this is why a lot of people use Academy pilots) but at least you still get to shoot first, and PS5+ pilots are a lot more use once the formation 'bursts'.

Frogman is right about using different PS TIEs and breaking formation early. One thing I want to try with my list is seperating the 'V's at deployment - I don't need to fly them as essentially a 2 x 3 block, and two formations converging should be easier to avoid collisions with.

Finally; don't obsess over your Howlrunner-granted reroll. It's lethal, but in many ways, getting your opponent to obssess over killing an evading howlrunner rather than taking easy, victory-point winning shots, is as good as getting a few extra attack die rerolls. She's a great lure.

One other thing to pay attention to is asteroid placement. If you do bring the TIEs in as a 2x3 box, which is simple to fly and provides massive firepower, you need a route to contact big enough to bring three ships abreast through - that's easy to block at deployment with a rock, and you can't afford to be weaving around.

I notice a lot of players deploying to fly along the edge rather than fly towards the enemy, so you can keep going slow then hard turn in for the first turn of contact. Staying out of the rocks until you get at least one turn of orderly in-formation fire off is probably critical.

Magnus, yup - had not understood the importance of the order. That would make a huge difference, cheers. I'm going to set up a replay and see what happens....

I think people stopped playing it because of 2 changes in the game: 1) the phantom was released and 2) the tournament structure changed to the Margin of Victory.

The phantom was able to deftly bounce around a swarm making it difficult for too many shots on them, especially since they don't win any PS battles. The Margin of Victory seriously killed the swarm because it's too easy to lose a ton of points and still pull out a win because there are just so many ships (losing 58 points on a Fat Turret build is game over, it's just half over with a swarm).

All of the things FFG did to try and minimize the swarm and it was ultimately killed because of Margin of Victory.

As a swarm player, I'm glad to see people playing it again.

I didn't face a phantom list on the day, so I can't say exactly how it will play out, but I think that the change to the decloak rules REALLY help out the TIE Swarm player. You now will have a better idea of where the phantom is going to be before you move. I can see myself using barrel rolls a lot in this matchup, especially early on, to try and block. On the other hand, a clever phantom player will use this against you and use his phantom decloak move to block you before jetting safely away. So it could be a double edged sword.

I'll try and scare up one of the better phantom pilots around for a matchup.

As for hte MoV thing, I hear you. My first game, I ended up losing everyone except Winged Gundark and two obsidians. Despite tabling my opponent, I had only achieved an MoV of 131. Not stellar. However, I have to wonder if being in the low end of the winners bracket might not have advantages of its own - maybe making it slightly easier to not draw top competition.

Excellent write-up!

It is great to see discussion of the Swarm in today's meta. As I've written in a separate post, it does feel under-represented, especially given the Phantom's recent decline in popularity.

I've been playing TIE Swarm pretty consistently for the past year or so. I believe there are a few things that separate the great Swarm players from the good ones:

1. Howl Management. Many have written on the importance of keeping Howl alive, so I won't repeat any of that here. To that end, my build includes Hull on Howl and a Black Squadron Pilot with Draw Their Fire. However, post-merge Howl management is imperative. Great Swarm players are generally able to position Howl so that her effect benefits multiple TIEs and that she gets her action to continue to stay alive. This often requires Howl to pass up shooting opportunities, which requires patience on the part of the Swarm player.

2. Ship Preservation. In today's MoV-dominated tournament scene, ship preservation is imperative to remaining competitive. Every ship you lose hurts you in the overall tournament standings. Because of this, great Swarm players find ways to cycle their damaged TIEs in and out of the fight so that the opponent is usually fighting fresh TIEs. When an Academy is reduced to one hull with a weapons malfunction, bug out, fix the crit, and come back in later. Remember - it is not about making sure all your ships fire, it's about making sure the right ships fire.

3. Teamwork. Great Swarm players run their Swarms as a team, especially post-merge. For example, rather than K-turning everyone, two Academy's may go on blocking duty to set up one great range-one, focused, Howl-modified shot on a B-Wing with no return fire. Depending on the board situation, the time remaining, and any number of other variables, use your Swarm deliberately to maximize your damage output while minimizing the risk to the overall Swarm.

Some of this might seem obvious, but I hope it is useful nonetheless. Best of luck!

Great tips! I particularly like your second point. It is a luxury to be able to run away and fix crits with one of your ships without losing an untoward amount of firepower. I need to restrain my naturally aggressive playstyle and run away when it makes sense to do so. MoV matters, and who knows? That ship that runs away in round 3 might just be the last ship in game.

As for Howl, do you recommend a certain upgrade on her? I'd be open to dropping one or both of the other named TIEs to get her jacked up a little (and also to unify my pilot skill at three).

I also tried out a 7 tie howlrunner + dark curse swarm this weekend as part of a minitournament with friends . I was having a ball - I managed to take down Whisper + Echo (new phantom rules) without too much of a problem, absolutely destroyed a moderately porky Han + Corran, but then came up against 2 sigma phantoms with stygian particle + sensor jammers and soontir with autothrusters. I was gradually plinking my way through Soontir, but every time I shot at the phantoms (and there were lots of shots, even uncloaked) the sensor jammers immediately wiped away one of my two possible hits (three at range one) and he usually had a couple of evade tokens, so all he had to do was roll a single evade. As he was moving after most of the ties he was able to cloak if a significant number had shots on him, meaning he could immediately cancel one hit and use at least one evade token on the other, with four defense dice if I did manage to get three hits at range one. I'm really not sure how swarms are doing so well in tournaments when it's so incredibly hard to get a hit though on a cloaked, evade tokened up, sensor jammered 4 dice phantom.

Does this make sense to anyone or am I missing something important?

The highest agility opponent I faced on the day was an autothruster star viper, which is annoying but not even close to Soontir or Phantom annoying. I'm afraid I'm more of a noob than you at this and probably won't be able to answer intelligently.

However, I am curious if he used his decloak on the sigmas to block you. I can imagine that would be ridiculously annoying.

Droofus - glad you liked it. Welcome to the TIE squadrons.....

I've been trying with an elite TIE swarm recently - the six named pilots in two 'v's - one each of Black Squadron and Obsidian Squadron pilots. If I had a seventh TIE I'd be tempted to try the pure obsidian squadron list. My list:

• Mauler Mithel - Veteran Instincts
• Backstabber
• Dark Curse

• Howlrunner - Veteran Instincts (But thinking about swapping this to Determination)
• Night Beast
• Winged Gundark

And yes, on the occasion you find yourself up against Y-wings or B-wings, it's terryfying how much damage the little buggers can do. Getting in a range 1-2 space in front of them is like feeding your ship into a woodchipper.

I've yet to really master flying the swarm - invariably I end up with an action-denying car-crash in the second turn of engagements. This is arguably an advantage of flying a lower skill swarm - with the TIE all-stars your lowest skill pilots are PS5, so you get blocked by generic pilots easily (actually, at PS3, even obsidian squadrons get blocked by most cheap generics. I guess this is why a lot of people use Academy pilots) but at least you still get to shoot first, and PS5+ pilots are a lot more use once the formation 'bursts'.

Frogman is right about using different PS TIEs and breaking formation early. One thing I want to try with my list is seperating the 'V's at deployment - I don't need to fly them as essentially a 2 x 3 block, and two formations converging should be easier to avoid collisions with.

Finally; don't obsess over your Howlrunner-granted reroll. It's lethal, but in many ways, getting your opponent to obssess over killing an evading howlrunner rather than taking easy, victory-point winning shots, is as good as getting a few extra attack die rerolls. She's a great lure.

One other thing to pay attention to is asteroid placement. If you do bring the TIEs in as a 2x3 box, which is simple to fly and provides massive firepower, you need a route to contact big enough to bring three ships abreast through - that's easy to block at deployment with a rock, and you can't afford to be weaving around.

I notice a lot of players deploying to fly along the edge rather than fly towards the enemy, so you can keep going slow then hard turn in for the first turn of contact. Staying out of the rocks until you get at least one turn of orderly in-formation fire off is probably critical.

Those are all pretty great tips. It sounds like the TIE All Stars (love that name by the way) plays very differently from my obsidians (as obsidians would play differently from the dreaded 8 TIE Swarm - I'm guessing). The pileup did become an issue with me as well, mainly because I had to remember that Winged Gundark and Nightbeast moved afterwards.

I kinda screwed myself with deployment in my three games. I deployed in 2 jagged lines, with 5 in front and 2 (one of which was Howl in the back). I was smart enough to put Howlie in the middle of the second row, but I idiotically placed Nightbeast and Winged Gundark on the edge of the swarm closest to my opponents (well, the two who DIDN'T try and joust me, that is). This meant that when I began to turn into the asteroids I found myself having to fly my lower PS Obsidians around/through Gundy and Nightbeast. It was a pain in the neck and caused more than a few bumps.

Lesson learned, when deploying in the corner pllace the higher pilot skill guys (not counting Howlie) on the side of your formation FARTHEST from the opponent.

Asteroids are critical. I'm curious, do you think there would be any reason to NOT take the 3 smallest asteroids as your obstacles. Maybe use debris clouds to slow the opponents down and funnel them into the initial kill zone?

How long ago was MoV introduced?

and why?

As for Howl, do you recommend a certain upgrade on her? I'd be open to dropping one or both of the other named TIEs to get her jacked up a little (and also to unify my pilot skill at three).

If you're taking Howlrunner, then generally you're flying a box formation of TIEs around her to benefit from her (frankly amazing) pilot ability. Therefore any upgrade should aim at either supporting the other TIEs or at keeping her ability in play; she can't use manouvrability upgrades because she's in the middle of a swarm, and she doesn't have enough firepower for stuff like opportunist or Ruthlessness to be worth looking at.

My suggestions are:

• Determination - Firstly, it prevents any critical which knocks out howlrunner's ability. Second, it means that if you take a pilot critical, you don't take the damage at all - which is a slight but measurable increase in toughness - slightly over 1/4 of the damage you take will be criticals (it's more like 1/3 in my experience*), and about 1/3 of the criticals are pilot ones...
• Swarm Tactics - use that lovely PS8 on multiple ships. You'll be flying in a tight box formation anyway... especially good if you've got additional Black Squadron Pilots, also with Swarm Tactics. A TIE swarm firing at PS8 is scary.
• Hull Upgrade - speaks for itself.
• Stealth Device - hull or stealth? Hull is more reliable, but a stealth device - especially with the added penalty of range (if she's at the back of the formation) and an evade token makes howlrunner a much-less-than-optimum target, which may convince an opponent not to fire at her in the first place.
• Veteran Instincts - good once the formation breaks up; although that tends to happen because howlrunner's dead, so this isn't the best option.

Those are all pretty great tips. It sounds like the TIE All Stars (love that name by the way) plays very differently from my obsidians (as obsidians would play differently from the dreaded 8 TIE Swarm - I'm guessing). The pileup did become an issue with me as well, mainly because I had to remember that Winged Gundark and Nightbeast moved afterwards.

I kinda screwed myself with deployment in my three games. I deployed in 2 jagged lines, with 5 in front and 2 (one of which was Howl in the back). I was smart enough to put Howlie in the middle of the second row, but I idiotically placed Nightbeast and Winged Gundark on the edge of the swarm closest to my opponents (well, the two who DIDN'T try and joust me, that is). This meant that when I began to turn into the asteroids I found myself having to fly my lower PS Obsidians around/through Gundy and Nightbeast. It was a pain in the neck and caused more than a few bumps.

Lesson learned, when deploying in the corner pllace the higher pilot skill guys (not counting Howlie) on the side of your formation FARTHEST from the opponent.

Yeah. Multiple PS values in a tight formation are a bugger to co-ordinate. Once things devolve into a close dogfight it gets even worse, because one ship crashes into an enemy, then someone else crashes into him.....filling a space which should have been empty....and so on.

There's a distinct advantage to taking pilots who are all the same PS so you can chop and choose the order as you see fit.

Asteroids are critical. I'm curious, do you think there would be any reason to NOT take the 3 smallest asteroids as your obstacles. Maybe use debris clouds to slow the opponents down and funnel them into the initial kill zone?

Umm. Depends on the nature of your swarm. A TIE fighter loves a close-packed dogfight - the hard 1 turn is very much its party piece; yes interceptors have it too but with Push The Limit they're generally stressed and unable to use it, but multiple TIE fighters generally want space.

Debris clouds are an interesting question. Being able to shoot is nice, and only taking criticals means you don't suffer too much. Stress tokens are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, a stressed TIE fighter isn't a catastrophe like a stressed expensive interceptor, but it also takes a bit more doing to get rid of the stress token. Three small asteroids seems the best choice to me but I'm claiming no real talent with obstacles strategy. Debris clouds do look larger, so it'll be easier to block off a part of the board and deny it to Phantoms and Squints which a formed-up TIE squadron struggles to get a bead on.

* Yes, a basic attack die roll generates 1/4 of the damage as criticals, but criticals get cancelled last, so substantially more of the uncancelled hits will be criticals. Equally, whilst the damage increase is the same (75% of rolls cause damage) for a focus token and a target lock, because you reroll and some of those rerolls come up crits, a target lock generates a higher proportion of critical damage. Finally, there's a non-trivial and ever-increasing pool of weapons, crew and pilot talents which change normal hits to criticals. The upshot is that in my experience somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the damage cards a TIE fighter takes tend to be face-up.