Dangit, how did that first one send without me hitting post? Whatever.

MKII better than Victory, here is why:

Ok, maybe "better than" is the wrong wording and I should use "a direct counter to" instead. Of course since the two don't exist in a vacuum, other things can balance the scales.

The issue is that maneuverability move of three to more-or-less outrun bombers, and two yaw to be able to literally run circles around a Victory. Just like Corvette said, from experience, at far range the Vics front or side arcs (just 2-3 red ussually) will to an amount of damage every turn that the MKII can just deal with in defense tokens or engineering since it's mostly shields. In order to do this damage every turn, you need to be using a maneuver order just to turn fast enough.

Meanwhile the MKII+EAmod gets to broadside every turn (4 red), and that ends up being damage the Victory cant sustain, because it has only one defense token that actually mitigates damage, which get's targeted by any accuracies, and you cant repair enough, because your orders are tied up turning ever turn...

Basically, in a one to one comparison, the MKII is better.

They have equal heath, the the MKII has it in sheilds, which are easier to repair/redirect.

They have similar firepower, with the Victory have in advantage on paper, but not in practice due to the MKII having it on two sides and also below...

Here is where the similarities end.

The MKII is just faster and more maneuverable to make better use of it to put its dice whereas the Victory has to overcome a yaw of 1 and one good firing arc.

The MKII has better diversity of defense token and can take ECM to use them.

The Victory has one brace and cant take ECM, need I elaborate on that...

And to top it off, they are almost identical in points but the MKII are marginally cheaper.

I feel like this needs to be said

ACM gladiators are not a counter to fatties

ACM gladiators are a counter to everything including fatties :

seriously, those things are terrifying

Almost makes me want a second one.

I've been giving real thought to an ACM + Engine Techs + Insidious build.

Oh, and my roommate loves his Assault Frog's performance so much, he immediately went out and bought a second one...

haha

I bought my 2nd AF before my first one arrived

I couldn't wait any longer!

rhymer and engine tech gladiators so far scare me

you still can't **** around with victories even as a fattie, front arc shots will ruin you

haven't played versus any rebs yet, but I'm almost positive that Corvettes will easily win at range point per point

AF's trouble my VSD. Granted I always, always, use Tarkin and use repair commands liberally, so my VSD can tank a lot of abuse, but broadside fights against Frogs is a losing trade of firepower, so I'm strongly considering never fielding VSDs without at least Enhanced Armaments to even up that exchange.

Just had my first game with Space Whale, and I will say painting him up as an Orca is appropriate, that thing is a Killer. My opponent was flying a VSD II and I decided to see what one can do going toe to toe with a VSD with only Electronic Countermeasures on it. The Whale took hits from the VSD with no issues and at the end of the game the VSD was dead, with some help from Dodonna's Pride, and the Space Whale had no damage on it with some shields still left on all the Hulls. (The CR90 only got two turns to shoot so the vast majority of the damage was from the Space Whale.)

Now I won't say the AF II is OP, it was my opponent's first time against it and he was still just using his core set for his fleet build. But the VSD was the same ship and build that has been giving me issues with my smaller ships.

Next week he will fly the GSD's with a VSD and we will see what happens then when he knows what is coming this time.

I love your signature beatty...

How are people finding the maneuverability of the Guppies?

I am loving this speed 3 "- I I" where I can come about at a 45° angle with the ability to keep a wide arc around their target. Any tighter and it might spiral inwards to black dice range, any less and it would lose the target after one pass.

Think of it like deployment chess, you need to build the obstacles into a barrier and leave there side of the field clear for maneuvers. Then send your 300 points to shoot up a flank of 100-150 points, and that's game.

I love your signature beatty...

How are people finding the maneuverability of the Guppies?

I am loving this speed 3 "- I I" where I can come about at a 45° angle with the ability to keep a wide arc around their target. Any tighter and it might spiral inwards to black dice range, any less and it would lose the target after one pass.

Think of it like deployment chess, you need to build the obstacles into a barrier and leave there side of the field clear for maneuvers. Then send your 300 points to shoot up a flank of 100-150 points, and that's game.

I too see Armada like chess, From a certain point of view. The Space Whale is an early game piece for sure. Don't send it in a suicidal run into the front hull zones of multiple ships but pick out and challenge a heavier ship at once from one of their flanks. Then maneuver your other ships wider up the flanks to act as a distraction or as a deadly flank charge if they focus on your Space Whale. (I see Guppy as a derogatory term used by Imperials. We should be proud of our Space Whale. )

And after seeing the Orca paint jobs I am seriously considering getting a second to paint it up like an Orca too. Very sexy.

I love your signature beatty...

How are people finding the maneuverability of the Guppies?

I am loving this speed 3 "- I I" where I can come about at a 45° angle with the ability to keep a wide arc around their target. Any tighter and it might spiral inwards to black dice range, any less and it would lose the target after one pass.

Think of it like deployment chess, you need to build the obstacles into a barrier and leave there side of the field clear for maneuvers. Then send your 300 points to shoot up a flank of 100-150 points, and that's game.

True, so far my opponers have all tried to turn into me, and that might be what kills them...

Also black dice are not minimal, you must take good care of your guppy and play the hard "stay away but not too far away" game. Plus less damage means you can just keep taking concentrate fire commands, and spend your vet captian for an engineering token to move 2 shields from one side to another.

True, so far my opponers have all tried to turn into me, and that might be what kills them...

Also black dice are not minimal, you must take good care of your guppy and play the hard "stay away but not too far away" game. Plus less damage means you can just keep taking concentrate fire commands, and spend your vet captian for an engineering token to move 2 shields from one side to another.

Hmmmm I can't wait to pick up my wave 1 ships this Friday. Will need to find some people to play test with or do some homework on my own. . . I am really bad at this game (which is odd because I am actually good at chess. . . )

I feel like this needs to be said

ACM gladiators are not a counter to fatties

ACM gladiators are a counter to everything including fatties :

seriously, those things are terrifying

Almost makes me want a second one.

I've been giving real thought to an ACM + Engine Techs + Insidious build.

Oh, and my roommate loves his Assault Frog's performance so much, he immediately went out and bought a second one...

Noob question: What's an ACM?

I feel like this needs to be said

ACM gladiators are not a counter to fatties

ACM gladiators are a counter to everything including fatties :

seriously, those things are terrifying

Almost makes me want a second one.

I've been giving real thought to an ACM + Engine Techs + Insidious build.

Oh, and my roommate loves his Assault Frog's performance so much, he immediately went out and bought a second one...

Noob question: What's an ACM?

After falling in love with the AFMrkII, I decided to learn all there is to know about it. Turns out their is only a paragraph...

Read up on the mark 1, but it looks frankinstine like, more so than the mark II. Then there is the par rent design, the 600 meter long Dreadnaught Heavy cruiser, which somehow packed 16,000 people (half a star destroyer) into it. Apparently they bare a tough nut to crack, as they can fight a "victory to a stalemate" and takes "five of them to take down a star destroyer" despite the smaller masses.

Seems like the design originated around 120BBY and 100BBY, as is advertised as a compact warship.

I think the only reason it can fight a victory despite having only a fraction of the volume/mass (but 3x the crew!) is because the victory is a multi-role ship. It has huge internal spaces for the storage, maintiance, and launch of strike craft. It carrys thousands of troops and probably hundreds of vehicles from speeder bikes to AT-AT's. It even has pre-fab bases inside of it.

The victory was a "all in one" package, with the ability to bombard and subjugate star systems. It was a troopship, a carrier, and a cruiser 'all in one'. The Dreadnaught Heavy Cruiser was just a pure warship, a "Heavy Cruiser" class. Dedicating all 100% of its mass and volume to just straight up slugfests, I can now kind of understand why it can beat a victory, dispite being designed 100 years before it.

Too bad there isn't more lore on the ships :/

Dangit, how did that first one send without me hitting post? Whatever.

MKII better than Victory, here is why:

Ok, maybe "better than" is the wrong wording and I should use "a direct counter to" instead. Of course since the two don't exist in a vacuum, other things can balance the scales.

The issue is that maneuverability move of three to more-or-less outrun bombers, and two yaw to be able to literally run circles around a Victory. Just like Corvette said, from experience, at far range the Vics front or side arcs (just 2-3 red ussually) will to an amount of damage every turn that the MKII can just deal with in defense tokens or engineering since it's mostly shields. In order to do this damage every turn, you need to be using a maneuver order just to turn fast enough.

Meanwhile the MKII+EAmod gets to broadside every turn (4 red), and that ends up being damage the Victory cant sustain, because it has only one defense token that actually mitigates damage, which get's targeted by any accuracies, and you cant repair enough, because your orders are tied up turning ever turn...

Basically, in a one to one comparison, the MKII is better.

They have equal heath, the the MKII has it in sheilds, which are easier to repair/redirect.

They have similar firepower, with the Victory have in advantage on paper, but not in practice due to the MKII having it on two sides and also below...

Here is where the similarities end.

The MKII is just faster and more maneuverable to make better use of it to put its dice whereas the Victory has to overcome a yaw of 1 and one good firing arc.

The MKII has better diversity of defense token and can take ECM to use them.

The Victory has one brace and cant take ECM, need I elaborate on that...

And to top it off, they are almost identical in points but the MKII are marginally cheaper.

Make that 5 red dice on the sides when I have concentrate fire ontop of my Enhanced Armaments. But then again, my Guppies tend to be around 100-120 points, and at the cost of two of them, I could have a third. (I don't because that is another $40 and I also believe in the power of upgrades).

It is easier to fly, and maybe next time you should pull away at speed 2 when the gold fish tries to get behind you, and leave it out of position. I don't run any command dial modifiers, so that could really screw me over when I reveal 2-3 concentrate fires in a row with no target.

And in terms of commanders, Motti is amazing when you have 3 or more medium ships like Victories, but Tarkin might just be better in terms of shear flexibility you might need for the first few games. And keep running that Glad with the shoot move move shoot thing you had, but swap expanded launchers for ACM maybe. And use the side arcs more, 4 black dice basically means 2 hits, 1 crit hit, and a blank.

aye, you can't just compare ship to ship and hope to come out perfectly balanced

there are going to be commanders and squadrons and other capital ships at work as well, and all of these combine to form a more complicated picture.

Still, imo, the dynamic between vics and fatties is the same, ie "don't get in range of the front arc if you don't want to die" and "the dominator will **** you up." Fatties just have an easier time flying themselves around the triangles and securing superior engagements

but, to add to the complexity, imagine this:

a fattie with EA is going to get far more out of the upgrade than a Victory with EA because it emphasizes side arcs

on the other hand, a Victory with Flight Controllers & Hangars terrifies me many times more than a Fattie with the same. Rebs still don't have access to speed 5, 6 dice + re-rolls interceptors (good ole Howlie ).

The faction surrounding the ships is a huge influence on how they actually interact with one another, making it so that a straight comparison isn't really the greatest determining factor of balance. Vics get corruptor + rhymer for their long range firepower and already come packaged with devastating close range batteries. Fatties already come packaged with devastating long range batteries, and get Gallant Haven + B-wings for devastating close range firepower.

The issue is that maneuverability move of three to more-or-less outrun bombers, and two yaw to be able to literally run circles around a Victory. Just like Corvette said, from experience, at far range the Vics front or side arcs (just 2-3 red ussually) will to an amount of damage every turn that the MKII can just deal with in defense tokens or engineering since it's mostly shields. In order to do this damage every turn, you need to be using a maneuver order just to turn fast enough.

Meanwhile the MKII+EAmod gets to broadside every turn (4 red), and that ends up being damage the Victory cant sustain, because it has only one defense token that actually mitigates damage, which get's targeted by any accuracies, and you cant repair enough, because your orders are tied up turning ever turn...

It is easier to fly, and maybe next time you should pull away at speed 2 when the gold fish tries to get behind you, and leave it out of position. I don't run any command dial modifiers, so that could really screw me over when I reveal 2-3 concentrate fires in a row with no target.

An interesting option: As no defense tokens will do any good -> go to speed zero with the Vic. Either the Frig does it, too and robs itself of the counters as well, the Frig keeps circling around it thus will inevitably get into the front arc or the frig decides to leave you be and maneuvre to somewhere else. If the Vic is still intact, when he does the big O, he might win this "contest of maneuvring" by refusing to maneuvre.

Remember to we are not flying alone out there. Fleet formations will be big now that we are at 300 and will only become more important when we hit 400. But we now know that an all VSD fleet is not as good as many thought. (I personally have brought this up before) Now comes the game of finding better Fleet builds.

One thing seems certain though, if the door being kicked in by the wave two announcement is any indication, that Rebel broadsides lists are going to be a legitimate thing and a strength to capitalize on.

It is pretty actually interesting to compare the focused broadside strength of the wave two ships to the Rebellion's varying wave one offerings.

So now, playing dual heavily upgraded AFMkIIs feels like a taste of what's to come. I was not overly anxious for wave two spoilers, but now I find myself wondering when we get to see more about the MC-30 and MC-80. I'm feeling much more at home fighting with my side arcs, and even if it proves to eventually be sub-optimal in our pre-wave two world, I'm really enjoying it.

With how punishing Imperial ships are (and particularly ACM Gladiators), I actually find myself a little worried about the Nebulon-B. In addition to the fragility of the Nebulon, it feels more natural to navigate with an enhanced armament AFMkII. To get several optimal-arc attacks with a Neb-B I see a few options:

-Drift at slow speed towards your target, leaving yourself vulnerable to any fast movers like the dreaded ACM Gladiator.

-Take a shot at high speed and blaze past your target. You would be hoping that you are moving fast enough to not expose your sides, and you are likely missing a turn of front arc shooting as you get your facing back. (Although on a large, slow target you could set this up to take advantage of a weak zone)

-Engine Techs shenanigans to jerk the front end toward your target at the end of the movement leading to be followed up by a concentrate fire command on the next activation?

But the AFMkII is just as fast as the Nebulon... so barring the Paragon builds that are angling for front/side arc combos, a pair of EA AFMkIIs can remain circling like sharks and attacking with 4+ dice each.

I am very interested in the movement counters that Corellian Corvette and Jochmann brought up though. The idea of a VSD dropping to speed-0 and forcing that big deadly orca into the tasty VSD front arc is something. I want to get someone to test that strategy with me soon. My questions in this hypothetical one-on-one scenario: How long does it take for the MkII to get around the VSD if it attempts to slow down to match vs if it doesn't? How long can a defense token-less VSD survive a circling MkII if it doesn't slow? How does this compare early game vs. late game, where the VSD could potentially have a navigate token (maybe from Tarkin?) to suddenly speed up again?

Using an ideal situation AFMkII A with ECM, Enhanced Armament, Sensor Team plus officer of choice (Intel or Raymus?), you have a 110 point ship. How would you build a VSD to play around with this kind of 1v1 face off? Don't worry about adding a commander, we can play with that to see how different admirals impact the outcome.

Yikes, I am wordy today.

Just had my first game with Space Whale, and I will say painting him up as an Orca is appropriate, that thing is a Killer. My opponent was flying a VSD II and I decided to see what one can do going toe to toe with a VSD with only Electronic Countermeasures on it. The Whale took hits from the VSD with no issues and at the end of the game the VSD was dead, with some help from Dodonna's Pride, and the Space Whale had no damage on it with some shields still left on all the Hulls. (The CR90 only got two turns to shoot so the vast majority of the damage was from the Space Whale.)

Now I won't say the AF II is OP, it was my opponent's first time against it and he was still just using his core set for his fleet build. But the VSD was the same ship and build that has been giving me issues with my smaller ships.

Next week he will fly the GSD's with a VSD and we will see what happens then when he knows what is coming this time.

You just wait until you get to experience some combined GSD/VSD firepower rebel.

Then, "You will pay the price for your lack of vision!"

Hmmmm I can't wait to pick up my wave 1 ships this Friday. Will need to find some people to play test with or do some homework on my own. . . I am really bad at this game (which is odd because I am actually good at chess. . . )

I'm good at this game and rubbish at chess.

Remember to we are not flying alone out there. Fleet formations will be big now that we are at 300 and will only become more important when we hit 400. But we now know that an all VSD fleet is not as good as many thought. (I personally have brought this up before) Now comes the game of finding better Fleet builds.

As it should be

if I remember right, AKbar's ability is going to give you two additional red dice if you shoot only out of your sides

That's basically taking your Afmk2 - B and going "yup, I got both my side and front/ass arc on you all the time" which isn't bad at all (won't trigger paragon, though)

Now the VSD, apart from the front arc, doesn't scare me so much on its own. It's really the combination of the front arc going "no, you don't get to go here" + stuff like gladiators and bombers (rhymer), which will easily outpace the fattie. Smart positioning, foresight, and counterplay is really needed there to not fall prey to all those black dice, because they will run the fattie through if allowed.

I don't think we have to worry about the Neb as much as our ability to play it Big spindly sides with 1 shield are tough to negotiate, but the Neb currently represents the most efficient anti-squadron capital ship in the game (even moreso than the wave 2 raider, which I believe has a blue and a short ranged black die and an unknown cost). It also tosses as much out of its front as the fattie does out of its side (before upgrades) for cheaper and also packs a pair of incredible titles (just like the Fattie ).

The Neb is for certain a much higher skill-floor ship, but I believe it'll come into its own with either practice or a higher point limit letting you better dictate positioning by fielding more ships, or maybe one big fat Home One telling enemies not to get near those vulnerable sides

To piggyback on Fickle's point, Ackbar will also introduce the option of offense versus defense in selecting your broadside fleet commander. So from the spoilers, the MC30 has evade but the MC80 does not, and we also do not know any costs, though I anticipate the good Admiral to be insultingly expensive.

The card itself wasn't spoiled, but the article text states "can add two red attack dice to any attack made by a starship that fires only from it's left and right hull zones during its activation." I would expect a Screed-like limitation where this bonus can only be applied once per activation.

So Mon Mothma tanky fleets built around the evade-capable ships and some ECMs? Or an Admiral Ackbar powerhouse with punishing fire from the soon-to-be wide variety of strong broadside options?

We know so little of wave two, but it feels like it will be another monumental game changer and a huge benefit to the Rebel broadsides capability.

hmm, and yet it seems Ackbar and Miss Mothy can get their roles inversed

the heightened offense of your sides give you little reason to point a fattie's front at the enemy, letting you defensively strafe with impunity (stay away, boys! don't fall for the trap!)

meanwhile, Miss Mothy's evades let you get into medium range without instantly exploding, letting you use your little ships a lot more aggressively (many bothans died getting this information...so give the empire hell, boys!)

ah man, there's nowhere for this game to go but up

I'm still waiting to see how far they take Ackbar's wording. Will I have to shoot out of both arcs to get the dice? Can I make one attack and get them so long as its from the side? Do I get the dice on both attacks? Can I shoot those red dice at squadrons, or only ships?

Looking foward to wave 2, coming July 2027.

guessing at akbar:

*shooting only from the sides meaning you declare his ability, your front and butt arc can't attack, and your side arc shots get +2 red die (and if you can somehow shoot at a different ship from either side, yay! if you can somehow shoot at the same ship from both sides...you're bending the laws of space-time; the "2nd player's objective ship can fire from the same arc twice even at the same ship" objective is going to be bonkers with akbar)

*I believe it will add to the arc's battery armament (like EA) because +2 red die against squadrons would be stupid overpowered