I think that HLCs are 100% the way to go. I feel like the loss of the die is just terrible. HLCs are still good against fatties that crits would otherwise be nice for, but Manglers are terrible against high AGI token tankers that HLCs can handle. I tend to have high AGI in a lot of my lists, and if I see a Mangler instead of an HLC, I'm a pretty happy camper.

The Advanced Sensors vs FCS is an interesting problem, because they're both so good, and IGs can make such good use of both. I'm tending to lean toward FCS (in that I would rather not face it), because of the relatively low PS of IGs. Advanced Sensors ends up being less good (although certainly not useless) if you have a lower PS, but FCS is pretty much always good. FCS leaves just a few extra points for a bid or Inertial Dampeners or whatnot. It also means that stress as a weapon doesn't leave you without offensive boosts. I feel like Advanced Sensors loses a lot if things Go Wrong .

It also means that stress as a weapon doesn't leave you without offensive boosts. I feel like Advanced Sensors loses a lot if things Go Wrong .

This is my thinking as well, and is why I will probably try FCS on them over the next week or so. What I will really miss about Advanced Sensors is the ability to boost before I reveal my dial. That almost always achieves excellent board position when used correctly.

It also means that stress as a weapon doesn't leave you without offensive boosts. I feel like Advanced Sensors loses a lot if things Go Wrong .

This is my thinking as well, and is why I will probably try FCS on them over the next week or so. What I will really miss about Advanced Sensors is the ability to boost before I reveal my dial. That almost always achieves excellent board position when used correctly.

That's the awesome part of Advanced Sensors, definitely. I feel like you can kind of pick 2: Extra-Awesome Maneuverability, PS8, and Good Damage. Brobots get to pick 2. You can do Predator/AS to get maneuverability and damage, VI/AS to get better PS to better use your maneuverability, or VI/FCS to better use your (pretty decent) native maneuverability and keep the damage up. I think with a 2-ship, fixed arc build, you can't really afford not to have consistently modified attacks, so that means you're picking either Predator/AS or VI/FCS. With Predator/AS, you're already to 42 points per ship, so with an HLC, you don't have enough for Autothrusters on both ships. You could go with a cheaper cannon and lose a die, but that puts you back to a low damage situation.

I'll stop here, as this is really just me rambling, but it's my thought process when I am thinking through a dual IG build. There's always something missing.

That's the awesome part of Advanced Sensors, definitely. I feel like you can kind of pick 2: Extra-Awesome Maneuverability, PS8, and Good Damage. Brobots get to pick 2. You can do Predator/AS to get maneuverability and damage, VI/AS to get better PS to better use your maneuverability, or VI/FCS to better use your (pretty decent) native maneuverability and keep the damage up. I think with a 2-ship, fixed arc build, you can't really afford not to have consistently modified attacks, so that means you're picking either Predator/AS or VI/FCS. With Predator/AS, you're already to 42 points per ship, so with an HLC, you don't have enough for Autothrusters on both ships. You could go with a cheaper cannon and lose a die, but that puts you back to a low damage situation.

I'll stop here, as this is really just me rambling, but it's my thought process when I am thinking through a dual IG build. There's always something missing.

You've definitely highlighted the struggles of outfitting IG with the cards we have at the moment. I love flying the Aggressor, and am always going to be looking at future cards with an eye towards "what can this do to improve IG?".

You guys brought up some interesting points, one point that I really heavy debated (and still debate) is this:

Pred/advS/HLC on both Iggys, and autothrusters on B only.

I am honestly seriously considering it, but the thought of losing AT on one of them makes me wildly uncomfortable and I am not 100% sure that the discomfort is justified.

I find that AT is great against turret lists in general, of course, but against Whispers and Soontirs and many other lists, it's only coming into play sparingly as both sides of the board are fighting for positions. And let's face it, with all of Iggies movement tricks, once your actually engaged in the fight, your repositioning isn't getting you range 3 from fixed arc ships. Your slooping to get arcs and to try to get out of arcs, not to put some distance between you and them. It's just not what's saving the day for me in about half my games. Ever tried to stay range 3 of BBBBZ for more than one round in a competitive environment? It's not happening, at least not consistently.

What do you guys think about dropping just one of the thrusters?

And a related follow up that I really want your honest answers on, as much as we hate to admit it...

How many shots are your brobots delivering, on average, at range 1, (compared to the number of range 2-3 shots your actually delivering) even with HLCs?

I'll give you my answer: At a minimum, just over half of my shots, against any list, seem to be from range 1 overall. I like those range 2-3's, don't get me wrong, but a lot of times it seems that the choice is "range 1 or run away".

I would estimate more than 50% on a low end, for me. Up to 2/3rds of my actual shots are probably range 1, honestly. The exception being falcons, decimators and Dash. The first two because the 4 die return shot is damning to Iggy, and dash because he will always work hard to get out of your range 1 and short of blocking him, he will always do it.

I really want I know, honestly, what yo think your ratio of range 1 shots to range 2-3 shots is in real games you have played.

I think one AT is acceptable. At full health, an Evading IG can reliably take 4 turns if fire to kill with a fat turret. If you get shots on half of those turns, the turret should be a goner or easily mopped up by your AT bot. Your non-AT bot has other options, too, such as running away to preserve points or going for a block to take fewer shots and make a better shot for the IG that's chasing the turret.

I bet you'd do just fine with one AT. It's not Soontir Fel or a Phantom. Getting hit is acceptable.

Unlike interceptors aggressors can't get one shot so losing AT isn't as big a deal, it's nice to have but you win the game through attacks not defence.

I don't frequently find myself taking Range 1 shots with Aggressors. I would say less than 10%. You definitely don't want to joust at Range 1; I would rather blow past someone completely or S-loop behind them than sit in front of their guns at Range 1. Occasionally I find myself shooting someone from behind at Range 1, in which case I just switch to my primary weapon and roll 4 dice anyway. That attack usually doesn't miss, so you're not giving up much (with regard to 88B's ability) there.

Mathswingers ran the numbers and I think they said the increased damage over your regular three attacks is minimal at best.

Outrider with Mangler is no better than the falcon for example.

That's not considering the effect of the critical hit from Mangler though.

Mathswingers ran the numbers and I think they said the increased damage over your regular three attacks is minimal at best.

Outrider with Mangler is no better than the falcon for example.

That's not considering the effect of the critical hit from Mangler though.

For that matter, I don't believe MajorJuggler included the YT-2400's superior dial and barrel-roll action in the assessment...

Mathswingers ran the numbers and I think they said the increased damage over your regular three attacks is minimal at best.

Outrider with Mangler is no better than the falcon for example.

That's not considering the effect of the critical hit from Mangler though.

For that matter, I don't believe MajorJuggler included the YT-2400's superior dial and barrel-roll action in the assessment...

Well i tried searching for the thread but couldn't find it that's why i added "i think"

I do seem to remember the consensus was that if your taking a mango outrider you may as well take the falcon instead as it's got a few things in it's favour.

Does anyone know the math on two IG's with fcs and HLC's with/without focus shooting at a tokened-up Fel? Based on my extensive testing(in arcs twice ever) the odds of getting through are 0%.

Not yet, been meaning to modify my scripts so I can run this. Depends if you are at range 3 or not and if Fel has Stealth. The chances are much greater than 0% with HLC FCS and 88B's ability.

Sozin and I have been working on something to simulate this. It's a Monte Carlo stand-and-shoot-each-other simulation.

For this run, Soontir is fully tanked up with Autothrusters active, not spending his focus tokens on attack. IGs start with a Target Lock, and will use their focus token on defense if necessary. Soontir shoots at IG-88B first, then the bots return fire.

This doesn't yet model the loss of Stealth Device on a hit.

I hope the math/code is right.

Forgive the output, it's still very much a work in progress.

Soontir Fel
-----------
Hits Landed: 0.174 (stddev=0.461)
 0 ( 85.77%): ##########################################
 1 ( 11.30%): #####
 2 (  2.68%): #
 3 (  0.25%): 

Crits Landed: 0.122 (stddev=0.350)
 0 ( 88.64%): ############################################
 1 ( 10.56%): #####
 2 (  0.80%): 

Hull Remaining: 1.737 (stddev=0.986)
 0 ( 13.27%): ######
 1 ( 25.40%): ############
 2 ( 35.65%): #################
 3 ( 25.68%): ############

Shields Remaining: 0.000 (stddev=0.000)
 0 (100.00%): ##################################################

IG-88B
------
Hits Landed: 0.279 (stddev=0.550)
 0 ( 76.86%): ######################################
 1 ( 18.64%): #########
 2 (  4.22%): ##
 3 (  0.28%): 

Crits Landed: 0.060 (stddev=0.244)
 0 ( 94.15%): ###############################################
 1 (  5.69%): ##
 2 (  0.16%): 

Hull Remaining: 4.000 (stddev=0.000)
 4 (100.00%): ##################################################

Shields Remaining: 3.704 (stddev=0.593)
 1 (  0.62%): 
 2 (  5.32%): ##
 3 ( 17.07%): ########
 4 ( 76.99%): ######################################

IG-88C
------
Hits Landed: 0.846 (stddev=0.859)
 0 ( 41.30%): ####################
 1 ( 37.14%): ##################
 2 ( 17.30%): ########
 3 (  4.15%): ##
 4 (  0.11%): 

Crits Landed: 0.105 (stddev=0.317)
 0 ( 89.81%): ############################################
 1 (  9.88%): ####
 2 (  0.31%): 

Hull Remaining: 4.000 (stddev=0.000)
 4 (100.00%): ##################################################

Shields Remaining: 4.000 (stddev=0.000)
 4 (100.00%): ##################################################

Edit: forgot to set IG attacks to HLC

Yikes that deviation is what's killing me. Thanks. Now kindly add in stealth device and Palpatine

Does anyone know the math on two IG's with fcs and HLC's with/without focus shooting at a tokened-up Fel? Based on my extensive testing(in arcs twice ever) the odds of getting through are 0%.

Not yet, been meaning to modify my scripts so I can run this. Depends if you are at range 3 or not and if Fel has Stealth. The chances are much greater than 0% with HLC FCS and 88B's ability.

Sozin and I have been working on something to simulate this. It's a Monte Carlo stand-and-shoot-each-other simulation.

For this run, Soontir is fully tanked up with Autothrusters active, not spending his focus tokens on attack. IGs start with a Target Lock, and will use their focus token on defense if necessary. Soontir shoots at IG-88B first, then the bots return fire.

This doesn't yet model the loss of Stealth Device on a hit.

I hope the math/code is right.

Forgive the output, it's still very much a work in progress.

Brute force calculation doesn't take that much compute time, and gives the exact answer. If I have a spare 20 minutes to an hour this weekend then I'll see about updating my code. I already have hooks for Stealth Device, Autothrusters, any number of focus and evade tokens, and getting attacked by multiple pre-defined attacks. I actually wrote the multi-attack code back after Worlds 2013 to see what the odds were of Dallas killing Paul's Biggs. The only thing that I don't have in my scripts already is the 2nd "gunner" attack for a particular attack if the first misses.

Yikes that deviation is what's killing me. Thanks. Now kindly add in stealth device and Palpatine

Sorry, Fel also has Stealth Device in that run.

Palpy... yipes. We'll see

Brute force calculation doesn't take that much compute time, and gives the exact answer. If I have a spare 20 minutes to an hour this weekend then I'll see about updating my code. I already have hooks for Stealth Device, Autothrusters, any number of focus and evade tokens, and getting attacked by multiple pre-defined attacks. I actually wrote the multi-attack code back after Worlds 2013 to see what the odds were of Dallas killing Paul's Biggs. The only thing that I don't have in my scripts already is the 2nd "gunner" attack for a particular attack if the first misses.

Brute force is the best force! The sim runs 10,000 iterations in under a second; not being a stats person I don't know how many to run to get good signal. What do you recommend?

Yeah, getting Gunner functionality in there was the wacky bit, but I believe it's working. I do want to see the output of your scripts, as a sanity check on my results.

(The eventual goal is to put this up as a web service to receive sim parameters and spit out data for analysis.)

Yikes that deviation is what's killing me. Thanks. Now kindly add in stealth device and Palpatine

Sorry, Fel also has Stealth Device in that run.

Palpy... yipes. We'll see

Brute force calculation doesn't take that much compute time, and gives the exact answer. If I have a spare 20 minutes to an hour this weekend then I'll see about updating my code. I already have hooks for Stealth Device, Autothrusters, any number of focus and evade tokens, and getting attacked by multiple pre-defined attacks. I actually wrote the multi-attack code back after Worlds 2013 to see what the odds were of Dallas killing Paul's Biggs. The only thing that I don't have in my scripts already is the 2nd "gunner" attack for a particular attack if the first misses.

Brute force is the best force! The sim runs 10,000 iterations in under a second; not being a stats person I don't know how many to run to get good signal. What do you recommend?

Yeah, getting Gunner functionality in there was the wacky bit, but I believe it's working. I do want to see the output of your scripts, as a sanity check on my results.

(The eventual goal is to put this up as a web service to receive sim parameters and spit out data for analysis.)

I brute force every possible combination of attack dice and defense dice, so the final probability density function is exact. For a 4v3 and ignoring crits, that's 3^4 * 3^3 = 2187 permutations, which is still less computationally expensive than 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations. The result gets stored in an N-dimensional matrix where N is the number of variables you care about: damage suffered, defensive focus left, defensive evades left, and (not yet implemented) offensive focus left. Adding gunner requires two new things: 1) looking at the resulting PDF and generating a new attack for cells with 0 damage suffered, and 2) adding options for defensive choice to eat 1 damage rather than let gunner trigger. For Fel the latter wouldn't really matter since he typically wants to evade everything anyway.

I can run it considering crits as well (4^4 * 3^3 = 6912 permutations), but typically only use that for durability calculations.

Ah, I see. I went the procedural route because I'm not so great at the probabilities. (Also, implementing decision points like Gunner and conditional defensive token spending is easier, for me, when done procedurally.)

...I'll stop derailing this thread and we can go back to talking about how awesome double IG is.

Double IG has kind of made me regret ever flying anything else. Lol

...I'll stop derailing this thread and we can go back to talking about how awesome double IG is.

So many awesomes.

I'm glad I self disclosed about the number of range 1 shots i take, I really don't get to see other Iggy players that often so I've really developed my own style, but there's room for improvement.

I just jumped in a vassal game and went double HLC Pred Adv.S, dropping 1 AT to make it work. Honestly, I didn't miss the AT that much. It was against a VI-Boba/VI-88.

It was weird, I felt a little fumbly with C and I'm not sure why. B is flying straight as an arrow as always, and even though C is the same ship, there's something I'm not quite doing right flying him and I really can't put my finger on it...

Perhaps I am still somehow stuck in the Fett88 mindset, flying one like a hammer and the other a bit more like a sickle... Except I'm not doing that, I'm basically flying them right up on each other until one of them dies. That's certainly not how I played Fett 88. I think my next match I will intentionally try the "hammer and sickle" approach again, see what happens.

I think I was just getting too used to flying Wingman... How do you guys fly your duo's in relation to each other?

Depends on the matchup. Versus low ps I'll set up together across from opponent and 3 straight, boost to get turn one shot if they go forward. Followed by boost/k turn usually.

Two ship builds I'll usually start together and then break apart.

Alright guys. The big one. I have absolutely no clue how to take out Super Dash/Corran. I am baffled. Corran's fine, it's Dash that's giving me hell. I dont need a lot of shots on him to take him down, but getting those shots has been a nightmare. So far, this has been the nightmare list for me to go up against. How have you guys fared and how do you approach this fight?

Alright guys. The big one. I have absolutely no clue how to take out Super Dash/Corran. I am baffled. Corran's fine, it's Dash that's giving me hell. I dont need a lot of shots on him to take him down, but getting those shots has been a nightmare. So far, this has been the nightmare list for me to go up against. How have you guys fared and how do you approach this fight?

So double IGs are winning regionals and nationals left and right, can we consider this a step from turreted meta? People complained about maneuvering getting useless, and IGs are all about movement.

Alright guys. The big one. I have absolutely no clue how to take out Super Dash/Corran. I am baffled. Corran's fine, it's Dash that's giving me hell. I dont need a lot of shots on him to take him down, but getting those shots has been a nightmare. So far, this has been the nightmare list for me to go up against. How have you guys fared and how do you approach this fight?

Dash and Corran are hard, particularly when flown together. It's my nightmare matchup as well. Dash is tricky to get within arc and you will almost always have to target him first, due to the point value. This usually means letting Corran get uncontested shots for a couple of turns minimum. I've found Corran is easier to handle once he's on his own, as the Aggressor is a very capable jouster, but the trick is surviving until then and knocking out his support quickly enough.

I've never faced corran/dash. But I'd treat it the way I treat corran/falcon builds. Pressure dash and stay out of range one of Corran. I'd like to kill Corran first, but that just is not realistic usually.