When I first read this upgrade card, I thought it was super cool. But this was on the core set and I fly Imperials so I realized it was useless.

Now with Wave 1, I still struggle to find ways to use it. I think it is mainly because of how I fly. Like I said, I fly Imperials... either 2 VSDs, 1 VSD and 1 GSD, or 1 VSD and 2 GSDs. However, I always find myself wanting to fire first with the ships that DON'T have the Overload Pulse upgrade. Maybe it's my GSDs that I want to shoot first at close range before the enemy has a chance to fly away. Maybe it's my other VSD... again wanting to shoot before the enemy has to fly away.

At most, I could use Overload Pulse as ships fly into the initial furball. As ships fly towards each other, then I could activate the OP-equipped ship first, find a way to trigger OP (Screed, most likely), then let the victim ship fly closer before I activate my GSDs or Vic1. Once the initial head-on pass has completed or if some of my ships are in pursuit of the enemy ships, the activating those ships first becomes a priority and OP becomes useless.

Has anyone found a good use/tactic/strategy for Overload Pulse?

It is currently more valuable for the rebels because of the CR90, however the Empire may see use out of it with the Raider Corvette, if it does have Ion Cannon upgrades.

I have struggled to get any utility out of it. It sounds like a cool card on the first reading, but it's hard to make it work.

I'm certainly hoping the Raider has Ion Cannon upgrades to make use of this card.

With the currently available ships however, I suspect the best use will be if you can get the target on the border of 2 arcs of your VSD2. This way you can open up with the weaker arc first, wipe out the defender's tokens, then follow up with the stronger arc.

Keeping in mind that I use Screed, I'm debating myself combining OP, H9s and Intel Officer on a VSD2. Firing from the side arc, this ship can usually flip one of the reds to an accuracy and spend the other red to flip the blue to a critical if necessary, thereby freezing out the target's Evade token. If the target has 2 Evade tokens, Intel Officer can at least force the target to discard the 2nd token if they want to use it.

This should make it pretty certain that you can fire off OP, leaving the target with exhausted defence tokens for your 2nd attack (if you have position) and any other attacks following on.

Currently the VSD-II is pretty much the absolute worst ship you could put OLP on. Intelligence Agent, on the other hand, is pretty much exactly what you would want on a VSD-II for that kind of effect. It just happens to be how the two cards interact with the ships they can go on.

I haven't seen it used much and I myself haven't used it all. Each time it's been used on me, it was limited (I think 1 time each in 4 matches) and the effect wasn't as horrible as I'd had imagined.

It was always on a cr 90 and whenever it got close enough to be used, it was, without fail, destroyed.

Yeah, I haven't taken that card since I figured out how the card actually worked (and that your opponent is still going to get free use of defence tokens for that shot). I normally play Imperials also and find Intel officer to be much more punishing.

To get the most out of it, the ship that has it equipped needs to be the first ship activated for your side, you need at least 3 ships to take full advantage (squads are already pretty much immune to defense tokens for the most part already) and prioritize a single target to focus on.

in the ideal case a VSD - 2 isn't bad with OLP.

the ideal case is: side arc to OLP and follow with a front-arc to cripple the **** out of the enemy

but, given that it's a VSD, there's a reason it's called the "ideal case"

Using it on a Corvette with all blue batteries, and being able to fly it behind the VSD/GSD makes it a wicked little distraction.

Dominator is another method to get the blue crits needed for the ability to trigger.

I've tried using it on the corvette but I've found two main problems:

It's hard to get in the medium range but not short range bracket a corvette at short range doesn't have long to live. This can be mitigated if you're player one but that brings us to the second problem- It needs to activate as soon as possible so that other ships can capitalise on the effect and so it can speed out of trouble.

Over time I'll get better at estimating the ranges and setting up the shot, but often another ship's activation is more important, whether it be to intercept squadrons or lay down some fire and get out of arc. At that point the enemy ship usually moves out of medium range, while still pounding the corvette.

I have tried laying the corvette in ambush but my opponents tend to stay out of medium range or move the target ship last, which again makes the OP less useful. I suppose it can be handy for dictating the opponent's activations.

I'm thinking of changing it to a corvette A and use it to score objectives and launch multiple small attacks against enemy ships.