Hey guys,
With talks of turrets and dice going on, I thought it'd be a good time to share how I have been coping with what I feel are unsavory elements in an otherwise extraordinary game.
By now, we should all know of the two looming shadows of bull and blubber: fat Han and fat Cheri. These two pack what is in my opinion the worst mechanic ever designed for this game, the primary weapon turret, and fly the only ships that can abuse it effectively (poor YT-2400 shoots 360, but hits as hard as a tie fighter). You simply cannot avoid a PWT if you hope to engage a VT or YT, it is literally impossible without the aid of a space peanut or an epic ship. To make matters worse, both ships lather on upgrades that trivialize obstructions or the impact of blocking (upgrades such as predator, c3po, gunner) which scale hard with the two high PS pilots and their offensive, action-independent abilities. The end result is a ship that is always in danger of being saved by your bad rolls.
Sure, dice are everywhere in this game regardless of ship-type, but there are no other ships where these exchanges cannot be avoided. Through the magic of honest-to-god arcs or minimum/maximum ranges, you can avoid ever having to roll your horrible green bastards by simply playing well. Unfortunately, until FFG erratas the PWT you will always have to interact with these dice and there will always be a chance that your plays will be rewarded with a slap in the face from rngesus himself.
Still, here I am playing X-wing for quite some time now. Let me share with you how I've coped.
Do note that "to cope" and "to win" are two very different things. The aim of this post is not to showcase foolproof strategies, those simply do not exist because you will never fully escape green dice and you will never escape getting shot at no matter how skillful you are. Instead, I intend to showcase builds that let your maneuvers matter almost as much as they would against any other ship.
1. Defeat dice with guarantees
Ironically, the ship least affected by the PWT's dice swings are PWTs themselves. If you want to play a ship as far removed from the effects of fickle dice, you technically can't do it better than the 0 agility Decimator and the always-heavily-modified attacks of cherineau. Unfortunately, I am not enamored with the idea of dice-offs with other PWTs since now neither player can avoid attacks, and that detracts quite a bit from the manuevering (not to mention places undue influence on that one roll-off for initiative). And so, we must look elsewhere.
A good place to start would be the popular meta ships that can survive in a setting polluted by fatties, namely Soontir, Corran, and the IGs. These arced ships all share a common theme of packing plenty of guaranteed damage mitigation, rivaling Han's c3po + evade with evade + thrusters, evade + r2-d2, and another evade + thrusters respectively.
The theme of all these ships over PWTs, however, is that they're highly dependent on manuevering. Auto-thrusters will not work in arc (outside of range 3) and Corran has to lock himself into a very limited array of greens to shed damage, making him predictable and avoidable. Moreover, Soonts or any sensor-less e-wing/aggressor actually have to worry about getting blocked, because without actions they have no defense against the whims of their green dice. This weakness is exactly what makes them so attractive.
Auto-thrusters are without a doubt my favorite card for doing the impossible: making your maneuvers count against PWTs. The guaranteed dice modification, when triggered, gives you a tangible benefit for outmanuevering them, and the fact that it can be countered means that losing Soonts to a range 1 shot by an in-arc Han can mean that you didn't play as well as could have, not that you would have suffered at any angle and nothing you could have done would have mattered. Combined with the evade action, thrusters make it very difficult for PWTs to land damage from out of arc shots and forces them, essentially, to act like honest to god arced ships once in a while. The only cons to thrusters are that green dice can and still will try to **** you over, and that thrusters are not available to every ship in the game.
As for Corran, my experience with E-wings pens them as being essentially invincible 1-on-1. While a green manuevered E-wing is very easy to dodge, there's not much a turret can do about the turtled terror of focus + evade as r2-d2 can repair the damage caused by horrible green dice. Since Corran cannot get thrusters and being out of arc gives you zero benefit, the thing you have to watch out for is enemy 2-ship lists concentrating fire on him. r2-d2 and PTL do good work, but they will not reliably staved off turn after turn of even two 3-dice attacks.
A less popular, but no less potent option is Xizor. Between auto-thrusters and his ability, Xizor guarantees that 2 damage rolled against him will be brushed aside. The problem, of course, is that his escort generally cannot cope with dice the same way.
In closing, these ships and pilots set a good standard for the only reliable way to withstand a PWT's bull: guaranteed damage reduction based largely upon outmanuevering your enemies.
2.) GSP is the new BSP
One of the lists previously touted as the turret killer was the swarm. Turrets pack a lot of points into a single attack and can be outdiced by multiple smaller ships. In practice, however, the ease of flying 2-ships and the lack of partial scoring make flying the mentally taxing swarm a wash. Worse of all, bringing more ships ultimately just brings more way that dice can screw you. An auto-thrustering, evading Soonts will take 1/2 damage at most from a turret. A focused Tie Fighter is never not in danger of being oneshot, regardless of your input as a player.
BBBBZ does not share the green dice weakness, but they have their own problem in producing red dice to match. The difference of one hull, of one bad roll depriving you of a hit, can lose you the game against a PWT. Even if you win the ensuing dice-fest, you might well be left wondering
why you didn't just go off and play 40k instead. No, to bring the game's tactical manuevering back to the forefront where it belongs we're going to need to go back a few waves.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:
Green Squadron Pilot (19)
*PTL (3)
*Refit (-2)
*Thrusters (2)
[22]
What this little guy lacks in raw health and dice, it makes up for in reliability and maneuverability. The curse of green dice will always be present, but PTL gives you access to the defensive focus + evade or the offensive focus + TL to get dice rolling in your favor. Autothrusters are absolutely essential to ensuring tactical use of the A-wing, especially in hit and run scenarios, aren't trivially invalidated by the poor mechanics behind the PWT. I used to run several un-thrustered prototypes and then stopped when I lost a run at a free cr-90 because I had to roll 1 natural evade out of 24 against cherineau. The thrusters, and maybe even the reduced impact of predator, are essential to making my games against PWTs even the least bit enjoyable.
Furthermore, they can be used to secure TL at range 3 without having to push the limit for a defensive token or evade, which keeps your dial options open and your A-wing healthy enough to not just get automatically killed when it tries to get another shot off.
The mechanics behind PTL and the fact that these little buggers live and die on their actions/thrusters leads to some very engaging games where it's less that PWTs pull wins out of their ass (though it can definitely still happen) and more that you did not enable the little buggers properly. GSPs are amazing for putting you, the player, back in control of your game.
As an alternative to BBBBZ, you could run 3 of the above Greens and 2 protos with thrusters.
3.) Mini-fell
Jake Farrel, Soontir-lite, boasts very similar defenses to the baron. While he cannot turtle with redundant focus, he can still pack on the focus/evade/thrusters combo and move like a maniac. Best of all, he can target-lock without having to waste points on targeting computer and he comes with some ablative shielding to buffer against a few bull rolls.
Jake's utility as an ace is hampered by his measly 2 red-dice, but when armed with prockets and the reliability of TL + focus (plus his ability, which allows him to scoot into range even after taking offensive dice modifications) he becomes an assassin capable of compensating for the A-wing's general lack of offense. With the highly likely 5 hits it produces, it provides a great counter-measure against the soontirs and corrans that often accompany PWTs and give A-wings trouble. Even a fully tanked Soonts would have to make four 5/8 rolls to completely negate the attack, and one damage is all you need to knock off that stealth device and make him much easier to kill. If soonts gets hit by prockets on a turn that he gets blocked...well, you can rightfully call bull if he manages to survive.
The 33 points of Jake (VI, PTL, test pilot, rockets, thrusters) make a great replacement for two prototypes with thrusters, giving you Jake and 3 GSPs to throw against opposing turrets. Even better, it's a 99 point list that'll give you the initiative bid against the derivative Cheri + Soonts build.
Jake even has select utility as a rebel captive soak, given he can get a defensive/offensive focus and free action into auto-thruster range/angle before taking the stress. Jake is the epitome of maneuver dependent, a high-flying, high performance ace until you screw up and he turns into a prototype pilot. With access to autothrusters, he forces PWTs to respect that fact.
just beware, suffering bull greendice on your one procket roll can be a real mood killer 
4.) Control without thrusters
Lacking thrusters will almost always land you at the mercy of the dice, but fortunately control elements give you ways around them.
Ion, while technically dice-dependent, carries enough threat to force the turret to care about its positioning. One forced 1-straight can be enough to force them onto an unsavory obstacle or on a crash course for the terrifying table edge. The requirement that large ships be double-tokened before ionization makes the damage loss of ion cannon unacceptable against the guaranteed exchange of dice, but with BTL-A4s and the upcoming ion bombs/conner net it may yet become a viable counter.
Stress is even better, because cards such as Tactician and R3-a2, god of stress, don't give two ***** about what you roll. Just line up the proper shot and bring the tokens down. While PWTs are, rather disappointingly, less affected by stress than just about every other ship in the game (don't have to worry about how their dial will affect their 360 weapon) it still forces a few more maneuver considerations upon them based upon the ubiquity of engine upgrade. Shutting off EU turns PWTs into lumbering, (even more) predictable bastards and while they have great dials it's not for an abundance of green maneuvers.
Stress also shuts down evades, via falcon title or isanne, which can be quite helpful. It's not something PWTs necessarily enjoy dealing with, especially not around obstacles nor the threat of other-wise cancel-able ion attacks.
Basically, Stress can bypass dice or guaranteed defensive tech and forces PWTs to make more significant decisions by forcing some manner of limitation on them.
The panic attack Y-wing (Ion Cannon Turret, R3-A2, Btl-A4) is the pinnacle of control tech atm, offering range and dice-independent stress on demand and the threat of ionization in one convenient package. At the very least, if the game goes poorly you can have fun trying to outdo Tycho i.t.o stress tokens stacked.
Sadly, though, control tech will always do more to counter the PTL small ships that can tangle with turrets (soontir, corran), but since they tend to hang around PWTs anyway this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Being able to ward off small aces gives games against PWT 2-ship lists a positioning element you would not have enjoyed otherwise. Unlike the PWT, forcing these ships out of arcs might also result in them losing their attack for the round.
Note that you don't necessarily have to play Panic Attack to get good use out of the Y. Additional sources of stress are more reliable than just the one, but the Y is perfectly capable of double-stressing on its own. This could make it a very interesting partner for our good friend dash, who hits 100 points when fully kitted out (eu, KK, hlc, outrider); escorted by the Y & a thruster prototype. Because of the doughnut hole, Dash provides a focal point where you can bet your opponent will want to be, and that's exactly where the little Y will aim its arc.
Sadly, that's all I got for now. Those are the only ways I have found to make games against PWTs the least bit enjoyable or engaging, the ways through which your input as a player can be respected and the impact of the dice reduced as much as possible. Hopefully, anyone similarly annoyed by the current popularity of two very specific ships can take some sort of inspiration from this wall of text.
Edited by ficklegreendice
