I've been thinking of trying a list with Rhymer and 10 basic TIE fighters. Basically stay together in a ball to protect Rhymer, prevent anyone getting close, overwhelm enemy fighters with sheer number of dice, and though they're not bombers, 10 blue dice at medium range will do some serious damage!

Thing is, if someone flies a ship right into the middle of this ball of fighters, only the ones in the middle will be placed touching the ship. What happens if they have no place to go? Are they destroyed, or do other fighters get moved out of the way to accomodate?

Note that Rhymer only allows you to extend the range of your squadrons when attacking ships, not other squadrons. I think you got that anyway...

If you want to protect Rhymer, a Tie Advanced or two does the trick of drawing away enemy fire. If you are planning on having your squadrons engage enemy ships, why not just bring bombers? They're much more effective against ships (hits counts as hits, crits counts as hits and can resolve a crit effect, so it's only accuracies and blanks that can ruin your day), more HP than a TIE (5HP vs 3HP for a 1-point cost difference), and move the same range as a TIE.

If you make your ball tight enough, I can see the issue about the inner set of squadrons being displaced and not fitting into the space between the ship and the un-displaced squadrons.... interesting scenario... RRG says squadrons cannot be placed so that it overlaps another squadron or ship, but nothing about whether the other squadrons are nudged out of the way to make room for the displaced squadrons....

Yes, I've been wondering as well - what happens if there isn't sufficient room around a ship base to place all the squadrons it has displaced (could be too many squadrons, could be another ship in the way or even the map edge)?

Anything stopping the player from placing it over the edge and destroying it? On the surface that seems legal.

The FAQ says you can't place them off the board, but there definitely isn't any protocol for not having enough room to place them.

Ah hell, we broke Armada.

To Intys Rule (praise the sun!), the reason I was thinking TIEs instead of bombers is that:

1) You get an extra fighter after 9, over the bombers.

2) They can actually fight other fighters. Bombers are Just. Terrible. At fighting other fighters.

3) You can suicide-fly a fighter into an enemy swarm to stall them a little. Bombers, on the other hand, are "heavy" and can't even engage other squadrons.

4) Along the same lines as stalling enemy interceptors, a tie fighter could also fly into someone's rhymer ball or B wing bodyguard and tie them up to keep them from shooting your ships

5) I only own 4 bomber models after two blisters of fighter expansions, and don't want to buy more. But after taking the Imperial half of two starters and buying two fighter expansions, I have SO MANY TIE FIGHTERS OH MY GOD and was wondering if there was any way I could use even *most* of them in a list.