Been seeing a lot of build discussion using the twin laser turret, but as I read the description, I was wondering what the hype was about. Now I am suddenly wondering if I have been playing different cards wrong.

TLT description, "Attack: Perform this attack twice (even against a ship outside your firing arc). Each time this attack hits, the defender suffers 1 damage, then cancel all dice results. Attack: 3, Range 2-3

so, you attach this to a Y-wing, and shoot at a Tie fighter... you roll two hits and a critical (wow) and the tie fighter rolls two blanks and an eyeball (bad luck), the tie suffers only one damage (not the critical) and now you have to roll for the second attack... you roll one hit and two blanks, the tie gets two evades, so no damage from the second shot...

how is this better than say the autoblaster (other than range) where the tie wouldn't have even been able to evade and the two hits would have just gone through...

what am I missing? the tie does get to try to evade, right?

what am I missing? the tie does get to try to evade, right?

You have it right. The biggest advantage of the TLT is the range. Range 2-3 vs range 1 on the autoblaster.

The other advantages are...

• You can make them spend a focus/evade token and then shoot again when they have no tokens.
• The more you roll green dice the more they will fail you.
• You have two chances to score a Hit and strip off a stealth device
• They are better then any other turret upgrade in the game.
• There's the death by a thousand cuts advantage. A defender may hold off using a evade token to stop that one damage because a bigger threat has yet to fire that turn.

Two things.

First, against high-Agility targets like a TIE fighter, the most likely results of an attack are 0-1 damage anyway. So you're trading away those relatively unlikely high-damage results in order to get a second attack, and on average that works in your benefit.

Second, for similar reasons the TLT is a lot more reliable (less swingy) than a regular attack. An attack with 3 dice against a TIE fighter could have any result from a complete miss to a one-hit kill. That kind of variation takes control out of your hands and gives it to the dice, which can add spice to a beer-and-pretzels game but is a bit obnoxious at a tournament. Even if it didn't push your average damage up (although it does), narrowing the set of possible results is a good thing because it makes it easier to anticipate the flow of the game and helps return some control of the game's outcome to the player (rather than the dice).

Put it on a high PS ship and your opponent has to worry about using all its defense against the double-tap early in the round. Put it on a low PS ship and your opponent has to worry about two highly likely hits coming to it late in the round.

• The more you roll green dice the more they will fail you.

That is the primary lesson in X-wing.

While it is true that TLT does not perform extraordinarily well against a large swarm (8 ties have 24 hp total to burn), TLT does very very well against things like high agility ace ships.... where each ace ends up costing a third or more of the list.