I was the tournament organizer for our local Massing at Sullust event. The 4th place player likes squadrons so I ended up with a shiny new Imperial Raider. Tomorrow I will return to Game Headquarters in hopes of finding an opponent for a casual game. Here is my 300-point Imperial force built solely for the purpose of me getting to use my Imperial Raider.

Victory I-class Star Destroyer

Admiral Screed

Weapon Liaison

Flight Controllers

Expaned Hanger Bay

Gladiator I-class Star Destroyer

Assault Concussion Missiles

Demolisher

Raider I-class Corvette

Admiral Montferrat

Expanded Launchers

Soontir Fel TIE Interceptor

3x TIE Interceptor

Objectives: Precision Strike, Fleet Ambush, Intel Sweep

Obviously the whole point of the fighter squadrons is escort the capital ships to eliminate enemy squadrons. I plan to try and use the Raider with maneuver commands to try to get to an advantageous position to charge with the nose guns and Expanded Launchers blazing. We'll see how it works out, provided I can find a game tomorrow evening.

Let us know how it goes

If you're running Screed as your Commander, I'd strongly recommend using Assault Concussion Missiles on your Raider instead of Expanded Launchers.

If you can replace one of the Interceptors with a TIE Advanced, the TIE Advanced does a good job of meat-shielding for the Interceptors (and helping them safely proc Swarm) and get ugly when he's palling around with Soontir Fel.

How are you running two admirals?

Admiral Montferrat is an Admiral by rank, but he is not a Commander upgrade card.

He's an Officer Card, and thus, perfectly legal to take alongside Screed.

Curiously, this came up many, many moons ago, when people started playing around with Admiral Chiraneu.

Good question. its strange that they would use these admirals as officers. Would have thought they could have saved them for future upgrades.

Unfortunately I haven't gotten to run it yet. The only opponent I found Friday was a new player who had literally bought the Core set that day. So I played the learning game out of the box with him. He enjoyed and is already planning to buy an Assault Frigate and a Rebel Squadron pack to supplement his Core set.

I have modified the build the to following:

Victory I-class Star Destroyer

Admiral Screed

Weapon Liaison

Flight Controllers

Expanded Hanger Bay

Gladiator I-class Star Destroyer

Assault Concussion Missiles

Demolisher

Raider I-class Corvette

Admiral Montferrat

Assault Concussion Missiles

Darth Vader

1x TIE Advanced

2x TIE Interceptor

Objectives: Precision Strike, Fleet Ambush, Intel Sweep

297 Points​

I'll have another chance to get into a game on Sunday, but there is a fair chance I will be teaching again. Since the exposure of the Massing at Sullust tournament we are attracting more new players.

Finally got to use this build last night. I won the game with about a 175-point Margin of Victory. However it felt like a much closer game than that.

First off the Raider and a Rebel CR90B are the objective ships in an Intel Sweep mission (my card). The Rebel Corvette zooms in at speed 4 and gets itself into long range of my Gladiator's front arc. My two red dice roll only a single hit which it evades. My Raider managed to get to medium range of of the CR90A and does some front shield damage. My Gladiator (Demolisher), moving at speed three manages to get into short range with a broadside that results in the CR90B having no more front or right shields and only 2 Hull remaining.

At the start of the next turn the CR90B, of course, activates first in a bid to extract itself from a hopeless position. It has the Overload Pulse upgrade. Its front guns, which can only roll two blue dice due to Admiral Montferrat roll two damage with a critical and so exhaust all of my defense tokens. It's side guns, 2 blue dice, roll two damage with a critical and so exhaust all of Gladiator's defense tokens. The enemy Neb-B has a shot at my Raider and his three red dice result in a single red critical (from Salvation), so two damage with a critical effect. Knowing that after this round, at speed 4 I will be well and away out of the Neb's front arc and at some range, I elect not to discard any defense tokens and just swallow the two damage since, with the stored Engineering token and my next command dial I can start rebuilding those shields while out of range. So naturally the critical I get is a Capacitor Failure. No more front shields and no way to repair them since I just left the base behind me.

The Raider survived the game but never got to fire another shot at an enemy ship. It was in too fragile a condition to risk it getting destroyed. It did manage to do a number on the few enemy squadrons that got too near and did win me the 75 points of Intel Sweep tokens. The Rebel CR90B, their objective ship, did not survive past turn two.

The Opposing Rebel Fleet

Assault Frigate Mark II B

General Dodonna

Electronic Countermeasures

XX-9 Turbolasers

Paragon

Nebulon-B Support Refit

XI7 Turbolasers

Salvation

CR90 Corellian Corvette B

Leia Organa

Overload Pulse

Tantive IV

Wedge Antilles X-Wing Squadron

X-Wing Squadron

2x A-Wing Squadrons

2x Y-Wing Squadrons

300 Points

Objectives: Most Wanted, Hyperspace Assault, Intel Sweep

The Rebels lost the Tantive IV and all of their Squadrons.

The Imperials lost 1 TIE Advanced and 1 TIE Interceptor

The Imperials got 75 VP for the Intel Sweep Objective

I also ran the raider with expanded launchers, and like you I felt it was too fragile to really get up there to use it. I would rather run them a little cheaper.

I had altered that set up and used ACM instead of Expanded Launchers (a minor change really). What screwed over the Raider was having an Overload Pulse exhaust all his defense tokens and then a Capacitor Failure which stuck me with no front shields and no way to fix them. So he had to keep his front arc out of the line of sight of enemy ships. I think if luck had been a little different the Raider would have contributed much more.

imo, using the Raider as a mini-GSD is just going to leave you dissapointed

it's far more fragile than the GSD and not terribly suited to unloading damage at all (missing so many dice on the sides...)

personally, I believe it'd be more efficient to try and leverage its unique selling points and set it apart from the GSD (otherwise, you're basically just better off using the GSD)

these selling points:

Raider-1

*more maneuverable than GSD; Expanded Launchers maybe? frail though

*definitely more anti-squadron utility; esp with Ordnance Experts and a title

Raider-2

*ion platform; OLP makes Skreed happy