Who is it that's depending on a CR90B's blue dice for damage output, anyway?

Clearly, you haven't played me much recently... The CR90B drive-by works wonders in conjunction with fighters to force those defense tokens before the big hit, especially if it hits at the beginning of the turn Demolisher wants to strike on.

And I'm almost never happy to see accuracies come up on it. This will be a pretty good upgrade for the CR90B.

I also love the CR90B + NK-7 idea. It is ludicrously easy to double-arc a larger ship with it, and you can decide to focus fire as and when you want due to command 1. With a double-arc, this is a guaranteed 6 damage across 2 shots - for 44 points.

It is both the ship you use to bulk up your fleet numbers to get uncontested activations, and the rebel ship that benefits the most from that advantage. (pre-MC30, anyway).

I also like the idea of this ship. But I expect it to be overshadowed by the CR90A + TRC. 7 points extra and you will have to spend evades, but you gain a lot of range and the damage is going to be much higher too.

Who is it that's depending on a CR90B's blue dice for damage output, anyway?

Clearly, you haven't played me much recently... The CR90B drive-by works wonders in conjunction with fighters to force those defense tokens before the big hit, especially if it hits at the beginning of the turn Demolisher wants to strike on.

And I'm almost never happy to see accuracies come up on it. This will be a pretty good upgrade for the CR90B.

I also love the CR90B + NK-7 idea. It is ludicrously easy to double-arc a larger ship with it, and you can decide to focus fire as and when you want due to command 1. With a double-arc, this is a guaranteed 6 damage across 2 shots - for 44 points.

It is both the ship you use to bulk up your fleet numbers to get uncontested activations, and the rebel ship that benefits the most from that advantage. (pre-MC30, anyway).

I also like the idea of this ship. But I expect it to be overshadowed by the CR90A + TRC. 7 points extra and you will have to spend evades, but you gain a lot of range and the damage is going to be much higher too.

I like both builds, and run both, but they just fill different roles. With the TRC build you *either* gain range *or* damage. Assuming CF, the SW-7 build is reliably 6 damage at medium range. At long range, TRC on an A gives you 2+(.75 avg) out the side and 2+(.75 avg) out the front... an actual decrease in damage, at the expense of both of your most valuable tokens at that range. At medium, it gives you (2+(1.25 avg))+(2+(1.25 avg)) = 6.5 average damage. So you get marginally more average damage and the ability to strike at longer range, at the cost of +16% point cost, and spending both of your damage mitigation defense tokens, and you're also betting on the most unreliable die for your damage.

Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages to both, but it's definitely not a huge swing either way.

Actually, I don't think my math is quite right there, because you can selectively choose which die to TRC. It won't be a major difference I don't think. I'm not quite sure how to do that, but I think the point still stands.

Well the shooting at long range vs not shooting at all is huge. And actually the damage goes up an awful lot.

To give you a rough idea of the numbers, add these into the expected damage aiming that you will always spend the token :

Red +Damage

1 1.25

2 1.625

3 1.75

So shooting at long range (2 red) = 1.5+1.625 = 3.125.

Better hope your ship has an evade token.

To drive the figure home, if this ship gets a double arc, even without a CF it's going to be landing on average 3.875+2.75=6.625. With: 2*3.875=7.75.

(but you did likely burn both evade tokens).

*I've not given my method; it's on a piece of paper here at work. I've made some assumptions/roundings, but I expect these figures to be close. I do have an MSc Applied Maths.

I don't understand why people think ISDIIs are squishy lol, I think some imperial players might be stuck in the mentality that big ships must only spam navigate.

I have had tremendous success with my 200 point ISDII, commands are usually Engineering for the token, navigate for the token, concentrate fire (my placement and navigation have gotten good enough that I am almost certain to have little to no damage and a front arc shot in this round and an extra blue die is great for accuracies or triggering NK7s) and from then on its nothing but engineering! that's 7 more shields to mitigate the likely XI7s or the shield exhaustion of enhanced projectors (sometimes I run projectors, sometimes ECM, projectors are good versus high activation lists as you only have so many tokens anyway and people are unlikely to have bought and equipped 5 or 6 XI7s).

I have had rebel players throw every ship at this thing only to expose their flank to my demolisher (with engine techs) and suffer withering return fire and the best they have managed is 9/11 damage (and this was in a contested outpost match where I couldn't leverage obstruction but did get 100 points in objective tokens). I have used this thing to 2-round a less upgraded ISD, just pointed that magical front/side arc line at it and vaporized him (he managed 2 bump damage and some shields). Its wonderful bait, both psychologically and strategically.

Its a poor carpenter that blames the tools!

Well the shooting at long range vs not shooting at all is huge. And actually the damage goes up an awful lot.

To give you a rough idea of the numbers, add these into the expected damage aiming that you will always spend the token :

Red +Damage

1 1.25

2 1.625

3 1.75

So shooting at long range (2 red) = 1.5+1.625 = 3.125.

Better hope your ship has an evade token.

To drive the figure home, if this ship gets a double arc, even without a CF it's going to be landing on average 3.875+2.75=6.625. With: 2*3.875=7.75.

(but you did likely burn both evade tokens).

*I've not given my method; it's on a piece of paper here at work. I've made some assumptions/roundings, but I expect these figures to be close. I do have an MSc Applied Maths.

Thanks for the post. For the record, I'm a huge fan of TRC, specifically for cranking up red punch at close range, and it's helpful to have a rundown of exactly how much of a boost they give.

This doesn't really change the fact that the two ships fill different roles, though. The A is flexible; the B is reliable.

Sure, being able to attack when you're at long range is huge... If you're at long range. The obvious solution to that is don't be at long range when you want to be shooting. And let's be honest here, you're flying CR90's: nobody can position better than this ship.

I use my CR90B's very aggressively, for drive-by softening-up attacks, much like you would use fighters. Getting an absolutely guaranteed 3+3 attack when it goes off with the double arc+CF is a really big deal for forcing damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't choices on those defense tokens. More damage is not necessarily what I'm after in this role. Obviously, who doesn't want more damage, but it's not very valuable to me in this case. I wouldn't pay a substantial percentage more if I could to be doing 4/4 attacks, for example, because they brace to the same anyway, which is exactly what I'm trying to force them to do. And I don't want accuracy most of the time because I want him spending those defense tokens.

The big thing the TRC build brings to the table that the SW7 doesn't is flexibility. You can play it defensively at long range, not spending your defense tokens and just foregoing the damage boost. You can play it offensively at long range, using TRC. You can play it aggressively for the hard hit, charging in to get those blues into play. And you can do all of this over the course of one game, depending on what the tactical picture calls for.

Bottom line, in my book, both CR90 variants got some pretty nice upgrades with Wave 2, and I'm excited to see where they go.