1 hour ago, BergerFett said:

at 11pts I do not care if they die. X-wings cost more than them. I found with howlrunner, dengar, and flight controllers they were insanely effective. i played it in wave 2/3 with 2x isd and rhymer.

6 blue on the way in, counter 4 is scary for all enemy squadrons. Having enemies not even engage or run because they dont want to seed points is a good feeling.

My squadrons were never meant to survive. my Interceptors would intercept high priority targets and eliminate it. 6 interceptors over 2 commands would usually be enough to bring down jann and another ace or 2 and then its counter 4. That was killing jann after making her use every single brace. Rhymer was there cuz gallant haven was popular for a bit.

that is/was my issue with rhymer bomber balls, you want them to live to get work out of them. Blue dice have a 50% for damage on ships I used rhymer for threat projection and to draw the enemy fighters out of the safety of their ships and their ships AA fire.

watching your opponents face as you drop Counter 4 swarm though.... those tears were so salty they found some scrolls

I like your explanation, but I do not like its implication: You do end up losing a considerable amount of points when you lose a lot of Ints.

And in general, we're talking about nullifying them in wave4 by doing AA flak first from a ship, then using flight Commander to delay squadrons until after the AA flak has softened them up. Yes, they get off one attack and one counter. so its still good. 10 blue dice with rerolls for 11pts. haha.

IF they don't die in two turns or one turn from extra concentrated AA flak.

4 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

I like your explanation, but I do not like its implication: You do end up losing a considerable amount of points when you lose a lot of Ints.

And in general, we're talking about nullifying them in wave4 by doing AA flak first from a ship, then using flight Commander to delay squadrons until after the AA flak has softened them up. Yes, they get off one attack and one counter. so its still good. 10 blue dice with rerolls for 11pts. haha.

IF they don't die in two turns or one turn from extra concentrated AA flak.

anytime someone shoots my squadrons and not my ships im happy. i really am. they always made their points back. i loved seeing enemy squadrons. if they let me alpha its a wrap. if i have 130pts and they have 130pts and i kill 30pts im already up. sure i lose points but i found there was a tipping point where i would stop losing squadrons. its hard to explain it probably wouldn't work as well now. I donno its pretty solid back then. if you draw their fighers out from aa range it helps too (points to rhymer)

like with counter 4 i didnt mind getting alpha'd knowing they wont kill all my fighters at once. was soo good

Something I thought that would have been a better use of cloak is to "move distance 1 after you activate." This way you can get that alpha strike, and then fade away out of range of return fire. Your opponent can't fire back without moving first, or you could just move deeper to lock down more/different squadrons.

The best way to use your phantoms is throw them in the trash because they are officially the worst squadron in the game.

I believe they are the most underrated squadron currently that the imperials have.

In my current CC campaign, I am running the following:

Phantoms cc
Author: LegionOfBOOM86

Faction: Galactic Empire
Points: 500/400

Commander: Admiral Ozzel

Assault Objective: Station Assault
Defense Objective: Fighter Ambush
Navigation Objective: Solar Corona

Gozanti-class Cruisers (23 points)
- Vector ( 2 points)
- Expanded Hangar Bay ( 5 points)
= 30 total ship cost

Gozanti-class Cruisers (23 points)
- Comms Net ( 2 points)
= 25 total ship cost

Raider-I Class Corvette (44 points)
- Ordnance Experts ( 4 points)
= 48 total ship cost

[ flagship ] Imperial I-Class Star Destroyer(110 points)
- Admiral Ozzel ( 20 points)
- Minister Tua ( 2 points)
- Ordnance Experts ( 4 points)
- Reinforced Blast Doors ( 5 points)
- H9 Turbolasers ( 8 points)
- High-Capacity Ion Turbines ( 8 points)
= 157 total ship cost

Gladiator I-Class Star Destroyer (56 points)
- Demolisher ( 10 points)
- Skilled First Officer ( 1 points)
- Ordnance Experts ( 4 points)
- Engine Techs ( 8 points)
- Assault Proton Torpedoes ( 5 points)
= 84 total ship cost

2 Lamda-class Shuttles ( 30 points)
1 Whisper ( 20 points)
5 TIE Phantom Squadrons ( 70 points)
2 Firespray-31s ( 36 points)

With being able to counter deploy against my opponents fighter contingent, the Vector gozanti had been able to consistently scalpel out the intel or aces. My opponents never key into the speed boost and always deploy at max distance. After the engagement, being able to yo-yo them back into lambda range just let's me abuse relay and I get to continue to chew away the squads. 4 hull against bombers is still fairly resilient. I do take losses, but I've come ahead this far in all my games with them (3 cc games, 1 test prior). I think the key to them is to go enmass. 1-2 will be underwhelming for sure, but once you load up on them , that's when they start to shine.

While I do wish they had either a natural reroll or cloak worked at the end of their activation, they are far from hot garbage

I want to like the phantom, but my problem is defenders have the same virsitlity with more consistency. I'm going to run whisper in my cc campaign, as I can just bearly justify her over steel as she has a scatter, but still steel is only one more point for more consistency and more hull with the lost of scatter. I'm going to force myself to play them more so I can get a better handle on them. I have said it once and I'll say it again if phantoms had swarm I would be sold on them. I really want them to be good because they are probably the coolist tie so I'm just hoping they have a high learning curve and I just have not mastered them.

Yeah if they had swarm,theyd be super cool. Though, they might step on the Tie Fighter's toes itself.

Yeah Swarm is pretty much all TIE fighters have so i'd rather not hand that off to any other generic ship. If we ever get a wave of unique pilots for fighters a Sigma Squadron or something of that nature with Swarm would be neat. And like i mentioned in my first post, Rogue would be amazing.
Probably the only squad you dont want to activate via commands. If cloak went off at the start of the squad phase it'd be different (command activate in, cloak out, thus requiring Snipe or Rogue to actually catch them w/o your own commands)