I am a fan of epic xwing because of the scope and having to play my imperial raider with my angry swarm makes for a fun game.

I have seen a problem arise every time i play against rebel and scum epic games at that is in the form of TLT(Twin Laser Turret).

Every time time my epic ships are shot down in one round from no defense from TLT's. How the rule is written for Reinforce it makes it count that you have a free evade. With weapons in the game like TLT this means nothing and creates a negative gameplay experience.

What i have in mind is to change Reinforce to read: All damage the ship receives is reduced by 1 to a minimum of 0. It gives Epic ships a chance against the TLT effect and allows a player like me to enjoy my Raider or Gozanti instead of collecting dust in my collection.

What kind of swarm are you using against them? And is your opponent fielding any epics of his/her own? 10 TLT Y-Wings is rather nasty, but impossible to one shot a Raider without the BTL upgrade to provide extra damage.

A couple suggestions off the top of my head is that a Darth Vader/Kylo Ren combination would allow you to start blinding pilots as soon as they start shooting at you.

An ordnance-based build would maximize the shield energy that you could regain and also allot energy for a Repair/Construction Droid usage if you go that route instead. An ATC Advance could just as easily substitute for Vader crew and avoid the issue of putting 2 extra damage on your ship.

If things get extra dicey and you know you're about to lose half your Raider, try to put that half in between you and the bulk of the swarm so that they can't get LOS on the surviving portion of your ship (obviously much easier to do on with a crippled front than back). An added bonus is that if you run into them, it doesn't do any extra damage to you while your opponent's fighters evaporate.

Other than that, I'd say make your opponent pay dearly for every TLT that he focuses on your epic by having a swarm of generic interceptors or other 3-4 dice ships shredding into his force every turn. Assuming they're using the max of 10 TLT Y-Wings, that leaves 60 points left for them to spend. With a nicely decked out Raider with triple Plasma Torpedoes, Construction Droid, and other gubbins, you still have enough points for at least 8 AT Alpha Squadron Interceptors.

As for your reinforce suggestion, the issue with that is that it would make the Raider immune to TLT completely. I hate that card and believe that it was one of the most disingenuous ideas that the X-Wing devs ever came up with and have to wonder if they even thought about epic when they designed the stupid thing. But negating the damage entirely isn't an acceptable alternative.

Yeah, TLTs seem a bit messed up in Epic.

You should play Rebel with the Bright Home one day and just run them over to feel better if they are too prevalent in your meta.

The Assailer can withstand better against them at range 3, still vulnerable at range 2. NM, forgot secondary weapons.

I'm not so sure about solutions for the Gozanti. Launch fighters and run like hell with the Suppressor , Tarkin, RAC (crew) and/or Engine Booster and Sensor Team to support as long as possible from range. Dual Laser Turret to hit anything chasing.

Too bad Shield Projector doesn't work on Huge ships. You could slap EM on the Raider and hug the Suppressor close to it. As long as you had the energy, you could potentially force 2 TLT carriers to attack the Gozanti with 3 green dice and a Reinforce token. Of course the Rebels have that option just by putting Biggs on the other side of a Corvette or Transport with SD and the regen astromech of your choice.

17 minutes ago, flyboymb said:

Of course the Rebels have that option just by putting Biggs on the other side of a Corvette or Transport with SD and the regen astromech of your choice.

Nope, Biggs is FAQ'd so he cannot protect huge ships from attacks. Only small and large base.

Oh right. Totally forgot that. What a tangled web we've woven from such simple card text!

On 2/20/2017 at 0:55 PM, Daemonic1 said:

I am a fan of epic xwing because of the scope and having to play my imperial raider with my angry swarm makes for a fun game.

I have seen a problem arise every time i play against rebel and scum epic games at that is in the form of TLT(Twin Laser Turret).

Every time time my epic ships are shot down in one round from no defense from TLT's. How the rule is written for Reinforce it makes it count that you have a free evade. With weapons in the game like TLT this means nothing and creates a negative gameplay experience.

What i have in mind is to change Reinforce to read: All damage the ship receives is reduced by 1 to a minimum of 0. It gives Epic ships a chance against the TLT effect and allows a player like me to enjoy my Raider or Gozanti instead of collecting dust in my collection.

The problem with this is that it completely negates some secondary weapons which doesn't seem ideal either. I don't understand why anybody would play a TLT swarm in epic, How is that fun?

On ‎2‎/‎20‎/‎2017 at 11:55 AM, Daemonic1 said:

I am a fan of epic xwing because of the scope and having to play my imperial raider with my angry swarm makes for a fun game.

What is your angry swarm up to that the Raider has to defend itself all alone?

Not a bad idea especially with so many kill 1 green die upgrades out there like TLT and crackshot. Also it makes the reinforce token something more than just an evade token that doesn't get discarded. Doesn't add much more to the defense as PW and other 3+ secondary weapon firepower will still be able to cut through it.

I like this idea - a lot!

Don't mind so much that it nerf's all "cause 1 damage" weapons because huge ships need a buff anyway.

Y-wing are vp 2 or vp 4 ?

Turbolaser will help you a lot against those low agility ship and since you fire at range 4-5 you can kill one (or two) before they are in range.

Stay most of your time at long range and use your swarm do distract them.

2 hours ago, benskywalker said:

The problem with this is that it completely negates some secondary weapons which doesn't seem ideal either. I don't understand why anybody would play a TLT swarm in epic, How is that fun?

It doesn't completely negate the TLT in epic - it just forces them to fly. If they get on the flank, they can choose to shoot the section that isn't reinforced, and that seems like a fair thing to require of such a lazy, yet powerful turret. I'm liking this change to reinforce quite a bit.

4 minutes ago, Parakitor said:

It doesn't completely negate the TLT in epic - it just forces them to fly. If they get on the flank, they can choose to shoot the section that isn't reinforced, and that seems like a fair thing to require of such a lazy, yet powerful turret. I'm liking this change to reinforce quite a bit.

Yeah the problem I find with reinforce is that it only covers one section. I don't think TLTs are more of an issue than in standard play. At least if they are attacking a reinforced section they have to roll 2 or more hits to cause damage for both rolls. Much reduced odds. In fact I played against a Ghost with TLT and shuttle for that extra shot. Didn't dint the Gozanti; even when all 3 damage get through it was easily recovered and no hull damage. A couple Z95s with Concussion Missiles and guidance chips were far more devastating.

2 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

What is your angry swarm up to that the Raider has to defend itself all alone?

Surprised it took 8 posts for this to be asked.

If you're going to fly a Raider or Corvette, you need to make sure you bring adequate fighters to support it, and then you need to make sure you fly them so they are actually supporting it. If you're allowing your opponent's entire wing to fire on your epic ship unchallenged, you pretty much forfeit any right to complain when it dies.

43 minutes ago, DR4CO said:

Surprised it took 8 posts for this to be asked.

If you're going to fly a Raider or Corvette, you need to make sure you bring adequate fighters to support it, and then you need to make sure you fly them so they are actually supporting it. If you're allowing your opponent's entire wing to fire on your epic ship unchallenged, you pretty much forfeit any right to complain when it dies.

I think the biggest complaint is how the fighters can completely ignore the fighter screen and just go after the big ship where most of the points are being held. And yeah it is too easy to get to the big ship and just blast it away since reinforce only equates to 1 evade. Thanks to the meta there are plenty of options to get past that 1 little evade (hmmm... crack shot anyone).

No doubt in 300 points you don't want half of your points in huge ships. You can take a Raider and Gozanti (5 epic points) but doing so might as well just fly them off the table. It is best if you only put 100 points in a support ship but still the support ship is still vulnerable to focus fire. As for the gunship it is only good against support ships. So the paper-rock-scissors has some back flow where 30% of the time scissors beats rock. So when you got that set up it is best to pick scissors all the time because you have a chance to win the disadvantage match up and rock would be the worst pick since it fails the most.

I think you miss one quite important aspect about Epic. Golden Rule: Epic is about having fun, deploying your fleet and try new ways to play.

If one players deploys 10 TLT ships he is betraying the Golden Rule. If someday I face one player that with the Rulebook in his hand brings 10, 8, 6 TLTs... I will honestly give him the victory before deploying, offer him a Heineken with no alcohol and in a polite way erase him from my game agenda.

And I know it is 100% legal to deploy 12 TLTs.

We need some kind of Epic upgrade for huge ships to help mitigate the terrible terrible damage that the meta is throwing out at this point.

Time was effective energy usage meant that you had a decent chance of doing a good deal of harm to the enemy if you balanced your weapons energy between repairs and weaponry well enough. Now you can throw every purple token into shields and shedding cards and you still can get a section nuked if your opponent focuses fire.

Be nice if there was an X-Wing equivalent to Armada's AA battery fire that targets every fighter within a certain distance in the arc(s) that it is assigned to with low dice rolls.

Multiple attacks for huge ships are nice, but even 3 a turn doesn't do enough damage these days to earn back the Huge ship's points compared to a comparably costed cluster of crit creating characters.

I think the lack of damage that can be done is potentially a problem with this suggestion, though it is interesting.

We figured before our epic league that we needed to curb some of the worst abuses in epic in order to avoid pointless match ups and general douchbaggery. This is a repost, but pertinent because it sort of restricts TLT somewhat.

Feel free to use them if you want. These were done a while ago and perhaps could do with an update.

Quote

Here are the rules we used for our epic league. I was quite happy with them and they take the edge of most extreme builds.

The rules would be the standard Epic Tournament rules with the exceptions:

. As normal you have 5 epic points to spend but you must use a minimum of 2 Epic points.

. The following ships and cards cost Epic points:

o Raider 3 pts

o Corvette 3 pts

o Transport 2 pts

o Assault Carrier 2 pts

o Large Base ship 1 pt

. The following upgrades cost Epic points but do not count against your minimum Epic points required:

o Heavy Laser Cannon +0.5

o Twin Laser Turret +0.5

(This means you can only use 3 IG-88s with HLC, or you can use 2 with HLC and 2 with a different cannon.

Rebels and Imperials can play without using an Epic ship, but must field at least 2 large base ships to do so (this prevents 300 swarm spam somewhat and TLTs have a theoretical maximum of 6 per list.)

The only other changes I would make would be to clarify that Juke does not work against Reinforce. It is a bit of a grey area at the moment (since Frank's email says it does, though it seems to contradict the rules as written).

The other change is to make Comms Booster "limited" so no stacking on the same ship. This is just a bit too effective and abusive.

I would invest in some Assault missiles and Jonas. You could kill 2 Y wings and put 3-4 damage on all the others if he's flying that many. You can also slow play the Raider, just do 1 forward and set up and charge all your batteries, etc. He may not have much of a fleet by the time he gets to you. That's how they do it in the movies. Small ships eat each other up so there's not that much left to hit the big ships.

5 hours ago, flyboymb said:

We need some kind of Epic upgrade for huge ships to help mitigate the terrible terrible damage that the meta is throwing out at this point.

Time was effective energy usage meant that you had a decent chance of doing a good deal of harm to the enemy if you balanced your weapons energy between repairs and weaponry well enough. Now you can throw every purple token into shields and shedding cards and you still can get a section nuked if your opponent focuses fire.

Be nice if there was an X-Wing equivalent to Armada's AA battery fire that targets every fighter within a certain distance in the arc(s) that it is assigned to with low dice rolls.

Multiple attacks for huge ships are nice, but even 3 a turn doesn't do enough damage these days to earn back the Huge ship's points compared to a comparably costed cluster of crit creating characters.

Almost every time I field a Raider, it doesn't even wind up being crippled. With Automated Protocols, you can take Reinforce and do something else, and the ship is LOADED with live hardpoints. Most of the energy goes to the guns, and the capital ship should get 3-4 attacks per turn on any starfighter stupid enough to be in range.

Alternatively, Optimized Generators gets you back energy every time you charge the guns.

Since you are getting swarmed, add Ordnance Tubes loaded with Assault Missiles to pound clustered Y-Wings. Add Ordnance Experts. Add Gunnery Team.

Essentially, gear everything into being a bad-ass battleship. Then go out there an show those Rebel scum the might of a FULLY ARMED AND OPERATIONAL IMPERIAL CORVETTE!!! Buh HA HA!!

19 hours ago, Parakitor said:

It doesn't completely negate the TLT in epic - it just forces them to fly. If they get on the flank, they can choose to shoot the section that isn't reinforced, and that seems like a fair thing to require of such a lazy, yet powerful turret. I'm liking this change to reinforce quite a bit.

Personally I don't have a huge issue with TLT being negated

17 hours ago, Hexdot said:

I think you miss one quite important aspect about Epic. Golden Rule: Epic is about having fun, deploying your fleet and try new ways to play.

If one players deploys 10 TLT ships he is betraying the Golden Rule. If someday I face one player that with the Rulebook in his hand brings 10, 8, 6 TLTs... I will honestly give him the victory before deploying, offer him a Heineken with no alcohol and in a polite way erase him from my game agenda.

And I know it is 100% legal to deploy 12 TLTs.

Definitely this. I am completely okay with someone continuously flying a meta fleet against me, even if I am flying what I feel is a more casual fleet. X-wing is one of very few things that I enjoy doing even if I am losing, and I judge my games more off of how well I flew rather than whether I won or loss. Even with that being the case if someone brought a TLT swarm to an epic game, I would definitely refrain from playing epic with them in the future. They would probably have more fun playing against someone else that is simply out to win, and I would get more enjoyment getting a bunch of ships on the table to play Star Wars.

23 hours ago, Hexdot said:

I think you miss one quite important aspect about Epic. Golden Rule: Epic is about having fun, deploying your fleet and try new ways to play.

If one players deploys 10 TLT ships he is betraying the Golden Rule. If someday I face one player that with the Rulebook in his hand brings 10, 8, 6 TLTs... I will honestly give him the victory before deploying, offer him a Heineken with no alcohol and in a polite way erase him from my game agenda.

And I know it is 100% legal to deploy 12 TLTs.

You totally missed the point. Epic is fun, but the biggest draw in epic are the huge Ships which can only be used in epic or the box campaign scenario have lost their fun.

Still the point is why take huge ships when they are more of a liability than an advantage. Go play with the big ships, have fun but odds are you are going to lose because you picked the big ships and they took a mega swarm. I know at first FFG was so worried that huge ships would have been so OP that only those with huge ships would win (so never play imperials in epic at the time). However because they were so under-powered as only one of 2-3 factions had them they were like a self imposed handicap that you had to pay $60-$100 for. I can see why people will be upset if the only good thing gameplay wise was those little <crew> upgrade cards that are everywhere in the meta.

As I said before it should be perfectly fine for huge ship to have the upper hand and it won't be biggest budget wins. I don't know how many times I compared the cost of a epic expansion pack and the amount of point you fill with the cost of small and large ship expansion pack. Buying the huge ship often proves to be the more affordable option than buying 300 points worth of standard ships. $60-$100 for a new format and some new models/pilots/upgrades that can be used in a tournament is a great deal. $60-$100 for a single ubermeta upgrade card or pilot is not.

So what we have here is where the fun is taken out of the most fun aspect of Epic. I am a believer of the golden rule but there is nothing fun about constantly getting your @$$ kicked.

20 minutes ago, Marinealver said:

Still the point is why take huge ships when they are more of a liability than an advantage.

Because you are wrong?

The problem people are having in here is not that the Epic ships are a liability, it's that they're not automatic "I win" buttons that can shrug off fire from 100+ points of enemy fighters when that was never going to be the case. However, the Epic ships can and will wreck face if you put some effort and skill into their use. You need to build them correctly, you need to deploy them correctly, you need to fly them correctly. Just like most everything else in this game.

43 minutes ago, DR4CO said:

Because you are wrong?

The problem people are having in here is not that the Epic ships are a liability, it's that they're not automatic "I win" buttons that can shrug off fire from 100+ points of enemy fighters when that was never going to be the case. However, the Epic ships can and will wreck face if you put some effort and skill into their use. You need to build them correctly, you need to deploy them correctly, you need to fly them correctly. Just like most everything else in this game.

Was I? When they first came out that was exactly how they werked (spelling intentional). I have won team games where it was 2 raiders against scum swarm so yes I know they are not the red herring they were when only Rebels had huge ships. Still they are easily wrecked by stuff that well comes from the meta but only twice or thrice the quanity. TLTs just melt them and that's when they do become an "I Lose" button. Connor nets, cluster-mines, Torpedo boats, TIE-Ds. These are just some of the things can can cripple a huge gunship in a single round if not outright destroy it.

They are good, if you take a bunch of X-wings of a mega TIE-Swarm the Raider will just plow through them. But there are lot of non-huge ship builds that become not only anti-huge ship but anti-EVERY ship. And huge ships are just the biggest (pun also intended) target out there. So they die first without getting their points in.

I was noodling with Huge ship ideas back in Wave 2, so I have done a bit of thinking about this.

I've honestly never really liked how squishy Huge ships feel. I think I _should_ need to take bombers against them, but basic TIEs do the job just fine- and Defenders can wreck them.

Playing amateur game designer, I might play test this idea: at the start of the activation phase, any Huge ship section with one or more shield tokens is assigned a reinforce token. A single Reinforce token adds an evade result when defending. Any reinforce tokens beyond 1 add one defense die.

I think I said that correctly.

Basically: Huge ships mitigate damage until they start to fail- then they start to cascade. If you make the decision to be tanky, you get benefits, but there are diminishing returns.

This would give Huge ships some extra protection from repeated chip damage, but still respect the opponent's list building decision.