That ISD build is nasty, nice one.

10 minutes ago, xanderf said:

I really wouldn't hate it if they created errata to let the 'swarm' keyword work with anti-ship attacks, too. Suddenly the 6-or-so TIE squadrons you need to bring to have a prayer of dealing with Rebel fighter superiority actually have SOME value once the enemy fighters are gone.

This is the REAL problem the Empire faces at the moment - if you do strong anti-squadron...you are crap at anti-ship. You go strong anti-ship...you've got poor squadron defense. Trying to go 50/50 means you just fail at both. Rebels just bring X-Wings, with a small handful of varied wingmen, and both topics are 100% covered.

Frustrating!

Honestly the TIE fighters needed to come with swarm (with no squadron limit qualifier because you're still swarming the capital ships) and escort (no escort on the unique squadrons, because IMO NO unique squadrons should have had escort, except maybe biggs...) and just been 9 points.

28 minutes ago, xanderf said:

I really wouldn't hate it if they created errata to let the 'swarm' keyword work with anti-ship attacks, too. Suddenly the 6-or-so TIE squadrons you need to bring to have a prayer of dealing with Rebel fighter superiority actually have SOME value once the enemy fighters are gone.

This is the REAL problem the Empire faces at the moment - if you do strong anti-squadron...you are crap at anti-ship. You go strong anti-ship...you've got poor squadron defense. Trying to go 50/50 means you just fail at both. Rebels just bring X-Wings, with a small handful of varied wingmen, and both topics are 100% covered.

Frustrating!

Totally agree. And tie fighter swarms are supposed to be scary! They're not scary to ANYTHING in this game haha.

I was going to suggest something like :

Imperial only, medium or large ship only. 6 points, Offensive Retrofit - Imperial Naval Comms - Squadron activation icon: Tie fighters and Tie interceptors you activate may reroll 1 die when attacking with their anti-ship armament. Tie Advanced and Tie Bomber squadrons you activate may reroll 1 die when attacking with their anti-squadron armament.

All of a sudden 8 ties is actually a great buy for its price.

(Should Tie Advanced be included?? They would be poor buys only used sparingly for escort if not. The other ties would be much more useful in all other respects)

Requires a player to also command those squadrons, and gives more use for the Offensive Retro.

6 points cuz its quite good and buffs all of the ones activated form THAT ship very much, though imp squadrons could use a little buff.
Though, I am not confident on that point cost. Could be less, could be more, dunno.

--

The problem with errata-ing I think is how good Zs would be and how good other stuff would be with Swarm.

It really should be errata, though, and don't get me started on Zs....thought they were supposed to be less effective than X-Wing?! Can't even count the times they roll those stupid dice, and...Oh! Three doubles! Well, naturally. Why shouldn't a Z-95 squadron be able to do 50% more damage than is even POSSIBLE for an X-Wing squadron?!

C'mon!

.. wouldn't this make Zs even better?

2 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

.. wouldn't this make Zs even better?

Better potential for damage, yes. I think that is the point he is making.

On Tuesday, March 07, 2017 at 9:42 PM, Kikaze said:

Snip...

Well with the limited reception and time all i can say is every thing you said i strongly disagree with everything listed...hehe

I will return...

I mentioned in an eariler post to errata Tie/F to 7 points. It's not the amazing wonder you are looking for, but taking 6 Ties now frees up 6 more points to take Flight Controllers.

On 3/7/2017 at 3:19 PM, geek19 said:

And to everyone who dislikes Nora, she's 17 points and rolls one black dice. Yes she does an extra shield damage, but let her evaporate your Star destroyer shields and then her crit is useless. Bring a good fighter screen and attack them next turn.

Who's talking **** about my girl?! Nobody messes with Norra.

12 hours ago, geek19 said:

The opportunity costs DO make up for it. You don't improve your ship's defenses or offensive ability, you just stay alive to get your turn, all for 30 points. You still die end of turn, but meanwhile precision strike and superior positions still hurt you. Mine those ships for points!

And you're still dead. You still get the points for the dead ship. Plus if the ship is dead, it can obstruct my own shots too, and clog up my own space lanes. Yes, things stay alive for longer, it just causes you to focus fire on ships to get them off the table.

As for the objective point mining, that's not an opportunity cost, just bad objective choice.

"You're still dead" isn't much of a drawback. You're dead, but you were dead regardless of which commander you chose. The difference is that Rieekan says "well I'm dead, but now there's no downside to being dead." He doesn't play in a way that takes being dead into account, aside from throwing off any and all shackles on what constitutes smart play. Any commander can smartly sacrifice a ship, Rieekan says he's allowed to *stupidly* sacrifice a ship for huge gain. In one turn, Rieekan can make a ship get rammed 3 times (2 ET rams, 1 ram from the target ship subsequently moving), and still potentially do ANOTHER 3 rams in the subsequent turn if it somehow survives. That's 3 damage from a dead ship that completely bypasses shields or die results.

Other commanders have a ship sacrifice itself in a desperate rearguard action. Rieekan observes that the battle isn't going his way, and turns ships in to maximize damage output well above the normal native capability of his ships if they had to survive beyond their activation.

If Demolisher and Rhymer couldn't be removed from the board by killing them, EVERY Rebel player would be up in arms and howling for a rule change.

I don't really like when something brake a rule in a game. If rules where made's, it was for a reason. For me, Demo is near okay because is only affecting imself and he can only attack this way once. But for Rhymer, bringing all the other squadrons to brake the limitation for the range 1, it's what I can call OP. That's my point of view and I play both side. When I play Imps, I find it to strong for that little price (16 points)

47 minutes ago, thecactusman17 said:

"You're still dead" isn't much of a drawback. You're dead, but you were dead regardless of which commander you chose.

Unless it was Mon Mothma, who gave you that reroll to knock off that last point of damage.

Or Madine, who let you dodge that ISD front arc.

Or Garm, who gave you the engineering token to heal off that one shield you needed.

Or Dodonna, who gave you that last Structural you needed to finish off their ship that didn't get a return shot.

Or Cracken, who knocked off that last die.

Edit: can't believe I forgot the fish. Oh well, who are we kidding, he's dumb and bad.

2 hours ago, WuFame said:

Better potential for damage, yes. I think that is the point he is making.

Basically, yeah. It's two points.

1) It needs to be errata, so that you don't need to use up a slot to take advantage of it, which is pretty important for that specific slot anyway.

2) Z-95s be broke, yo. I get the IDEA that their dice set was intended to be 'more swingy', but in practice, it's just BETTER than the X-Wing. And that's idiotic. Maybe if they also added an errata rule that fighter 'damage results' are capped at the number of dice they rolled? Maybe that'd help...although I still think the Zs would end up averaging more damage than the X-Wings, and that just feels flat wrong.

27 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

Unless it was Mon Mothma, who gave you that reroll to knock off that last point of damage.

Or Madine, who let you dodge that ISD front arc.

Or Garm, who gave you the engineering token to heal off that one shield you needed.

Or Dodonna, who gave you that last Structural you needed to finish off their ship that didn't get a return shot.

Or Cracken, who knocked off that last die.

Edit: can't believe I forgot the fish. Oh well, who are we kidding, he's dumb and bad.

All of these have particular flaws, and the one thing they all have that Rieekan doesn't is that when they're dead, they're gone. You can't heal off damage when your ship no longer exists on the table.

Again, my complaint isn't that Rieekan preserves the ship. It's that he does so indefinitely until the end of the round. This ensures that the ship or squadron is just around, indefinitely, interfering with enemy plans long after it had an opportunity to do something.

My change would be to make the ship or squadron die after its activation. It still gets to activate. But now, you have to plan in advance to be going later or even last, possibly after your best opportunity if the ship was still alive, to get the most out of it. Now you might need to activate out of sequence to keep from losing points to something like Superior Positions or Precision Strike.

2 hours ago, xanderf said:

Basically, yeah. It's two points.

1) It needs to be errata, so that you don't need to use up a slot to take advantage of it, which is pretty important for that specific slot anyway.

2) Z-95s be broke, yo. I get the IDEA that their dice set was intended to be 'more swingy', but in practice, it's just BETTER than the X-Wing. And that's idiotic. Maybe if they also added an errata rule that fighter 'damage results' are capped at the number of dice they rolled? Maybe that'd help...although I still think the Zs would end up averaging more damage than the X-Wings, and that just feels flat wrong.

Zs ain't broke. I roll all crits all the time with them.

A minor aside: all upgrades are options to resolve, so with Rieekan you CAN let a ship die 'prematurely' if that's convenient.

They'd have to do a Jamming Field errata for this not to apply.

46 minutes ago, Green Knight said:

A minor aside: all upgrades are options to resolve, so with Rieekan you CAN let a ship die 'prematurely' if that's convenient.

They'd have to do a Jamming Field errata for this not to apply.

They did do a Jamming Fields errata.

Rieekans effect is not a "may" or "when." The card lays out pretty clearly that it just happens regardless of any plans you may otherwise have.

2 minutes ago, thecactusman17 said:

They did do a Jamming Fields errata.

Rieekans effect is not a "may" or "when." The card lays out pretty clearly that it just happens regardless of any plans you may otherwise have.

Sorry, but that's not what it says. It's just a when effect that triggers off the destruction of a ship/unique squid. I can therefore opt not to use Rieekan's effect. This is pure RAW. If it needs to work differently, we need errata.

I don't know why but I was just reading that card and sweat it read "If." But I brought it back up and it does read "When."

30 minutes ago, thecactusman17 said:

I don't know why but I was just reading that card and sweat it read "If." But I brought it back up and it does read "When."

My guess: your brain is so used to playing Rieekan as a 'must' effect (mine certainly is), that it's hard to think differently. But there is no must in Rieekan, and the RRG is very clear about all upgrades being optional.

1 hour ago, Green Knight said:

Sorry, but that's not what it says. It's just a when effect that triggers off the destruction of a ship/unique squid. I can therefore opt not to use Rieekan's effect. This is pure RAW. If it needs to work differently, we need errata.

Do we have official confirmation on this? If it is true I would immediately swap all my objectives in my Riekaan bomber fleets to the obvious ones.

38 minutes ago, Darth Veggie said:

Do we have official confirmation on this? If it is true I would immediately swap all my objectives in my Riekaan bomber fleets to the obvious ones.

No. But why would this NOT be the case? A special Rieekan restriction, invented by the collective Armada community?

I'm guilty too, btw, but that's no excuse for not looking at it with fresh eyes.

I think the subject has been discussed before, but not exhaustively.

So, you would also say I could, if I have for example Spinal Armament, not use it when I fire with my front arc?

10 minutes ago, Darth Veggie said:

So, you would also say I could, if I have for example Spinal Armament, not use it when I fire with my front arc?

Hypothetically, yes.

I know is sounds corny, but it's FFG that insists that upgrades are optional unless otherwise specified (cannot for example).

And Jamming Field is proof of this - I mean, the card was well enough worded, until you took the optional rule into account. Then it suddenly became broken.

Coming late to the party again, so I will just lob a few random grenades from the last few pages:

1: On the topic of Imperial commanders, the core issue is twofold. One, the Rebels have more commanders who reward you for changing how you build your fleet (Ackbar, Mothma, Cracken) and reinforce certain different archetypes. The imperials do not, other than Konstantine, who is some serious hot garbage. Motti, Jerjerrod, Screed, and Tarkin all work pretty well with everything, and Ozzel with anything other than the Vic/Dic. None of them make me say things like "huh, maybe a fleet of all raiders" or "yeah, I have to run an Interdictor with that guy and then it gets really good". So the impetus to be creative is not there and also the reinforcing synergy is not there. I feel the biggest ball-drop in this game so far is FFGs creativity with imperial admirals.

2: On ties and z-95s, the real problem is being 3 hull. That's the magic number to be one-shot with decent probability by a lot of squadrons in the game if you don't have defense tokens. The real problem and why you rarely see the vanilla versions is that they aren't even a speed bump. 4 hull (hello, A-wing, my old friend) is where things start to get good.

3: I think the IA passing rule would be a major game-changer. It would require play testing and I can see it would shift the meta, but my gut is that it would open up a greater diversity of builds and would also reward both constructing and utilizing your individual ships and the synergy between them well. I also expect we would see less flotillas by count, if not by fleet (a lot of fleets would still take one, but I predict multiples would die outside of squadron-heavy builds).

4: the Rieekan argument is identical to my jamming fields argument (refer back to the massive thread in rules I started and the eventual errata). It may even have been intended to be mandatory but that's not what the rules actually say. I've always played it as optional for that reason (same reason I thought jamming fields were insanely good pre-errata).

5: to go back to Imperials for a moment, I will boldly predict that Jerjerrod is a powerhouse because of the move/still use a squadron command synergy for carrier fleets and that Motti is good because boring passive effects are typically good and under-appreciated. However, several waves forward, unless some of the other guys get errata'd or have additional cards made for them, I expect we see none of them (honorable mention to Ozzel if no other cheap admirals are released because sometimes you do just want the points - he will be drinking with Dodonna at the cheap bar until you need him).