The YNOT squadron builder ( here ) is an excellent way to practice against either oneself or the inbuilt A.I. online. Playing against myself gets old though, so the only real option is the AI. The AI has quite a few problems:
- Glitterstim is always used on turn 1.
- Crack shot is always used whether it's useful or not.
- Often sub-par movement (4k into a bump when moving first...), or downright stupid plays (3 bank the wrong way off the map).
- A general strategy of getting as close as possible to the target, rather than focusing or other more beneficial actions.
That said, there are a few builds that the A.I. makes excellent use of. A TIE swarm is one, because the AI blocks quite well. Even Biggs + Co can be done fairly decently, but nothing compares to Thug Life (4 x TLT Y-wings with Unhinges Astromech). The AI knows when to close range and when to flee with them, and does a good job of focusing fire on tokenless or out of position targets. In fact, it plays thug life near-perfectly (occasional unnecessary K-turns stop it from being perfect).
This brings up a good question - do different lists have a different skill level?
Of course, the answer is yes, but for a lot of reasons:
- Aces are hard to fly because a single mistake will often kill them.
- Swarms are hard to fly because you have to get aces to make mistakes.
- Ordinance is hard because ordinance.
- And so on.
Yet Thug Life doesn't require much skill at all - move with a 3 speed maneuver most likely to get you outside of range 1 of all enemy ships, then focus. Rinse and repeat. It's this simplicity that makes Thug Life both so deadly and so vulnerable to counters. Autothrusters is incredibly strong, as are AGI 3 jousters like Defenders and IG-2000 (AGI 3 jouster with autothrusters!).
The Interesting Part
It's a list that is notorious for easy wins and is berated for the "NPE" it creates. I personally love testing out tournament lists against it on YNOT, because if a list can't beat Thug Life it's going to have a lot of troubles in the world. I recently started trying to beat it with the fewest points possible (i.e. 100 points of thug life VS minimum number of points on my side).
It's very easy with 100 points to build a hard counter, but with 50 it becomes far more difficult. I've done it with IG-88 A and Whisper at that point range.
The lowest points I've tried was a 35 point Jake Farrel, and I killed 2 Ys and had 2 nearly dead left, but couldn't close it before the dice failed.
Update
: I've done it with a 39 point Guri! Link is
here
to the playthrough.
I'm interested to see what other players can do against such a notorious "no skill" list. So, how few points can you use to defeat thug life?
Edited by Astech
. That's a pretty impressive win, though. Paratanni in particular—I'd think with that list's speed and PS advantage it would be a pretty tough matchup. But I guess TLTs are pretty good at chewing through Manaroo and Asajj, and they'd mess Fenn up if they got him in arc at Range 2.