Hot on the heels of Warithdt's Fletcher RSD list, lets throw in Screed's D-ball as well. We're in our local Armada Whatsapp group together and we were also talking about the strength of the D-ball.

I've used massed Defenders and lately I've added Jendon to the list. I pretty much ran Jendon, Steele, 1 Advance and 5 Defenders.

I'm just curious to find out what you guys think of it since here in our local alrea, we can't let go of our squadrons. We even have a Biggs Imortal Ball fielded by one of our guys.

Ummm...what does Screed have to do with helping Defenders? Screed only works for ships. Is there something more to this list that you didn't mention?

2 Gozantis and 2 GSD

How does a single Tie Advanced help?

It can't stop fast fighters from attacking Jendon from the opposite side of the tie.

Did you mean Steele's D-Ball, maybe?

Sloane and the tie-swarm is gonna shred that ****...and it's gonna be awesome.

Definitely a fan of swarms of TIE Defenders. Two big advantages to them:

• That's a lot of firepower, and a lot of hitpoints, packed into a single squadron, at a reasonable cost. Makes managing activations for them MUCH easier.
• Those hitpoints, tho! When running against a local MC30 swarm, any lesser TIE Fighter swarm just melts the first turn of fire. Four ships firing at the entire squadron swarm = 4 damage a turn. (He never rolls blanks on his anti-squadron dice. Sure, Toryn helps, but c'mon ) At least the TIE Defender can survive a turn of that. 16 squadrons of TIE Fighters? Nah, just deleted in one turn. (IMHO, there really needs to be SOME kind of cap on how many squadrons anti-ship AA can hit. I mean, every squadron in range, no matter how many there are? That's just silly...)

7 minutes ago, xanderf said:

(IMHO, there really needs to be SOME kind of cap on how many squadrons anti-ship AA can hit. I mean, every squadron in range, no matter how many there are? That's just silly...)

I definitely agree. I don't think we'll ever see TIE swarms until that happens. And that's a shame, because in every space battle ever seen on screen in Star Wars there is always a TIE swarm. I want my opponent to say:

13 minutes ago, xanderf said:

Definitely a fan of swarms of TIE Defenders. Two big advantages to them:

• That's a lot of firepower, and a lot of hitpoints, packed into a single squadron, at a reasonable cost. Makes managing activations for them MUCH easier.
• Those hitpoints, tho! When running against a local MC30 swarm, any lesser TIE Fighter swarm just melts the first turn of fire. Four ships firing at the entire squadron swarm = 4 damage a turn. (He never rolls blanks on his anti-squadron dice. Sure, Toryn helps, but c'mon ) At least the TIE Defender can survive a turn of that. 16 squadrons of TIE Fighters? Nah, just deleted in one turn. (IMHO, there really needs to be SOME kind of cap on how many squadrons anti-ship AA can hit. I mean, every squadron in range, no matter how many there are? That's just silly...)

Yep a large tie swarm will be just pionts to farm, a demo glad 2 could ( with only slightly better than average luck) pretty much knock out a tie swarm in one round. If someone tried a 16 tie swam against the lists I tend to play they would be pretty much handing me an open chance at 128 points.

Heck, I wouldn't mind if they tied it not to a count of attacks, but even hits . And scaled it up with hull size, even.

Like..."attack all squadrons in range, until you have damaged as many squadrons as you have remaining hull points" or something like that. Just... some kind of limit on it.

Until that happens, the squadron game - for any given price point - is always going to be biased towards a smaller number of higher-hitpoint squadrons, over larger numbers of low-hitpoint squadrons. As, at the moment (for anti-ship AA), the number of squadrons makes literally no difference at all to the effectiveness of AA...other than that you tend to have more health per-stand with fewer squadrons on the table.

And it takes that many more activations to make them viable. I wonder what would happen if you could activate two vanilla ties for one squadron point of activation. Likely be OP but it would be cool.

1 hour ago, xanderf said:

(IMHO, there really needs to be SOME kind of cap on how many squadrons anti-ship AA can hit. I mean, every squadron in range, no matter how many there are? That's just silly...)

So... you want to remove one of the few advantages capital ships have when attacking fighters?

The problem is that advantage disproportionately punishes swarms of generic fighters, which is what the Empire is supposed to be about anyways. Sadly you can't do that because it will evaporate with any serious AA. No one is complaining about facing a bunch of generic squads. It's always a smaller group of aces. If the limit was say 4 squads per zone, that won't change much against Rieekan aces.

57 minutes ago, Norsehound said:

So... you want to remove one of the few advantages capital ships have when attacking fighters?

Not at all - but think about that. It's not an 'advantage' that capital ships have 'when attacking fighters'. It's only an advantage when they are attacking swarms of cheap, low-value, generic fighters . Which, last I checked, nobody was having any problems with.

Indeed, the current way ship AA is handled, drives squadron players to PLAY the type of squadrons that ships ARE having issues with . IE., a low number of high-value aces or high-defense/high-attack squadrons.

Consider the proposal I'd thrown out - an ISD would be able to damage up to 8 squadrons with its AA, vs it's current theoretical-max of 19 (basically the most fighters of any type you can currently put on the table for 134 pts). If the enemy is running a Rieekan-Aces list with 6-7 elite pilots...this change makes literally no difference at all . On the other hand, it would get squadron players thinking...maybe it's worth it to drop some aces and bring along more fighters to try to overwhelm the AA defenses and give it more targets than it can shoot. Or maybe not.

It would just introduce the option for more variety, and even make swarms a viable possibility , again, instead of the endless-ace-lists we have now (and always will have, unless AA is ever capped in some way).

I like defenders a lot there a bit pricey but nice I love Jendon and Steele one of my favorite duos in the game. I do want to comment on the tie subject I think ties should have had another keyword on release as yeah there fragile, but they are hard to hit in my mind it would be something like this.

Agile- when you are the target of an attack by a ship or squadron that dose not have the agile keyword remove one die from their attack pool to a minimum of 1.

I think this could be added to Ties, Tie interceptors, and A-wings it would just help simulate how hard they are to hit, but when you do hit them its a good chunk of there health. I feel like they were trying to do this idea with Jamming Field upgrade, but because it effects your squadrons it just dose not work. Maybe they could release an imperial only upgraded in the offensive retrofit slot that all attacks against tie fighters and tie interceptors at distance 1-3 of you is treated as obstructed? i'm not really sure how to translate this into the game now, but I do think that there should be some type of mechanic that shows how hard they are to hit, that just dose not exist in the game now.

On 5/13/2017 at 5:09 PM, xero989 said:

Maybe they could release an imperial only upgraded in the offensive retrofit slot that all attacks against tie fighters and tie interceptors at distance 1-3 of you is treated as obstructed? i'm not really sure how to translate this into the game now, but I do think that there should be some type of mechanic that shows how hard they are to hit, that just dose not exist in the game now.

It could be done as some type of non unique title for Imperial ships. Maybe even a title that wasn't ship type specific that obstructed friendly squads with the swarm keyword at distance 1-3.

On 5/13/2017 at 4:43 PM, xanderf said:

Not at all - but think about that. It's not an 'advantage' that capital ships have 'when attacking fighters'. It's only an advantage when they are attacking swarms of cheap, low-value, generic fighters . Which, last I checked, nobody was having any problems with.

Indeed, the current way ship AA is handled, drives squadron players to PLAY the type of squadrons that ships ARE having issues with . IE., a low number of high-value aces or high-defense/high-attack squadrons.

Consider the proposal I'd thrown out - an ISD would be able to damage up to 8 squadrons with its AA, vs it's current theoretical-max of 19 (basically the most fighters of any type you can currently put on the table for 134 pts). If the enemy is running a Rieekan-Aces list with 6-7 elite pilots...this change makes literally no difference at all . On the other hand, it would get squadron players thinking...maybe it's worth it to drop some aces and bring along more fighters to try to overwhelm the AA defenses and give it more targets than it can shoot. Or maybe not.

It would just introduce the option for more variety, and even make swarms a viable possibility , again, instead of the endless-ace-lists we have now (and always will have, unless AA is ever capped in some way).

Out of curiosity, how many TIEs are you packing into one enemy hull zone?