1 minute ago, Darth Meanie said:

*sigh* Back to the drawing board. I thought I had my roster figured.

Does it really make you change your list? Why?

I think that the Auzituck and the Scurrg are the two most interesting additions, but the Aggressor is also intriguing.

The Auzituck is going to excel in those situations where a head-on engagement is very likely. There are a lot of missions where this is going to be the case. The reinforce token is just really really solid in missions. I think the ship will do well in the event if people bring it.

The Scurrg, and to a lesser extent the Aggressor, are going to be interesting because they are very flexible via their upgrade bar. The Scurrg can be reconfigured from ordnance carrier to turret carrier, to efficiency jouster if you have the right upgrades. I will point out that the non-transferrability of EPTs during the event means that if you kit out a 'u-boat' style Scurrg, with deadeye and missiles, then the deadeye stays on the ship regardless of whether you swap out the missiles for a turret, or anything else. So they lose some flexibility. I also don't think they pose the same kind of threat that real u-boats posed in the alpha strike capacity because they're not as durable and they lack a PWT. Nonetheless they might be quite powerful.

9 hours ago, heychadwick said:

Does it really make you change your list? Why?

In truth, it probably won't, cuz I've been practicing with the ships I like. Smasher Squadron was always Squints, so that is what I'm flying. Plus TAPs, just to give options. My ships will all be in my livery, too. I'm coming just to have a hoot; swag to go home would just be gravy ?

2 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

In truth, it probably won't, cuz I've been practicing with the ships I like. Smasher Squadron was always Squints, so that is what I'm flying. Plus TAPs, just to give options. My ships will all be in my livery, too. I'm coming just to have a hoot; swag to go home would just be gravy ?

Swag will go pretty far as we are going to give everyone a pick of what they want. I think there are prizes that go through all the medium Black Box 7 token bags through the top....15? Winning side gets a small token bag from BB7.

11 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

In truth, it probably won't, cuz I've been practicing with the ships I like. Smasher Squadron was always Squints, so that is what I'm flying. Plus TAPs, just to give options. My ships will all be in my livery, too. I'm coming just to have a hoot; swag to go home would just be gravy ?

Yeah, Jim is right about the prizes. We have several play mats in addition to grayskull base, template sets, other terrain stuff such as asteroids and turrets I think. By my quick count there are something like 20 prizes, not counting participation prizes and the token bags for the winning team. So the prizes are going to stretch pretty far by the look of it.

@heychadwick @Babaganoosh - great job at securing such a large prize pool.

My own list will be changing as I still have nightmares from flying Xwings into deadeye driven torps. It's amazing how fast ships are deleted, so do not underestimate the power these designs that allow optimized alpha strikes offer.

Anyway... Being only an average level player I'm not driving for ultimate victory anyway. Fun is the objective.

Only 6 tickets left! All this talk about the awesome prize support may have convinced a few to go for it.

33 minutes ago, Biff said:

Only 6 tickets left! All this talk about the awesome prize support may have convinced a few to go for it.

Seriously, I hope it is NOT the prize support driving people in. You guys have done a lot of work on this and it looks fun. This is what should be the draw.

Down to 5 remaining!!!!

I think they will be gone before we start. Those that don't make the cut will be there. I wonder if people lose their first to games if they will go register?

I wish I could commit to the events, but Saturday is the busiest day at the vendor hall so I will try and stop by and maybe get a couple of casual games in Saturday night, my K-Wings are itching for some action.

Well....I'm unlikely to ever go to gencon but someone brought the pack for this to our club and we thought we'd give it a shot. We had an interesting first week of games, and I think we intend to carry on because it's created some very different ways to play.

First up some mistakes...we did mess up and not assign EPTs to specific ships but I think we're fine and just going to keep it that way for us. Because of the nature of the pilots there's not a lot of EPT slots going around, and most of us really restricted our EPT spend anyway.

I ended up playing the communication net mission and we had some issues with it. First up the deployment. The Rebel player put satellite 1 smack bang in the middle of the play area...after a couple of placements that were a bit more than range 1 from the edge we ran into a problem....the sixth satellite couldn't be placed. We ended up slightly modifying the placement to get all six on the board but it does appear to be possible to only place 5.

It did take us a while of reading the pack to realise the transmission didn't end the scenario, and we weren't quite sure if, after a transmission had been received, it kept generating tokens for a second transmission.

Overall the mission was good fun and significantly different to other games. We had a an E, Y, Y rebel loaded with bombs on the Y wings and a torp on the E-Wing vs Scum Y, Y, Light M-3A, Kihraxz with Torps on the Y Wings and little elsewhere. The 1 ship advantage turned out to be crucial for scum as a nippy M-3A bounced off a cluster mine, heeled around hard between a 'roid and a second cluster mine to claim an undefended satellite while everyone else fought over the middle eventually giving the Scumperials (it's cool, some were Black Sun, Xizor has interests in the area apparently) a 5-1 control as the transmission went out.

In the other game at our club there was a similar Imperial win in the Terror Campaign scenario. Given how the game went we all agreed that Defenders should probably be banned or limited in our campaign (your mileage may vary). Even at PS3 they were proving a real handful for our rebel player.

Overall very fun, and a real change from our 100 point timed games, Knowing you're not going to see a TLT is a good feeling, and it's interesting trying to build a list on short notice for the game ahead. Good stuff!

Quote

I will point out that the non-transferrability of EPTs during the event means that if you kit out a 'u-boat' style Scurrg, with deadeye and missiles, then the deadeye stays on the ship regardless of whether you swap out the missiles for a turret, or anything else. So they lose some flexibility. I also don't think they pose the same kind of threat that real u-boats posed in the alpha strike capacity because they're not as durable and they lack a PWT. Nonetheless they might be quite powerful.

That said, Deadeye with a Synched Turret is just as nasty an option if you need to change your scurrg to play gunship. It's a 3-dice attack with focus outside arc, and a focus/reroll shot inside it.

3 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

That said, Deadeye with a Synched Turret is just as nasty an option if you need to change your scurrg to play gunship. It's a 3-dice attack with focus outside arc, and a focus/reroll shot inside it.

Right now, my thinking is that I'm going to go ahead and ban deadeye, actually. I think the card is a little too good for setting up alpha strikes in scenarios where ships are a little more predictable than in a standard dogfight. Here's the current draft of the ban list, which is going to go official by the 15th:

Banned Cards:

Ban rationale code:

(T) = Thematic, (B )= Balance

General:

Twin Laser Turret (B)

Seismic Torpedoes (B)

Minefield Mapper (B)

Cruise Missile (B)

Deadeye (B)

Scum and Villainy:

Any Jumpmaster 5000

Imperial:

Emperor Palpatine (T)

TIE Phantoms (B)

Any TIE/FO (T)

Any TIE/SF

Any Upsilon-class Shuttle (T)

Kylo Ren (T)

General Hux (T)

Darth Vader (T)

Royal Guard TIE (T)

Royal Guard Pilot (B/T)

Rebel:

Any T-70 X-wing (T)

Biggs (B)

Rey (T)

Finn (T)

BB-8 (T)

Captured TIE modification (B)

Han Solo(T)

C-3P0(T)

R2-D2(T)

Leia(T)

Chewbacca(T)

Luke Skywalker(T)

note that the Resistance Sympathizer YT-1300 is legal for this event

Cards released after July 15 will not be allowed during the event

6 hours ago, MrChom said:

Well....I'm unlikely to ever go to gencon but someone brought the pack for this to our club and we thought we'd give it a shot. We had an interesting first week of games, and I think we intend to carry on because it's created some very different ways to play.

First up some mistakes...we did mess up and not assign EPTs to specific ships but I think we're fine and just going to keep it that way for us. Because of the nature of the pilots there's not a lot of EPT slots going around, and most of us really restricted our EPT spend anyway.

I ended up playing the communication net mission and we had some issues with it. First up the deployment. The Rebel player put satellite 1 smack bang in the middle of the play area...after a couple of placements that were a bit more than range 1 from the edge we ran into a problem....the sixth satellite couldn't be placed. We ended up slightly modifying the placement to get all six on the board but it does appear to be possible to only place 5.

It did take us a while of reading the pack to realise the transmission didn't end the scenario, and we weren't quite sure if, after a transmission had been received, it kept generating tokens for a second transmission.

Overall the mission was good fun and significantly different to other games. We had a an E, Y, Y rebel loaded with bombs on the Y wings and a torp on the E-Wing vs Scum Y, Y, Light M-3A, Kihraxz with Torps on the Y Wings and little elsewhere. The 1 ship advantage turned out to be crucial for scum as a nippy M-3A bounced off a cluster mine, heeled around hard between a 'roid and a second cluster mine to claim an undefended satellite while everyone else fought over the middle eventually giving the Scumperials (it's cool, some were Black Sun, Xizor has interests in the area apparently) a 5-1 control as the transmission went out.

In the other game at our club there was a similar Imperial win in the Terror Campaign scenario. Given how the game went we all agreed that Defenders should probably be banned or limited in our campaign (your mileage may vary). Even at PS3 they were proving a real handful for our rebel player.

Overall very fun, and a real change from our 100 point timed games, Knowing you're not going to see a TLT is a good feeling, and it's interesting trying to build a list on short notice for the game ahead. Good stuff!

Thanks for the writeup! I'm glad you guys had fun. I'm adding some lines to the rules to clear up those issues you ran into. I'm planning to give in-person mission briefings during the event to make the mission parameters clear before people start building their lists. The games not ending at a discrete point is definitely something unusual about these scenarios, and it can make things interesting - if you put your ships in a compromised position to accomplish the objective, you can end up paying a high price for it. (I also need to add a timeout provision if games go too long).

I did think about defenders for a while - ultimately my call was that they are powerful, but because the x7 title is more defensive than offensive, it doesn't perform as well during objective based pay as it does during dogfight-centric standard play, because objective-based games often reward the most offensive ship builds, rather than the more defensive ones. TIE Defenders have decent offense but their real strength is more defensive I think. They did OK in the playtests I ran with them.

If you're getting ready to play the next round of missions, make sure you use the most recent version of the mission pack, which you can get here: MISSION PACKET. My advice going into round 2 missions is to remember to read the scoring sections in advance of going in, paying attention to the increase in points scored by destroying enemy ships for mission 2A and 2B - particularly in 2A, where Rebels actually get triple points for destroying Imperial ships. (otherwise that mission may seem a little harsh on the Rebels). Mission 2C is a new addition - the top-scoring rebel and imperial players will get assigned that mission during the actual event. That one is the least polished of the three right now - if you play that one, remember that as the rebel player you can reduce the amount of dice you roll at the Prison Barge, which is important if you are interested in trying to rescue Bowlin instead of killing him. Let me know how it goes!

8 hours ago, MrChom said:

Overall very fun, and a real change from our 100 point timed games, Knowing you're not going to see a TLT is a good feeling, and it's interesting trying to build a list on short notice for the game ahead. Good stuff!

Excellent to hear that people are trying it out! Glad to hear the change of pace is enjoyable. We definitely want feedback on games you have played. How many people are trying it?

Definitely let us know how it goes. I am thinking round 3 will be harsh for whomever loses, but want to hear about it.

6 hours ago, heychadwick said:

Excellent to hear that people are trying it out! Glad to hear the change of pace is enjoyable. We definitely want feedback on games you have played. How many people are trying it?

Definitely let us know how it goes. I am thinking round 3 will be harsh for whomever loses, but want to hear about it.

We just have the four of us right now....which is probably lucky because otherwise we'd have to fight the 40k players at the club for tables!

My t-shirt arrived today. Totally stoked

36 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

My t-shirt arrived today. Totally stoked

Which one you get? I like the blue, but only had the $$$ for the black.

21 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

Which one you get? I like the blue, but only had the $$$ for the black.

I think he meant his custom squadron shirt. Could be wrong.

11 hours ago, heychadwick said:

Which one you get? I like the blue, but only had the $$$ for the black.

11 hours ago, LagJanson said:

I think he meant his custom squadron shirt. Could be wrong.

I did (but it is blue!)

I could use some help building a list for this event. See Here.

Thanks,

K

2 hours ago, k_sciberras said:

I could use some help building a list for this event. See Here.

Thanks,

K

I set up a list in Excel with a running total of points. Plugged in the ships I wanted and the upgrades followed. Your list is rather short, but easily have enough to work with. I will post some thoughts over in your thread.

Just a heads-up for those coming to Gencon- if you want to draft any ships that only have unique pilots (such as the attack shuttle, or IG2000,) we're asking that you bring models for those ships with you. Keep that in mind when making your draft pick list.