Tarkin's personal ship, with a stygium cloaking device, ion cannons, and more. It may be too large for standard play, but imagine if we had an epic ship that could cloak! Either this would be a very powerful large ship or a Raider-esq huge ship. Ideas?
Note: Stygium Particle Accelerator would be a GIVEN if this ship was ever released. Also, if they released this, they would most likely have to do the V-Wing and the Eta-2.
Edited by Celestial LizardsI like to think of it as a custom Raider-class corvette.
I've always said this should be the next Imperial huge ship. Unless, of course, they want to go bigger and do the Lancer class frigate. But, they've said they won't do that. The Carrion Spike is just under 150m so it qualifies sizewise. They probably don't want to do a cloaking huge ship, though, as it would likely be OP.
Edited by weisguy119Certainly we wouldn't see the current rules for cloaking ported over unchanged, but having an Epic ship that could power down it's weapons for a turn in exchange for some defensive buff would be compelling enough.
Or you could allow it to deploy at PS12 rather than PS0 to show it suddenly dropping the cloak before the battle begins.
There are plenty of ways to handle it. "Cloaking Huge Ship" doesn't have to mean "Huge TIE Phantom".
9 hours ago, Mangipan said:Certainly we wouldn't see the current rules for cloaking ported over unchanged, but having an Epic ship that could power down it's weapons for a turn in exchange for some defensive buff would be compelling enough.
Or you could allow it to deploy at PS12 rather than PS0 to show it suddenly dropping the cloak before the battle begins.
There are plenty of ways to handle it. "Cloaking Huge Ship" doesn't have to mean "Huge TIE Phantom".
I like your thinking. It could be a huge ship with a similar setup rules as Heroes Han.
I would guess if they did a huge ship with cloaking, it would just gain the +2 agility. No decloak move. Just getting some actual green dice would be a big deal by itself.
Im just imagining all of the salt that would flood the forums if this turned out to be the second scum huge ship packaged alongside an Ugly. Terex and the Ranc gang would make a fine addition to the game...
17 hours ago, Mangipan said:Certainly we wouldn't see the current rules for cloaking ported over unchanged, but having an Epic ship that could power down it's weapons for a turn in exchange for some defensive buff would be compelling enough.
Or you could allow it to deploy at PS12 rather than PS0 to show it suddenly dropping the cloak before the battle begins.
There are plenty of ways to handle it. "Cloaking Huge Ship" doesn't have to mean "Huge TIE Phantom".
And miss out on all the small based fighters you could insta-gib when you decloak and barrel roll??
They gotta figure out a way to do it. It's Tarkin's ship in the new canon. They need something to balance out the inevitable Hammerhead Corvette release and just about every other capital ship the empire fields it's too big.
This was the thread about my quest to make a Carrion Spike title card for the Raider:
I would love for this to be the next Imperial epic. It was used by both the Empire and the First Order too, so you have a lot of crew and upgrade options.
Maybe package it with a TIE Punisher with fixes?
I picture the huge ship cloaking to be represented by a cargo upgrade card that is 'carrion spike only'. It would cost a bunch of energy to cloak so that you wouldn't be able to regenerate shields or power up weapons while you are running with it up.
I'd love to see the Carrion Spike in X-wing.
Interestingly, I came across this ship not in Tarkin's stories but in Poe Dameron's - it features as the Terex, the security agent's ship in the comic series, and would be interesting to me as a possible First Order epic ship - there are, to date, no Force Awakens era epic ships. Whilst most of the current tech upgrades wouldn't really work for an epic ship (since none of focus, stress or evade tokens stick), hyperwave comms scanner and targeting synchroniser would, and it's an opportunity for a slew of new tech upgrades.
You can either justify the tech slot in a Rebellion era ship by noting how advanced it was, or else give it a title for the rebellion era version which trades off the tech slot for a different upgrade (or vice versa!)
My suggestion for the cloak:
Cloak is cloak is cloak. So let's stick with a cloaking rule and modify it, rather than a new rule. At the same time, barrel rolling an epic ship is ridiculous (and how would you do it, anyway). Dropping in and out of cloak seems a bit awkward, too; it's more a case (as noted above) of "Surprise!" "What?" "Ka-Boom." and then behave like a normal warship, than playing Rogue Squadon and popping in and out of cloak.
Rather than giving it a cloak action, therefore, "assign it a cloak token when it is deployed". This means that once you come out of cloak, you're not going back into it.
It shouldn't be able to run over people at decloak, though (in the same way you can't crash into people on decloak - it's not a 'move', you just weren't actually there). Given how easily an epic ship's moves can be blocked if it can't run over people, though, I'd say give it the ability to just discard the cloak token without a move. At the same time, provided you're not running over people, pretty much any move is fine - certainly any speed 1-2 is fine.
"When you decloak, you may not perform a boost or barrel roll. You may choose and execute a speed 1-2 manoeuvre on the ship's dial. You cannot do this if you would overlap another ship or obstacle."
Bear in mind that this will be followed up by the ship's own manoeuvre - meaning that you can come about twice in a turn, letting you get the Carrion Spike's nose far further around than would normally be possible. Equally, a speed 2 forward decloak followed by a speed 4 forward gives you 6 moves forwards - potentially 8 with engine booster and rear admiral chiraneau, enough to put even the far side of the board within range of Ordnance Tubes weapons.
Equally, the Spike is tough whilst cloaked - at range 3+ you're looking at 3 green dice plus a reinforce token - essentially like trying to hit an evading TIE fighter - or 4 green dice plus a reinforce token against turbolaser fire. Throw on a Flight Instructor and that's **** hard to hit.
Carrion Spike - Title
Assign this ship a cloak token when it is deployed. When you decloak, you may not perform a boost or barrel roll. You may choose and execute a speed 1-2 manoeuvre on the ship's dial. You cannot do this if you would overlap another ship or obstacle, but may still discard the cloak token.
I'd probably want to see Agent Terex as a crew card, and maybe First Order retrofit as a Huge Ship Only modification that adds a couple of Tech slots, plus a set of tech upgrades which might be useful to big ships (and to a lesser extent the Upsilon Shuttle). Don't give it too many hardpoints, but maybe give it a systems slot? That opens up a huge wealth of possible upgrades - from sensor jammer to fire control system - which can really amp up the ship's potential at a low cost.
Some sort of boarding mechanic might be interesting - the Spike got used for commando raids (mostly after being captured by dissidents!) - it'd be a huge-or-large-ship only ability and target (maybe a team card?) - it'd be nice to have an effect which specifically punishes large ships, which are generally better than small ships in pretty much every way (faster for a given manoeuvre or boost, more tolerant to ion tokens, unmoveable with tractor tokens, and with many more upgrade slots leading to potent 'greater than sum of their parts' combos).
A huge ship hardpoint (or cargo or modification) tractor beam might be nice, too. after all, tractor beams are referred to as a thing on big ships far more often than as a cannon on snubfighters. You could even make it useable (by making it a [turret] and allowing it to be equipped to a [hardpoint] by an upgrade card, or vice-versa, or by giving the Spike a [turret] slot of its own) in standard play - a turret upgrade tractor beam, depending on range limitations and cost, might be an interesting alternative to the inevitable bloody twin laser turret.
I get that if you want to throw 'fixes' in with it, the key imperial candidate at the moment is probably the TIE punisher. I guess that doing something with the Black Eight squadron pilot might be best - the big issue with the Punisher is that anything you can do with it, the Gamma Squadron Veteran TIE bomber generally does better, cheaper or both. This isn't intended to be a 'fix the' thread, though - so 'non-spike' cards can be left to a different debate.
Wasn't that the mobile droid factory that made all 3 phases of Dark Trooper droids?
That was the Arc Hammer - a much bigger ship.