1 minute ago, citruscannon said:

That's a neat way of doing it.

I like the idea of upgrades that diminish as your squad is killed off, or that have range restrictions that reward good tight flying.
Within the context of this squad, what about this?
forces you to take more interceptors? This would reward having a ps3 pilot, or ps5 pilot, a range of PS values in your squad hinged on having an ace. This might be really cool!

Does it tone down the potential advantage of high PS, but retain good flexibility?

You have to be extremely careful when playing with PS during the activation stage. Especially, when the effect is optional. That's an EXTREMELY powerful effect. When planning dials, your opponent has an expectation that you will move your ships in an order that he is aware of. If you can suddenly move your ships in a totally unpredictable order he can't plan his movements with any level of certainty where he can go without getting blocked.

Taken to the extreme, imagine an interceptor that could move at any PS it chose. That ship is now the games best arc dodger as well as one of the games best blockers. It's a totally unfair situation for your opponent. He can't know if you are blocking or dodging.

Anything that plays with the PS of ships during activation should be declared BEFORE the planning stage for the upcoming turn. But, even then that's powerful in that you can't plan too far ahead when playing against it.

There is a reason we have yet to see any abilities that adjust PS during activation, I suspect the reasons above are why.

6 minutes ago, Rinehart said:

You have to be extremely careful when playing with PS during the activation stage. Especially, when the effect is optional. That's an EXTREMELY powerful effect. When planning dials, your opponent has an expectation that you will move your ships in an order that he is aware of. If you can suddenly move your ships in a totally unpredictable order he can't plan his movements with any level of certainty where he can go without getting blocked.

Taken to the extreme, imagine an interceptor that could move at any PS it chose. That ship is now the games best arc dodger as well as one of the games best blockers. It's a totally unfair situation for your opponent. He can't know if you are blocking or dodging.

Anything that plays with the PS of ships during activation should be declared BEFORE the planning stage for the upcoming turn. But, even then that's powerful in that you can't plan too far ahead when playing against it.

There is a reason we have yet to see any abilities that adjust PS during activation, I suspect the reasons above are why.

Excellent points. Yea, I was wondering about that. One iteration of the card was that it declared 0 or 10 at the beginning of the planning phase.

But with a range restriction, and a restriction that it disappears if the pilots start dying, and then having the player declare the ps at the beginning of the planning phase, it might manage the power of having that PS flexibility.

Another consideration is that it becomes far less efficient the more points you spend on having more than one ace in the squad. so the ace becomes a good keystone for the abilities of the rest of the squad.

After having survived the PS race at the Phantom vs. Fat Turret meta, I'd be very cautious about changing pilot skill directly, especially the idea above about making them PS 8 for the activation phase. I did have an idea that may help the generics.

"At the start of the combat phase, you may perform a free boost or barrel roll action. You cannot perform another action this phase."

Thus, if you've lined up correctly, you should be able to boost or barrel roll to better position to face/avoid enemy targets. The catch: it's antisynergistic with push the limit, so you can't turtle up with focus + evade. You'd be stressed in the combat phase, so you wouldn't get the free action, and you couldn't push off the free action because it says so. If you chose Intensity as your Elite, you could focus during the activation phase, boost or barrel roll in the combat phase, and then get a focus or evade token assigned to your ship. Also, Turr Phennir wouldn't really benefit from it because he wouldn't be able to use his pilot ability, and Lt. Lorrir or Tetran Cowall wouldn't like it because of the ways their abilities assign stress. Hmm...designing cards is tough.

Unfortunately, I think this makes stress tactics even more necessary. If pre-nerf phantoms were bad, these guys would be pretty un-fun to play against. However, they have 1 less health, 1 less attach, and 1 less agility than TIE phantoms, so it may be balanced: at least you could hit these guys when you line up a shot. I think TLTs would be a tough sell against this kind of ship because

3 minutes ago, Parakitor said:

After having survived the PS race at the Phantom vs. Fat Turret meta, I'd be very cautious about changing pilot skill directly, especially the idea above about making them PS 8 for the activation phase. I did have an idea that may help the generics.

"At the start of the combat phase, you may perform a free boost or barrel roll action. You cannot perform another action this phase."

Thus, if you've lined up correctly, you should be able to boost or barrel roll to better position to face/avoid enemy targets. The catch: it's antisynergistic with push the limit, so you can't turtle up with focus + evade. You'd be stressed in the combat phase, so you wouldn't get the free action, and you couldn't push off the free action because it says so. If you chose Intensity as your Elite, you could focus during the activation phase, boost or barrel roll in the combat phase, and then get a focus or evade token assigned to your ship. Also, Turr Phennir wouldn't really benefit from it because he wouldn't be able to use his pilot ability, and Lt. Lorrir or Tetran Cowall wouldn't like it because of the ways their abilities assign stress. Hmm...designing cards is tough.

Unfortunately, I think this makes stress tactics even more necessary. If pre-nerf phantoms were bad, these guys would be pretty un-fun to play against. However, they have 1 less health, 1 less attach, and 1 less agility than TIE phantoms, so it may be balanced: at least you could hit these guys when you line up a shot. I think TLTs would be a tough sell against this kind of ship because

Captain Yorr

I would say if you want to make interceptors more nimble and arc dodgy, then you have to be able to hit them when you do catch them in arc. Interceptors are already both hard to hit when you catch them in arc and hard to catch them in arc. Improving either their ability to dodge arc or dodge damage has to come at the expense of the other.

If you give them the ability to move at PS10, then you should remove the evade action from their action bar, and/or deny them Autothrusters.

ok, so if you have this, the highest you can go is 9. This makes an initiative bid important for the squad, so you're looking at a 2-3pt penalty immediately.
The lowest you can go is 3, if you took a sabre that's running adaptability, but that gives you some strong options for flexibility in tight situations. in many cases dropping PS to 4 will let you get that crucial PTL in, but if you've opted for going second and giving up initiative then it's not an option.

I think this might do it. How are these three then, covering the aforementioned bases.

EDIT:

As anecdote, just played a game against a Genesis/Ndru/Ketsu with Attani. The interceptor list looked almost unbeatable until some great focus fire from Ketsu, which downed soontir and everything crumbled pretty quickly from there.
I lost the game, but that was almost a perfect result, it felt like the squad went from being really really powerful to a bunch of RGP pilots in the span of a few turns when Soontir died. Which to be honest, thematically, is just about the best thing I could have hoped for.

HSD was REALLY powerful, well worth the 3 pts. Making soontir amazingly good on the opening charge with 5 dice tokened up, but that tactic cost me as some damage squeaked through from getting barrel rolled on to an asteroid, and he got out of the range restriction to give his high ps back to the other interceptors. That led to a loss of cohesion and it was hard to get guns back on target at PS3 and 5. The thing that made soontir so powerful in the open then cost the rest of my squad.

Blood stripes felt very thematic as well. I was wondering if the r1-2 was too powerful, but it ended up being pretty much just an attani equalizer. It didn't feel particularly overpowered, more playtesting I think should confirm or deny this.

The loss of the r3 band on the autothrusters was extremely bad. Multiple points at which damage leaked through because of this. I think that offsets the perks of being able to stack mkii and an almost never-used primed thrusters effect. It's a real dilemma to take this or autothrusters, given that, it seems to me at this point a 1pt cost is actually surprisingly reasonable.

4 hours ago, citruscannon said:

ok, so if you have this, the highest you can go is 9. This makes an initiative bid important for the squad, so you're looking at a 2-3pt penalty immediately.
The lowest you can go is 3, if you took a sabre that's running adaptability, but that gives you some strong options for flexibility in tight situations. in many cases dropping PS to 4 will let you get that crucial PTL in, but if you've opted for going second and giving up initiative then it's not an option.

I think this might do it. How are these three then, covering the aforementioned bases.

Your Bloodstripes title is way too powerful. Wes Janson's ability strips tokens after attacking, so they've had the ability to use them. Hotshot CoPilot strips tokens at the cost of a crew and 4 points, and it still offers the ability to use them. Palob steals a token, which is a close ability, but it's so super powerful he's usually public enemy number 1. You've created a 1 point title that allows multiple EPTs, and provides an ability to strip green tokens at the start of combat. For 1 point. That's something that would be 4 points even without the second EPT added in. You can't create a ship that is super defensive, super arc dodgy, and ALSO increase it's offense by stripping defensive tokens from it's target. It's too much man.

Honestly, all these upgrades are a little much. The interceptor is a high variance ship. Sometimes it will win you games on it's own due to favorable variance, and sometimes it will flat out lose you games due to poor variance. You are trying to change the interceptor into something it shouldn't be. You are giving the interceptor way too many abilities and options.

8 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

This is the most epic over-correction I've seen yet

Oh, I don't know, the Contracted Scout is a pretty absurd response to the deficiencies of the Wild Space Fringer. Likewise, the hilarious power creep from wave 8 on that was probably intended to bring Scum in line with the other factions but actually , uh. Well.

7 minutes ago, Rinehart said:

Your Bloodstripes title is way too powerful. Wes Janson's ability strips tokens after attacking, so they've had the ability to use them. Hotshot CoPilot strips tokens at the cost of a crew and 4 points, and it still offers the ability to use them. Palob steals a token, which is a close ability, but it's so super powerful he's usually public enemy number 1. You've created a 1 point title that allows multiple EPTs, and provides an ability to strip green tokens at the start of combat. For 1 point. That's something that would be 4 points even without the second EPT added in. You can't create a ship that is super defensive, super arc dodgy, and ALSO increase it's offense by stripping defensive tokens from it's target. It's too much man.

Honestly, all these upgrades are a little much. The interceptor is a high variance ship. Sometimes it will win you games on it's own due to favorable variance, and sometimes it will flat out lose you games due to poor variance. You are trying to change the interceptor into something it shouldn't be. You are giving the interceptor way too many abilities and options.

Thanks for the comments. The power level of the card drops considerably being an interceptor only title. The basic saber is undercosted roughly by 2-3, depending on whose math you like, so if this is the 'fix' card, that eats into the cost right away. As for the super arcdodgyness, yes, absolutely, but it falls apart as soon as fel dies. And you just don't have enough points to meaningfully put in more than two ships with the HSD upgrade, they get up to around 40 pts pretty quickly.

In practice, the opening salvo they hit horrendously hard, due to the above effects you outlined, but after that things start to fall apart pretty quickly if they get separated, which is often. And then you're down to pretty much plain old interceptors at low PS, because the high PS ones don't all fit well into a squad as it is.

The loss of access to a SD is the biggest blow to someone expensive like Fel, and without the title he won't have access to the other wild cards. Yes they become slightly better at an open joust, but in practice once that pass is done Fel is walking out the other end with 1 or 2 hits because too many 3-dice or 4 dice attacks just sneak damage through without the SD.

Effectively the aim is to wean the interceptor off stealth devices and promote some multi-interceptor synergy. happy to discuss alterations

12 hours ago, citruscannon said:

That's a neat way of doing it.

I like the idea of upgrades that diminish as your squad is killed off, or that have range restrictions that reward good tight flying.
Within the context of this squad, what about this?
forces you to take more interceptors? This would reward having a ps3 pilot, or ps5 pilot, a range of PS values in your squad hinged on having an ace. This might be really cool!

Does it tone down the potential advantage of high PS, but retain good flexibility?

I'm not sure about costs, but the idea is essentially a Swarm Tactics for the activation phase, not the combat phase, which is nice (since at the moment, the only card which does anything similar is General Rieekan).

Swarm Tactics costs 2 points, and is limited to range 1. Plus, since it's attached to the higher pilot skill pilot, it's limited to one ship benefiting without a 'chain' (requiring multiple copies at 2 points a pop)

Decoy costs 2 points, is limited to range 1-2, but it swaps , not copies , pilot skill, leaving your ace on the gunky end of the PS stick.

I know neither elite upgrade is exactly making the tournament scene shudder in fear, but since this is essentially "a-wing test pilot" plus an extra rule, it shouldn't be that much better/cheaper.

Besides which, copying someone's pilot skill when you're flying on their wing at range 1 makes sense. Range 1-2 no longer really feels like you're flying in formation with someone, just "in the same general area". Making it range 1 gives you more of a downside to manage.

Also; specify "at the start of the activation phase". Otherwise my PS4 pilot is going to fly up to Soontir Fel, then become PS9, then activate again .