I believe we can all agree that stock fighters have great difficulty hitting ships decked out in mods. I was trying to think of a thematic fix, and one thing I realized that Imperials do best (thematically) is treat their underlings as expendable. And so I thought of a fitting title...

EXPENDABLE (0pts)
Imperial only.
TIE only. Title.

You may equip up to 2 different Title upgrades. When defending, you cannot spend focus tokens. After you execute a maneuver that causes you to overlap or touch an enemy ship, roll a an attack dice. Each ship suffers all hits and critical rolled.


Thematic and extremely undesirable for higher PS pilots since you obviously want to keep your investments alive. The lower pilot skill you are the better since it helps guarantee that the target you're flying into will still be there. Since critical hits can be rolled, too, there's always a danger of causing a 'Direct Hit' on yourself. For ships with no shields like a TIE Fighter, TIE Bomber, and TIE Striker, this is a big deal. This means that it's optimal to use the kamikaze ability when you only have one hull remaining. For the Empire!

This was inspired by the "Fanatical Devotion" condition card, and it really fits the Imperial mindset of fanatical, ruthless, and efficient while also giving stock fighters a chance at damaging high defense targets. What do you guys think?

EDIT: If it's too powerful with Boost, Barrel Roll, Coordinate and such then the kamikaze aspect can additionally be made to require an action. Another option would be to allow the damage to only work on a speed 3 or greater maneuver.

I'm sorry, but why do you think that making imperial ships blatantly WORSE will somehow fix them and see them get played more?

That title is going to hurt the TIE fighters more than it is going to hurt most of the ships that they would be crashing into. And that's not even taking into account the fact that you took focus tokens away from their defense dice.

It would need to be -2 pts to even be considered. -3 to have a chance at being competitive.

Do TIE swarms really need a fix? I think they've done okay, they don't get seen a lot because they're extremely difficult to fly well. The only fix for that is practice.

4 minutes ago, pkreynolds said:

Do TIE swarms really need a fix? I think they've done okay, they don't get seen a lot because they're extremely difficult to fly well. The only fix for that is practice.

Scared of a bomb hitting 6 ties in a single explosion T_T But dunno how realistic that scenario is.

17 minutes ago, Chibi-Nya said:

Scared of a bomb hitting 6 ties in a single explosion T_T But dunno how realistic that scenario is.

Not very... unless you're fighting Emon, haha. But seriously, things like the Bomblet Generator are going to make things more difficult for them.

As far as making them "blatantly worse," not being able to Focus for defense still doesn't stop you from doing an Evade action. At that point it limits your versatility in combat by having to choose offense or defense ahead of time, but the upside is that you can use the efficiency of the TIE Fighter to trade hull for hull in your favor (because you REALLY shouldn't be crashing into their shields unless it's something like Whisper. You also don't have to equip the title to ALL your TIE Fighters, so it allows for options like having a front-line of 3 without the title and 3 in the back with the title. You use the title to help close the game when your list's offense is starting to dwindle down to the point where it's becoming difficult to break through defense.

If it's still too weak, it can be a dual card title that's permanently flipped at the cost of a focus token or something.

Squadron Leader

3 points - EPT

When you take an action, all ships of the same type within Range 1-2 of this ship may copy that action for free if they are PS4 or lower.

Example list:

Howlrunner + SL (21)
Youngster + SL (18)
4x Black Cracks (60)

You are forced to fly your main ships slower to maintain the Range. But your Grunts can take Focus + Evade + BR.

5 hours ago, f0rbiddenc00kie said:

I believe we can all agree that stock fighters have great difficulty hitting ships decked out in mods.

Agreed. There are four tools a TIE swarm has to get around this:

• Blocking - the simplest means of denying actions; it has it's weaknesses (Attani Mindlink, K4 Security Droid, Boba Fett, Concord Dawn Protector) but also messes with your opponent's maneuvering plans, which is a good thing.
• Range combat bonus - because at range 1 even a TIE fighter's popguns demand a bit more attention.
• Crack Shot - still as good as when it was released. The fact that it works against any source of evades, up to and including reinforce, is very nice, and the Imperials have a lot of cheap elite pilots. Consider it a sort of one-use-ordnance that sits in the elite slot, and it's rather nice.
• Snap Shot - Firstly, it's hitting your opponent before they can get their tokens up (Barring Night Beast and TIE/x7), secondly it gives you a response to the 'boost out of arc' crowd, thirdly, quite a few cheap TIE pilots have 'extra attack die' abilities (Mauler Mithel, Scourge, Zeta Leader, Pure Sabbac)

Using the above in combination, stuff remains killable. I'm not saying you don't have to bloody work for it these days, though.

At the same time, I'd never say no to extra things for a TIE swarm, and treating the generic TIE pilots as expendable is entirely in Imperial nature. Using them as kamikazes, on the other hand, isn't - we've not, that I'm aware of, seen them ram or attempt to ram (not surprising as it's hard to imagine any ship that'd come off worse from a collision than a TIE/ln!).

If I wanted to give them anything, I'd possibly steal the Reinforcements gimmick from some of the scenarios : a title which would allow you to 'respawn' a destroyed generic pilot might help make Academy Pilots and Alpha Squadron Pilots attractive again.

Mission 1: Political Escort

Quote

Imperial Reinforcements: During the End phase, the Imperial player may call for one REINFORCEMENT for each Imperial ship that was destroyed in that round. For each reinforcement, he takes one Academy Pilot Ship card and places it outside the play area. Then he places one "Academy Pilot" ship within Range 1 of his edge of the play area. The Imperial player can assign maneuvers to this ship and use it as normal.

Mission 6: Undeniable Assets

Quote

Rebel Reinforcements: At the end of the End phase, the Rebel player may call for one REINFORCEMENT for each Rebel ship that was destroyed during that round. For each reinforcement, he takes the Ship card with the lowest squad point cost matching the destroyed ship's type and places it outside the play area. Then he places the matching ship within Range 1-2 of any corner chosen by the Imperial player. The Rebel player can use this ship as normal.

Mission F3: Rescue

Quote

First Order Reinforcements: During the End phase, the First Order player may call for one REINFORCEMENT for each First Order ship that was destroyed during that round. For each reinforcement, he takes one "Epsilon Squadron Pilot" Ship card and places it outside the play area with one facedown Damage card assigned to it. Then the Resistance player chooses a neutral edge and the First Order player places each "Epsilon Squadron Pilot" ship within Range 1 of that edge. The First Order player can assign maneuvers to this ship and use it as normal.

This would require a bit of cunning to do right (taking into account victory points, when the ship counts as destroyed/squad counts as 'tabled') but having a continuous 'stream' of arriving TIE fighters overwhelming you with sheer numbers feels very Imperial Navy to me.

I definitely agree with the reinforcements idea, and I've actually mentioned that same thing on these forums before. The Empire has a huge amount of wealth and resources at their disposal, but that has not presented itself in-game well at all so far. There's a lot of design potential waiting to be explored there.

Yes, it's true that so far we haven't seen Imperial pilots being used as kamikaze pilots, although having some of them be like that seems extremely consistent with Imperial mentality. Funny enough, the only kamikaze I remember seeing in Star Wars was from an A-Wing destroying a Star Destroyer, but I still stand that the reasoning is valid for Imperials.

The common opinion which I agree with:

Ships with exclusively 2 attack dice have a problem, maybe with the exception of the A-Wing due to Snapshot/Crackshot (Even though I have to admit: why are those 5damage such a massive difference and make the A-Wings semiviable compared to 5Blacks+Snapshot and Howlrunner?)

But if we look at the ships...

Of all 2attack ships, the following don't have an attack problem due to low dice because they get secondary weapons or ATC or the Inquisitor:
K-Wing(Everything), Y-Wing(Turrets), Advanced, TAP, Punisher(Everything), Bomber(Everything), Aggressor(Turrets), JM5K(Torps), Quadjumper(Tractorbeam)

The remaining ships are:
A-Wing, Z-95, TIE Fighter (including Rex), /FO, Scyk.

A-Wing has his double EPT
Z-95 is either an ordnance carrier or ... what? Why is he played so successfully, currently the 10th best ship on metawing , and often without ordnance! Why does XYYZZ work and TIE Swarm doesn't?
TIEs are bad, and Rex doesn't have to hit
/FO is Lockdown, who gets Juke and prevents defensive mods
Scyk is Inaldra as token machine, or Sunny who has 3 dice/results, or it has a secondary weapon

So for me this raises the question why Zs work when TIEs don't? What's the difference?

8 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

So for me this raises the question why Zs work when TIEs don't? What's the difference?

Took a real quick look, and apparently it's most common to load them out with XX-23 S-Thread Tracers and Guidance Chips. I guess the PS2 and the team utility they bring via Tracers makes a big deal. They're also less reliant on actions for defense, so their 2 shields and 1 extra total health goes a longer way. Less prone to crits.

1 minute ago, f0rbiddenc00kie said:

Took a real quick look, and apparently it's most common to load them out with XX-23 S-Thread Tracers and Guidance Chips. I guess the PS2 and the team utility they bring via Tracers makes a big deal. They're also less reliant on actions for defense, so their 2 shields and 1 extra total health goes a longer way. Less prone to crits.

But not in the last month - out of 65 squads, only 6 used Tracers, and only 31 GC. So I expect around half not to use any ordnance, which are the ones I'm talking about (sorry to make it not clear enough)
And if you look at the individual squads here you actually see that from the 67 Z-95s shown, only 33 used Ordnance, with more Ordnance in the lower hal

Granted, several Z95s have feedback array or BMST (9/34), but 19 of the 34 are completely naked, some carry mindlink and some crackshot.

So somehow they work, and they do so much better than TIEs in a swarm.

My group tried a classic Howlrunner + seven versus the correct meta and despite myself being a competent swarm player (apparently), the amount of four to five, high accurate, able to focus/target lock even when bumped and actionless attacks, plus bombs galore REALLY hurt them. Even to the point where it was laughably pathetic.

However, one simple change made all the difference and swung matches back into a 50/50 win state.

Fel's Wrath ability on all TIE Fighters.

That's right, the joke of the Imperial Navy actually helped.

Dengar / Tel didn't want to joust the swarm any more as they weren't able to remove three of them before they fired.

Nym didn't want to ram into them, bomb two and autoblaster / AC another off the board because, guess what, he died to the sheer amount of pew-pew.

Miranda's five dice homing missile, whilst nice, also saw her reduced to a single hull point, al for the cost of Howlrunner who was able to offer her ability all the way until the end of turn.

It really made a difference. Made Mauler and Scrouge quite threatening as well.

The other suggestion was a TIE Title:
Overwhelming Force
After you have performed an attack, assign a OF token to the defender. When a friendly TIE attacks a ship assigned a OF token, they made spend the token to reduce the defenders agility by 1, to a minimum of 1. At the end phase, remove all OF tokens.

Kind of represents the sheer amount of pew-pew thrown out by TIE fighters.

The key thing there, is that Z-95 headhunters tend to have something.

An academy pilot as a blocker is actually a fairly big investment in the realm of 125% points efficient squads that the tournaments now inhabit.

Z-95s can do many things;

• a Thread Tracer/Guidance Chip ship can do a decent impression of Howlrunner for a turn, but at a lower cost.
• A Feedback Array or Black Market Slicer Tools does precisely what we've been discussing; give a low action efficiency 2-attack ship a means of punching damage through onto the Push The Limit Focus Evade Royal Guard TIE TIE/x7 Reinforce Kanan Just Give Up And Go Home crowd. The fact that you can field a swarm of 7 ships so equipped turns your squad into a nasty tazer-jellyfish monstrosity.
• Mindlink makes a cheap ship with an elite upgrade disproportionately valuable.
• N'Dru Sulhak, Lieutenant Blount and Airen Cracken all have really useful abilities.

The TIE fighter does get used too, but - at least at the moment - the best 'filler' is a ship which supports the rest of your squad, and (Howlrunner aside) the best support TIE fighters are Rex and Ahsoka - you'll note that more than half the "TIE fighter" metawing lists are rebel ones, and equally that there are relatively few "Z-95 squads" but rather "squads with a Z-95 or two in them".

11 minutes ago, Viktus106 said:

Fel's Wrath ability on all TIE Fighters.


The other suggestion was a TIE Title:
Overwhelming Force
After you have performed an attack, assign a OF token to the defender. When a friendly TIE attacks a ship assigned a OF token, they made spend the token to reduce the defenders agility by 1, to a minimum of 1. At the end phase, remove all OF tokens.

Kind of represents the sheer amount of pew-pew thrown out by TIE fighters.

Wow, I love BOTH your ideas a lot! They are thematic, simple, and effective. If anything, I would question whether the minimum 1 agility cap is necessary since not all ships even have 1+ agility. If you're worried about 3+ agility targets being brought down to nothing then:
A.) well first of all if the enemy is in that many arcs, then they are likely outplayed
B.) The cap can instead be removing a max of 1-2 OF tokens
C.) The cap can be removed, and instead OF tokens only stack on misses (similar to Operations Specialist).

I love the concepts, though.

9 minutes ago, Viktus106 said:

My group tried a classic Howlrunner + seven versus the correct meta and despite myself being a competent swarm player (apparently), the amount of four to five, high accurate, able to focus/target lock even when bumped and actionless attacks, plus bombs galore REALLY hurt them. Even to the point where it was laughably pathetic.

However, one simple change made all the difference and swung matches back into a 50/50 win state.

Fel's Wrath ability on all TIE Fighters.

That's right, the joke of the Imperial Navy actually helped.

Dengar / Tel didn't want to joust the swarm any more as they weren't able to remove three of them before they fired.

Nym didn't want to ram into them, bomb two and autoblaster / AC another off the board because, guess what, he died to the sheer amount of pew-pew.

Miranda's five dice homing missile, whilst nice, also saw her reduced to a single hull point, al for the cost of Howlrunner who was able to offer her ability all the way until the end of turn.

It really made a difference. Made Mauler and Scrouge quite threatening as well.

The other suggestion was a TIE Title:
Overwhelming Force
After you have performed an attack, assign a OF token to the defender. When a friendly TIE attacks a ship assigned a OF token, they made spend the token to reduce the defenders agility by 1, to a minimum of 1. At the end phase, remove all OF tokens.

Kind of represents the sheer amount of pew-pew thrown out by TIE fighters.

I've often thought that there should be a TIE Fighter (and by that I mean OT only TIE Fighter stuff FFG's naming scheme) title that says 'PS>2 only. When you are removed from play, an Academy Pilot enters play within range 1 of the board edge of your choice'. Simulating endless ranks, basically, but without increasing the number of ships on the board at any one time.

You'd have to work out how this would code for MoV, but my idea would basically be that the Imperial player in this context could win with a 0 MoV - i.e. his opponent killed all his original force, but then the spawned APs killed his opponent.

I really like the idea of universal Fel's Wrath though. Makes the Swarm something you don't want to joust, instead of something you can joust easily with high-hull ships if you can nuke Howl.

17 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

I've often thought that there should be a TIE Fighter (and by that I mean OT only TIE Fighter stuff FFG's naming scheme) title that says 'PS>2 only. When you are removed from play, an Academy Pilot enters play within range 1 of the board edge of your choice'. Simulating endless ranks, basically, but without increasing the number of ships on the board at any one time.

You'd have to work out how this would code for MoV, but my idea would basically be that the Imperial player in this context could win with a 0 MoV - i.e. his opponent killed all his original force, but then the spawned APs killed his opponent.

I really like the idea of universal Fel's Wrath though. Makes the Swarm something you don't want to joust, instead of something you can joust easily with high-hull ships if you can nuke Howl.

My suggestion was to gratuitously plagiarise draw inspiration from the Hound's Tooth title/ Nashtah Pup pilot:

Quote

If the only ship remaining in a match is the Nashtah Pup Pilot, the player who controls that ship wins. If this scenario arises during a tournament match, the Nashtah Pup Pilot is treated as though it is worth 1 point. For example, in a standard 100 point dogfight match, the player who controls the Nashtah Pup Pilot earns a full win and has a margin of victory of 101 and his opponent scores 99.

So the precedent is that 'respawned' pilots are worth zero points unless they are the only survivors, in which case they count as worth 1 point.

If you make it "TIE fighter only" and "You may not equip this upgrade if your Pilot Skill is 2 or higher", then that prevents TIE/sf taking it (the Zeta specialist is PS3), not that they'd want to take it in precedence to the Special Forces Training title anyway. I don't think Epsilon Squadron - the TIE/fo Academy Pilot equivalent - having it is that unreasonable either.

You could make it TIE only, PS1 only, but there are two problems.

Sigma Squadron are also PS3, so no Phantoms.

Preventing PS2+ taking it also means that you don't have to worry about TIE bombers taking it and respawning with ordnance.

Imperial Trainees can take it, but only at a cost of their adaptive ailerons.

Alpha Squadron Pilots.....I don't think most people would have a massive problem with them respawning if they paid a fair cost for it, but they are a lot more dangerous than a TIE fighter.

The biggest problem is the Delta Squadron Pilot. Even at a cost of TIE/x7, you do NOT want respawning defenders!

I'd make it a cheap title that discards on use (so you can only use it once). Making it 1 point means that an 8-strong academy pilot swarm, or 6-strong epsilon pilot swarm is actually 12-strong (aesthetically pleasing as that's a full squadron!), with the extra pilots waiting the wings.

2 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

The key thing there, is that Z-95 headhunters tend to have something.

An academy pilot as a blocker is actually a fairly big investment in the realm of 125% points efficient squads that the tournaments now inhabit.

Z-95s can do many things;

• a Thread Tracer/Guidance Chip ship can do a decent impression of Howlrunner for a turn, but at a lower cost.
• A Feedback Array or Black Market Slicer Tools does precisely what we've been discussing; give a low action efficiency 2-attack ship a means of punching damage through onto the Push The Limit Focus Evade Royal Guard TIE TIE/x7 Reinforce Kanan Just Give Up And Go Home crowd. The fact that you can field a swarm of 7 ships so equipped turns your squad into a nasty tazer-jellyfish monstrosity.
• Mindlink makes a cheap ship with an elite upgrade disproportionately valuable.
• N'Dru Sulhak, Lieutenant Blount and Airen Cracken all have really useful abilities.

The TIE fighter does get used too, but - at least at the moment - the best 'filler' is a ship which supports the rest of your squad, and (Howlrunner aside) the best support TIE fighters are Rex and Ahsoka - you'll note that more than half the "TIE fighter" metawing lists are rebel ones, and equally that there are relatively few "Z-95 squads" but rather "squads with a Z-95 or two in them".

Yes, and you're right.

But this shows one thing: having a 2 dice attack is not a crippling problem, demonstrated by mindlink and the pilot abilities.

So it's not the 2 dice attack that sucks, it's the platform of the imperial TIE fighter. And that is something new to me.

15 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

Yes, and you're right.

But this shows one thing: having a 2 dice attack is not a crippling problem, demonstrated by mindlink and the pilot abilities.

So it's not the 2 dice attack that sucks, it's the platform of the imperial TIE fighter. And that is something new to me.

On the contrary; having just 2-dice attacks in your squad is a problem. Which is why 2-dice attack ships tend to only turn up supporting something else with a bigger gun, or else with a 'gimmick' that makes the 2-dice attack more worthwhile. A mix of 2-dice attacks and one ace, or 4-dice big ship, or whatever, works very nicely.

It's much the same as with snap shot (which is an unmodified 2-dice attack); do you see it being taken en masse everywhere it can be? No - it is useful, but generally it's useful where there is a second ability hanging off it (Rhymer/Tactician, R3-A2, Fire Control System, Juke, Crack Shot, etc).

Similarly, a couple of academy pilots (or black squadron pilots with crack shot/snap shot) are useful 'filler' to drop into a list. So is Wampa - who is a superb pilot for his cost.

What you don't see very often are squads with nothing more than a 2-dice attack to their name.

The platform of the TIE fighter is fine - it's just as good as the Z-95 (in fact, I'd far rather have a TIE fighter swarm than a Z-95 swarm) - but the Rebel TIE and z-95 and scum Z-95s win not because of their attack, and not because of their platform, but because specific support-unit-abilities that various elite and unique pilots possess.

You could say much the same for Howlrunner; she would be a unit worth considering no matter what she was flying.

Woukd love to be able to kamikaze Ties into valuable targets (after executing a maneuver, if you overlap another ship and if you did not overlap an obstacle, may destroy yourself to deal 1 damage to the ship you are overlapping)

problem is i dont think kamikaze is very star wars. No one would do it when you could just intensify foward firepower instead

If we ever get the TIE Experimental M-whatevernumberitis, "TIE Bomb", it would fit, I guess.

3 hours ago, f0rbiddenc00kie said:

Wow, I love BOTH your ideas a lot! They are thematic, simple, and effective. If anything, I would question whether the minimum 1 agility cap is necessary since not all ships even have 1+ agility. If you're worried about 3+ agility targets being brought down to nothing then:
A.) well first of all if the enemy is in that many arcs, then they are likely outplayed
B.) The cap can instead be removing a max of 1-2 OF tokens
C.) The cap can be removed, and instead OF tokens only stack on misses (similar to Operations Specialist).

I love the concepts, though.

Here's hoping for squad upgrades!

1 hour ago, Magnus Grendel said:

On the contrary; having just 2-dice attacks in your squad is a problem. Which is why 2-dice attack ships tend to only turn up supporting something else with a bigger gun, or else with a 'gimmick' that makes the 2-dice attack more worthwhile.

I'm not sure the data supports this. There is almost a quarter of naked ability-free Z-95s that are played in winning squads.

I also did not say well what I intended to: the 2attack dice itself can work quite well, and many of the tools to make it work are available to TIEs. So the 2dice attack is not crippling and irredeemably bad. Whatever the problem is, it seems to be more specific to TIEs besides being the 2dice attack.

13 minutes ago, Chibi-Nya said:

Here's hoping for squad upgrades!

Squad upgrades already exist in Armada in the form of non-unique Hammerhead titles that only work with other copies of said title on other ships

Well, theyre "task force" titles but same difference

9 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

I'm not sure the data supports this. There is almost a quarter of naked ability-free Z-95s that are played in winning squads.

I also did not say well what I intended to: the 2attack dice itself can work quite well, and many of the tools to make it work are available to TIEs. So the 2dice attack is not crippling and irredeemably bad. Whatever the problem is, it seems to be more specific to TIEs besides being the 2dice attack.

Yes, but again, they're generally acting as blockers, I suspect, for bigger guns.

Just now, Magnus Grendel said:

Yes, but again, they're generally acting as blockers, I suspect, for bigger guns.

So you're saying that these ships work as single ships with specific tasks, but not as swarms? And if they are played as swarms then they actually do(/should) have a >2 dice attack (or at least one with more reliable damage), such as with missiles, feedback array or BMST?