2 minutes ago, Darth Seridur said:

I find it interesting that they are lumped differently from TIE swarm. Podcasters frequently saying TIE swarm is good/more people should play them. But not about droid swarms.

When droid swarm also fulfilsthat "jousty list that makes cut" archetype in your words.

Do you think this is because droids are still relatively unknown? Whereas TIE swarm is an Xwing foundation.

I think that is strictly because iden exists. Partly because Tie Swarm is actually a high init list as well.

22 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Jousty lists collecting swiss games than losing their first game in cut are an institution.

This quote must be preserved for the history books.

27 minutes ago, Darth Seridur said:

I find it interesting that they are lumped differently from TIE swarm. Podcasters frequently saying TIE swarm is good/more people should play them. But not about droid swarms.

When droid swarm also fulfils that "jousty list that makes cut" archetype in your words.

Do you think this is because droids are still relatively unknown? Whereas TIE swarm is an Xwing foundation.

TIE swarm has Iden+Howlrunner to fight against variance and Swarm Tactics for Initiative killing. Vultures have neither of those and worse defensive profile, thus they are extremely dependent on variance.

It's possible to do well in Swiss with Vultures since many will insist on jousting you and people are really bad at range control. Won't work in cut tho.

With the June points, will CIS become the faction with the most coherent theme? Or will they keep on chugging along being ****?

TIE Swarm is a bunch of i4 **** with a assload of words, passive mods, and Iden.

Vulture swarms are too god **** frail to not lose games where The enemy Ace list just jousts you and Init Kills 2+vultures before they shoot.

Initiative killing is the enemy.

You can quote me on that if you'd like.

9 minutes ago, Kieransi said:

Initiative killing is the enemy.

You can quote me on that if you'd like.

I earned killing your ship by proxy of firing first + additional information for my repositions.

stop attacking my skill.

(Note - I still like my jedi list. You can pry the Jedi from my cold dead hands. I’m just fully aware of what ‘skill’ I’m bringing to the table.)

I'd also like to note that due to their unique lack of maneuverability (red 3bank is a big ******* deal) it's potentially much easier to flank a Vulture swarm for chip damage/a ship removal before a full engage.

An ESC Vulture is only worth 20 points, tops.

5 hours ago, Darth Seridur said:

Heard in the latest podcast, people stating that Separatists are terrible.

Droid swarms have frequently been making cuts in the UK. Why do you think they are bad?

They’re sort of like rebel beef - great until they meet a tie swarm.*

*a rebel beef beat a tie swarm in a UK hyperspace trials.

The thread is probably over due for a repeat conversation about how to beat ships and lists that move after you and shoot first.

Ramble time...

Normal Answers:

• Catch Bumps
• Land Close to them before they move, inhabit the space where their slowest moves go while the rest of your list threatens the faster options.
• Attack from multiple angles ideally from a far enough distance/angle that denies single reposition arc dodging.
• Cast a net and prey your allowed to focus fire (*Hint: Most Ace Players Opt Into Nets )
• Threaten Flanking Aces, make them choose their escape route
• Force a favorable joust ( these are tricky to engineer as the vast majority of Aces are built to win partial jousts )
• Use Rocks to restrict their escape or repostion options ( Fully Execute rules + Gas Clouds make this way less useful )
• Bring Stuff that punishes them for playing the game they want to play ( Hint: Sloane, Stress Control Phasma stuff etc. )
• Tractor Beam is fantastic for ace control, trouble is Ketsu Lists by far the best example of this are just a high init jouster list.
• Bring Bombs because they are turrets and that helps
• Turrets ( Anything more than a forward arc help a ton ) ideally with boost but still good if you move awkward places and get to shoot anyway
• Rear Arc Boost is the ace killer ( But its used the vast majority of the time by Aces )
• Ordinance that works without Target Locks and doesnt require formations to work
• Be able to K-Turn with mods ( See Turrets ), denies the disengagement turn and forces the joust ( Pre-movement Aces manage this better but are the actual worst )
• Be High-Mid Initiative and Bring more HP than most aces can realistically destroy in 75 Minutes
• Set up locks turns you know you have no chance to shoot them so the turns you do matter more, usually good to do this the turn you move to block

It might be the least defined topic in x-wing. Jedi make it more and more relevant as "traditional" answers dont really apply. Bumping them is helpful but only partially consequential. They dont want to but are more than able to absorb damage in a joust and regen it back the next two turns. Forcing them to double reposition eats up their passive mods and makes them more "normal" aces but you cant force them to restrict their dial as they can do 3 actions in exchange for zero stress. Rocks don't really "trap" them as they will absolutely fly right over them and full throttle to safety with mods to boot. I don't want to pick on Jedi specifically but they do somethings that are mechanically difficult counter. Forcing them to opt into the disengage regen turns and splitting up to keep pressure on them has been the most reliable answer for me. Silencers do some of this easier other parts less easily.

So yea whats a low init player to do besides calling for Rule or Point Changes in a world were Reposition Aces and Turret Reposition Aces hold most of the cards?

The most reliable answer so far in 2.0 has probably been just to mix in at least one High Init (i5+) closer or threat in a relatively tanky list. Not sure if that qualifies as "if you cant beat them join them".

As a side note I think the game is in a pretty amazing place and the Aces situation isnt all that bad.
Beating things moving after you is still very doable and the most interesting thing about xwing to try and figure out.

44 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Cast a net and prey your allowed to focus fire (*Hint: Most Ace Players Opt Into Nets )

I feel personally attacked.

44 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Land Close to them before they move, inhabit the space where their slowest moves go while the rest of your list threatens the faster options. 

A whole lot of this.

45 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

• Tractor Beam is fantastic for ace control, trouble is Ketsu Lists by far the best example of this are just a high init jouster list.
• Bring Bombs because they are turrets and that helps 

I feel personally attacked again.

47 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Use Rocks to restrict their escape or repostion options ( Fully Execute rules + Gas Clouds make this way less useful ) 

Good note - people seem to think bigs rocks are always aces friends, but the key is they restrict both players choices, and aces typically have more options anyway, so it’s ‘okay’.

its not always okay.

48 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

• Be able to K-Turn with mods ( See Turrets ), denies the disengagement turn and forces the joust ( Pre-movement Aces manage this better but are the actual worst )
• Be High-Mid Initiative and Bring more HP than most aces can realistically destroy in 75 Minutes

Found the rebel player.

48 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Set up locks turns you know you have no chance to shoot them so the turns you do matter more, usually good to do this the turn you move to block 

Under utilized.

On the topic of helping CIS out, I think the right approach with them has to be making their weirder options cheaper.

It’s really hard for them to work as a faction as a pure efficiency swarm archetype since they are trapped at low initiative and so susceptible to just dying if their green dice go even slightly cold at the wrong time. Other factions are going to pure joust better, unless you cut the CIS points dramatically so that even after losing two ships to initiative kills, the vultures still have overwhelming firepower. And doing that would create a huge backlash since so few people opt out of jousts - we’d get a bunch of swarm hate knee-jerk upgrades and CIS swarms would be irrelevant again.

So I think the solution has to be bringing down the cost of the weird / flavorful upgrades/pilots and leaning into a “joust but with a twist” style. Discord Missiles in particular have some cool functionality that gets around initiative kills and generally eat up enemy actions/force suboptimal plays - if they come down a point or two that would enable more interesting swarms.

Similarly, the multi-dot limited pilots could legitimately cost the same as the non-limited pilots of the same initiative and it would be fine. Their abilities are challenging to trigger and fairly weak given the platform - it’s hard to justify paying more than *maybe* 1 point for them.

7 hours ago, Darth Seridur said:

Heard in the latest podcast, people stating that Separatists are terrible.

Droid swarms have frequently been making cuts in the UK. Why do you think they are bad?

Because no one knows what frequently means. Given the UK nats cut, droid swarms could be either the best or the worst list in the game. Only getting cuts is nearly (not to discourage getting even that much) useless. We can't just assume how many droid swarms showed up - in a 250 person event, if 3 of lists X make cut, all I know is 3 made cut. There could be 200 copies of the list that didn't make it, or 0.

30 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Because no one knows what frequently means. Given the UK nats cut, droid swarms could be either the best or the worst list in the game. Only getting cuts is nearly (not to discourage getting even that much) useless. We can't just assume how many droid swarms showed up - in a 250 person event, if 3 of lists X make cut, all I know is 3 made cut. There could be 200 copies of the list that didn't make it, or 0.

We know how many of each faction there were at Uk Nats. They printed up the faction breakdown sometime during day 1 and put it on the pairing boards. Presumably because so many prizes were based on where you did in your own faction.

We know that exactly 16 people showed up Separatists, so all 16 got the Maul card. Not sure how many were droid swarms of course as opposed to Dooku Maul.

3 minutes ago, Darth Seridur said:

We know how many of each faction there were at Uk Nats. They printed up the faction breakdown sometime during day 1 and put it on the pairing boards. Presumably because so many prizes were based on where you did in your own faction.

We know that exactly 16 people showed up Separatists, so all 16 got the Maul card. Not sure how many were droid swarms of course as opposed to Dooku Maul.

That's useful info - but like you said it doesn't really help much. Let's say every separatist list was a vulture swarm:

3/16 made top32 - 19% The overall tournament was 16.4%. Not bad! It's likely that not all of the separatists lists were vulture swarms (we have at least one maul/dooku), so it's likely better than that.

Unfortunately, that's a huge outlier. With all the extended data we have, vultures are still below average - and that's even with European events only having cuts dramatically over-representing the newer factions. For example, Wolffe is rolling in at 36% cut rate, which is obviously not an accurate representation.

25 minutes ago, Darth Seridur said:

We know how many of each faction there were at Uk Nats. They printed up the faction breakdown sometime during day 1 and put it on the pairing boards. Presumably because so many prizes were based on where you did in your own faction.

We know that exactly 16 people showed up Separatists, so all 16 got the Maul card. Not sure how many were droid swarms of course as opposed to Dooku Maul.

That plus was supposed to be a Hyperspace event until a few weeks before.

23 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Wolffe is rolling in at 36% cut rate, which is obviously not an accurate representation.

PROVE IT

2 hours ago, Boom Owl said:

• Set up locks turns you know you have no chance to shoot them so the turns you do matter more, usually good to do this the turn you move to block

the Y-wing Block+Lock into Turn+Torp is pretty fun or Block+Lock into Bomb+Burn

11 minutes ago, Do I need a Username said:

the Y-wing Block+Lock into Turn+Torp is pretty fun or Block+Lock into Bomb+Burn

If you set that up with a ywing you earned it to. Not able to reposition to the block spot.

With rocks and 2 Y-wing its not too hard, since the aggro Y-wing is confusing sometimes. esp. fun when its Norra.

5 hours ago, Tlfj200 said:

They’re sort of like rebel beef - great until they meet a tie swarm.*

*a rebel beef beat a tie swarm in a UK hyperspace trials.

It happened once so I accept this as my new gospel

2 hours ago, jagsba said:

It happened once so I accept this as my new gospel

I was beaten to a pulp by a tie swarm while flying Rebel Beef, I strongly recommend caution in believing your new gospel.

1 hour ago, Blake7689 said:

I was beaten to a pulp by a tie swarm while flying Rebel Beef, I strongly recommend caution in believing your new gospel.

This contradicts my beliefs so must be wrong

9 hours ago, Kieransi said:

Initiative killing is the enemy.

You can quote me on that if you'd like.

Played an interesting capture the flag based variant the other week. 7v7, one ship from each faction and initiative worked by each team alternating movement, then alternating firing, killed ships are removed immediately, 1st player token changed each turn. Effectively allowing any given ship on your side to dynamically be the low init blocker or the high init ace added a lot of depth to the planning/movement phase. Not to mention a new kind of blocking where you know they dialed in something that hits where you are now so you hold your guy and try to make them move before you. Initiative killing in the firing phase felt fine since everyone had the potential to do it. It was a thoughtful part of the strategy rather than an artifact of where the good pilots in that faction sit on the initiative spectrum

Obviously would not work for the main game due to an uneven number of ships (ships respawned so it was always even for the whole game). Still, it highlighted to me how warping initiative (and worse, bids) is on the relative worth of ships

2 hours ago, Blake7689 said:

I was beaten to a pulp by a tie swarm while flying Rebel Beef.

The range-1 Beef (Selfless, Biggs, Swarm Tactics) strategies for Beef all play into the TIE Swarm’s hands by encouraging the Beef to stick together and joust as a team.

The more free-wheeling B-Wings and Cassian and none of the range-1 upgrades Beef allows for Wedge to go do a Soontir Fel impression while the B-wings do a pincer move backstopped by Cassian, which forces the TIE player into difficult dial decisions and makes it a much more even game.