I found myself on Friday afternoon with no plans and my family all busy all weekend. There is a local gaming convention here that does all sorts of games from role playing to table top minis. With no plans, I decided to go. I planned on a bunch of DnD for Saturday, but it seems that all sessions were full in the afternoon. There was also an X-wing event going on at the same time. I thought it doesn't cost any extra, so I might as well try it. It was my first tournament in 2 years. I haven't even played 100/6 in a couple months as I'm usually doing HotAC, missions, or some other form of casual.

I wanted to play something fun. I remembered a Vader list that I thought of before that I played a few times and I thought it had legs. I figured I'd give it a go and try it out. I didn't care if I won a single game, as long as I had fun.

Darth Vader (29)
Swarm Leader (3)
Advanced Targeting Computer (1)
Engine Upgrade (4)
TIE/x1 (0)

"Night Beast" (15)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Total: 100

My main goal was to use the Tie Fighters as the main force and Vader would try to come in on the flanks. If they concentrated on Vader, the Tie Fighters could swoop in and do damage. I've got a lot of games in with Tie Fighters since Wave 1 and I love bumping with them. It's pretty important to my overall strategy. Try to create a bump screen where no matter where the enemy goes, they end up bumping into the first one and have no actions. Tie Fighters can then fire at short range against someone with no actions. Even if I bump and I have an Evade, I can still give it to Vader for an extra die. Night Beast gets the free Focus so he can then do an Evade for Vader. Oh.....this would be flown as a true Tie Swarm. Not some Tie Formation. No formation at all for these guys.

OH, if I were in Range 1, I could get 5 red dice attack and throw a free Critical hit on at the end. I did get that off a couple of times.

The Sling Paint guys were there and said I'd probably win the whole event as I hadn't done a tournament in forever and had my crazy list. I expected to lose every game. There were 12 people who signed up as you had to pay a $25 fee to get into the convention and most X-wingers don't really play other games. So, most stayed away as it's steep to pay for just one tournament. There were only 3 Imperials and mostly Scum.

I typed up a quick report for FB, but I'll try to pull it in here and format it better.

Round 1 vs. Joe from Sling Paint Gaming

• Bumpmaster
• 2 x Skurrg with Auto Blaster turrets, GC, Harpoon Missiles, and Deadeye

First game was vs. Joe who hadn't played this list before. I had also never flown against a Skurrg before. I just don't play against meta lists in my little casual world. The Bumpmaster went in first and the Skurrgs behind. Joe was pretty cautious. I got Vader in on the sides and nailed his Bumpmaster pretty hard, but a Skurrg was able to get a Harpoon Missile shot off on me. I had saved a Focus. His first missile only got 3 hits in and Vader used Focus to evade them all! After that, I had Vader pull out of there as they chased him. Tie Fighters chewed up here and there until he was out of shields with all ships. Vader circled back and blew up the Bumpmaster with Night Beast's help. Tie Fighters blew up the Skurgs while losing one. Joe's dice were really bad here. I'll fully admit that.

100 - 12

Round 2 vs. Buddy with Slightly Overweight Han

• Han wasn't quite fat. He had VI, but no Gunner. Can't recall what else he had on him.
• Dutch Y-wing with nothing
• Gold Squadron with nothing

I think Buddy might've not had a lot of tournament games. I'm thinking back and I think he might have forgotten about his crew the whole game. I don't recall what he had because he never used them. I've played a lot vs. Fat Han and knew I needed to block him before he baited and zipped past me. Han was aggressive and flew straight at Vader to Range 1. Vader and Han faced off and Han's dice were really bad at attacking me that round. Han had first shot at my Vader and all I had was a Focus, but he failed to land a hit. If he had managed to nail me, it might have been a different game. Vader and Tie Fighters knocked Han's shields out. Most Tie Fighters circled behind Falcon and went for Y-wings due to asteroids and placement. Vader bugged out and went for Y-wings as I wanted Tie Fighters to hunt Han and not let a lucky Han Solo roll blast me to pieces. I had one Tie Fighter rush out in the way of Han and bumped him. I was facing the same way he was and pretty much spent the rest of the game getting in the way of Han. He had no actions and couldn't get far. There were always a couple Tie Fighters firing at him. Vader and a couple Ties hunted down the Y-wings. I can't recall who had the final shot, but he was about to go off the board before I shot him down. All due to one Academy Pilot blocking him the entire game. I did use a Focus when I should've saved it for defense and a Tie Fighter got blasted without taking down the wounded Y-wing.

100 - 12

Round 3 vs. Vader and Rear Admiral - Vader Off!

• Identical Vader, except with VI
• RAC with Kylo Ren, Rebel Captive, Engine Upgrade, and other stuff

So.....after hearing how Imperials are unplayable for so long on these forums, I thought it was funny that the final top table was 2 Imperial players. Also, both had Vader, who isn't good or competitive.

I totally forgot this players name because I am a terrible person and suck at remembering names. I was not expecting to do well here as this is someone who does the tournament thing a lot and I was rusty. My Vader was going first and I fully expected Kylo to mess with my Vader. My opponent was fully doing the bogus TL attempts to see if he was in range for his real targets. Such as.....trying to TL something at R5 or 6 just to see if he could fire at my lead Tie Fighter. I gave him a hard time about it only because it's really just bogus, but I don't really care that much. I was there to have fun. He ran along his board edge to draw my Tie Fighters through the rocks. I don't mind this as I don't fly formation. One guy got too close, though and he was able to start to pick at them. I took my Vader to face his, but he had VI. I totally flubbed up the approach and thought I was behind a rock and waiting, but ended up exposed and not able to get a shot off. He took my shields for it. At this point, Vader was running most of the game. He fired at Tie Fighters and I did get decent evade dice. I'm telling you that Tie Fighters are hard to kill if they don't blank out. I whittled away at the Decimator while I could and couldn't really bring many Tie Fighters to fire at the same time, but almost always had a Tie Fighter there to fire. I felt I wasn't flying my best. For the longest time I had all my Tie Fighters with just one or two hull left. Night Beast died. Another Tie died. The Decimator was really low and I had boxed him in a bit. Rear Admiral went for broke and went across an asteroid to avoid all the attacks, but took a crit and got Direct Hit! Decimator died. Pretender Vader killed another Tie Fighter of mine. It was then Vader vs my Vader and a Tie Fighter. I stripped his shields one round. Low on time. If I ran and kept everything alive, I would win. Screw that! Who likes running until time? Besides, *I* was the real Vader! Vader wouldn't run and wait for time. He would go for it. Went for it and my Tie got lucky a couple times as his Vader tried to blast it to make it a tied game. Did lots of K-turns with my Vader because you have to to keep higher PS Vader in arc. I had a TL to get the extra crit hits in. We traded lots of pot shots on each other, but couldn't hit each other. Lots of back and forth. He finally blanked out on some defense dice and I got him! Very fun game. Very challenging. I didn't think I would win from the beginning, but still stuck to it. I made some bad mistakes in the beginning. There were a few wasted opportunities. One time I landed just barely on a rock and missed a R1 shot at Vader with a Tie Fighter. I think I did 2 damage to myself via rocks. Was able to pull it off somehow. My opponent stated that he hadn't had a nail bitter game like that for a long time. I fully agreed with that. It was really good! Really not sure how I pulled it off.

100 - 51

There was one other guy who won all his games. He had a Scum list with Palob and a Space Tug Tractor Beam. Four ships. Not sure what else. Nice guy that turned out to be from Maryland. His opponent gave up near the end, so he ended up getting 100 - 0. This pushed him ahead of me by just 31 pts! So, I came in 2nd. I hadn't done a tournament in 2 years and I come in 2nd! First prize was a C-ROC, but I already had one. Second prize was $50 at Miniature Market, so I was more than happy to take 2nd place! I felt like I won first after that last match. My opponent wanted to play me for a 4th round, but I was beat. I had been there since 8am and wanted to get some dinner before the next round of DnD started. I didn't get to bed until 1am that night and was glad I didn't play the 4th round. Nice guy that won it, though.

I do want to say that I think my Tie Fighters were the stars of the day. I have also been hearing that 2 attack die ships are dead and have no place in the competitive game again. When I've looked at people's lists in the past 6 months, there haven't been high agility aces and the whole token stacking for defense hasn't been a thing, either. So, I figured my 5 Tie Fighters would do alright. I've played quite a lot of games with Tie fighters. I know that if you have a Tie Fighter with a Focus token a turn (or Evade) then it's hard to one shot them....unless you blank out on green dice. I only blanked out once in 3 games. With that in mind, it takes at least 2 shots usually to take down a Tie Fighter. That's pretty significant when most lists have just 2-3 ships in them and I have 5 Tie Fighters! So, a little 12 point ship is pretty efficient. Yes, they only have 2 attack dice, but out of all the ships I faced, I only faced a single ship with agility 3. There was only a single ship with 2 agility and the rest were either 1's or a 0. My 2 attack dice were great firing at my opponents. I even rolled only a single hit at R3 through a rock against 4 green dice (but with no Focus). He didn't get a single evade! When you have that many ships firing they start to add up. I also prefer to get them in close and bump while the rest fire at R1. I did that often and did get a lot of hits in. Oh, it wasn't usually a lot at one time, but there was constant damage each turn. Almost like a TLT shooting each round. I don't think people give Tie Fighters enough credit. I kept hearing people say that there were some great abilities on Tie Fighter pilots.....but they were only on Tie Fighters. I just showed people that Tie Fighters don't suck!

I had a great time. I might want to get some more 100/6 games in, especially with older minis, just to try them out against the latest and greatest. Not sure if I will, though. It was good to take a break from Casual and almost win an event just to prove I can still do it.

Ty for batrep. Good to see a messy swarm do well.

8 hours ago, RittsMJ said:

Ty for batrep. Good to see a messy swarm do well.

Messy swarms are the best. The rest are just formations. It takes away half the strength of the Tie Fighter to force it in a formation.

Glad you had fun with it!

Makes me want to break out my A wings again and run a mini swarm (without harpoons/cruise) + Ace.

When people said Tie Fighter pilots had great abilities, but stuck in a Tie Fighter, it makes me want to break out my old 6 named Tie Fighter list and try it out. Maybe update it.

There is also a list with a Lambda and....Flight Instructor? The one that gives 2 Focus for stress.

On 11/12/2017 at 2:32 PM, heychadwick said:

I found myself on Friday afternoon with no plans and my family all busy all weekend. There is a local gaming convention here that does all sorts of games from role playing to table top minis. With no plans, I decided to go. I planned on a bunch of DnD for Saturday, but it seems that all sessions were full in the afternoon. There was also an X-wing event going on at the same time. I thought it doesn't cost any extra, so I might as well try it. It was my first tournament in 2 years. I haven't even played 100/6 in a couple months as I'm usually doing HotAC, missions, or some other form of casual.

I wanted to play something fun. I remembered a Vader list that I thought of before that I played a few times and I thought it had legs. I figured I'd give it a go and try it out. I didn't care if I won a single game, as long as I had fun.

Darth Vader (29)
Swarm Leader (3)
Advanced Targeting Computer (1)
Engine Upgrade (4)
TIE/x1 (0)

"Night Beast" (15)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Total: 100

My main goal was to use the Tie Fighters as the main force and Vader would try to come in on the flanks. If they concentrated on Vader, the Tie Fighters could swoop in and do damage. I've got a lot of games in with Tie Fighters since Wave 1 and I love bumping with them. It's pretty important to my overall strategy. Try to create a bump screen where no matter where the enemy goes, they end up bumping into the first one and have no actions. Tie Fighters can then fire at short range against someone with no actions. Even if I bump and I have an Evade, I can still give it to Vader for an extra die. Night Beast gets the free Focus so he can then do an Evade for Vader. Oh.....this would be flown as a true Tie Swarm. Not some Tie Formation. No formation at all for these guys.

OH, if I were in Range 1, I could get 5 red dice attack and throw a free Critical hit on at the end. I did get that off a couple of times.

The Sling Paint guys were there and said I'd probably win the whole event as I hadn't done a tournament in forever and had my crazy list. I expected to lose every game. There were 12 people who signed up as you had to pay a $25 fee to get into the convention and most X-wingers don't really play other games. So, most stayed away as it's steep to pay for just one tournament. There were only 3 Imperials and mostly Scum.

I typed up a quick report for FB, but I'll try to pull it in here and format it better.

Round 1 vs. Joe from Sling Paint Gaming

• Bumpmaster
• 2 x Skurrg with Auto Blaster turrets, GC, Harpoon Missiles, and Deadeye

First game was vs. Joe who hadn't played this list before. I had also never flown against a Skurrg before. I just don't play against meta lists in my little casual world. The Bumpmaster went in first and the Skurrgs behind. Joe was pretty cautious. I got Vader in on the sides and nailed his Bumpmaster pretty hard, but a Skurrg was able to get a Harpoon Missile shot off on me. I had saved a Focus. His first missile only got 3 hits in and Vader used Focus to evade them all! After that, I had Vader pull out of there as they chased him. Tie Fighters chewed up here and there until he was out of shields with all ships. Vader circled back and blew up the Bumpmaster with Night Beast's help. Tie Fighters blew up the Skurgs while losing one. Joe's dice were really bad here. I'll fully admit that.

100 - 12

Round 2 vs. Buddy with Slightly Overweight Han

• Han wasn't quite fat. He had VI, but no Gunner. Can't recall what else he had on him.
• Dutch Y-wing with nothing
• Gold Squadron with nothing

I think Buddy might've not had a lot of tournament games. I'm thinking back and I think he might have forgotten about his crew the whole game. I don't recall what he had because he never used them. I've played a lot vs. Fat Han and knew I needed to block him before he baited and zipped past me. Han was aggressive and flew straight at Vader to Range 1. Vader and Han faced off and Han's dice were really bad at attacking me that round. Han had first shot at my Vader and all I had was a Focus, but he failed to land a hit. If he had managed to nail me, it might have been a different game. Vader and Tie Fighters knocked Han's shields out. Most Tie Fighters circled behind Falcon and went for Y-wings due to asteroids and placement. Vader bugged out and went for Y-wings as I wanted Tie Fighters to hunt Han and not let a lucky Han Solo roll blast me to pieces. I had one Tie Fighter rush out in the way of Han and bumped him. I was facing the same way he was and pretty much spent the rest of the game getting in the way of Han. He had no actions and couldn't get far. There were always a couple Tie Fighters firing at him. Vader and a couple Ties hunted down the Y-wings. I can't recall who had the final shot, but he was about to go off the board before I shot him down. All due to one Academy Pilot blocking him the entire game. I did use a Focus when I should've saved it for defense and a Tie Fighter got blasted without taking down the wounded Y-wing.

100 - 12

Round 3 vs. Vader and Rear Admiral - Vader Off!

• Identical Vader, except with VI
• RAC with Kylo Ren, Rebel Captive, Engine Upgrade, and other stuff

So.....after hearing how Imperials are unplayable for so long on these forums, I thought it was funny that the final top table was 2 Imperial players. Also, both had Vader, who isn't good or competitive.

I totally forgot this players name because I am a terrible person and suck at remembering names. I was not expecting to do well here as this is someone who does the tournament thing a lot and I was rusty. My Vader was going first and I fully expected Kylo to mess with my Vader. My opponent was fully doing the bogus TL attempts to see if he was in range for his real targets. Such as.....trying to TL something at R5 or 6 just to see if he could fire at my lead Tie Fighter. I gave him a hard time about it only because it's really just bogus, but I don't really care that much. I was there to have fun. He ran along his board edge to draw my Tie Fighters through the rocks. I don't mind this as I don't fly formation. One guy got too close, though and he was able to start to pick at them. I took my Vader to face his, but he had VI. I totally flubbed up the approach and thought I was behind a rock and waiting, but ended up exposed and not able to get a shot off. He took my shields for it. At this point, Vader was running most of the game. He fired at Tie Fighters and I did get decent evade dice. I'm telling you that Tie Fighters are hard to kill if they don't blank out. I whittled away at the Decimator while I could and couldn't really bring many Tie Fighters to fire at the same time, but almost always had a Tie Fighter there to fire. I felt I wasn't flying my best. For the longest time I had all my Tie Fighters with just one or two hull left. Night Beast died. Another Tie died. The Decimator was really low and I had boxed him in a bit. Rear Admiral went for broke and went across an asteroid to avoid all the attacks, but took a crit and got Direct Hit! Decimator died. Pretender Vader killed another Tie Fighter of mine. It was then Vader vs my Vader and a Tie Fighter. I stripped his shields one round. Low on time. If I ran and kept everything alive, I would win. Screw that! Who likes running until time? Besides, *I* was the real Vader! Vader wouldn't run and wait for time. He would go for it. Went for it and my Tie got lucky a couple times as his Vader tried to blast it to make it a tied game. Did lots of K-turns with my Vader because you have to to keep higher PS Vader in arc. I had a TL to get the extra crit hits in. We traded lots of pot shots on each other, but couldn't hit each other. Lots of back and forth. He finally blanked out on some defense dice and I got him! Very fun game. Very challenging. I didn't think I would win from the beginning, but still stuck to it. I made some bad mistakes in the beginning. There were a few wasted opportunities. One time I landed just barely on a rock and missed a R1 shot at Vader with a Tie Fighter. I think I did 2 damage to myself via rocks. Was able to pull it off somehow. My opponent stated that he hadn't had a nail bitter game like that for a long time. I fully agreed with that. It was really good! Really not sure how I pulled it off.

100 - 51

There was one other guy who won all his games. He had a Scum list with Palob and a Space Tug Tractor Beam. Four ships. Not sure what else. Nice guy that turned out to be from Maryland. His opponent gave up near the end, so he ended up getting 100 - 0. This pushed him ahead of me by just 31 pts! So, I came in 2nd. I hadn't done a tournament in 2 years and I come in 2nd! First prize was a C-ROC, but I already had one. Second prize was $50 at Miniature Market, so I was more than happy to take 2nd place! I felt like I won first after that last match. My opponent wanted to play me for a 4th round, but I was beat. I had been there since 8am and wanted to get some dinner before the next round of DnD started. I didn't get to bed until 1am that night and was glad I didn't play the 4th round. Nice guy that won it, though.

I do want to say that I think my Tie Fighters were the stars of the day. I have also been hearing that 2 attack die ships are dead and have no place in the competitive game again. When I've looked at people's lists in the past 6 months, there haven't been high agility aces and the whole token stacking for defense hasn't been a thing, either. So, I figured my 5 Tie Fighters would do alright. I've played quite a lot of games with Tie fighters. I know that if you have a Tie Fighter with a Focus token a turn (or Evade) then it's hard to one shot them....unless you blank out on green dice. I only blanked out once in 3 games. With that in mind, it takes at least 2 shots usually to take down a Tie Fighter. That's pretty significant when most lists have just 2-3 ships in them and I have 5 Tie Fighters! So, a little 12 point ship is pretty efficient. Yes, they only have 2 attack dice, but out of all the ships I faced, I only faced a single ship with agility 3. There was only a single ship with 2 agility and the rest were either 1's or a 0. My 2 attack dice were great firing at my opponents. I even rolled only a single hit at R3 through a rock against 4 green dice (but with no Focus). He didn't get a single evade! When you have that many ships firing they start to add up. I also prefer to get them in close and bump while the rest fire at R1. I did that often and did get a lot of hits in. Oh, it wasn't usually a lot at one time, but there was constant damage each turn. Almost like a TLT shooting each round. I don't think people give Tie Fighters enough credit. I kept hearing people say that there were some great abilities on Tie Fighter pilots.....but they were only on Tie Fighters. I just showed people that Tie Fighters don't suck!

I had a great time. I might want to get some more 100/6 games in, especially with older minis, just to try them out against the latest and greatest. Not sure if I will, though. It was good to take a break from Casual and almost win an event just to prove I can still do it.

Hail Vader!

I'll admit that I wanted Vader to be relevant when I picked him.

On 11/12/2017 at 1:32 PM, heychadwick said:

So.....after hearing how Imperials are unplayable for so long on these forums, I thought it was funny that the final top table was 2 Imperial players. Also, both had Vader, who isn't good or competitive.

I don't think you really needed this in here as life has changed a bit after the FAQ and before the FAQ Vader was becoming more relevant if not top tier. I also think most people would agree that small tourneys aren't really what people who made that complaint were concerned with unless they were in a hyper competitive meta. Vader is especially an option people are looking at since the FAQ and RAC has been one of two imperial ships that has consistently been top tier for the Imperials recently.

Anyway, now that that is out of the way, kudos on the win, especially against that last opponent as that should have been a very tough matchup and congrats on getting back out.

Yes, I think a lot has changed since the FAQ and I was glad for it. I didn't see any list that made me groan as obnoxious. I did think I had lost that last match up, especially after some poor flying from me early on. I did manage to swing it back and out luck my opponent as we were both waiting to for the other to blank out.

I also like the fact that I nearly won it by flying only Wave 1 ships. That was pretty cool.

On 11/13/2017 at 3:02 PM, heychadwick said:

When people said Tie Fighter pilots had great abilities, but stuck in a Tie Fighter, it makes me want to break out my old 6 named Tie Fighter list and try it out. Maybe update it.

There is also a list with a Lambda and....Flight Instructor? The one that gives 2 Focus for stress.

Fleet officer. It's a surprisingly good support ship.

The named TIE fighters and TIE/fo fighters' abilities are nothing short of devastating if they were in anything but a TIE fighter. I've always assumed it's a result of spending 6 points on a TIE fighter (1/2 the price of the chassis!) compared to spending 6 points on a TIE defender (1/5th the price of the chassis) being why the pilot abilities are so dratted brutal.

Well done! Nice to see Swarm Leader get some use. I've thought it should work well with a swarm of academy pilots plus an ace, good to see someone actually get some mileage out of it.

There are quite a few combinations that have popped up compared to the old 6 named TIE fighter All-stars - the newer EPTs plus the additional pilots in the carrier.

• Chaser does the same job in your list as Night Beast for a point less - he won't work well with academy pilot buddies (who are lower PS) but he can evade, feed that evade to a Swarm Leader, then snag someone else's focus out of the air when they spend it and spend it again himself.
• Mauler Mithel + Snap Shot is a surprisingly brutal knife-fighter. If someone wanders into his gunsights he drops a 3-dice snap shot, and if they don't get out of it again he follows this up with a 4-dice range 1 primary attack. People are not used to being on the receiving end of 7 red dice in one turn from a TIE fighter.
• Scourge does more or less the same, albeit needing that initial damage card. He's actually pretty good against the tons-of-hull crowd like Y-wings, large ships, and so on. I'd love to try him with Swarm Leader but he feels too fragile (I think you're right that Vader is the better choice), although the thing is that Swarm Leader isn't actually all that expensive - if you think about it as a one-use four-to-five-dice missile that's somehow in the elite slot, it's not actually a bad deal.
• Wampa is just terrifying. He's not actually that good - he has about a 1/4 chance of triggering his ability without someone else intervening - but with Palpatine on the field he's much nastier. More importantly, the unreasoning fear he causes in the arc-dodging ace crowd is worth 14 points by itself. He's also not bad supporting a swarm leader since he can evade and then roll unmodified dice, which are no less likely to get a [critical] than focused dice, but he's a lot scarier a prospect than Night Beast if the Swarm Leader cops a PS11 cruise missile on the first turn.
• Youngster - by himself he's okay. Rage is his main party piece, passing out focus/rerolls to TIEs at range 1-3 rather than just range 1 like howlrunner. He does best supporting someone who gets extra attack dice - like Mauler Mithel or Backstabber, or a swarm leader, because the more dice you roll, the more value the fact that rage lets you reroll up to 3 dice rather than howlrunner's 1 is likely to give you. Plus he's 2 points cheaper than Howlrunner.

On 11/12/2017 at 7:32 PM, heychadwick said:

I've played quite a lot of games with Tie fighters. I know that if you have a Tie Fighter with a Focus token a turn (or Evade) then it's hard to one shot them....unless you blank out on green dice. I only blanked out once in 3 games. With that in mind, it takes at least 2 shots usually to take down a Tie Fighter. That's pretty significant when most lists have just 2-3 ships in them and I have 5 Tie Fighters! So, a little 12 point ship is pretty efficient.

I've had the same thing with TIE strikers - I played my first game against a harpoon missile alpha strike list the other day. I lost, but it reinforced how tough the little blighters are - in each case, a guidance chipped, target locked missile failed to one-shot the ship in question despite drawing a direct hit! on two of the shots. Swarm ships will never be 'tough', but with 2-3 ships squads being the 'norm', especially 2 ships without a double-tap ability, forcing someone to waste an extra shot is a big deal.

I don't sadly own any TIE/x1 cards, otherwise I wouldn't mind having a try with the canonical Black Squadron lineup:

• Darth Vader
  • TIE/x1
  • Advanced Targeting Computer
  • [Elite Upgrade]
  • [Modification]
• "Mauler" Mithel
  • [Elite Upgrade]
• "Backstabber"
• "Dark Curse"
• "Chaser"

[Elite Upgrades] are 3 points worth - either Swarm Leader on Vader and Adaptability/Trick Shot/A Score To Settle on Mithel, or Veteran Instincts on Vader and Snap Shot on Mithel. The former works better with Dark Curse and Chaser, the latter makes Vader and Mithel better at hunting aces and pairs well with a Missile-armed Vader.

[Modification] is either Engine Upgrade or Guidance Chips & Cruise Missiles/Harpoon Missiles

With Vader acting as a flanker, a stand-off weapon helps a lot, and - especially with Veteran Instincts, he lacks much punch himself, so a missile helps open the festivities. Cruise Missiles offer a brutal 5-dice attack, whilst Harpoons are only 4-dice but have the 'harpoon bomb' effect that Vader can easily set off with his reliable critical hits.

With Vader, he's a good match for the list. He's at PS9 and gets 2 actions. Give him EU and he's very squirrelly. Durable, too. To be honest, he only got to use his Swarm Leader a few times, but it was pretty brutal when he did. After that, he either had the enemy Chase him or cleaned up chaff. You don't want him trading shots with people, but if you use him as bait, it gets easier to control where people will go. In a list like mine, people want to nail the expensive guy. They are used to couple of aces per list and gave their tricks for them. That's where the Tie Fighters bump them to stop actions and fire at R1 effectively. To be honest, you can even just use one other Tie with an Evade to boost Vader's attack. Doesn't have to be the mega attack all the time. Still, there were some nice 5 die attack rolls.

People underestimate ignoring 5 Tie Fighters coming at them.

Fleet Officer....yes, that's it! Had a list called Space Cowboys as they escorted the Space Cow (lambda) around.

Can't find the old one, but this is good. Had 2 pts and threw in System Officer.

Omicron Group Pilot (21)
Advanced Sensors (3)
Fleet Officer (3)
Systems Officer (2)

"Dark Curse" (16)

"Night Beast" (15)

"Backstabber" (16)

Academy Pilot (12)

Academy Pilot (12)

Total: 100

View in Yet Another Squad Builder

As for the named 6 Ties, I had forgotten about some new stuff. I forgot Snapshot on Mauler. Was torn about Chaser. I want to try it without Swarm Leader. Think it might have legs if people don't take high agility ships. Not sure on this list. Had 3 pts left over. Could do Swarm Leader on Scourge, but would probably make him a target. Thought about Hull Upgrade on Dark Curse, but here is what I picked:

"Mauler Mithel" (17)
Snap Shot (2)

"Scourge" (17)
Predator (3)

"Dark Curse" (16)

"Backstabber" (16)

"Night Beast" (15)

"Chaser" (14)

Total: 100

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Good to hear this! I had a friend of mine ask if I should switch out a Triple Aces for Vader + Swarm, this will help give me more consideration for it!

On 11/16/2017 at 9:49 AM, Praetorate of the Empire said:

Good to hear this! I had a friend of mine ask if I should switch out a Triple Aces for Vader + Swarm, this will help give me more consideration for it!

Just don't fly in formation!