1 hour ago, Church14 said:

Hm. Ships that want dice fixing, speed changes, and potentially a lot of shield repair. Sounds like arquitens’ to me.

I mean the fundamental assumption I'm making is that Imperial fleets don't have a lot of use for All Fighters Follow Me! Boosting your speed 4 TIEs up to speed 5 is all right, of course, but it doesn't feel as helpful as the alternative fleet commands. Maybe I'll be proven wrong on that one (throwing Morna Kee and Bossk at speed 5 with Vector and AFFM sounds funny at the very least).

That leaves us with Shields to Max, Intensify Firepower, and Entrapment Formation (I'm getting tired of using exclamation points on these things all the time, sorry). Chimaera should thus be planning to get solid use from at least 2 of those 3, if not all 3.

I think you're right that Arquitens qualify for all 3. ISDs and Gladiators would enjoy the help of all three too (IF making the Glad front arc two red dice less swingy is certainly desirable for me, anyways, provided you have other reasons for using beyond just Glads). Raiders like the shield regen and speed control, even if the dice-fixing is less of a thing. VSDs and Interdictors like the shield regen and dice-fixing even if the speed control is circumstantial and usually not nearly as good as using a nav dial (because doubling your yaw is good, sans Jerry). Quasars are down for shield regen and speed control, although dice-fixing is iffy - on a Quasar-II (especially with Gunnery Teams) it's a lot more appealing.

The best general ImpStar Title is Relentless, obviously.

17 minutes ago, Moore1980 said:

My heart is and always will be fixed on Avenger... as it was even before Boarding Troopers..

AMEN

4 hours ago, Thraug said:

Even so, Avenger + Boarding Trooper still seems, by far, a more powerful title.

Boarding Teams costs you Gunnery Teams. This is a huge cost. Avenger + Boarding Teams can kill almost any ship, but it can do it once, and it can only do it if you get in position. I find that it is over kill for so many ships that reduces its usefulness even further. Sloane + Avenger is IMO the powerful title combo. It isn't as powerful as Avenger + Boarding Teams in the very narrow circumstances where Avenger + Boarding Teams is at its best, but it is more useful in more circumstances. Honestly Killing one ship per turn once a game isn't nearly as good as maybe up to two ships per turn for an entire engagement.

But onto Chimera, I love and hate this card. Even if it didn't allow you to switch out the card you gave it, the title allows you to put, what's it called, A Fleet Upgrade, on your ISD. In the past this upgrade was only available to the Pelta, an otherwise terrible ship, but this upgrade made taking the ship worth it (sometimes). Now to be fair, the rebels still don't have another way to get this upgrade, but letting the Empire put it on what is arguable the best ship in the game is a little rude, I feel. How would you guys who are trying to make Interdictors work if the Assault Frigate got a title that gave it gravity well projectors?

Well I run a twin ISD-II list regularly, and Avenger is always present.. I never use Boarding troopers, and I usually run Motti as the Admiral... I lead off with an ISD firing with Heavy turbo laser turrets, forcing the use of Brace, and the follow-up with Avenger firing using Xi-7's .. Brace is orange and cant be used, with Xi-7's working on that redirect.

1 minute ago, Hrathen said:

But onto Chimera, I love and hate this card. Even if it didn't allow you to switch out the card you gave it, the title allows you to put, what's it called, A Fleet Upgrade, on your ISD. In the past this upgrade was only available to the Pelta, an otherwise terrible ship, but this upgrade made taking the ship worth it (sometimes). Now to be fair, the rebels still don't have another way to get this upgrade, but letting the Empire put it on what is arguable the best ship in the game is a little rude, I feel. How would you guys who are trying to make Interdictors work if the Assault Frigate got a title that gave it gravity well projectors?

The fleet commands are most powerful when applied to numerous ships and an ISD rocking a fleet command chews up a lot of points, diminishing the number of possible recipients. Peltas are still better at being fleet command ships compared to ISDs due to their much lower points cost. That's not even getting into the costs of supporting the fleet commands, the other titles (or ISD chassis, in the case of the Cymoon) you could've taken, etc. The example with Interdictor isn't a good parallel for that reason because an Assault Frigate is cheaper than an Interdictor. The cheapest Pelta (56 points) compared to the cheapest fleet command ISD (Cymoon at 112, as an ISD-I with Chimaera is 114), is exactly half the points cost prior to upgrades. So we'd need a Rebel ship that cost 180 points with a title to use an experimental retrofit before we had a comparison that worked.

I also contest that the Pelta is a terrible ship - the Command Pelta is a perfectly solid carrier (especially with Flight Commander+Fighter Coordination Team+Expanded Hangars) and the Assault Pelta has been slowly but surely getting some upgrades that make it more useful than when it was first released (Flechette Torpedoes lol why did it come with a Raider upgrade).

14 minutes ago, Moore1980 said:

Well I run a twin ISD-II list regularly, and Avenger is always present.. I never use Boarding troopers, and I usually run Motti as the Admiral... I lead off with an ISD firing with Heavy turbo laser turrets, forcing the use of Brace, and the follow-up with Avenger firing using Xi-7's .. Brace is orange and cant be used, with Xi-7's working on that redirect.

Oooh that's mean. I like it!

@Snipafist

I agree that for many of the upgrades the more ships you have the better advantage you get out of them. While the Empire doesn't spam small and medium ships as often as the Empire, I see lots of 5 (or more ship lists) that include ISDs in them. And don't forget "All Fighters Follow Me." I routinely have 134 points of fighter in a list that also has an ISD. The empire's fighter are for the most part cheaper (and faster) than the rebel fighters so this upgrade if anything will be better in the empire's hands.

6 minutes ago, Hrathen said:

@Snipafist

I agree that for many of the upgrades the more ships you have the better advantage you get out of them. While the Empire doesn't spam small and medium ships as often as the Empire, I see lots of 5 (or more ship lists) that include ISDs in them. And don't forget "All Fighters Follow Me." I routinely have 134 points of fighter in a list that also has an ISD. The empire's fighter are for the most part cheaper (and faster) than the rebel fighters so this upgrade if anything will be better in the empire's hands.

Do you NEED it though? You're already outstripping most Rebel fighters and any interceptors you have are speed 5.

As for 5 ship lists, yes, technically the gozanti is a ship that can benefit from IF. Technically correct.

22 minutes ago, Hrathen said:

@Snipafist

I agree that for many of the upgrades the more ships you have the better advantage you get out of them. While the Empire doesn't spam small and medium ships as often as the Empire, I see lots of 5 (or more ship lists) that include ISDs in them. And don't forget "All Fighters Follow Me." I routinely have 134 points of fighter in a list that also has an ISD. The empire's fighter are for the most part cheaper (and faster) than the rebel fighters so this upgrade if anything will be better in the empire's hands.

You can definitely get 5 or so ships with an ISD, but keep in mind that keeping a fleet command upgrade operational consistently requires further investments (usually a Comms Net flotilla and/or Wulff in the officer seat, depending on a few things) and at least one of of those ships will usually be Gozantis, which do okay with the fleet command buffs but not necessarily great.

I'm not a fan of AFFM with most Imperial squadron-heavy fleets for the reasons @geek19 gave - you already have high-speed squadrons and going from 4 to 5 can make a difference occasionally, but rarely, and if you must have speed 5 squadrons, Defenders and Interceptors already work just fine. The slower Imperial squadrons that would really benefit from a speed boost are all Rogues and so they don't generally want to be commanded most of the time, anyways. It just feels like you could've still run a squadron-heavy Imperial fleet and used a different fleet command (likely Entrapment Formation) to manage other elements of your fleet while your ships focus on squadron commands and the end result would be better than going with AFFM.

What I'm hearing so far is that Chimaera is probably one of the most powerful ISD titles in a well built fleet, but given it will run you as much as Devastator , "best" is still wide open.

53 minutes ago, GiledPallaeon said:

What I'm hearing so far is that Chimaera is probably one of the most powerful ISD titles in a well built fleet, but given it will run you as much as Devastator , "best" is still wide open.

Shhhh, let them overbuild ISDs like crazy so it's easier for us Rebels to blow up less ships.

Of course it is not: any other title works on every version. Chimaera doesn't.

Here's a perspective that is first based off of IF, but secondarily applies to Chimaera.

For 6 points, you get a dice manipulation boost that specifically works with blanks like the red and black dice. But for a single die manipulation, you also pay or more than other single-modification effects. So where it thrives most is in places where you've got multiple activations that can benefit from it. In order to have more shots that can benefit, you're looking first at red dice, while adjusting a blank black after the fact is nice side-effect. This is honestly where a Cymoon that doesn't have to take Chimaera and has a lot of red dice that could benefit seems to fit naturally. Especially with no access to LS that lets you fix the dice, and you didn't have to pay for Chimaera to do it. I think a lot of what you're looking for is a way to use IF to replace some of the upgarde cards that you might have taken to fix your dice, and if that allows you to do more with less, its pretty big. JJ"s idea with Kuat sounds interesting.

The starting point for IF would seem to be a build of the ISD that most directly benefits from it, so that you can in turn grab Chimaera and switch out, so an ISD-II with its own dice fix, such as LS probably isn't what you'd want, but perhaps you could take something else in your Ion slot (Ion Cannon Batteries?) and just use a CF reroll/IF to boost the red dice you have. Once you have the ISD centerpiece down, then adding red dice ships starts to work. Still, for Chaemera itself AND the fleet command upgrades, you're paying a lot, so you have to be absolutely certain that you're getting bigger net benefits. These look really exciting, to say the least, and I'm sure we'll open up a number of interesting builds through this expansion and its upgrades. I know I'm eager to try a few Imperial ones myself.

My sense is with those in the thread, that AFFM doesn't offer the Imperials much due to the already fast nature of their squads. STM might offer that tiny boost from time to time, but where I've seen it have success with the Rebels has been with Projection Experts and also combined with other regenerating effects, and there's an open question in my mind whether the Imperials can take an ISD and get the right mix of units elsewhere in the list that could really make good use of STM. Some of the problem is that by the time you put small ships out there with the ISD, you've got a lot of ships that can be effectively one-shotted. That's been the Achilles' heel of STM so far, and having the option of access to it doesn't change that. That leaves EF, which could be very interesting in a Jerry list that permits ships to use non-Nav commands and be at virtually any speed and with flexible yaw. In any case, even if one or more of the fleet commands aren't all that useful, there's going to be that one match-up where the OPTION to change out fleet command upgrades to the right one on the right turn is really going to be a huge benefit.

I was beginning to wonder if the fleet commands would be as useful in the fewer-ship builds of the Empire vs the spam-one-ship/upgrade meta of the Rebellion. Thanks for the breakdown Vergilius!

AFFM obviously doesn't help the Imps as much as the rebels, but it may actually get some use out of a few squadrons that rarely see the table.

YV666 has a solid anti squadron attack, rogue, and a lot of hull, but is stuck at speed 2 making it hard to utilize. The aggressor is another nice squadron, but the 3 speed hinders it when compared to other Imp squadrons. The decimator and firespray are seen a little more often, but again their speed makes one hesitate.

I could see a non-carrier fleet built around the concept of pushing these rogue squadrons first round with AFFM, and then letting them be on their own as you cycle from AFFM to something like IF to up your firepower.

AFFM isn't any less valid in use with Firesprays than it is with Scurrgs or Bwings.

Your still going to need a pretty specialized build where your YV666 is more valuable than a Defender for one reason or another, but it does at least give the Imps another way to get those slower ships up to speed and engaged with the enemy. They may, just may see the light of day again.

On 11/29/2017 at 5:30 AM, Darth Sanguis said:

Some


Follow by some



mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Whoa!!!! That scene where the Devastator drops out of hyperspace - it all happened so quickly when I watched it all those months ago!

That GR75 - it actually starts hyper-ing then 'stops' then barrels into the ISD?

Is that some sort of safety mechanism being triggered on the GR75?

Or was it tractor beamed or something?

What actually happened?

Amazing scene gave me goosebumps!

Ahh NO just saw it, it was the GR75 at the top right corner that actually Hypered out!

The unlucky victim was too slow to try and hyper! Muahahahah!!! >:|

On 11/28/2017 at 10:30 AM, Darth Sanguis said:

Some


Follow by some



mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

That's pretty much my entire fleetbuilding strategy. Before it was "fringe;" now it's just "Sloane." Isn't progress a beautiful thing?