I thought the only reason they did it the way they did in rogue one was that they couldn’t risk the ship being destroyed before transmission completion or being jammed and not working at all. Either scenario makes Scariff a total waste. Remember they haul *** on the tantative with a star destroyer RIGHT on their heels. Easily could have jammed transmissions at that distance and required them to try and break jamming distance which we see in ANH they fail to achieve.

No I mean why didn't they use scarifs planetary comms systems to send the plans straight to the rebel base (or an outpost if ya dont wanna lead the whole empire to yavin) if as you say data can be beamed across half the galaxy.

My guess is: they cant. At least not without even more powerful comms gear than was installed on scarif (like the rig palps used to call Vader in esb mounted on coruscant)

Bigger more powerful gear (comms booster range 1-3) reaches further than rudimentary starfighter comms (r 1 maybe sometimes 2)

I figured the distance was a factor, data is still basically a physical thing so transferring over a short distance is much much faster than trying to establish a connection between solar systems. The death star was in orbit so speed was a huge factor. Jamming is the only reason I can come up with that they couldn’t send the data to a ship in between them and Yavin. Well that and Lucas has no logical reasoning in much of his physics models. Anyway good discussion but we are veering from the proper epic topic ? Short answer is that it’s a movie and in the script lol

Yep. But consider it post inflation for this most excellent topic that is EPIC.

All of us need more epic in our life.

1 hour ago, LordFajubi said:

Good points, in rebuttle

A. I usually hear how weak huge ships are so I figured they needed the boost but admittedly have no experience to base it on.

B. I can agree with that change, but wouldn’t that make 2 att dice ships almost useless in epic? They are already nearly useless in the small game.

C. The fighters destroying ISD’s on screen are dumping torpedo’s into it first which I agree completely should work but a large shield grid absorbs a lot of blaster fire. Also naval ships are prone to sinking damage so aircraft are superior ship destroyers but I’ll wager explosives played a bigger part than machine gun fire to drop a boat ?

A. I have seen Huge ships go down fast and also be the beast. Some of it is good play, good/bad listbuilding, and dumb luck. I think Huge ships are tough enough, but if they could use some improvements, I would like to see that happen thru crew and team upgrades rather than rules mods. Combat Refits. Armor Upgrades. Improved Shields. Damage Control Teams. That way, list building and choosing the right build becomes an important skill. If you want to protect the Huge from fighters, develop more cards like Cluster Bombs and Quad Laser Cannons.

B. I think the official FFG position is "if it's F, who cares if you F it gain." Hellllooooo harpoons.

C. The most dangerous thing to a capital ship is a runaway A-Wing. We just need a new Title card.

1 hour ago, LordFajubi said:

Agreed that makes more sense but if that was the case why would range be a restriction for targetting data ? You could be half a lightyear away and that scenario is totally plausible if the guns had that kind of range. Probably thinking too much about it but I like balance between fluff and game mechanics ?

Well, back in the glory day before hyperspace became a joke, FTL was the problem. You could send it direct, at sublight speeds, and they would get the data several centuries after the war was over. So, you had to put in on physical media, and carry it in a ship thru hyperspace.

The holonet transmissions of the Prequels made that a non-issue (since Jedi were having phone conversations between the Core and the Outer Rim), although you could still say that by the GCW the Imperial Military controlled the holonet and suspended civilian use of it as part of the Tarkin Doctrine.

Now that hyperspace has become a Star Trek-level "it does what we need it to do" plot device, you can argue bloody well anything.

3 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

A. I have seen Huge ships go down fast and also be the beast. Some of it is good play, good/bad listbuilding, and dumb luck. I think Huge ships are tough enough, but if they could use some improvements, I would like to see that happen thru crew and team upgrades rather than rules mods. Combat Refits. Armor Upgrades. Improved Shields. Damage Control Teams. That way, list building and choosing the right build becomes an important skill. If you want to protect the Huge from fighters, develop more cards like Cluster Bombs and Quad Laser Cannons.

B. I think the official FFG position is "if it's F, who cares if you F it gain." Hellllooooo harpoons.

C. The most dangerous thing to a capital ship is a runaway A-Wing. We just need a new Title card.

Well, back in the glory day before hyperspace became a joke, FTL was the problem. You could send it direct, at sublight speeds, and they would get the data several centuries after the war was over. So, you had to put in on physical media, and carry it in a ship thru hyperspace.

The holonet transmissions of the Prequels made that a non-issue (since Jedi were having phone conversations between the Core and the Outer Rim), although you could still say that by the GCW the Imperial Military controlled the holonet and suspended civilian use of it as part of the Tarkin Doctrine.

Now that hyperspace has become a Star Trek-level "it does what we need it to do" plot device, you can argue bloody well anything.

I thought Lucas tried to cover this we Obi told R4 they are too far from Coruscant and need Anikan to retransmit the message?

46 minutes ago, Ccwebb said:

I thought Lucas tried to cover this we Obi told R4 they are too far from Coruscant and need Anikan to retransmit the message?

I can't remember that exactly.

OTOH, Qui Gonn was talking to the Jedi Council on Coruscant from Tatooine. . .supposedly a long way from nowhere.

Eh, all I can say was that WEG did a pretty good job of knitting together a cohesive "space physics" for the galaxy, and every movie since has just unraveled a knot.

22 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

I can't remember that exactly.

OTOH, Qui Gonn was talking to the Jedi Council on Coruscant from Tatooine. . .supposedly a long way from nowhere.

Eh, all I can say was that WEG did a pretty good job of knitting together a cohesive "space physics" for the galaxy, and every movie since has just unraveled a knot.

I can’t find a movie clip right now; Obi is in Genosis, following Jengo, and was trying to alert the Jedi Council. Tatooine was apparently closer, and thus R4 sent the message to Anakin. This lead Anakin and Padme to head towards Genosis.

And... agree.

possibly obiwan's fight took damage during the fight that limited its range. tatooine is only a few ly from geonosis, but coruscant is halfway across the galaxy.

and we saw FTL transmissions in the original trilogy as well.. Vader calling the emperor in ESB for example.

Leia used R2 to deliver the plans and message to obiwan because she didn't want to risk a transmission giving away the location of yavin base, and Obiwan didn't have a receiver. easier to stick it in a droid who would then find his way to the planet.

and as far as Scarif.. well, Jyn was sending the message using controls at the transmitter itself. presumably there are limits to what you can do with those. she might not have access to the hyperspace comm up there, but could access the regular stuff easily. plus note that she was having to aim the dish manually. so even if she did have access to the hyperspace comms, she wouldn't be able to aim it accurately enough to reach yavin or where ever. but a ship sitting right overhead in orbit is easy enough.

11 minutes ago, Ccwebb said:

I can’t find a movie clip right now; Obi is in Genosis, following Jengo, and was trying to alert the Jedi Council. Tatooine was apparently closer, and thus R4 sent the message to Anakin. This led Ron Anakin and Padme to head towards Genosis.

Right, I remember now. Always assumed it was a weather thing.

11 minutes ago, mithril2098 said:

possibly obiwan's fight took damage during the fight that limited its range. tatooine is only a few ly from geonosis, but coruscant is halfway across the galaxy.

and we saw FTL transmissions in the original trilogy as well.. Vader calling the emperor in ESB for example.

Leia used R2 to deliver the plans and message to obiwan because she didn't want to risk a transmission giving away the location of yavin base, and Obiwan didn't have a receiver. easier to stick it in a droid who would then find his way to the planet.

and as far as Scarif.. well, Jyn was sending the message using controls at the transmitter itself. presumably there are limits to what you can do with those. she might not have access to the hyperspace comm up there, but could access the regular stuff easily. plus note that she was having to aim the dish manually. so even if she did have access to the hyperspace comms, she wouldn't be able to aim it accurately enough to reach yavin or where ever. but a ship sitting right overhead in orbit is easy enough.

Yes, but Imperial military. I'm not saying it didn't exist, I'm saying the old lore was that the Empire took it away from the civilians.

And both of your Rebellion scenarios make even more sense if FTL radio is not available.

actually, as i remember the lore from before the prequels, the FTL comms were available to civilians, it was just monitored and expensive. the rebellion had a whole elaborate system to send messages using it.

post prequels the whole monitored and expensive aspect as still around, but the rebellion was given its own covert access to it, similar to how the IRL deep web and dark web works.

Epic 2.0 rules

Here are my proposed changes and fixes for epic.

General Rules

Lists are 300 pts.

Each list must contain at least one epic point.

Each upgrade card is limited to a maximum of 4 copies per list. This limits most of the excesses of spam abuse (e.g. guidance chips, HLC or TLT) while encouraging creative list building.

Initiative switches each turn. Note, this has been a recurring problem notably because of the the two corvette class ships being PS4 and activating after everything. They have a lot of pseudo actions and often there isn’t any way to counter them. Things like Tarkin, Comms Booster and coordinate are prime candidates for NPEs.

Rules Changes

Epic ships may maintain as many Target Locks as they like, but no more than one per ship. This makes the Targeting Coordinator crew more useful or an alternative option (or combo) to the Weapons Engineer. It also allows a bit more flexibility for using ordnance that requires discarding of Target Locks, e.g. Torpedoes.

Comms Booster is limited . This is less of an issue with the Biggs change, but this cards is still by far one of the most powerful cards in epic.

Optional or Playtest rules

Games are played on a 4’x4’ surface.

Games are played on a 3’x6’ surface but player edges are the short edges.

Both of these setups allow for players to make use of distance and range 4/5 weapons before an epic ship gets swamped.

Enhanced Terrain rules? Epic terrain deserves to be more epic!

Epic Reinforce tokens. Replace the text with the following:

“At the start of the “compare results” step you may cancel a [hit] or [crit] result for each reinforce token on the targeted section.” This adds a little more resilience to epic ships by making it harder to crit them, it also removes any doubts about Juke affecting it, and also makes reinforce immune to Crack shot. It is a small change but makes it act more like armour and less like an evade.

Dual Laser Turret, add Gozanti-class Cruiser or C-ROC cruiser only

Heavy Laser Turret, add Gozanti-class Cruiser or C-ROC cruiser only

If the Rebel Transport is equipped with Combat Retrofit it can also equip the Dual Laser Turret or Heavy Laser Turret.

Highly experimental rules

Epic ships may spend an energy from their ship card to change [focus] results to [hits] or [evades].

Other issues

Contrary to the pervasive belief Epic ships are actually quite strong now. They can actually be worth their points and very competitive. While some of the random ways to improve Epic ship performance are a little jarring, such as Jonus, Esege, Roark et al. I think they need those to stay competitive. Currently Maul is a bit of an issue for the Rebels, but is not that bad when used in Scum. Zuckuss is fine with only the C-ROC available, but could be a problem in the future. My feeling is that Stress generated by your own effects on an epic ship should be converted to Ion tokens, but not sure of the wording yet. It nerfs Fleet Officer and Hux though unfortunately.

13 hours ago, ID X T said:

Games are played on a 3’x6’ surface but player edges are the short edges.

Both of these setups allow for players to make use of distance and range 4/5 weapons before an epic ship gets swamped.

Enhanced Terrain rules? Epic terrain deserves to be more epic!

I do this a lot, but beware: there may be 3+ turns of movement before engagement.

The bummer about 4x4 would be no official/readily available play mat.

One Enhanced Terrain idea is using the gas clouds from HotAC.

A space station Huge "ship" could also be a very fun addition.

14 hours ago, ID X T said:

Epic Reinforce tokens. Replace the text with the following:

“At the start of the “compare results” step you may cancel a [hit] or [crit] result for each reinforce token on the targeted section.” This adds a little more resilience to epic ships by making it harder to crit them, it also removes any doubts about Juke affecting it, and also makes reinforce immune to Crack shot. It is a small change but makes it act more like armour and less like an evade.

I love this so much! I wish we could make it so! Now that Juke and Crack Shot are pretty common, this really makes the Huge ships more durable.

14 hours ago, ID X T said:

My feeling is that Stress generated by your own effects on an epic ship should be converted to Ion tokens, but not sure of the wording yet. It nerfs Fleet Officer and Hux though unfortunately.

Hmm...this makes me a bit nervous. I have a real soft spot for Fleet Officer - especially in Epic where there are groups that more closely resemble "fleets." I guess it doesn't make them unplayable, but it sucks that they would have to suffer. I guess I'd just put them on nearby shuttles instead of the huge ship.

@Darth Meanie thank you for starting this thread - we really needed a "home" for the Epic lovers and supporters, and I feel like we finally got one.

I have a collection of Epic-related materials (posts, batreps, guides, videos, ...) that I'd like to make public, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of the folks around here would contribute to the collection These materials would probably be the most useful in a form of something like "Index of useful links - EPIC" thread (that may eventually get pinned). So I have a question for all:

How do we want to start collecting, curating and sharing the materials useful for EPIC?

1. Start a new thread "Index of useful links for EPIC play" (best visibility, but splits the EPIC-related discussions into two threads)
2. Use this thread to collect and share the EPIC-related materials (we keep the single-thread-for-EPIC, but the visibility/sharing effect of EPIC-related materials is reduced)

@Darth Meanie - perhaps if you'd like to adjust the thread title somewhat, and you're OK with re-purposing/appending the 1st post to hold the links, we could get the best of both worlds?

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome

37 minutes ago, vladamex said:

@Darth Meanie thank you for starting this thread - we really needed a "home" for the Epic lovers and supporters, and I feel like we finally got one.

I'll see what I can do.

Playing a game of Epic: Fighter Squadrons tonight! But, which list should I fly?

Imperial Good Stuff

4 Interceptors + 4 TIE/D Defenders

Fear the First Order

Game starts in an hour so let me know ASAP!

46 minutes ago, SpikeSpiegel said:

Playing a game of Epic: Fighter Squadrons tonight! But, which list should I fly?

Imperial Good Stuff

4 Interceptors + 4 TIE/D Defenders

Fear the First Order

Game starts in an hour so let me know ASAP!

Fear the FO. Because it is finally possible to do list like that !!

On 1/4/2018 at 9:34 PM, ID X T said:

Epic 2.0 rules

Here are my proposed changes and fixes for epic.

General Rules

Lists are 300 pts.

Each list must contain at least one epic point.

Each upgrade card is limited to a maximum of 4 copies per list. This limits most of the excesses of spam abuse (e.g. guidance chips, HLC or TLT) while encouraging creative list building.

Initiative switches each turn. Note, this has been a recurring problem notably because of the the two corvette class ships being PS4 and activating after everything. They have a lot of pseudo actions and often there isn’t any way to counter them. Things like Tarkin, Comms Booster and coordinate are prime candidates for NPEs.

Rules Changes

Epic ships may maintain as many Target Locks as they like, but no more than one per ship. This makes the Targeting Coordinator crew more useful or an alternative option (or combo) to the Weapons Engineer. It also allows a bit more flexibility for using ordnance that requires discarding of Target Locks, e.g. Torpedoes.

Comms Booster is limited . This is less of an issue with the Biggs change, but this cards is still by far one of the most powerful cards in epic.

Optional or Playtest rules

Games are played on a 4’x4’ surface.

Games are played on a 3’x6’ surface but player edges are the short edges.

Both of these setups allow for players to make use of distance and range 4/5 weapons before an epic ship gets swamped.

Enhanced Terrain rules? Epic terrain deserves to be more epic!

Epic Reinforce tokens. Replace the text with the following:

“At the start of the “compare results” step you may cancel a [hit] or [crit] result for each reinforce token on the targeted section.” This adds a little more resilience to epic ships by making it harder to crit them, it also removes any doubts about Juke affecting it, and also makes reinforce immune to Crack shot. It is a small change but makes it act more like armour and less like an evade.

Dual Laser Turret, add Gozanti-class Cruiser or C-ROC cruiser only

Heavy Laser Turret, add Gozanti-class Cruiser or C-ROC cruiser only

If the Rebel Transport is equipped with Combat Retrofit it can also equip the Dual Laser Turret or Heavy Laser Turret.

Highly experimental rules

Epic ships may spend an energy from their ship card to change [focus] results to [hits] or [evades].

Other issues

Contrary to the pervasive belief Epic ships are actually quite strong now. They can actually be worth their points and very competitive. While some of the random ways to improve Epic ship performance are a little jarring, such as Jonus, Esege, Roark et al. I think they need those to stay competitive. Currently Maul is a bit of an issue for the Rebels, but is not that bad when used in Scum. Zuckuss is fine with only the C-ROC available, but could be a problem in the future. My feeling is that Stress generated by your own effects on an epic ship should be converted to Ion tokens, but not sure of the wording yet. It nerfs Fleet Officer and Hux though unfortunately.

Multiple target lock does seem interesting. Weapons engineer can just give 2 a turn instead of 1. It would make for huge ships to use more guns than ramming.

Ramming being an autokill was one of the things that always broke immersion for me. I mean none of the ships can crash (unless you use Oicun or APL) into each other. So I made up some modified rules for Overlapping

Huge Ship Overlapping Small/Large Ship Base

If a huge ship base overlaps the base of a small or large ship that ship will attempt to move out of the way by making an evasive maneuver. An evasive maneuver may be attempted by any ships as long unless.

• A ship that is stressed (even if it is able to ignore stress effects such as Tycho)
• A ship that is ionized (large ships must have at least 2 ion tokens or tractor beam tokens to count as ionized)
• A ship that has 0 Agility (Including effects such as tractor beam tokens or critical damage)

Any ship that cannot make an evasive maneuver is immediately destroyed and removed from the table.

To make an evasive maneuver a ship will roll one green die. This die cannot be modified by adding or subtracting more die but may be modified with focus or evade tokens. If A single evade result is shown the ship successfully avoids crashing into the behemoth move the ship straight forward or backwards until it is only touching the base of the huge ship with the shortest distance possible. If no evade results were present then the ship is immediately removed from the table and counts as destroyed.

For each small ship destroyed in this manner the huge ship rolls red die and suffers damage shown. For large ships roll two red dice and suffer the damage shown.

Small and Large ships touching base of a huge ship counts as overlapping and cannot make an attack on huge ship that their base is touching. Huge ships do not count as overlapping and may attack small and large ships even if their base is touching as long as the base is inside firing arc.

Another is well the catastrophic damage, I don't think ships should just disappear when they are destroyed and instead of a campaign specific rule here is an alternate rule set.

Destroyed Huge Ships Alternative rules

Once a huge ship has damage cards equal or exceeding its hull value on all its sections the owning player rolls one red dice and consults the chart below.

• <blank> Adrift The Huge ship is treated as an obstacle (use huge ships as obstacle rules) At the end of each activation phase (after all huge ships have moved) in initiative order move the huge ship 1 straight. If this maneuver causes the huge ship to hit an obstacle or another ship follow the rules for huge ship overlapping obstacles or ships (you may combine this with the optional evasive maneuver rules) then roll again on this chart.
• <focus> Tumbling The Huge ship is treated as an obstacle. At the end of the activation phase the huge ship will execute a 1 speed maneuver in the same bearing as the huge ship used in the last turn (if huge ship was already adrift use the straight maneuver). If this maneuver overlaps with another obstacle or ship follow rules then roll again on this chart.
• <hit> Reactor Breach All ship at range one roll a red die and suffer damage shown. Remove the huge ship and place 1 debris token for each section card the ship has on the ships last location.
• <critical hit> Chain Reaction All ships at range One suffer 1 critical damage. Place as many debris token as epic points the ship has touching the base of the huge ship, then remove the huge ship.

Well those are my ideas, what do you think of them?

I'd love tournament support for Epic play. Or even 150 point regionals, just to mix things up.

I don't own any epic ships (not enough Epic gets played in my area to justify it), but I'd love some squadron-based rules to make large numbers of ships thematic.

On 1/5/2018 at 5:06 PM, vladamex said:

@Darth Meanie thank you for starting this thread - we really needed a "home" for the Epic lovers and supporters, and I feel like we finally got one.

On 1/5/2018 at 5:43 PM, Darth Meanie said:

I'll see what I can do.

Ok, everybody, I asked FFG nicely Friday night about an Epic Subforum.

They gave us one. . .everybody send them hugs and kisses. . .FFG rocks!!!

Way to go @Darth Meanie !!!

and thank you FFG!

Hugely agree to epic lists MUST contain at least one epic ship. And I would love to see more upgrades to help them against the new madness.

We need a Rebel Imperial raider A.K.A "The Corvus"

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Corvus

It looks different enough that it definitely warrants being in the game. And it would also have a new title/upgrades for the existing Raider while giving the Rebels/Resistance something similar. This could come with an upgrade for the raider that lets it be able to dock two X-Wings/TIE Fighters at a discounted cost, could even be similar to Hounds Tooth that they launch when the ship (or section) is destroyed.

We would get a new Title card, could come with an X-Wing/Basic TIE Fighter and fixes/squadron titles for both. And would create a cool carrier/assualt ship blend for both factions.

Thank you @Darth Meanie

and thank you FFG!

Move this to the new subforum