I've been bouncing ideas around on how to make classic TIE Fighters and Interceptors a bit more viable in today's environment. I originally thought giving unshielded TIEs the bullseye arc and after play testing that... way too good on something that can actually move.

We then tried a new idea called Lucky Shot. How this works is after attack dice are rolled, roll another attack die. Ignore hits and critical. On a blank, the defender cannot modify their defense dice or use evade tokens for this attack. Yeah, this forces you to compete with the dice gods a more, but TIE Fighters and interceptors are suddenly serious threats and while they still pop easily, if they come at you in a swarm, they aren't a cloud of gnats, it's a swarm of bees... made of pure rage and fire.

The thing currently keeping Tie Fighters down is their defenses- specifically to AoE damage and the fact that turrets exist. The next thing that **** them is Reinforce.

Adding a random factor to your ability makes it a terrible choice to take, and Crack Shot already exists.

In order to make TIE Fighters good enough to see play, they either need to be cheaper, or never-engage-always-kite turrets, Bombs, and Wookiees need to recieve a heavy nerf.

Oh, this wouldn't be an EPT, it would be baked into a title or mod that allows another mod type deal, but I hear what you're saying.

So, let's talk about mines first. How'd you go about balancing them? Allow for green dice rolls?

I've tried this and it makes swarms quite competitive again:

1. Fel's Wrath ability on all TIE Fighters
2. You may roll one additional attack dice per damage card assigned to your ship.

So you WILL take damage but you WILL also destroy most things before you are removed. It becomes a bit of a damage race really.

Nym and Miranda must dodge your arcs to reduce the damage they take and cannot simply just tank everything. Ghost / Fenn melts if it gets caught, same with Dash.

Certain pilots have potential to deal obscene amounts of damage but due to no target lock, they often roll a balanced amount. Mauler and Backstabber putting out seven red dice before they are removed from play is extremely fun but normally you just have a focus and the dice don't like you.

The other "fix" idea that was tried was actually a change to the fundamental rules of the game. Simply changing the collision rules to state that "should you finish your move in base contact with an enemy ship, you immediately receive a stress token and cannot modify your attack or defense dice in anyway this round."

Brings back bumping. Counters Expertise / Maul / Ezra / Dengar Crew / K4 Crew / etc, etc

A 0 cost mod slot that you can discard to prevent 1 damage from non-arc attacks would help pretty much every swarm in the game and slightly nerf TLTs/Harpoons/Bombs, effectively giving them all +1 HP without actually making them more difficult to kill for arc dodging aces and the like. Generic Interceptors could equip 2 of those to effectively give themselves 5 HP vs. indirect attacks without spending a single pt. And most upgraded ships tend to have other important modifications they need, so such an upgrade should only ever buff generics and not make top lists even better.

I kinda liked the custom card someone floated where if you swarm enough, you can add a hit, but if your attack hits you cancel all dice and deal 1 damage to the defender.

Another idea: " There's too many of them! When defending, if another friendly TIE fighter is at range 1 (maybe two friendly TIE Fighters at range 1-2?), the attacker cannot modify their attack dice except by spending target locks and focus tokens for their normal function." There's too many Expertise and Predator and Maul and Ezra and Guidance Chips and Accuracy Corrector and Wookiee Commandos and and and, so it makes sense to me to have at least a few options which directly target non-token dice mods. Would it be too good on Dark Curse? Maybe. But ***** it. It's just Dark Curse. Well... I guess there's other ways for Empire to mess with tokens, from Carnor Jax to the Jam tokens almost surely handed out by the TIE Reaper. Still, this is the powercreeped world of X-Wing 2018. Let the classsic TIE Fighters get in on the fun, not just the Ghost and ships with Missiles.

Tie swarms are almost always viable. One just went 4-2 at regionals and was **** close to 5-1. Beat triple wookiees in round 1.

I think they just need a 0pt title/mod that works like breach speciliast to flip faceup damage card facedown, so a direct hit doesnt wipe them out. One more round with a 1hp tie fighter can make all the difference since it can block or force the opponent to use another attack to take it out instead of going after a new tie fighter, increasing the entire swarms life.

As a man who's X-wing career has been 90% TIE swarms, I think the swarm is just barely underpowered, and I think any buff would make it too powerful. Better to leave it as it is. mixing in TIE FOs has been a great way to help swarms to.

man, these newbies really don't remember the days of the old TIE Swarm do they?

They don't need a buff. They are in many ways the ship the game is designed around, don't ****-ing power creep them.

TIE Swarms have always taken incredible skill to fly, but if you can master the TIE Swarm you are rewarded with one of the most brutally numbers efficient lists in the game.

You still see some people playing TIE Swarms, and they do well. It's just that more recently certain ships (naming no names) give you similar efficiency as a masterfly flown TIE Swarm by just locking in the same manever each turn and twiddling your thumbs.

Swarms suffer at the tournament scene for many reasons. The biggest of witch (and the reason i wont fly anything more then 4 ships in a big tournament) is they require alot of thinking and are unforgiving to flying mistakes, when you get to game 4, 5, or 6+ in the same day you hit a massive fatigue wall flying swarms and start making mistakes. Its just to many ships to concentrate on after a long day of flying.

I love 5x M3A manglers its probably my most effective list but i have yet to bring it to a large event because i know i will start bumping and hitting rocks in the latter games as my fatigue increases. Where *** a 2-4 ship list will have not worn me down as hard throughout the day and requires less concentration latter in the day.

In my personal opinion their is no way to make swarms truly top tier in competitive play (outside some truly gifted players who can hold their concentration) without over buffing them for casual play. Somethings are going to just be better in casual play, or competitive play and their is no way around that. Frankly i would rather swarms not be overpowered in casual play simply to compensate for player fatigue in competitive play.

14 hours ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

The thing currently keeping Tie Fighters down is their defenses- specifically to AoE damage and the fact that turrets exist. The next thing that **** them is Reinforce.

Yeah, the stuff that was specifically designed to counter swarms is the stuff that’s keeping swarms down. Who wooda thunk.

the TIE swarm was the first OP list in the game, with every wave since the first bringing more stuff to counter it. I don’t think that’s been randomly done. If the basic TIE Fighter ever got a real boost it would dominate and find its way into the hands of many, many tourney goers, whether they hit that fatigue wall or not.

19 hours ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

The thing currently keeping Tie Fighters down is their defenses- specifically to AoE damage and the fact that turrets exist . The next thing that **** them is Reinforce.

Adding a random factor to your ability makes it a terrible choice to take, and Crack Shot already exists.

In order to make TIE Fighters good enough to see play, they either need to be cheaper, or never-engage-always-kite turrets, Bombs, and Wookiees need to recieve a heavy nerf.

The fact that turrets are a problem has been obvious since the Falcon came out. It's a possibly unavoidable shame. Turrets are a thing in Star Wars, so leaving them out is a no-go, but at the same time they throw a monkey in the wrench of a dog-fighting game.

For the life of me, I can't imagine how they could have avoided the problem short of leaving turreted ships out of the game. Except maybe making them all act like mobile fire arcs that you have to choose the facing of during your planning step (leaving a little room for making the wrong choice and not having a shot).

The biggest problem I see with swarms is their lack of versatility. They typically have a lot less slots and upgrades to work with and adapt to the meta or to player taste.

Someone, I think it was "fickle," also suggested making Outmaneuver a baseline rule in the game. Simple little things like that are all that's needed.

12 hours ago, jimmius said:

man, these newbies really don't remember the days of the old TIE Swarm do they?

They don't need a buff. They are in many ways the ship the game is designed around, don't ****-ing power creep them.

TIE Swarms have always taken incredible skill to fly, but if you can master the TIE Swarm you are rewarded with one of the most brutally numbers efficient lists in the game.

You still see some people playing TIE Swarms, and they do well. It's just that more recently certain ships (naming no names) give you similar efficiency as a masterfly flown TIE Swarm by just locking in the same manever each turn and twiddling your thumbs.

I flew a swarm for years, considered the "go to" TIE Swarm player in my area and the fact that there are ships that can shrug off 16 dice with ease, have full mods when blocked or even have full mods AND still shoot their desired target when bumped takes a lot of the tools away from the swarm. Without those, you have raw dice, which is massed into eight, two dice attacks which can do nothing.

Not to mention Harpoons, Assault Missiles, Twin Laser Turrets, AC Autoblasters, five forward bombs, unlimited bombs, "take three damage at the start of the combat phase" bombs, hyper accurate four to five dice attacks and reinforce.

I don't know about other people but the risk / reward for flying a TIE Swarm just isn't there. You get credit for bringing one to an event. Your opponent will generally comment that you don't see many TIE Swarms these days or that they haven't flown against one before but have heard about it back in it's glory days and dread fighting against it. Then the match starts.

I managed to block with two academies due to excellent flying and perfect prediction barrel rolls. My other five TIES all have focus and within range 1 of Howlrunner, ready to bring the pain.

Rey rolls four dice. . (hit, hit, focus, blank). Adds a blank from Finn and re-rolls the other blank with her ability. (hit, hit, focus, focus, hit). Expertise converts the focus results for five hits.

Howlrunner rolls two natural evades, YES! . . oh wait . . . Howlrunner dies. . She fires back for one hit. Rey rolls an evade, uses Finn and adds a focus result. Crack shot for one damage. Howlrunner dies. . .

Low fires and deals one damage to Black Sqd 1.

Black 1, 2 & 3 as well as the Academy Pilot all fire at Rey, dealing a total of three damage due to the use of three crackshots.

Congrats. I delayed the engagement, I blocked and focused. I had everything pointing in the same direction and I played it right but I still lost that engagement.

Next turn, Rey is going to Sloop and Low will move into a reinforce position and repeat the process. Tried to block it and succeeded but Rey still hits with four dice due to turret plus expertise. The other TIES K-Turn and are now tokenless.

This carries on for three more turns until eventually, I had two academy pilots left which cannot, CANNOT hurt either ship. If they fire at Low, they need two hits minimum to deal one damage, assuming Low doesn't roll an evade. If they fire at Rey, they need to do at least three, twice in a row for the prospect of dealing one damage. All the while I am taking constant fire.

That actually happened.

Against four Wookiee Gunships, I managed to block all four with two TIES. I pushed through as much damage as my dice would let me and almost killed one gunship. Howlrunner then died to two three dice attacks and then a Black Sqd died to two four dice attacks, thanks to Wookie Commandos.

I killed the wounded gunship after but lost another Black Sqd. I blocked and wounded another gunship and then lost two Academies the same turn. The gunships then got one turn where they were reinforced and I did ZERO damage from the remaining three TIES I had. Zero.

Do you know how disheartening that is?

You also hear the same thing after every game:

"Phew man, that was a close one (it wasn't). I was really dreading going against a TIE Swarm and then when they just started popping. . i got really lucky!"

So if people can still do well with TIE Swarms, more power to them but I think its a case of going against inefficient jank instead of pulling a hard earned win against a top meta list. Also, it's emotionally taxing. Playing between six to eleven rounds using seven ships that must be flown almost perfect is much harder than the PS11, fly at them, target lock and launch Harpoons for ten damage each.

ANd those aren't even the worst matchups. Harpoons and trajectory sim bombs are **** on swarms.

Harpoons, if you get three harpoons off, you're likely to wipe the entire swarm, and there's comparatively little they can do to stop you except break formation and thus lose howlrunner's buff which kills their damage.

TSim bombs just ruin them.

4 hours ago, Viktus106 said:

I flew a swarm for years, considered the "go to" TIE Swarm player in my area and the fact that there are ships that can shrug off 16 dice with ease, have full mods when blocked or even have full mods AND still shoot their desired target when bumped takes a lot of the tools away from the swarm. Without those, you have raw dice, which is massed into eight, two dice attacks which can do nothing.

Not to mention Harpoons, Assault Missiles, Twin Laser Turrets, AC Autoblasters, five forward bombs, unlimited bombs, "take three damage at the start of the combat phase" bombs, hyper accurate four to five dice attacks and reinforce.

I don't know about other people but the risk / reward for flying a TIE Swarm just isn't there. You get credit for bringing one to an event. Your opponent will generally comment that you don't see many TIE Swarms these days or that they haven't flown against one before but have heard about it back in it's glory days and dread fighting against it. Then the match starts.

I managed to block with two academies due to excellent flying and perfect prediction barrel rolls. My other five TIES all have focus and within range 1 of Howlrunner, ready to bring the pain.

Rey rolls four dice. . (hit, hit, focus, blank). Adds a blank from Finn and re-rolls the other blank with her ability. (hit, hit, focus, focus, hit). Expertise converts the focus results for five hits.

Howlrunner rolls two natural evades, YES! . . oh wait . . . Howlrunner dies. . She fires back for one hit. Rey rolls an evade, uses Finn and adds a focus result. Crack shot for one damage. Howlrunner dies. . .

Low fires and deals one damage to Black Sqd 1.

Black 1, 2 & 3 as well as the Academy Pilot all fire at Rey, dealing a total of three damage due to the use of three crackshots.

Congrats. I delayed the engagement, I blocked and focused. I had everything pointing in the same direction and I played it right but I still lost that engagement.

Next turn, Rey is going to Sloop and Low will move into a reinforce position and repeat the process. Tried to block it and succeeded but Rey still hits with four dice due to turret plus expertise. The other TIES K-Turn and are now tokenless.

This carries on for three more turns until eventually, I had two academy pilots left which cannot, CANNOT hurt either ship. If they fire at Low, they need two hits minimum to deal one damage, assuming Low doesn't roll an evade. If they fire at Rey, they need to do at least three, twice in a row for the prospect of dealing one damage. All the while I am taking constant fire.

That actually happened.

Against four Wookiee Gunships, I managed to block all four with two TIES. I pushed through as much damage as my dice would let me and almost killed one gunship. Howlrunner then died to two three dice attacks and then a Black Sqd died to two four dice attacks, thanks to Wookie Commandos.

I killed the wounded gunship after but lost another Black Sqd. I blocked and wounded another gunship and then lost two Academies the same turn. The gunships then got one turn where they were reinforced and I did ZERO damage from the remaining three TIES I had. Zero.

Do you know how disheartening that is?

You also hear the same thing after every game:

"Phew man, that was a close one (it wasn't). I was really dreading going against a TIE Swarm and then when they just started popping. . i got really lucky!"

So if people can still do well with TIE Swarms, more power to them but I think its a case of going against inefficient jank instead of pulling a hard earned win against a top meta list. Also, it's emotionally taxing. Playing between six to eleven rounds using seven ships that must be flown almost perfect is much harder than the PS11, fly at them, target lock and launch Harpoons for ten damage each.

This.

There are so many ways to beat swarms now that it does get disheartening to bring one to a tourney. Passive mods make blocking more of a deterrent now than a skill, since you're giving up range 1 attacks to do so. I keep wanting to bring a swarm, but then i think about all of the singular ships that can beat it, and I know it's not worth it.

Examples of what i mean:

Timewalk Asajj

Lowie with 3PO and Expertise

Miranda with Sabine bomblet

Dengar with practically anything

Scum Fenn

heck, many lists actively like to be blocked, because it means one more ship that isn't shooting them.

11 minutes ago, hothie said:

This.

There are so many ways to beat swarms now that it does get disheartening to bring one to a tourney. Passive mods make blocking more of a deterrent now than a skill, since you're giving up range 1 attacks to do so. I keep wanting to bring a swarm, but then i think about all of the singular ships that can beat it, and I know it's not worth it.

Examples of what i mean:

Timewalk Asajj

Lowie with 3PO and Expertise

Miranda with Sabine bomblet

Dengar with practically anything

Indeed. I used to fly a TIE fighter swarm, and in my case it was a case of glitterstim-ed Boba Fett that left me going "you know what? bugger this for a game of tin soldiers".

I've had a bit of experience since with Youngster and 7 academy pilots - they're better than you think, because you can give up a warm body to block without losing numbers of shots, but.....yeah. It's a gimmick. The problem is that there are so many ships and combinations out there that are functionally speaking immune to 2-dice attacks in whatever quantity you care to throw at them that a purely TIE swarm doesn't have the kicking power to deal with.

The most recent example at our LGS was someone using TIE/x7 Ryad with Lone Wolf and Stealth Device on the table next to me. It took half a dozen heavy laser cannon rounds to hit her at all; I dread to think what it'd have been like with TIE fighters.

I've pretty much moved to Heavy Swarms - 5-ship squads with 3-dice attacks like strikers, generic interceptors, and so on. You actually don't lose much firepower compared to a tie fighter swarm - in fact you have 15 dice to a 7-ship swarm's 14 (albeit without howlrunner and crack shot) but it's delivered in 3-dice lumps which can actually knock through a reinforce token.

I do like swarms. But yes, 2-dice swarms do need something to give them a leg up. Howlrunner is nice in theory but she's expensive and drags your squad into a splash-damage-able box, and that's a bad plan, especially since killing her at PS8 before any of her wingmen get to shoot is very easy these days.

The thing is, as noted, it wouldn't or shouldn't be hard to make swarms nasty. They have the tools - they just don't have enough of them.

Look at the unique pilots - if they weren't unique they'd possibly be the most terrifying squad I can imagine. A swarm of 7 wampas, or 6 backstabbers.

One of the squads I really want to run is the "extra-dice" TIEs:

Mauler with Snap Shot

Backstabber

Scourge with Adapt (down to a 6 so he shoots last)

Zeta Leader with Wired and Optics

Sabacc with Determination, LWF, and AA.

They don't have the Howl restriction, and they all have the capability of 3 or more dice in the given situations, but it's 5 ships without much hull.

On topic, I would love to see either an Autothruster-like TIE title or an Adaptive Aelerons like mod for TIEs. Giving an ln swarm Aurothrusters might help out considerably.

On 2/21/2018 at 1:15 AM, Kehl_Aecea said:

I originally thought giving unshielded TIEs the bullseye arc and after play testing that... way too good on something that can actually move.

I'm curious how broken this was and in what way? I've always thought giving bullseye to 2 dice TIES (LN, Advanced, Advanced Prototype, Bomber, Punisher, Aggressor, etc) would be a good way to buff them without getting too convoluted. If you can't kill them/get out of their way they'll burn you down.

Bullseye would be fine on TIEs. They'd be scary, but only a few of them would be scary to each given ship per round.

Unless you somehow parked in ALL of the bullseye arcs, and if they managed to trap you into doing that, they deserve to mince you.

Swarm Leader should have buffed swarms. But it paints a huge target on the ship that has this talent.
They should make a TIE Fighter title that has the same or similar effects but that can be equipped on all ties in the swarm. So at any moment you can choose which 3 ships are going to pool evade tokens for a fourth ship to add the same amount of dice. With a 8 ship swarm you will have 6 poolers and 2 hitters, hitting with 5 dice each.

I was thinking of a title that could buff both lambda and/or punisher.

Don't juge me, it is a kind of crazi idea just to see more generic TIE.

title, stuff only, 12point " escorted thing or wathever"

during the placement force step, you may deploy up to two TIE/ln costing 13 or less at range 1 of your ship.

yeah, I have no idea what i'am doing, but seem's fun to have a 50% discount on neaked generic tie.

Gotta say my favourite suggestion for TIEs is to have an upgrade that allows any non-academy-pilot TIE Fighter to be replaced with an academy pilot on that player's board edge the round after it dies. Endless Ranks.

How about this for an interceptor fix?

181st Squadron Interceptor

Title. TIE Interceptor Only

[You are considered to have the equipped EPT of every friendly ship with this title.]

I don't know what I would price this at, but it's lore friendly because the 181st was a very teamwork oriented squadron. It borrows from "Youngster's" ability and the IG-2000 title, but with a slight twist. The maximum you could possibly fit to a list would be 4 (Saber Squadron Pilots at 4 PS and 21 points each bare) would limit the number of shenanigans one could get into with shared EPTs. I think this title should not be a title that one could equip with another title, like the Virago and the StarViper Mk 2. I do not know how I would price this title, but I don't think it would be fair to be a negative value. 0 is a hard sell to me, and 2 might be too much.

EDIT: After pricing a title at 0, and then equipping Soontir, Carnor Jax, and Turr Phennir each with Autothrusters, and the EPTs as PTL, VI, and Adaptability, the final tally of such a list is 88. This list would be possible with such a title priced up to 4, but I think it is most balanced at the price of 2.