I recently picked up a couple of fun-looking M3A builds from the forum and wanted to build a list around them. I ended up adding a Thug for the heck of it, and then slotted-in my Gila Monster because it fit and I still hadn’t flown it yet.

What I ended up with has turned out to be a mean little list. I’ve flown it twice now to good effect. I was handily out-PS’ed by every ship in both games, except for an AP-5 Sheathipede; but the list just tanked the first round of fire, then started deleting things.

I wanted to post it to see if I’m onto something here, or if it can be tuned-up even tighter. I doubt it’s truly a “new meta” list but it steals some meta tools.

Quinn Jast (18)
Deadeye (1)
Harpoon Missiles (4)
Guidance Chips (0)
"Heavy Scyk" Interceptor (Missile) (2)

Sunny Bounder (14)
Linked Battery (2)
"Heavy Scyk" Interceptor (Cannon) (2)

Dalan Oberos (Kimogila) (25)
Deadeye (1)
Harpoon Missiles (4)
Unhinged Astromech (1)
Guidance Chips (0)

Syndicate Thug (18)
Twin Laser Turret (6)
Unhinged Astromech (1)

Total: 99

View in Yet Another Squad Builder

So obviously the name of the game is to try to alpha (or I guess beta) strike something(s) with Dalan and Quinn, then use the TLT to finish off the wounded or start more chaos as necessary. Actually though, Sunny is the true master (mistress?) of disaster here; she wants to run out front to either draw fire off the real heavy hitters, or to punish the failure to stop her from getting to R1 and popping out a 4th hit-die. YEEEAAAHH BOYEEEE

I like it because it feels like it can deal with some pretty big threats, and it can take a pretty good amount of punishment in return.

First some very specific problems:
You'll be wrecked by any of the current meta lists. Probably a 3-4 combat turn game in come cases. 3NuQD will nuke 2 ships in the first round, then reload and do it again - game over. Ghost/Fenn will strip the focus token required to fire one harpoon, then laugh as the other one bounces off, and none of the other ships do meaningful damage - and Kanan will slowly blast your ships apart with the TLT and primary. Miranda/Nym, of course, laughs at your jousting list as proton bombs explode politely in the vicinity of your low hull Scyks. If you're going to be flying this list competitively, you need answers to meta lists.

General critiques:
Scyks suck. They can - and very likely will ebe - 1-shot by any 4-die weapon. They're also too expensive to justify flying over Z-95s. Except for Sunny Bounder .
Dalan's ability is anti-synergistic with deadeye.

My Recommendation:

Cartel Brute x 3 (27)
Harpoon Missiles
Inertial Dampeners
long Range Scanners

Sunny Bounder (19)
Ion Cannon
Heavy Scyk

Totalling 100 points.

Long Range scanners is crucial on generic and low PS ordinance carriers, since only countermeasures and black one can mess with it - and the list has answers to both with ATT3 primary weapons. Three harpoons are better than two, and with an ATT3 primary weapon you have no exploitable R1 gap that aces can use. Inertial dampeners is fantastic in these kinds of lists, since aces will often try to K-turn behind you, only to be blocked by a card they forgot you had equipped.

Sunny is a general support ship. With an Ion cannon she's not doing much damage, but she makes up for it with the ability to wreck both Nym and Miranda single-handedly, and has numerous other good matchups.

Now to the fights against meta monsters:

3NuQD lists are out-PS'd by your Cartel Brutes, so they'll either lose QD or a 'boat in the opening exchange. Sunny will ionise a boat for the next turn, and the brutes can easily move to R1 of it and destroy a second ship on the second combat turn. After that it's easy going, since the remaining Nus don't get the better of you in any exchange.

Ghost/Fenn finds you high hull ships chuckling against TLTs, with no blind spot to exploit with the boost, and the ability to easily nuke Fenn on the first combat turn, even without tokens. Every two turns the ghost will be ionised, unless it mistakenly goes for Sunny first, who takes 2 turns to kill. After Fenn's dead, the brutes can punish the Ghost and win the damage race provided you can keep arc on the thing, which shouldn't be a problem with Ion control.

Miranda/Nym hates Ion control with a passion, and will probably go for sunny first if they have a choice. That means that your brutes get a free turn of harpoons, nuking one of them before they contribute much. After that, you just keep setting up harpoon shots until they're dead.

Dengar/Asajj is slightly outdated, but nevertheless terrified of a triple harpoon alpha on Dengar, followed by enormous jousting strength and ion control for Asajj.

Overall, you've sacrificed some of the fun of the list - harpoon scyks and named Kimogilas, but you gain a lot of reliability and flexibility to how you tackle the more difficult lists.

@Astech thanks for the advice! I appreciate it. I'm not sure about running out and buying 2 more Kimonos but at least I know I could, and why that might be better.

I had one very minor point of disagreement: in the games I've played thus far, I felt like Dalan's ability synergized pretty well with Deadeye. I thought it was great that he could grab a focus to guarantee at least getting to fire the Harpoons at someone, then maybe end up double-modded with the free TL in the best case.

Having played against deadeye Dalan with token stripping lists (HS Fenn or B1 Poe) I have to say in the current meta he is complimentary because he has multiple ways to fire his missile depending on what token stripping he is facing.

9 hours ago, CoffeeMinion said:

@Astech thanks for the advice! I appreciate it. I'm not sure about running out and buying 2 more Kimonos but at least I know I could, and why that might be better.

I had one very minor point of disagreement: in the games I've played thus far, I felt like Dalan's ability synergized pretty well with Deadeye . I thought it was great that he could grab a focus to guarantee at least getting to fire the Harpoons at someone, then maybe end up double-modded with the free TL in the best case.

Yeah, I don't know many people who own more than 1. They just don't have the prettiness of the Gunboat. What do you have access to?

With Dalan, just using the focus to mod his attack his average roll is 3.68 damage with a 30% chance of not spending his focus. Adding the TL to the attack takes the expected damage up to 3.98 with a nearly guaranteed 4 hits, but of course the actual increase in damage for the TL is a meagre 0.3 per turn if your target is inside your firing arc.It's nice, but not, I think, 4 more pints (points?) worth of nice.

4 hours ago, nitrobenz said:

Having played against deadeye Dalan with token stripping lists (HS Fenn or B1 Poe ) I have to say in the current meta he is complimentary because he has multiple ways to fire his missile depending on what token stripping he is facing.

There's only 3 big token strippers at the moment - HSCP, Poe and Countermeasures.

Countermeasures comes down to initiative, and is a 1-time use so not that bad overall for Dalan. It really doesn't affect Deadeye in the first place.

Poe's token stripping doesn't work against Deadeye, and he's far, far to maneuverable to be caught in the bullseye arc at R2-3 anyway. He can also tank a single harpoon in his R2 form.

Finally you have HSCP. Let's face it - it's on PS11 Fenn or PS10 Boba if someone's going really crazy. Either way you're losing your focus before the missile goes off. Unless they're in your bullseye arc you won't get a missile at all, and if they are, you're scoring 3.68 hits again.

So sure, in that one meta match up, Dalan's ability is useful, but what's even more useful is Deadeye and Long Range Scanners, since you ca guarantee both a focus and target lock going into the combat. Your damage goes down slightly to 3.75, but its a small loss for incredibly reliable double-mods that also synergise with the reloading process.

10 hours ago, Astech said:

Yeah, I don't know many people who own more than 1. They just don't have the prettiness of the Gunboat.

The model's actually quite pretty; it's just got a grud-awful paintjob, but it's a surprisingly nice ship and accepts repainting well due to a nice amount of greebling in the gaps between the 'plates' of the shell.

It's a very nice little ship to field en masse. I've been meaning to have a try with 3 or 4 of them - they're actually pretty effective.

Dalan Oberos is nice as a missile platform, but the need to boresight someone for the free target lock means it's hard to pull off reliably against another small ship. Against a large ship, by comparison, it's disconcertingly easy, especially at short range. My favourite use for him is with R4-B11 - he becomes an absolute nightmare for any medium/high-agility large ship (Dash, Dengar, to a lesser extent - because latts and glitterstim - Assaj and is devastating against IG-88).

Note that that doesn't stop him carrying harpoons or cruise missiles too , just that keeping that target lock in your pocket is often much better than spending it.

I actually dig it! But I would use R4 Agro on Dalan to really capitalize on loads and loads of actions.

Sure, it's a bit fragile, but frankly, I think it could work - lots of arcs means that Fenn and Poe can't screw everyone over

@Astech , I have one of just about everything. I'm currently on a yearlong project to fly everything I've got at least once. So the prospect of going all-in on Kimos is interesting but a little orthogonal to my current goals.

What got me excited here was that my extended tour through janktown seemed to have struck gold. It's great to hear that it might not be gold, but that it might have helped reveal some nearby gold. :-)

@Magnus Grendel , I totally agree about the horrible paint job. I could maybe see buying more of these but the default paint is just hideous. Maybe I'll have to bust out the old Warhammer paints and see if I can do better despite being desperately out of practice...

Actually though, I love that R4-B11 suggestion. That might be the money 'mech on this guy. I might have to tweak this and fly it again with him!

10 hours ago, CoffeeMinion said:

@Astech , I have one of just about everything. I'm currently on a yearlong project to fly everything I've got at least once. So the prospect of going all-in on Kimos is interesting but a little orthogonal to my current goals.

What got me excited here was that my extended tour through janktown seemed to have struck gold. It's great to hear that it might not be gold, but that it might have helped reveal some nearby gold. :-)

@Magnus Grendel , I totally agree about the horrible paint job. I could maybe see buying more of these but the default paint is just hideous. Maybe I'll have to bust out the old Warhammer paints and see if I can do better despite being desperately out of practice...

Actually though, I love that R4-B11 suggestion. That might be the money 'mech on this guy. I might have to tweak this and fly it again with him!

Well, the nice thing about the Killergorilla is that you can make it into just about anything . It's not a bad B-wing impersonator with just it's basic kit and maybe an R4 Agromech for a bit of action economy, but it can play discount ordnance truck (both missiles and torpedoes - meaning you'll always be able to equip whatever's hottest at a given moment, has reload, and can have long range scanners to make Cartel Brutes effective), but it's got a half-decent dial (especially with unhinged astromech), and with Veteran Instincts and both the Barrel Roll action and access to the Cloaking Device, Torani Kulda can dance around like an imbecile at PS10 without breaking the bank.

If you're trying to 'try everything' then I wouldn't suggest going in en masse on Kimogilas, but I'd still suggest that they do work well en mass - multiples allow them to create a 'crossfire' of bullseye arcs, which is much easier to trap someone in, and they're very flexible for their cost.

There are a lot of good ships in the medium-weight scum ships - certainly the Scyk and Vaksai. I notice Linked Battery Sunny Bounder in your list - another very good example.

I'm half tempted to try a Hutt squadron mixing Scyks and Kimogilas as my first foray into scum.