Hello and Happy Friday,

So with the T65 adjustment coming along I got to thinking,

There are edge cases where one AP makes a cut but the Tie fighter disappeared when the Tie Phantom hit the tables, TLT, 5 dice primaries and bombs completely removed the chances of people playing them long before Harpoon Missiles showed up which continue to remove them from the table.

What would it take to make tie fighters and tie swarms seen in torny play again and not just by Dallas Paker?

Again there is a problem based on 3 hull not being enough with the auto damage or the amount of modded dice complete removing the chances of seeing Tie Fighters be a top tire ship.

Inferno Squad.

Just now, Celestial Lizards said:

Inferno Squad.

What would it be?

Happy Friday!

What if TIE Fighters got a combined-attack squad mechanic? So they could add up their attack dice somehow and attack together in a swarm? Like, if four TIE Fighters are all at range 1 of each other, they roll a single eight-dice attack?

A title that allows for a defensive re-roll, and a modification that allows it to hit harder.

Quote

Formation Flying

Title - Imperial only - TIE Fighter only

You may not equip this card if you have a shield value of 2 or higher (To prevent TIE SF from abusing, but allowing for TIE FO)

When defending, if there is at least 2 friendly ships at range 1, you may re-roll a result.

1 pts (It is more restricted than Crossfire formation, and doesn't add a result, so it's cheaper)

It helps against dice powercreep, and swingy green dice, but it still allows for autodamage to destroy them. Why? Because frankly, they should be fragile.

Quote

Precision Lasers

Modification

You may not equip this card if your primary weapon value is "3" or higher.

When attacking with a primary weapon, you may cancel all dice results. If you cancelled at least 2 [hit] or [crit] results, the defender suffers 1 damage

2 pts

Now this one helps them deal damage against anyone, but it still rewards good play. You'll want mods on your attacks, so you can trigger it.

I did not make "you can't roll 3 attack dice" for a very simple reason. TIE Aces add extra dice. I still want them to be viable, and better. If that means that the ARC and the TIE/SF get this mod... so be it. It's not really worth it for them, due to better options, but it isn't broken even if they take it.

Happy Friday!

For me, the best fix comes from the age old suggestion of Squadron Upgrades. Make it a new style of upgrades that apply to certain combinations of ships. There are several TIE squadrons, so you could have multiple Squadron cards to customize different play styles. For TIE Fighters, having say a Black Squadron card giving bonuses for other TIEs at range one of you can help with Swarms while an Inferno Squad card could make them into pocket aces with Missile tubes.

Reaction Trusters (mod, 1 pt)

TIE Fighter, Interceptor only. Galactic Empire only.

When rolling attack dice during the detonation of a bomb you may roll a number of defense dice equal to your agility. You may then cancel hit and crit results from the bomb dice with any evade results. No modifications can be made to these defense dice.

Or something to act as if some Ties were distracting a target while the others moved in for the kill, a true swarming attack strategy.

"Tie Swarm Title"

Tie Fighter only, You may not equip this card if your Shield value is higher than 1. (to keep if off of Tie/sf but to keep it open to Tie/fo's)

At the start of the combat phase, you may assign yourself a weapons disabled token to choose one enemy ship in your arc at range 1-3. Assign that ship the Distracted condition.

Distracted Condition Card:

When you are assigned this card, if you do not have a weapons disabled token, you may assign yourself a weapons disabled token to discard this card.

When defending against a ship with the "Tie Swarm Title," reduce your agility value by 1 for each Distracted card assigned to you. At the end of the End phase, discard all Distracted cards.

So say you have 6 Ties all with this. You manage to get four of your ships to surround an x7 Vessery but he has one of your Ties dead to rights at range 1 and he has a Stealth device and focus and Evade tokens. Odds are good you will lose a ship and not even scratch his paint with your other three. By having 2 of your ships sacrifice their shot, you can either stop some return fire and/or increase your odds of getting damage through with your remaining shots. Notice that in this scenario, if Vessery choose to not disable his weapons, he would still be sitting at 2 agility with focus and evade tokens available to defend against at most 2 shots from ties. He still has a good chance of coming out of the fight unscathed and for that reason, this title should probably cost no more than 1 point if not zero.

Nerf AoE bombs- Particularly Bomblet, as there is no reason to not drop a Bomblet every turn- It makes the TIE fighter unable to chase anything carrying it.

The other thing keeping them down is hyper-defense. Maybe let them roll an extra die when attacking, but have to cancel one as well?

Squadron Formation (title, 1 [or 0?] pt)

TIE Fighter only. Imperial only

when within R1 of another ship with Squadron Formation equipped you may reroll one attack die when attacking.

lets keep it simple.

Happy Friday!

With how well Rex seems to work, Maybe an imperial version of his ability in the form of a title : When defending, If the attacker is in a friendly ships firing arc, reduce their attack die by 1.

31 minutes ago, GrimmyV said:

Squadron Formation (title, 1 [or 0?] pt)

TIE Fighter only. Imperial only

when within R1 of another ship with Squadron Formation equipped you may reroll one attack die when attacking.

lets keep it simple.

That's just a Howlrunner swarm. It's not bad, but it ain't gonna bring the ship back to the game, sadly

14 minutes ago, Commander Kaine said:

That's just a Howlrunner swarm. It's not bad, but it ain't gonna bring the ship back to the game, sadly

Oh, oops. Hey, I guess howlie gives you another reroll for two! Yay!

Nevermind just TIE Fighters - anything that relies on green evades is hurting at the moment in the alpha-heavy meta. One bad roll, and the ship blows up. But an overly-good roll? Wasted.

Some way to bank 'overkill' dice roll results would be useful. IE., only need 1 evade and you roll all 3 on 3 dice? Go ahead and save 2 of those for later. Some mechanism to do that would help TIE Fighters, Interceptors, Advanced, etc. The 'squadron' mechanic might be a way to balance that vs the higher-value ships with a lot of agility that are already okay. Maybe some kind of 'squadron' card that has 3 dice spots on it - you can only select that squadron if you have at least 4 of the same ship and pilot, and it applies to those units only. Between 'Roll [Attack/Defense] Dice' and 'Modify [Attack/Defense] Dice' steps you can then choose to place or replace any of those three spots with one or more dice results you rolled. So if you roll overly good...go ahead and set aside some of those dice for use later, when you roll overly bad.

TIE fights should be fragile, not super effective, and plentiful.

Drop the cost by 5 for all imperial TIE/F and we will see them a lot more.

30 minutes ago, xanderf said:

Nevermind just TIE Fighters - anything that relies on green evades is hurting at the moment in the alpha-heavy meta. One bad roll, and the ship blows up. But an overly-good roll? Wasted.

Some way to bank 'overkill' dice roll results would be useful. IE., only need 1 evade and you roll all 3 on 3 dice? Go ahead and save 2 of those for later. Some mechanism to do that would help TIE Fighters, Interceptors, Advanced, etc. The 'squadron' mechanic might be a way to balance that vs the higher-value ships with a lot of agility that are already okay. Maybe some kind of 'squadron' card that has 3 dice spots on it - you can only select that squadron if you have at least 4 of the same ship and pilot, and it applies to those units only. Between 'Roll [Attack/Defense] Dice' and 'Modify [Attack/Defense] Dice' steps you can then choose to place or replace any of those three spots with one or more dice results you rolled. So if you roll overly good...go ahead and set aside some of those dice for use later, when you roll overly bad.

Here is the thing. Rolling horribly bad, is pretty much the only way to take out green dice tanks.

If you can bank results, you basically guarantee that you won't be hit.

People are freaked out about Palpatine. A double slotted, 8 point unique crew that CHANGES 1 result per turn.

AT+Evade+Palp, plus you can bank results (multiple even)... What would you need to roll to take THAT soontir out?

I think is is one of the most broken ideas yet.

3 minutes ago, Commander Kaine said:

Here is the thing. Rolling horribly bad, is pretty much the only way to take out green dice tanks.

If you can bank results, you basically guarantee that you won't be hit.

People are freaked out about Palpatine. A double slotted, 8 point unique crew that CHANGES 1 result per turn.

AT+Evade+Palp, plus you can bank results (multiple even)... What would you need to roll to take THAT soontir out?

I think is is one of the most broken ideas yet.

You have a way to get 4x Soontir Fels in a list? Do tell...

(The entire point of the suggestion was to provide a boost to the squishier generics that specifically don't have good defensive options like Soontir does)

1 minute ago, xanderf said:

You have a way to get 4x Soontir Fels in a list? Do tell...

(The entire point of the suggestion was to provide a boost to the squishier generics that specifically don't have good defensive options like Soontir does)

Unless someone give me an exact proposal for what would the card text say, I have to go by the general idea.

There was no limitation mentioned, so I illustrated that problem by a worst case scenario.

No I can't fit 4 soontirs in the game, but I also don't see a reason why not to include it on Soontir.

Galactic empire only TIE fighters all get outmaneuver

Galactic empire only TIE fighters all become Xizor, but can only pass onto other friendly TIE fighters

The TIE Firghter needs a fix, since when? Because people find swarms boring to play since you cant load them with upgrades, that does not make them broken. I challenge people to play this squad in a tournament even in the current meta and tell me the results. I am confident it will chew down any 2 ship build.

"Quickdraw" + Swarm Leader + Fire-Control System + Advanced Optics + Lightweight Frame + Special Ops Training
Black Squadron Pilot + Crack Shot
Black Squadron Pilot + Crack Shot
Black Squadron Pilot + Crack Shot
Black Squadron Pilot + Crack Shot

Swarm Discipline

Title. TIE/LN Fighter only. Imperial only.

When another friendly TIE Fighter at Range 1 is attacking, it may reroll 1 attack die. If it does it cannot reroll more than 1 attack die on this attack.

0 points

Obviously based on Howlrunner’s ability so we know how this’d work. TIE Fighters should still blow up easily but need to be rewarded for thematic flying in swarm. TIE/LN only so it only works with the original TIE Fighter (which would need an errata for all existing TIE Fighters).

I want my Z swarm to be good without missiles too, darnit!

3 hours ago, Pewpewpew BOOM said:

TIE fights should be fragile, not super effective, and plentiful.

Drop the cost by 5 for all imperial TIE/F and we will see them a lot more.

Yes and no.

1. Do I want 7 point TIE fighters? Yes, well - obviously. I'm an imperial swarm player. Force of numbers like that appeals to me.
2. Do I want to play a game with 14 TIE fighters on the board at once? No. Putting it like that makes the idea sound horrible in terms of game time and mental effort. Plus, you're still stuck rolling in to trajectory-launched bombs and harpoons, so increasing weight-of-numbers arguably offers diminishing returns.
3. I still agree 'have more TIE fighters' would be a good solution.
4. My suggestion would be this. A lot of gimmicks in the missions have subsequently made it into the game proper, from starting outside your deployment zone, to launching bombs, to creating debris mid-mission. One that's never been used to date, though, is Reinforcements.
5. If a non-unique TIE fighter killed during a turn could 'respawn' during the end phase (or even immediately provided it was outside combat range), it gives you a means to mitigate several key problems with the TIE swarm as a squad archetype:

• TIE swarms bleed victory points even when they win; 100-0 wins are basically unachievable by a TIE swarm because even scattered pot-shots will generally get the odd kill, which often locks them out of any placing decision where margin of victory matters and means that games which go to time rarely end in their favour.
  • Assuming the 'respawn' is tied to a discard-on-use title, having to ships in the squad twice to get points for them helps compensate.
• TIE swarms lose fighting potential very quickly; their firepower is attached to smaller 'chunks' of durability
  • Even if the target killed won't get to shoot this turn, the reinforcement means that there's still a threat for subsequent turns.
• TIE fighters are surprisingly slow when trying to chase turreted ships - especially large ships - as whilst they can move at speed 5, they can't move faster than speed 3 when changing course. Boosting large ships like Chiraneau can literally run rings round them.
  • If a TIE fighter 'respawns' after being killed outside combat range (>range 3 of any enemy) but within range 1 of any board edge, you can bring reinforcements in ahead of Dash/Chiraneau/Miranda and try to box them in, which is what you need to do to kill such opponents.

How many 'respawns' you want in a squad should drive the cost of the title. To go into examples, a 1 point title means:

• an eight ship swarm of academy pilots can get 4 reinforcements.
• a swarm of three crack shot black squadron pilots and four academy pilots all get reinforcements (this might be a bit too much!)

You'd need to decide if you wanted it to be:

• TIE fighter Only (Bad idea - rebels and TIE/sf!)
• Imperial Only. TIE Fighter Only
• Imperial Only. Academy Pilot Only

The latter depends on whether you want to improve the academy pilot only or the Black Squadron Pilot too. If the latter, you can really deliver a kick in power if you want to by allowing the reinforcement to flip discarded cards face-up (thus resetting crack shot and/or stealth device).

Title: TIE Fighter only

When attacking or defending, if you are not in the firing arc of the enemy ship, you may reroll one of your dice.

Gives an edge to both /ln and /eo figthers. /sf would not take this. Puts the emphasis on good maneuvering and recalls the OT: tie fighter in your rear: bad news. Tie in your firing zone = easy prey.

10 minutes ago, MaxPower said:

Gives an edge to both /ln and /eo figthers. /sf would not take this.

A fair point. Any fix which comes via a title almost excludes the TIE/sf by default unless the bonus is better than Spec Ops Training.