42 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Being points efficient and manoeuvrable doesn't matter when you die before you can make back your points cost.

It's not actually all that manoeuvrable, to be honest.

• It has barrel roll. So does the X-wing. With Flight Assist Astromech, the X-wing can get Boost and Barrel Roll in one round.
• It has speed 1 turns. So does the Upsilon Shuttle. Granted, they're red, but that's only a problem if you don't have the means to get continuity of actions/tokens
• Its green dial is very restrictive, being just a T-65 dial moved one speed up.
• It lacks any end-around move other than a Koiogran turn.

10 point TIE fighters would be terrifying if they were prepared to let you field so many ships at once.

On the other hand, both Flight Assist/Renegade X-wings and Adaptive Ailerons Strikers shows that 5 ships, each doing a reposition and manoeuvre every turn are considered 'okay' for a normal game length.

The problem is that the TIE fighter has multiple weak points - the cheapest ship in the game bleeding victory points in smaller chunks, the easy nature of one-shotting it, the fact that some opponents are functionally immune to 2-dice attacks (go on, try and kill Lone Wolf/R2-D2 Poe Dameron. I'll wait), and so on.

The X-wing had three key problems - cost, manoeuvrability, fragility. Its firepower was okay for a snubfighter, and the PS and abilities of its unique pilots were top-notch.

The cluster of 'fixes' has essentially attacked all three:

• Cost
  • Renegade Refit
• Manouvrability
  • Flight Assist Astromech
  • Servomotor S-Foils
• Fragility
  • Integrated Astromech

Stack all those cards together and you get a net effect of adding +1 shield (ish), Barrel Roll, Speed 3 Talon Rolls, action-free boosts or barrel rolls if you have no shot, and a -1 point discount (-2 if you take an elite upgrade).

I like the ideas in this thread, it is enticing and very well penned. Seems Rebel-Wing is going to get some actual original cannon design ships in the power of the game; heck, I'd jump in too as I don't own a Ghost and haven't flown my K-Wing beyond staging for practice games.

T-65 re-insertion to the meta via buffing by: 1) lowering their cost, 2) increasing their maneuverability and 3) making them tougher is AMAZING!!!

The Empire's fighters are already struggling against the current power-curve-laden game additions, so adding the same three to the TIE/LN (maybe the TIE/FO for @ficklegreendice?) sounds good to me. Wouldn't it be interesting if the game came full-circle and the original game ships go back the top of the meta as they were when they were the only meta? I think a dual card which gives TIE/LNs a boost in fragility-reduction on one side and a red dice increase on the other side and it can be flipped by some mechanic that has to do with wing-men positioned within range one.

A lot of interesting ideas here.

In the interest of spit-balling just to get more ideas flowing, what about something like this...

Tactical Swarm (Because they wasted the name swarm tactics on something else) - Blah, Blah restrictions

Side A - You may not perform attacks. Once per round, when a friendly ship at Range 1 with the Tactical Swarm upgrade is attacking with a primary weapon, it may roll one additional die. After you perform a maneuver, you may flip this card.

Side B - When defending, you may reroll one die for each friendly ship at Range 1 with the Tactical Swarm upgrade . After you perform a maneuver, you may flip this card.

Too much? Too little? What should it cost? Are the two sides balanced?

OK, here's a weird idea that was introduced in a pint game so many months ago.....

TIE/LN Title: Swarm Volley

When attacking, you may roll all attack dice from ships of the same pilot skill with this Title as one attack against a single enemy ship. This attack cannot be modified.

5 minutes ago, clanofwolves said:

OK, here's a weird idea that was introduced in a pint game so many months ago.....

TIE/LN Title: Swarm Volley

When attacking, you may roll all attack dice from ships of the same pilot skill with this Title and that have the target ship in arc at Range 1-3 as one attack against a single enemy ship. This attack cannot be modified.

Added just a tiny restriction in BOLD there...

My favorite fix for the TIE Fighter don't make them tougher; the only fixes in this category that I like are the ones that give them some way to deal with indirect damage, i.e. a way to occasionally mitigate some (not all, and not easily) of the splash damage from poons and bombs that absolutely wrecks swarm play.

Other than that, I like the idea of a small offensive buff when multiple TIEs have the enemy ship in arc--either sacrificing one shot to boost the shot of another, or giving free outmaneuver when multiple TIEs have arc. Nothing crazy.

I don't really like combining attacks, ESPECIALLY more than two. Green dice are weak enough as it is, and combining attacks gives a much bigger advantage against ships with lots of green dice than it does against low-agility tanks. Effectively, the bonus you get from combining attacks is that the defender doesn't roll green dice against any attack beyond the first, which doesn't feel like good design to me. Even if it was just -1 agility for all attacks after the first, this would still feel pretty rough. Plus, there's never a reason to not combine your attacks.

Sacrificing an attack to add only one attack die feels much more in the right spot to me for an offensive TIE buff. That way you can combine attacks to pin down an evasive target, or you can roll separate attacks to push through damage on low-agility targets.

I also think that the TIE Interceptor needs help, and that making them cheaper or more durable isn't the answer. They should be relatively expensive, fragile aces, hard to pin down but coming apart like paper when you do, and still countered by bombs and turrets. As such, their delicate frames need access to PS10-11.

My fixes:

(TIE/ln is my shorthand here for Galactic Empire TIE Fighter or whatever terminology will distinguish them)

[TIE swarm title] (title, TIE/ln only): 0 pts. When you activate during the combat phase, you may choose to take a Weapons Disabled token. If you do, once during this phase another friendly TIE/ln may add 1 attack die to a primary weapon attack against an enemy ship in your firing arc at Range 1-3.

[TIE defensive modification] (mod, TIE/ln and TIE Interceptor only): 0 pts. You may discard this card to reroll all of your defense dice. You may discard this card to reroll all your attack dice from an opponent's bomb token.

No Shields, All Guts (title, TIE Interceptor only): 3 pts. Once per turn, after performing an action, you may perform a free Barrel Roll action. Then, add a stress token. Your shield value may not exceed 0.

Here are my full thoughts, for the sake of completeness:

Flexible Combat Fitout. TIE only, Imperial Only. Modification, 2 points.

At the start of setup, choose any number of different Modification upgrade cards you do not have equipped, whose combined points cost is two or less, and equip them.

(Because for goodness’ sake, the Punisher and Bomber with their 3 different fix Modifications, and yes, this does allow the Squint and /sf to have a little flexibility in not always including Autothrusters/LWF, and being able to swap it out for TIE Mk2 and the below Ablative Duranium Panels if there are bombs and harpoons around, and yes it lets QD get Guidance Chips on top of LWF)

Ablative Duranium Panels. TIE only. Imperial Only. Modification. Dual card. 1 point.

Side A When you are not the target of an attack and you are dealt a face down damage card, you may flip this card to discard that damage card.

When you are not the target of an attack and you are dealt a face up damage card, you may flip this card to flip that damage card face down, or discard this card to discard that damage card.

Side B (Damaged) When you are not the target of an attack and you are dealt a face down damage card, you may discard this card to discard that damage card.

When you are not the target of an attack and you are dealt a face up damage card, you may discard this card to flip that damage card face down.

(Because honestly, screw Harpoon Missiles, and bombs, and Sabine. Hopefully balanced as those effects can still take shields away, and you only get a maximum of two uses out of it, or one if you want to discard a faceup entirely. Something like this might just manage to unfrack swarms)

Endless Ranks, title, 0 points

Galactic Empire Only, unique TIE Only

When you are destroyed, at the start of the next planning phase, flip your ship’s base token over, and your ship is returned to play anywhere within range 1 of a board edge. Your pilot card is flipped to denote this, and the new ship has all non-unique upgrades equipped except this and any [elite].

The new ship costs 0 points for the purposes of determining the victor of the game.

(The new ship is deployed the following round, which means that if you run out of ships entirely in a single round, the game ends at that point. It costs 0, so it doesn’t add to your MoV, but it can win the game if it (along with other Endless ships) is the only ship left on the board, and it contributes to final salvo if your remaining MoV is equal to theirs, but not in the case of mutual destruction.)

32 minutes ago, pickirk01 said:

Added just a tiny restriction in BOLD there...

Good catch, it was assumed in our pint game. It does make those Miranda's nervous to joust a TIE/LN swarm though, let me tell you. No ship would ever joust it...very thematic.

TIE/LN Title: Swarm Volley

When attacking, you may roll all attack dice from ships of the same pilot skill with this Title that have the target ship in arc at Range 1-3 as one attack against a single enemy ship. This attack cannot be modified.

(0) points

My old house rules... New Squad Upgrades!

TIE Fighter Swarm

Squad. Imperial Only.

You must field 9 TIE fighters in your squad.

-10 Points

15 hours ago, jmswood said:

If Soontir arc dodges 5 ships, the Rebel player is doing it wrong.

Who said he has to arc-dodge all five? If you think Soontir is just going to explode when he ends up in the arc of a single Rookie that only has a Focus token, at best, to modify her shot then you have been deeply scarred by your green dice.

57 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Endless Ranks, title, 0 points

Galactic Empire Only, unique TIE Only

When you are destroyed, at the start of the next planning phase, flip your ship’s base token over, and your ship is returned to play anywhere within range 1 of a board edge. Your pilot card is flipped to denote this, and the new ship has all non-unique upgrades equipped except this and any [elite].

That's a cool idea!

3 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

That's a cool idea!

Yeah, i was pretty pleased when I thought of it. It's not perfect - ideally all the incoming would be academy pilots - but it serves (with the removal of EPTs) to make them crappy generics.

The wording needs a bit of tweaking though, to make it clear that discarded upgrades are re-equipped and maybe that shields are re-added and damage cards removed.

Thematically and from nature point of view a swarm should be harder to hit, that is why animals school together. Maybe a title that all have with something to the effect of having 2+ ships in range 1 of each other add an evade or green dice and/or can not use a target lock or tokens. Something along these lines.

As others have stated the TIE suffers from being fragile and easy to 1 shot and being very anemic with only 2 red dice.

Just now, Cusm said:

Thematically and from nature point of view a swarm should be harder to hit, that is why animals school together. Maybe a title that all have with something to the effect of having 2+ ships in range 1 of each other add an evade or green dice and/or can not use a target lock or tokens. Something along these lines.

As others have stated the TIE suffers from being fragile and easy to 1 shot and being very anemic with only 2 red dice.

Ehhh. Animals swarm together to make each individual harder to hit, but it doesn't necessarily make the swarm as a whole harder to hit.

The 'swarms share damage between them' ideas are really nice from that perspective. It's harder to kill individual ties, until all of a sudden they ALL start popping.

5 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Yeah, i was pretty pleased when I thought of it. It's not perfect - ideally all the incoming would be academy pilots - but it serves (with the removal of EPTs) to make them crappy generics.

The wording needs a bit of tweaking though, to make it clear that discarded upgrades are re-equipped and maybe that shields are re-added and damage cards removed.

I suppose, and yet the elegance is that you don't need to bring more gear to downgrade the ace.

You might want to specify that the redeploy must be further than R3 from enemy ships. . .unless an R1 surprise attack is fine.

For simplicity, I would just toss all upgrades. Heck, for 0 points you are getting a whole new ship. And, it would make this a less useful title for the better TIEs (SF, Defender, Striker etc.).

It makes it completely pointless (not to mention off-theme) for the Bomber and Punisher though, which is what I want to avoid. (By academy pilots, I meant to say the lowest PS generic for that ship)

Indeed, it mostly makes it only applicable to TIE/lns, which again, I want it to work on everything.

7 hours ago, Wedgeismyhero said:

I'd like to see a new TIE pilot that works well with swarms like Howlrunner does. I've no idea what the pilot ability would be, but it would be simpler to have one pilot affecting an entire swarm than stacking cards on cards on cards to a big TIE swarm. Maybe make it the first non-Unique pilot with an ability so you're not putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

About the only counter-point I'd make to this (and, indeed, my own suggestions in the thread) is...

...well, everyone remembers what the game looked like when the Howlrunner-wave1-meta was going on, right?

Yeah, that.

"Cube-o'-TIE-Fighters" on the table. It was finicky, took a long time to play, looked aesthetically kind of silly...

So maybe stacking 'range 1' benefits on top of each other is possibly not the way forward.

5 hours ago, Procastination said:

Granted, a few of the named TIE pilots are probably crying out for some more table time, but really does the TIE fighter at it's most basic need any help?

It's points efficient and manouverable, it fills its role perfectly as is.

Well the point was really more that the X-Wing was considered too powerful to have more than 4 on a table, while the TIE Fighter was similarly limited to 8. Now that we get not just original-X-Wings, but buffed X-Wings (with new actions or a better dial as well as more health) and five of them on the table...really, it'd only be balanced to do the same for the lowly TIE Fighter. Presuming FFG was always aiming to get them at 2-to-1 odds with the X-Wings, we're really looking at some means of getting 10 on the table...

(Ideally, seeing previous point, not clumped all together)

2 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Who said he has to arc-dodge all five?

I only mention arc dodging because not getting shot is better than a token stack every time. The token stack is still vital because you can't arc dodge 5 ships unless the opponent is incompetent. If the Rebel player isn't an idiot; they will block Soontir into a kill box. Token stack and arc dodging denied, Soontir melts while the Rebel blasters are still warming up.

So the real question: what is the rest of your list? Because your other 60ish points will have to carry the game.

3 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

you have been deeply scarred by your green dice.

Leave my green dice out of this.

I think the TIE fighter needs help in two areas

1. Make blocking matter more
2. Be able to push through all the damage mitigation BS.

My humble suggestions

1. "Ships that you are touching may not perform actions." And if we really want to up the pain add: "or modify attack dice." Not sure if that should be a unique pilot ability or a mod or what.
2. "When attacking, if another friendly TIE fighter has the defender inside their firing arc at range 1-3, the defender may not add dice result to their defense roll." Probably best as a title. Shuts down evade tokens, reinforce, Lowhrick, Rey (pilot), Norra, 3PO.

22 hours ago, xanderf said:

Notably, in interviews early on in the life of the game, the 21 pts of the Rookie pilot was noted as being intentional, for the same reason Academy Pilot TIE Fighters were 12 pts. In both cases, exactly one point higher than would have otherwise allowed 5-ship-swarms or 9-ship-swarms, which FFG playtesting at the time (waves 1-3, here) indicated was too powerful.

Obviously, today, we've had revealed something that changes that.

So a 5x Rookie-pilot list is now possible. And, indeed, quite a capable ship, there.

Yet...9x TIE Fighters still not possible.

Sooooo....what could be done? Unfortunately, the X-Wing has a few more upgrade slots that let it have a number of possible fixes. The lowly TIE Fighter, unfortunately, doesn't. Just a mod 'slot' and title 'slot'. Or potentially some kind of new list-wide refit?

The real question is - is there anything in the TIE Reaper expansion that could be that fix?

I think the Ties should get to make 2 movements.

19 hours ago, AwesomeJedi said:

I would like to see a -2 point reduction because TIE fighters should be dirt cheap.

Mass Production

TIE/ln and TIE/fo fighter only. Imperial only. (Remember that this is possible now because we have T-65 X-wing only restrictions)

This card has a negative squad point cost.

-2 squad points

I've been saying this for years and just put a restriction on how many squad points you can add and call it good.

I think the other way we can get more ties in the game is start rating all lists by how many tie fighters it would take to defeat the list. One of the biggest problems facing ties is that a swarm of 12 of them still couldn't conceivably take down some current lists in a standard timed game and some probably not ever. There should be more of them than any other ship and they should be deadly when you don't kill enough of them fast enough AND even if you do kill enough of them there should be more on the way.

I've done the "flip the unique base to generic side" for ties in campaign style play. It does give that endlessness feeling to it, especially en masse. If we can get more of them and make them zombie ties I think we'd have a chance.

Just adding that I'd love to see more (swarms of) Tie fighters in the game.

Bombs/ harpoons really kicked the poor Tie to death.

And 2 red dice on top of mentally exhausting to play several games back-to back with 7+ ships did it a number already.

(yes; I know; the latter is a sign of my mental weakness. I shall have to deal with that...)

Nerf bombs.. ESPECIALLY that goddamn bomblet generator.

On 24/04/2018 at 7:08 PM, xanderf said:

I think you are really selling s-foils short. The ability to selectively t-roll is crazy, especially at high PS. Nevermind the extra greens and added boost action for approach turns or retreat/regroup maneuvers.

Although the point on other TIEs is certainly valid. The TIE Fighter desperately needs a buff, but there are others - despite their own first pass at a fix, both the TIE Interceptor and TIE Advanced are trailing a bit in the meta. The TIE Punisher is in a dire spot, as well as TIE Bomber not doing well. OTOH, the TIE/fo and TIE/sf (and TIE Silencer) are...totally, totally solid. So...going to have to be a pretty well focused fix.

Just make it a Galactic Empire-only card OR a card that can be equipped only in ships without shields. Or both?

Although...

A Inferno Squad title for both the TIE Fighter and the TIE Interceptor would be cool...

PS: I did a lot of custom cards in that regard, like Defensive Thrusters, Mass Deployment, Rrrrraaaaahhhh!, TIE/rc...

Some ideas for "fix upgrades" that I came up with at 2:30am:

Prototype Build TIE Fighter

Title

4 points

TIE Fighter only.

You may equip 1 additional Modification.

Stabilizing Assistant

3 points

Modification.

After performing a red manoeuvre, you may gain 1 evade token.