It shows as 1 point,

On declaring a defender , I as the attacker just assigns an extra damage to an enemy ship at range 0-1 of that defender? Also, it's a choice ? Not mandatory and could hurt my own ships?

The attack doesnt have to actually hit?

Is the card worded wierd or am I just wrong?

I think you may be reading the card wrong.

Ruthless : While you perform an attack, you may choose another friendly ship at range 0-1 of the defender. If you do that ship suffers 1 hit damage and you may change 1 of your die results to a hit result.

That seems worth about 1 point given 1 damage on a friendly ship for 1 potential damage on an enemy ship.

Friendly to the defender though....

?

Oh...so it's not bonkers,its awful.

Your saying friendly to the attacker?

So assign my own ship a damage to change one of the attack dice to a hit?

Card text is worded from your perspective.

When it says friendly, regardless of context, its referring to YOUR ships.
When it says enemy, regardless of context, its referring to THEIR ships.

Ruthless is pretty piss poor. You guarantee damage one of your ships to get a single die mod that can still get evaded. I'd literally never use it unless i could kill said ship with that hit, but i'd also have a different EPT anyway.

Yes, you do hit a friendly ship. You're causing 'collateral damage' to improve your chances to hit.

• It's risky, but it's also cheap
  • Taking one damage to get a free action or equivalent isn't unheard of (Chopper, Unkar Plutt, Electronic Baffle)
  • An automatic blank-or-focus-to-hit is about as much 'extra damage' as you'd anticipate getting from having a focus or target lock, with the added bonus that you don't need to suck up the damage if you end up rolling straight hits.
  • You don't have to take the damage on the firing ship.
  • Spreading out damage across your squad can be useful, especially when paired with Admiral Sloane, who actively punishes your opponent for killing ships in your swarm.
• It's particuarly valuable if:
  • The ship carrying it has no other means of doing anything with blank red dice - virtually no TIEs have native target lock.
  • The ship taking the collateral hit is much less valuable than the thing you're shooting at - having a supporting miniswarm of Academy Pilots is a good choice, since TIE fighters tend to want to block and be at range 1 anyway.
  • You're confident you won't 'waste' the extra hit. When firing at a valuable low agility target - especially if they've got no tokens after being blocked - and also if the extra hit you're applying makes it more likely to land a critical rather than just an extra hit.
• A good example of this is Maarek Stele's quickbuild (the only quickbuild so far to use the ability). With a target lock, he gets a 3-dice attack with a free hit-to-crit, but even with fire control system can only reroll 1 die, and needing to target lock will often lack focus tokens. As a 3 point ace, you can field him and an academy pilot to block and act as expendable punching bag.

The card oozes empire flavor. Is it good? Maybe not so much. Does it allow you to play empire like empire should be played? Yes.

If empire werent primarily based on low health high agility/maneuverability, it'd be fine.

Only ships we have that can take a couple hits and not really care are half our list or more, either because theyre just that fat (deci) or are ALSO super evasive (defenders) on top of it.

True we have access to regen (finally) in the form of Gonk but only 4 ships can take it (deci, lambda, reaper, phantom) and of those the Phantom is probably the only one that can deal with losing its action once in awhile, or is fast enough to GTFO to use gonk. And i am not autohitting my phantoms lol

Note that you can use Ruthless to abuse the new simultaneous fire rule. Ships aren't removed until all ships of the current Initiative have fired, so you can, for example, have a whole bunch of Black Squadron Aces load the Ruthless damage into only one of their brethren, reducing most of the damage to irrelevant overkill. The sacrificed ship will even still get to make his shot, even if he goes last.

@DR4CO that's ....... RUTHLESS

4 hours ago, DR4CO said:

Note that you can use Ruthless to abuse the new simultaneous fire rule. Ships aren't removed until all ships of the current Initiative have fired, so you can, for example, have a whole bunch of Black Squadron Aces load the Ruthless damage into only one of their brethren, reducing most of the damage to irrelevant overkill. The sacrificed ship will even still get to make his shot, even if he goes last.

1 hour ago, Mep said:

@DR4CO that's ....... RUTHLESS

I think that runs a foul the paying costs requirements in the Rules Reference. Once the sacrificial ship's damage equals its hit points the effect can't be used with that ship.

1 hour ago, Hiemfire said:

I think that runs a foul the paying costs requirements in the Rules Reference. Once the sacrificial ship's damage equals its hit points the effect can't be used with that ship.

Nope. Dead ships can still be dealt cards.

4 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Nope. Dead ships can still be dealt cards.

Okay. I found the section. You're right. As long as it is in the same init as the ones damaging it via Ruthless it can be treated as a sink hole for damage cards. Now I'm wondering if the destruction of the damage sink is enough to offset the damage delt with Ruthless being only one point. Ruthless might be under costed.

29 minutes ago, Hiemfire said:

Okay. I found the section. You're right. As long as it is in the same init as the ones damaging it via Ruthless it can be treated as a sink hole for damage cards. Now I'm wondering if the destruction of the damage sink is enough to offset the damage delt with Ruthless being only one point. Ruthless might be under costed.

1 point is probably right. You have to be in a VERY specific situation fo rit to be worth loading damage onto a single ship AND it has to be in the right place too. It's not worth killing your own ship if it's no already dead anyway, probably.

6 hours ago, DR4CO said:

Note that you can use Ruthless to abuse the new simultaneous fire rule. Ships aren't removed until all ships of the current Initiative have fired, so you can, for example, have a whole bunch of Black Squadron Aces load the Ruthless damage into only one of their brethren, reducing most of the damage to irrelevant overkill. The sacrificed ship will even still get to make his shot, even if he goes last.

I have been wondering about a swarm of black squadron pilots with ruthless. You can get a 7-ship swarm but unlike Howlrunner you're not stuck trying to hold a formation which makes you vulnerable to bombs and awkwardly placed rocks.

I agree with @thespaceinvader that you'd very, very rarely voluntarily want to drop a killing blow on your own ship (especially since Stygium Array is no longer driven by getting a shot - I recall once driving an opponent to apoplexy by killing off a wounded TIE fighter that was a phantom's only shot, stopping it recloaking). Having the option is no bad thing for the niche cases when they come up, though, and if a ship is dead or effectively dead, then being able to mass-ruthlessness your entire squad by loading 4-5 meaningless damage cards onto it might be a nasty shock.

10 hours ago, Vineheart01 said:

If empire werent primarily based on low health high agility/maneuverability, it'd be fine.

Agreed, but an academy TIE fighter is essentially only paying 8 points per hit point, which is less than (say) a rookie X-wing. The Galactic Empire isn't big on 'tough' but it's not bad at 'expendable'.

You can field TIE bombers, who get an impressive tank of hit points for a low cost, but the requirement to get ships within range 1 of an enemy means that most of the heavier tanks wouldn't be a great option to support a ruthless ship.

It's probably worth noting that if you really want to do Ruthless, a TIE Bomber is WAY better value per use than a TIE Fighter. Bombers have 6HP and cost 28, so 4 2/3 points per health, where TIEs are 7 2/3 points.

I suspect that the best generic swarm is actually Howlrunner plus 4 bombers and 2 APs, rather than all TIE/ln.

6 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

It's probably worth noting that if you really want to do Ruthless, a TIE Bomber is WAY better value per use than a TIE Fighter. Bombers have 6HP and cost 28, so 4 2/3 points per health, where TIEs are 7 2/3 points

Completely agree. My concern is purely around being able to reliably get the wider turning, slower TIE bombers to stay within range 1 of the target like you need them to for ruthless to matter.

Of course, from another point of view, it's a nice option to use with limited-ordnance bombers (cheap with low charge counts like homing missiles); shoot the racks dry then rather than trying to use their red reload, use them as blockers and punching bags for ruthlessness.