For those not aware, the new Homing Missiles in 2.0 give you a choice: you can either take the hit, suffering one point of damage without a dice roll, OR you can let your opponent roll four red dice and try to evade the attack.

Unless you are down to your last hit point, or maybe if you have Soontir Fel with an expensive stealth device, are there any situations where you would not simply take the single point of damage?

When you have 1 hp. that is the only time it makes sense to eat 4 dice with a lock over 1 auto damage. 3pts for 1 damage twice is incredibly meh.

I was wondering about this earlier. I suppose you would choose to take the one guaranteed damage if you were a low agility ship. And if you were in a high agility with mods (say, an Interceptor) you'd want to avoid taking damage at all so would gamble that you could avoid all damage from the 4 dice.

At least it's cheap and 3 points.

If you have 3 green, focus, AND, evade while the opponent only has lock, expected damage for the missile is 0.6.

Even then you might just take the damage since 1 is a guarantee and dice will bite ya every time.

If you cloak up as a Phantom with an evade, or are behind a rock (4 AGI) and have an evade, projected hits are almost .8. There is one big advantage to making them take the shot: make them spend the lock. All of this is situational, but occasionally it is better to make them shoot.

if you have really high evasion odds to begin with and/or really cannot take that damage.

You wouldnt ever just take the hit on a Stealth Device user or on Sabaac with 1 dmg card already.

13 minutes ago, HammerGibbens said:

If you have 3 green, focus, AND, evade while the opponent only has lock, expected damage for the missile is 0.6.

Even then you might just take the damage since 1 is a guarantee and dice will bite ya every time.

Even then, I'd probably still take the single point of damage. It's guaranteed to only be a hit, unless 1) You have no shields, and the missile was fired by an Evading Rexlar, or 2) You have an active Hull Breach. If you let them roll dice, there's a good chance that the single point of damage you take will be an uncancelled crit.

One thing to note, if you are token stacked 3 AGI ship, and there are follow-up shots, it is probably better to just eat the 1 expected damage and use the tokens to evade the rest or even use them for offense.

Homing Missile sounds worse and worse the more I think about it. It is effectively saying "please save your tokens for offensive modifiers and blow me up in return."

Though I bet it is useful from time to time, if you had 3 spare pts to blow haha.

It depends on what dice modifications you have vs. your opponent and what value you place on the likelihood of forcing them to use their Lock to modify the 4 dice attack. If you have say 3 defense dice + focus and your opponent only has the Lock (no focus), you are looking at an expected 1.125 damage received to your ship - not much more than the guaranteed damage. If you can get 4 green dice + focus, the expected damage drops to .5. You also want to consider that the guaranteed damage option allows your opponent to carry over their Lock to the following turn, so they are looking at a double modded attack the following turn (usually at range 1). It might be better to risk the damage on the 4 dice attack and encourage them to use their Lock to push the damage through just to avoid giving your opponent an action advantage/firing solution for ordnance moving forward.

From a different perspective, when would you ever fire a Homing Missile into 5 tokened up green dice?

I think you need other stuff to make them scary. Like Rex. And even then, you're looking for ideal targets with it. I kinda like the circumstantial way of it.

Homing Missiles on a Phoenix Squadron A-Wing has made it harder for my opponent’s Whisper to ignore them. Situational, but I like that. I like Homing Missiles on 2-die primaries like A-wings and TIE Adv v1 (TAP’s).

I think you take the 1 most of the time unless you're on your last hull. The other interesting decision point is when it's a close game and taking that one will knock you into half points. Do you just accept the half point loss, or do you take your chance to evade it all?

6 minutes ago, Cuz05 said:

From a different perspective, when would you ever fire a Homing Missile into 5 tokened up green dice?

I think you need other stuff to make them scary. Like Rex. And even then, you're looking for ideal targets with it. I kinda like the circumstantial way of it.

Yeah, but they're also only 3 points for two shots. I'd happily fire a missile into five tokened up green dice, and chalk it up as a win even if they have me roll. I still have good odds of dealing damage, or at least stripping a lot of tokens.

Just now, PhantomFO said:

Yeah, but they're also only 3 points for two shots. I'd happily fire a missile into five tokened up green dice, and chalk it up as a win even if they have me roll. I still have good odds of dealing damage, or at least stripping a lot of tokens.

3 pts for hit and hope sounds expensive to me

3 minutes ago, Cuz05 said:

3 pts for hit and hope sounds expensive to me

33 points for Phoenix with Homing. The first 30 points is for the blocker, the last 3 is for the sting!

I wish they had made homing missile an auto crit or a dice roll (basically combine 1.0 Homing Missiles and Advanced Homing Missiles into one) and make it a couple points more expensive. Then at least it would be a hard decision some of the time.

You take the 1 damage unless math says otherwise or you are facing death.

That 1dmg is all a 2 dice attack ship really wants anyways. That is their win and the main reason homing missiles exist in the first place. Nice card that isnt OP.

Take the 1 damage almost always - even if you have a good chance of evading the 4-die attack, the 1 damage that gets through could easily be a crit.

3 points off a 200 point total squad is basically nothing. Plus even a single guranteed damage twice is pretty awesome. Would people complain about a 1.5 cost missle in 1.0? I doubt it. These things are fine and a nice back up to a 2 die primary. The only issue is there are arguably better ordnance but there is nothing wrong with these.

10 minutes ago, LordFajubi said:

3 points off a 200 point total squad is basically nothing. Plus even a single guranteed damage twice is pretty awesome. Would people conplain about a 1.5 cost missle in 1.0? I doubt it. These things are fine and a nice back up to a 2 die primary. The only issue is there are arguably better ordnance but there is nothing wrong with these.

I'd argue otherwise. Much of the point of ordinance is to give you burst damage and buff your jousting potential. a missile that says you still need that target lock to fire it, but will only ever do 1 damage accomplishes neither of these goals as it has no burst damage and is very questionable as a joust weapon. The fact that it can only be used twice is also super weak because it's the only ordnance in the game that cannot kill a ship by itself. 1 more point at least gets you ion missiles that can force token spending and have 3 charges, 2 more gets you clusters that has a useful secondary effect and 4 charges and 3 gets you the super underrated concussion missiles that function as a poor man's attack 3 primary. There are too many other options that make more sense for marginal point differences.

19 minutes ago, MasterShake2 said:

I'd argue otherwise. Much of the point of ordinance is to give you burst damage and buff your jousting potential. a missile that says you still need that target lock to fire it, but will only ever do 1 damage accomplishes neither of these goals as it has no burst damage and is very questionable as a joust weapon. The fact that it can only be used twice is also super weak because it's the only ordnance in the game that cannot kill a ship by itself. 1 more point at least gets you ion missiles that can force token spending and have 3 charges, 2 more gets you clusters that has a useful secondary effect and 4 charges and 3 gets you the super underrated concussion missiles that function as a poor man's attack 3 primary. There are too many other options that make more sense for marginal point differences.

3pts for 2 auto damage is not bad.

you are assigning random goals for some reason... what if your goal was to do 2 damage. you are stating it's not good because it has different outcomes than other ordinance and since its ordinance, it should have those same outcomes? that makes no sense.

let's say you face a lot of interceptors locally.... for 3 points this missile is amazing in that meta. 3x 26 point bandit squadrons can take out an interceptor pretty easily there is no other missile that will have that kind of performance. The missile is very very strong on cheap 2 dice primary ships, it gives them a massive power boost for 2 turns even if the enemy just takes the 1 damage 2 turns in a row. Its very good at putting damage on high agility low hp ships.

Don't use it on a ship that will do better without the missile... that's just pointless.

It is also a very nasty 3pts anti-stealth device weapon.

17 minutes ago, MasterShake2 said:

I'd argue otherwise. Much of the point of ordinance is to give you burst damage and buff your jousting potential. a missile that says you still need that target lock to fire it, but will only ever do 1 damage accomplishes neither of these goals as it has no burst damage and is very questionable as a joust weapon. The fact that it can only be used twice is also super weak because it's the only ordnance in the game that cannot kill a ship by itself. 1 more point at least gets you ion missiles that can force token spending and have 3 charges, 2 more gets you clusters that has a useful secondary effect and 4 charges and 3 gets you the super underrated concussion missiles that function as a poor man's attack 3 primary. There are too many other options that make more sense for marginal point differences.

Here I though torpedoes were the big burst damage.

Missiles were for clipping fighters that would had a good chance to dodge protons. At least in the game this game is based on.

4 hours ago, MasterShake2 said:

I'd argue otherwise. Much of the point of ordinance is to give you burst damage and buff your jousting potential. a missile that says you still need that target lock to fire it, but will only ever do 1 damage accomplishes neither of these goals as it has no burst damage and is very questionable as a joust weapon. The fact that it can only be used twice is also super weak because it's the only ordnance in the game that cannot kill a ship by itself. 1 more point at least gets you ion missiles that can force token spending and have 3 charges, 2 more gets you clusters that has a useful secondary effect and 4 charges and 3 gets you the super underrated concussion missiles that function as a poor man's attack 3 primary. There are too many other options that make more sense for marginal point differences.

Homing missiles are cheap enough to fit in with a mini-swarm. One ship with homing missiles can be ignored. Four ships with homing missiles is a significant threat.

Also, when using them on cheap, low IN generics, it's nice that they don't need to have loaded up with modifiers. You just need a lock, and that's it. And you still have room for a higher IN ace that can provide attacks that can strip tokens before the homing missiles are even fired.

There's a few situations where you might want to consider it (generally always assuming no other shots are coming in):

1) They have only the lock and you have 3+ dice and an evade. The expected damage is about the same and they have to spend the lock to get it.

2) They have only the lock and you have 4+ dice and a focus or evade. The expected damage is generally better if you make them fire it, *and* they have to spend the lock.

3) You're countdown and you don't mind being stressed.
4) The shooter is a gunboat who has SLAMmed and thus can't spend the lock. Generally these gunboats will have FCS so they can reroll 1 die but with only a single reroll a lot more cases have lower expected damage (ex. 3 naked dice, or 2 w/ focus or evade). Granted you don't have the advantage of them spending the lock here but if you are playing the averages you are slightly better off making them roll it.

In general you need pretty good defense dice + mods to justify it, but it's definitely worth considering that they will almost always have to spend the lock if you make them shoot it, and never if you don't. Thus depending on what might happen the next turn it's worth considering whether it might actually be worse to open them up to a double-modded attack the next turn. This is why I tend to put homings + APTs on gunboats for instance, as the threat of the double-modded APT after free damage from a homing is fairly significant.

4 hours ago, MasterShake2 said:

I'd argue otherwise. Much of the point of ordinance is to give you burst damage and buff your jousting potential. a missile that says you still need that target lock to fire it, but will only ever do 1 damage accomplishes neither of these goals as it has no burst damage and is very questionable as a joust weapon. The fact that it can only be used twice is also super weak because it's the only ordnance in the game that cannot kill a ship by itself. 1 more point at least gets you ion missiles that can force token spending and have 3 charges, 2 more gets you clusters that has a useful secondary effect and 4 charges and 3 gets you the super underrated concussion missiles that function as a poor man's attack 3 primary. There are too many other options that make more sense for marginal point differences.

It's probably more comparable to Crack Shot, where you paid a single point for an upgrade that you could use once, but which might let you push through a point of damage against a turtled target. Or at the least, you're forcing them to make decisions they may not want to make.

Ion and Concussion Missiles both require them to actually hit, or else they're a wasted shot. Homing Missiles are going to do at least one point of damage to a ship in 95% of cases.