So I've read a few things suggesting that there are different sorts of ship roles that ships can be built into. I'm completely new to the game, so could someone give the forum noobs a quick tour of the different ship roles and how they're used to help build lists? While we're at it, I play Scum & Villainy, so what ship/pilot combinations are the basis for the different roles?

This article does an alright job of explaining a possible distribution of roles as "pillars." https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2018/8/21/flight-academy-know-your-ships/

Note that i'm not exactly a good player, mostly casual. The following is based on what i've read and how i perceive things, it may or may not be wrong. Also i'm not familiar with 2E Scum so my examples are mostly for the other factions.

As a general rule, ships can be split into arc-dodgers, jousters, turrets, bombers, and support ships, these provide the role bases for ships though specific abilities and upgrades can alter things. Also faction styles twist things around.

Arc-dodgers possess high mobility and agility but are weak, they attempt to attack enemy outside of their firing arcs. The A-wing, TIE Interceptor, and StarViper are traditional examples, though some high initiative aces like Poe Dameron or Wedge Antilles may try to arc-dodge. The Scum's Fang Fighter is also an arc-dodger though its built-in feature sort of promotes jousting.

Jousters possess durability and firepower while having lesser agility and middling mobility. They fly straight to the enemy, and then turn around for another attack run. The X-wing and Kihraxz Fighter are good examples.

Turrets are ships that either have primary weapon turret or can carry Turret upgrades. They may prefer kiting an enemy, by pointing their turret at the enemy but flying away. The drawback is expense and reliance on actions to rotate turrets. The YT-2400 and Y-wing are good examples, the former being a native turret while the latter can be configured to be one.

Bombers may be literal bombers, utilizing Devices like mines or bombs, or ordnance carriers that use Torpedoes and Missiles as their source of damage. Usually these ships can be configured either way. These have good burst damage but often pay for their abilities with lesser mobility, though they may be quite sturdy. The Y-wing and TIE Bomber are traditional examples.

Support ships usually aren't good at direct combat, may have poor dials, or lack durability, but they affect the game by carrying upgrades that benefit others or hinder enemies, and use actions like Jam and Coordinate. The U-wing, Lambda-class Shuttle and HWK-290 are excellent examples.

There are also ships that could be called "swarmers" like the TIE Fighter or Z-95 Headhunter, they're cheap and weak but this qualities make easy to field many of them at once. Then there are "toolboxes", ships that are very flexible depending on how they're built.

Roles may overlap, sometimes even considerably. The TIE Reaper for example is both a support ship and capable combat ship. Building ships for both roles at once is usually expensive though, and may be difficult to use in multiple roles at once.

Then there's the important distinction between Aces (high initiative pilots) and... well, everyone else. Aces are expensive, and likely core of your team. For example, if you have StarViper Guri, who is an arc dodger ace, you may want to fly low-initiative blockers with her to limit enemy movement (Scyks or Headhunters), or something bigger to keep enemy attention (like... uh, some Firespray-31? I'm not sure, i'm not a Scum player). Or if you have Captain Jonus TIE Bomber who grants bonus to other ordnance users, you'd want to fly him with other bombers. List-building depends a lot on details and what and how you want to play.

There's no real "role" that we could give you a real consensus about, apart from a basic few

A jouster is a ship that moves towards the enemy, exchanges dice, k-turns, and does it again

Basically looking for cheap ships that get efficient access to a lot of modifiers. TIE Fighters are the quintessential example

For scum, you'd be looking at mainly cheap z-95s and khirax. They can be helped by Drea (y-wing) to greatly improved their efficiency by allowing them to reroll their attack dice

The arc-dodger is the exact opposite. You use better manueverability and boost/barrel-roll actions to dodge enemy firing arcs, hence the name. Usually, these are elite and high initiative pilots that are incredibly potent in the late game (when there are fewer ships on the table)

Blockers are there to get in the enemy's face and cause them to overlap, denying them sctions and setting up killer shots. Something like the Initiative 1 yt-1300 Frieghter is a blocker, because it can move fast and boost into your enemy's face.

Now some ships can joust while not being "jousters". You could consider Fang Fighters to be jousters because of their concordia face-off ability, but you generally wouldnt want to jam one in front of a formation of TIE fighters or bombers.

Fangs are basically a hybrid of all three roles, depending on which pilots you use and how you decide to fly them turn-by-turn

Finally, support ships help your other ships out. Escape Craft exist soley for this purpose with coordinate (not counting docking thrm to falcon's) while pilots like Drea and Serissu (m3-a interceptor) can fight but are taken for their pilot abilities

Then there are weird things like the Moldy Crow...the Moldy Crow is basically everything. It has a lot of dice modifiers so it can joust 1v1, it can boost to block or dodge lower initiative pilots, and both Palob/Mux "support" your list by debilitating the enemy

Moldy Crow is really fun, would recommend in every list ?

Generally speaking, the "pillars of X-Wing" are often misunderstood and oversimplified. A better way to put it is that ships will base their usefulness on

-efficiency

-positioning

-control

So "jousters" generally fall under efficiency. They're things that don't have as many tricks up their sleeve but are predicted by things like MathWing to be very good at fighting things. "Aces", "arc-dodgers", and "turrets" usually fall under positioning. They aren't as efficient as other things but they generally can have more favorable board position and better information of where they're going to engage. "Bombs", "ion", "jam", "tractor beams", and "blockers" are examples of control. They force the opponent to be in a certain place, or engage in a certain manner, and deliver debuffs to the opponent's ships that prevent them from properly doing their job. These three aspects are best imagined as a 2-dimensional field (along the lines of a Venn Diagram) - ships may possess differing levels of any/all of these three core capabilities.

A seperate dimension on which to consider ship archetypes is initiative, which can affect all of this. As an example: Many initiative 6 ships exist more as control than as reposition, purely because of their usefulness as information-denial to the opponent. They serve to make it so that an initiative 4 or 5 ace or turret with high reposition capability (Guri, Boba, Kylo, Ved Foslo, etc) cannot go wherever it pleases because that ship doesn't know for certain where the i6 ship will be. Therefore, thinking of ships like Darth Vader, Han Solo, and Wedge Antilles as "aces" is a misnomer of sorts, because there are ships that can do their job of shooting things and repositioning far better for less cost. The reason one pays for these ships is the ability to deny board information to a more efficient i5 ace.

I would say that with 2.0, support has become a sub-category of the jouster pillar, or at least there is significant overlap. Most the ships that you think of as support ships, like the Lambda, HWK, U-Wing, Jonus, Dutch, Howlrunner etc are still very useful in a joust and expected to train their guns on the enemy and roll dice, which means they are contributing to the list as a jouster and as a support. There aren't that many ships I can think of that are support but don't also have to actively engage the enemy as a side effect of having to stay within range of their squadmates. I think those kind of support ships that stay completely out of the fight were mostly a first edition thing, like Manaroo and Palp shuttle. The only example I can think of is the Quadjumper, which is just a weird ship.

But also, the usefulness of these categorizations are debatable. You don't need to have a certain amount of each type in your list for it be good, although I think the lists that are doing well right now are mostly focused on jousting with 1 hybrid joust/support ship added in like Jonus or Biggs and maybe 1 ace included like Luke or Vader or Whisper. But in the end I think you're better served just learning which specific cards are good and bad and which individual cards work well together before getting so abstract as getting into the 1.0 concept of pillars.

I know i found the concept of different roles useful when i started playing, though they definitively don't quite matter when you know more about the game. So many exceptions and blurred cases, and cards do indeed change things a lot.

Ultimately it is perhaps just one method of classifying things. Not necessarily wrong but not necessarily useful either.

I've never seen Kieransi's system before but i can see the logic right away, and i need to consider it more the next time i build a list.

I'm by no means an expert here, but this is my input:

Jouster, Ace, Filler, Blocker, Turret, Bomber, Anvils, Support, Arc dodger/Interceptor.

Jousters are taken mainly for good base stats and decent prices for those stats, usually generics, in groups of 3 or more. They want to fly straight at the enemy for a head-on fight. Some good examples are B-wings, TIE fighters, X-wings, Kiraxes, and Kimolugas.

Aces are usually the "centerpiece" of your list, with great stats, manuverabilty, Action bars,Pilot abilities, and high initative. This power comes at a price, however, and these pilots cost a pretty penny. Some examples are TIE Defenders, Fang fighters, Guri, Whisper, Corran, And Most force users. Note: there is a subset group called "pocket aces" which are slightly weaker for a lower price. Some of these are Soontir, Thane, Named strikers, and barebones guri.

Filler ships are cheap, less than forty points, who are there to mess with target priority and provide some extra dice to throw at the enemy. Some examples are liuetenant blout/generic, zeb in a tie fighter, wampa, strikers, A-wings, and quadjumpers

Blockers are similar to filler ships, except they serve a purpose to make the enemy ships collide with them, denying their actions.

Turrets are pretty basic: they have a turret slot. They can also fit as jousters or filler ships. Example is any ship with a turret, like Y-wings or aggressors.

Bombers are any ship ment to do damage and control the area with bombers, usually with trajectory simulators. They also qualify as a a ship carrying high-damage ordinance like proton torps or concussion/cluster missiles. They have quick bursts of damage to do as much damage as possible, as quickly as possible. Some examples are Punishers, K-wings, Y-wings, TIE Bombers, and occasionally X-wings

Anvils are also list centerpieces, focusing more on heavy damage, lots of offensive mods, and large amounts of hull and shielding. Some examples are Han, Boba, Lando, VCX-100s,and Decimators.

Support ships are not taken to fight directly, but rather to make the other ships in your list better. Not to say they can't have good offense, but that's not the main reason you take them. Some examples are Kyle Katarn, AP-5, Howlrunner, Drea renthal, and esege tuketu.

11 hours ago, ficklegreendice said:

There's no real "role" that we could give you a real consensus about, apart from a basic few

A jouster is a ship that moves towards the enemy, exchanges dice, k-turns, and does it again

Basically looking for cheap ships that get efficient access to a lot of modifiers. TIE Fighters are the quintessential example

For scum, you'd be looking at mainly cheap z-95s and khirax. They can be helped by Drea (y-wing) to greatly improved their efficiency by allowing them to reroll their attack dice

The arc-dodger is the exact opposite. You use better manueverability and boost/barrel-roll actions to dodge enemy firing arcs, hence the name. Usually, these are elite and high initiative pilots that are incredibly potent in the late game (when there are fewer ships on the table)

Blockers are there to get in the enemy's face and cause them to overlap, denying them sctions and setting up killer shots. Something like the Initiative 1 yt-1300 Frieghter is a blocker, because it can move fast and boost into your enemy's face.

Now some ships can joust while not being "jousters". You could consider Fang Fighters to be jousters because of their concordia face-off ability, but you generally wouldnt want to jam one in front of a formation of TIE fighters or bombers.

Fangs are basically a hybrid of all three roles, depending on which pilots you use and how you decide to fly them turn-by-turn

Finally, support ships help your other ships out. Escape Craft exist soley for this purpose with coordinate (not counting docking thrm to falcon's) while pilots like Drea and Serissu (m3-a interceptor) can fight but are taken for their pilot abilities

Then there are weird things like the Moldy Crow...the Moldy Crow is basically everything. It has a lot of dice modifiers so it can joust 1v1, it can boost to block or dodge lower initiative pilots, and both Palob/Mux "support" your list by debilitating the enemy

Moldy Crow is really fun, would recommend in every list ?

I try to fit in 5 categories (because it is easier to silicate them) But one that doesn't seem to be on the list is alpha-strikers. They are like jousters but jousters are in it for the long haul. Alpha strikers hits hard and fast but run out of steam and tend to be more fragile than jousters.

I like the different definitions. In the end, there is no exact science behind it, just a model for understanding.

Things you should ask yourself when building a list and facing an opponent's list: why is each so on this list, what is its goal and win condition, what is the whole list's goal and win condition?

Having a role concept available helps answering these questions