I have arrived at the conclusion that the most obnoxious and tedious thing in X-Wing is having a vulture droid hard turn, then link an barrel roll into a calculate...and then doing it 7 more times. Separatists were not my first call for a faction, in fact they were close to last, but we didn't have many local players who were seriously looking at them unlike republic.
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The list I took to the Hyperspace trial in Atlanta last weekend was one that picked up the nickname of Space Invaders because of how it flies, it's just 8x Seperatists Drones, 6x of which have Energy Shell Charges. I went through quite a few iterations before arriving at it. The working theory with bringing it was that I2 and I3 ships were becoming more common and most lists you could expect to see at least 1 (In fact all of my 6 matches this weekend had at least 1 and most had multiples) and with that knowledge, the I1 Federation drone was really to vulnerable to getting initiative killed by common meta lists in ways that the I3 Separatist Drone wasn't. In fact because a lot of opponents would have at least some of their firepower shooting after the Sep drones, their ability to remove firepower was more limited and your alpha could be considerably more brutal. That being said, Vulture droid are weird ships in a number of ways and it took me a number of iterations to arrive at this list, so that basically left me with about a week and a half to figure out how the **** to fly it. What makes them weird is the lack of white/blue banks and the presence of generally good other blue maneuvers combined with a Barrel Roll > Calculate linked action. This basically means that all of those normal skills you picked up playing X-Wing with generally sane maneuver dials have only limited application in terms of flying droids and especially flying a lot of them in a group. Then there's Networked Calculations where droids can spend their buddies tokens and this changes a lot of the dynamics in terms of actions, spending tokens and maneuvering. You don't need every droid to have a token to have dice modification, so it behooves you to not necessarily turn everyone around at once or even plot intentional bumps as long as there are friendly tokens nearby. This, combined with learning a turn 0 for 8 ships that don't believe in non-cardinal directions is a steep learning curve that differs substantially from other lists you can fly.
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--Space Invaders and Floating Actions--
I had to develop an opening for this list fast that I could flex into a number of match-ups and what I came up with was the Space Invaders opener. Deploy a block of 4 droids in relatively close formation facing away from your table edge just outside of a speed 2 movement template from the left/rgith board sides, then put 2 more droids on both the left and right side of this block facing towards the 4 man block. The first move for the 4 man block is a straight 3 and the first for the droids on the side is a 1 turn. This puts you into a 2x8 column of droids and ideally you want the other players main element near the opposite corner of the board. This basically forces them to run into your side which allows your column to easily hard turn into a line, possibly combined with a barrel roll > focus to shift your formation left or right as needed. If the other player is all higher initiative and sets up directly across instead of the opposite diagonal, you can just do straight 4's instead of 3's and 2 turns instead of 1 turns and if you get the distance right, you can easily barrel roll into a staggered line and correct that next turn by doing slightly faster maneuvers on the sides. So this opener sets you up for a line or column, but interestingly because this means moving along the board edge, then hard turning and possibly even barrel rollng it looks a lot the formation from the old Space Invaders arcade game. Side Note, if it looks like the other player is trying to get too far ahead of your line, you can barrel roll everyone towards the board edge to give you some more room and less room for them to get under the formation.
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The list also has what I'd call "floating actions" because the calculates can be used by anyone. Obviously, because you need a caculate on a specific droid to fire Energy Shells, much of where you spend on the initial joust will be dictated by simply trying to keep the tokens on the shell-eqiupped droids, but as soon as you move past this, you need to be more discerning about where you spend an when. Sequencing your attacks and spends correctly is a bit of an art. It's also important that, unlike a lot of the lists you'll face, you can still get effective tokens on a turn around as long as everyone doesn't turn around. Just having a few droids hard turn and calculate while everyone else K-turns or Tallon Rolls leaves you in a much better position than an opponent who was only able to K-turn and lost their action. An average list will take 4-5 actions and still have 2-3 tokens left on the table at the end phase. Droids will frequently take 8 actions and have 0 tokens left because every token was spent and modded a dice to a desirable result. This means that even though calculate is a little weaker than focus, the economy the droids enjoy on their caulculates is quite high because almost none of their actions go to waste even if the droid taking the action isn't the one using it.
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--Game 1-- v Seperatists
This was a mirror match and normally when you say this people think, "Oh, 2 very similar lists" or "2 lists of the same faction", no it was an actual mirror, exact same ship/upgrade split. We both had out board sides that we were flying along, but significantly, he was in a line while I was in a column and he moved first. After both of us k-turned on our respective table sides, he just proceeded forwards doing a 2 straight, but then he had an "oh crap moment" when I revealed hard 2's on everyone and turned in. He didn't have a great choice, but to accept a poor joust because the alternative was getting hammered with no return fire. In the opener, I got 2 of his droids and he only got 1 of mine, sweet, looking good. Next turn I had this plan for turning in and halfway through said "and this guy does a hard 1" and then revealed the dial and it was a hard 2...I had actually slighty changed my plan halfway through plotting dials and forgot to fix those 2, so my droids hit a cascade collision. Also, the dice were pretty tame on the unfavorable joust for him, but they turned up to 11 as soon as I messed up and he got 2 and a half droids to my 1. Then it just became a mess of droids running in circles around each other and we both ended the game with 4 droids on the the table although I had 2 at half, so he got a 20pt win. Basically, I took this game away, then immediately handed it back to my opponent.
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--Game 2-- v Rebel I6 alpha
I called an audible on the Space Invaders formation and used my board edge instead of one of the sides because that gave me the best position with the turn 0 and his deployment of a pair of Ion Y-Wings. He didn't call the turn in correctly and only got 1 and a half droids in exchange for losing 2 Y-Wings (1 of them got killed by 2 energy shells, Fuel Leak into a direct hit). From them on, it was pretty uneventful, just Dutch and Wedge Drowning in droids and I still had 5 left at the end of the game.
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--Game 3-- v TIE Salad
I had to call another audible here because his initial deployment of TIE bomber threw me off, then just deployed a bunch of I4's across from the droids, so I had to flex into a line. Fortunately, the TIE Bomber tethered his formation back so he could either slow down or just joust without it and he did the former so I could still get a really good opening joust where I traded 0 damage on droids for a TIE fighter and half of Mareek. The Remaining TIEs faired poorly in the ensuing melee and the game ended with Mareek running from 4 vultures that had all target locked him and reloaded and when they finally caught him, lit him up with fully modded energy shells.
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--Game 4-- v Rebel Beef
Here I just used Space Invaders classic, but my opponent stumbled a little around an energy cloud and didn't look sufficiently set for a joust, so I gambled on just opening up the engines for a 3 hard turn with a barrel focus to try and jump him before he got reset. It worked as expected, losing a droid, but killing Biggs and getting some pot shots at Dutch. Then just wore down Dutch and Wedge with a ball of angry range 1 shots with calculate before chasing after the last U-Wing and downing it, only losing 3 droids in the process.
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--Game 5-- v Scum Aces
Traditional opener, but Fenn Rau looked like he was getting froggy, so I barrel rolled almost flush with the board side, then timed a turn in correctly to spook him out of the fight for about 5 turns while Guri and a Generic Star viper tried to flank, but were overwhelmed by the number for firing arcs. There was a small point of contention later in the game where Fenn Rau moved and I was basically 100% that he hit a gas cloud wherease my opponent apparently didn't think so, and went to boost, and I was like "woah". I really should've called a judge to see if he hit the cloud before anything moved, but it didn't look close to me and the cloud definitely moved while he was pushing Fenn into the guides which for me is an instant "oh, he hit it" moment. The reason this was relevant was because we were near time being called and if hits the cloud, he's out for the rest of the game, but if he doesn't he can boost and then hard turn and boost next turn and get back in. This gave my opponent 22 extra points as he killed a droid that he really shouldn't have been able to attack in my opinion. This is on me for not calling the judge for that placement and it didn't give him the win, but it did lose me MoV. I don't know if it would've made the difference in standings, but it's still annoying.
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--Game 6-- v Republic Beef
Normal Space Invaders stuff, got a good opening joust position, but wasn't able to kill a V-19 with an range 3 normal shot and 3 Energy Shells and did minor damage to Ahsoka. This will be basically be a theme for this game and literally every ship in the Republic list (2x V-19s, ARC, Sinker) other than Ahsoka, survived on 1 hp for at least a turn just long enough to get another shot in. Sinker was the big deal, as I still had 4 droids when I hit him at range 1 with a shot and he had 2hp with a fuel leak and no actions. A kill here leaves me with a lot of droids to try an do Ahsoka's last 3 health, but I only get 2 normal hits and he natties an evade. Then I proceed to fail to kill him for the rest of the game as he's contributing damage both through his guns and giving Ahsoka re-rolls. Reflecting back, I do think I made some wrong decisions, but I don't think the shots I was allocating to kill ships were low, but they probably weren't sufficiently overkill to guarantee the execution. In retrospect, I think the correct call based on the Republic split (Ahsoka on 1 side, clones on the other) was actually to roll the formation into 2x 4 mans instead of single block, so that after the joust, the formation on Ahsoka's side could turn in and more easily finish off clones and their closer proximity to Ahsoka likely would've forced a disengage for her leaving her out longer.
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Conclusions: Most of my broad assumptions about Space Invaders and how it played into the meta seemed to come out pretty consistently correct and going 4-2 (and coming dangerously close to a 5-1) despite some errors that were not small also speaks to how well that initial call probably was. I don't love the list into TIE swarms, but there isn't much in Hyperspace I love into TIE swarms and it at least a game where a slightly favorably RNG break on the joust (or a range 3 opening salvo) can leave you set to beat the TIEs. A week and half isn't ideal to tune a list this weird, but I'm proud I got a 4-2 out of these little guys (finished 13th out of 56) and it has a lot of potential with some more fine tuning. Also, despite not really liking droids initially, the little guys have grown on me.
