I've never really bothered with TIE swarms too much as I find it a bit of a headache with so many ships to control but I thought I would give them a go.

Last night I found my swarm face to face with 4 X wings. With similar pilot skill levels and both of us spending 200 points I'd lost the toss and in effect wasted points on black squadron pilots as I ended up deploying first after being given the initiative but that's by the by. I would have been better off with the numbers provided by academy pilots I guess.

What do you do in a situation where you can't kiogran to get behind the X wings because you don't have the distance, you'll end up on top of them? If you break left or break right you're risking him getting on your tail and breaking up your formation. What's my best course of action in a situation like that?

Also is it best to have the initiative if you have the same pilot skills as the enemy? I can see some advantages in it; blocking, jamming him before he gets to shoot, getting any critical hits that you achieve on him to kick in before he gets the chance to shoot back though I realise of course that even if I destroy him he still gets his shot because of the simultaneous fire rule. All that I understand but nevertheless not having initiative and being able to deploy second does seem to be a massive advantage. Seeing where the opponent deploys and seeing what his ships do before you take your actions seems very handy.

Can anybody advise me on what I should have done? Certainly TIE fighters seemed a little bit outgunned and outclassed now X-wings have been improved. I'm sure that's not the case in reality, it's no doubt just my perception.

It sounds like you had no pilots below i3. I imagine your swarm was in a block like this

H H H
H H H

or this

H H H
H H H

If you can't complete your K-turn, it stands to reason that the X-wings won't complete theirs either. This is a situation where you want to self-bump, assuming initiative works out that way. What that means is you have the back row all do speed 1-turns into the row in front of them, so they effectively stay in place. The front row I'm not sure about. I guess I'd turn 1 in with the two on the outside, and straight 2 or 3 to attempt to jam up their forces. If they chose to K-turn, they are now stressed, and you are free to K-turn the next round. If they didn't, you've just scored yourself range-1 shots (although the trade off is that now neither of you have actions).

I'm not a super swarm player or anything, but I've played a fair bit, and that's what I would have done. Note that depending on where the enemy ships are lined up, you could instead bump just one of your TIE fighters, move the others up at varying speeds, stringing along your forces and then watch as the X-wings get bumped further and further back (it's more effective against a large ship). This way only one of your ships loses their action, and then all of your ships have focused shots on the bumped ship (except your lead TIE).

Useful stuff, thanks for the advice. I hadn't thought of the self bumping.

When i play a swarm my main thought for dials is am i going to bump my own ships? and how can i force him to bump.

block! constantly block there moves, if you have 8 ships and they have 4 making one of your ships not shoot because its blocked a ship or 2 is worth that statistically better ship getting no mods for the shot or defense. This goes the same for a 6v4 situation, really the goal should be how can i have mods and them have no mods. By that logic i always want to move first with any kind of swarm or mini swarm, even against arc dodge ships because a ship cant arc dodge anything if its bumped into one of your ships.

I second (third!) getting used to the idea of blocking, and self blocking. One nice thing about swarms of similar initiative is the ability to chop and change movement order to either clear a block or deliberately activate when you 'know' you're not going to get to actually move.

Another point is the common refrain; "concentrate arcs of fire, not ships".

If your TIE fighters are snuggling up to Iden Versio and Cive Rashon (a.k.a. "Howlrunner") then that's one thing. They need to be in a range 1 'bubble' to get their bonuses.

If not....then try not engaging in a tightly-formed-up 'brick'.

The difference between

éééé

éééé

and

è ç

ì ë

éé éé

is that the latter is a lot harder to pull off getting everyone to engage at once but it means that a boosting/barrel rolling enemy is going to have a lot more trouble evading you because rolling out of one attacker's arc generally means rolling into range 1 of someone else. It also means you've got space to koigran turn next turn and for that matter you may be able to 'turn and pursue' with the people on the flanks without pulling a red move, meaning you'll have tokens and your opponent won't.