I am new to this game and fell in love instantly. I have a question about the Luke Skywalker escort action. I'm just not sure exactly it means so I'm reluctant to use anything till I can explain it to the person I'm playing. We are both new to the game.

Welcome to this great game! 😃

If an enemy squadron is engaged with a squadron with Escort (like Luke or the generic X-Wing for example), that enemy is forced to attack a squadron with Escort.

For example, a TIE Fighter is engaged with Luke and with a Y-Wing. When that TIE attacks, it won't be able to attack the Y-Wing, it has to attack Luke because of Escort.

Hope it helps.

Luke's special rule is that when he attacks a ship he ignores shields. Throw a black dice and apply the damage to the enemy hull. They may brace or scatter the damage with defence tokens but redirecting won't effect this attack as shields aren't used v Luke. Remember Luke has the bomber rule so any crit results on the dice will also contribute to the damage and you can also make the first damage card dealt a face up version as bombers can use the standard crit effect.

Luke (along with standard X-Wings and some other squadrons) also has the Ecsort rule. This means an enemy TIE fighter for example that is at distance 1 of a heavily damaged Y-wing and a fresh X-Wing cannot attack the Y-Wing for a nice easy kill. It must attack the fighter with Escort . If there are several targets to choose from that all have the escort rule then the TIE fighter can choose which escort to attack.

Escort is very usefull for protecting valuable squadrons like Jan Orrs for example to keep them alive while they provide benefits to others or kill things. If one of your squadrons takes a lot of damage then you could fling an X-Wing into that same combat and take some of the heat off it, keeping the wounded squadron alive longer and spreading the damage around while you keep fighting with all your attack dice.

Edit: Ninjad

Thank you guys that helps a lot and answered what was going to be my next question. Can I use brace with out having a shield left on that hull that's being hit.

16 minutes ago, player4222506 said:

Thank you guys that helps a lot and answered what was going to be my next question. Can I use brace with out having a shield left on that hull that's being hit.

Yes. Unless a card (like the capacitor failure critical effect) tells you otherwise, the number of shields on the targeted hull zone doesn’t affect any defense token spending.

You can even spend defense tokens that don’t do anything, like redirecting without any shields left or containing when there’s no crit; it just usually doesn’t make sense to do so.