Looky here, another article: https://thenerdstreamera.blogspot.com/2020/01/musings-on-epic-listbuilding-gr75.html

Excellent article! I have thoughts, but work followed me home yesterday and I couldn't look at the cards and put everything together. This weekend I will.

Amilyn Holdo. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to make her work on a GR-75. Never figured it out. What's holding her back is that she triggers when her ship engages, and the GR-75 engages at initiative 1. This means she can only aid ships at i1 or i0. Any named bombers that reload (except Cat) will still have their weapons disabled tokens when they engage. And the GR-75 can already help them ditch those tokens with the Resupply Craft ability.

So I think she's better off on a smaller ship with higher initiative. You could even put her on a bomber to take a reinforce token from the GR-75 and give it the weapons disabled token. But then she's not on the huge ship, so that's out of the scope of this conversation.

Rating: C-tier. The only reason she's not F-tier is because you could run her with a bunch of i1 X-wings, A-wings, and bombers, and I think it wouldn't be awful. GR-75 with Holdo flying alongside 3x each of X-wings, A-wings, and Bombers leaves you 59 points to kit out the bombers and GR-75.

@Stefan Alright, I finally have some time to engage in conversation about Epic! I'll try to take this in the order you did, so here we go.

Command Upgrades

Mostly agree. I think you may have been a bit harsh against Raymus Antilles . Yeah, he's probably too expensive currently at 12 points (fully double the cost of Stalwart Captain), but the main point of the card isn't just to shoot again - you survive until the end of the End Phase. As in, all other scenario effects happen before you are removed. Depending on the scenario, this could be HUGE. Sure, they get the 70+ points for your GR-75, but you can score all of your objective tokens. I'll grant you that he's not as good on a GR-75 as he is on a CR90, but I still put him in B-tier.

Hardpoints

Agree, agree, agree. I think the only thing I have to add is that you need to take a title ( Quantum Storm or Luminous ) to get your energy capacity high enough to even equip Turbolaser Battery . Yeah, I agree that you shouldn't do that.

Point-Defense Battery deserves another mention here because you can equip it on Luminous and have the energy you need to really be a nuisance. Here's a sample build:

Echo Base Evacuees (55)
- Luminous (12)
- Point-Defense Battery (9)
- Optimized Power Core (6)
- Damage Control Team (3)
- Perceptive Copilot (8)
TOTAL: 93

Can you name a standard ship worth 93 points that gets 4 attacks, a reinforce, calculate, and two focus tokens all backed up by 12 hull and 2 shields? The Decimator comes close, and so does the VCX, but this thing is still lightyears better. I totally agree that the GR-75 is made to be a support ship, but it can sure dish out some damage for its points. Worth it!

Turrets

Agreed. If you could get a gunner on board so you could fire it in addition to the primary, maybe it would work on a gunboat-style build. Actually, I kind of like pointing a turret sideways so you have a really big arc but with different weapons. Still not putting it at S- or A-tier.

Crew

You wrote,

Quote

"There are some uses for Toryn Farr (Rebel Alliance). While you usually don't want to Target Lock with a GR75, it being red and all, the following red Coordinate (that's two energy for everyone that keeps counting) allows any ship to lock on whatever you just locked."

I just want to point out that Toryn Farr grants the GR-75 a white lock action. So the lock -> coordinate linked action only costs 1 energy for the linked coordinate. Not bad! This is also true for Damage Control Team, which grants the GR-75 a white Reinforce action linked into a white Calculate action. So Toryn Farr is a nice way to get 3 actions for the price of 1 action and 1 energy (lock with GR-75, coordinate a focus to a ship which then locks onto the ship the GR-75 is locking). Seems good for a Torpedo strike. I think it moves her from C-tier to B-tier. In fact, just go ahead and switch her spot with Amilyn Holdo's.

Cargo

Yeah, I pretty much agree here, but in my personal experience Tibanna Reserves is A-tier. That action is a steep cost. Still, I haven't included it on my GR-75 too much, so maybe it is that good on a GR-75. The loss of action is probably worth the energy for Resupply Craft.

I also need to try Adaptive Shields. If you are using energy to let friendlies recover shields, that means they aren't shooting your GR-75, so you can spend you shields to prevent damage, too. Seems alright. Worth putting on the table for sure.

Titles

Luminous . You must try it! It might be a little overpriced now that we have plenty of clarification about how ships in reserve interact with scenario rules. Before those clarifications, I was shouting "Up, up, UP!" with the points. But even at a high point cost, this thing can just wreck your opponent's deployment. Once I used it to run down a wing of TIE fighters. Fun for me, not for my opponent. I was literally in his deployment zone on round 2. I can almost guarantee you won't miss the extra 9 points this thing costs over Quantum Storm . Being able to set up your huge ship with perfect knowledge feels almost dirty it's so powerful.

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You'll notice I mention scenarios quite a bit. I just don't enjoy epic death match because it often ends up as "line up against each other and destroy their most fun ship before they destroy your most fun ship." Scenarios add a layer of depth, especially in deployment. You don't have to bunch your ships together; you can spread them out, go for objectives, regroup if your ships need backup - it's just so much better!

Thanks for all the comments, I modified the article based on them. As you noticed, I didn't play scenarios yet AT ALL, so I have no experiences there. Will try soon!

4 hours ago, Stefan said:

Thanks for all the comments, I modified the article based on them. As you noticed, I didn't play scenarios yet AT ALL, so I have no experiences there. Will try soon!

Oh, I didn't mean for you to change the article - your opinions are just as valid as mine. I just wanted to share my opinions, too.

Why, you're points were better, and I want this to be a deliberative effort. It's not like I'm Pro of the Pros

On 1/25/2020 at 5:15 AM, Stefan said:

Thanks for all the comments, I modified the article based on them. As you noticed, I didn't play scenarios yet AT ALL, so I have no experiences there. Will try soon!

My thoughts are that the GR-75 and Gozanti are better suited for the scenarios. I think they can fit into the 300 pt games pretty well. I want to try more, but my locals don't want to do Huge ships on the weeknights.

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