So how do you beat cloneball with Imperials? If your not sure what cloneball is, its also called tower of power or Voltron. Its clones all grouped up (every unit has at least 1 member range 1 from at least 1 member of all other clones) and very seldom move. They only move to win the needed objective in the needed turns. Like moving turn 5 and 6 to win. They sit together sharing tokens across the whole army ( 4 + phase 1 and 2 troopers) with Obi Defending, or Rex making them range 4 nightmare, or anikin/padme allowing them to token share standby (exemplar). Since they practically never die because or Dodges, surges, cover, Red dice, and support from there commander. I loose the majority of my force every game no matter How I go. If I try to be aggressive to get key units off the board I just loose those aggressive moves, If I try to turtle up, I just loose to attrition since he is far more defensive and outlasts my offense and his offense wins. I can't "win on objective" because by the time I can get any points hes usually WAY ahead.

What battle cards are you using? Who is winning the bid most often?

As imperials, I would say your best bet for beating cloneball is activation spam it's one of the only things i've found that works. Republic is basically a better version of the empire so you don't stand a great chance going toe-to-toe with them on two opposing gunlines. It's best to spread out your forces so the clumped up units can only actually shoot a small fraction of your army at a time. force them to spread out and thus make them lose most of their effectiveness. Have a hefty bid for blue player and bring some objectives that hurt cloneball such as breakthrough, intercept the transmissions, and bombing run. Playing any one of those objectives while also trying to play cloneball is an absolute nightmare i'll tell you from experience. Don't play into their hand, spread out, and out-activate them every round and you should be able to beat cloneball based solely on objectives every time

I think (don't have much experience right now with it) that your objectives, conditions, etc would be a place to start as well.

Keeping on the outskirts of the ball, so only a few of the ball can shoot you at a time and then hitting those 2 units hard with what's left of your team so they can't do it again with efficiency is important. Suppression can still be nasty for them.

I think War Weary, Hostile Enviro, Breakthrough, Moisture Vaporators, etc are some choices that would pull the ball out of its comfort zone

Having activation advantage is always helpful

Frankly, having good dice is important. I've hit clones and watched them lose 4 clones from that unit at times.

If there's enough line of sight blocking terrain, an option to win the attrition war could be to use a lot of snowtroopers and Veers or someone that can give them aim tokens. You should get them quickly in a position where no enemy unit can see them and then feed them aim tokens and in their activation make them move out of the cover, attack with Steady and move back to cover. Also complement that with some snipers to make some extra attacks from range 5. You won't be making too much damage, but if the clones don't move, they won't be able to attack you back and by the last rounds you'll have more minis than him to try and win the objectves.

Best thing against Clones I find is High Velocity, not letting them share dodge tokens can be crucial, especially so vs. Obi as it prevents him triggering deflect as well (on top of preventing him getting surge to block), Paired with pierce is the best.

Sadly there is so little of it available, I like using High energy shells on AAT's in CIS to rip through Clone ranks with them, but for Empire your only option is the sniper teams.

Also as mentioned above, a solid bid to get blue player along with objectives that force your opponent to move to win are very strong. Bombing Run, Breakthrough, Vaps and to a lesser extent recover the supplies and Payload.

Some days though with a mountain of dodge tokens or surge tokens at their disposal it feels like clones are all wearing mando armour and if the roll well or even average it feels like you just can't kill them, so forcing win-cons that aren't reliant on killing your opponent are key.

5 hours ago, dennisharlien said:

So how do you beat cloneball with Imperials? If your not sure what cloneball is, its also called tower of power or Voltron. Its clones all grouped up (every unit has at least 1 member range 1 from at least 1 member of all other clones) and very seldom move. They only move to win the needed objective in the needed turns. Like moving turn 5 and 6 to win. They sit together sharing tokens across the whole army ( 4 + phase 1 and 2 troopers) with Obi Defending, or Rex making them range 4 nightmare, or anikin/padme allowing them to token share standby (exemplar). Since they practically never die because or Dodges, surges, cover, Red dice, and support from there commander. I loose the majority of my force every game no matter How I go. If I try to be aggressive to get key units off the board I just loose those aggressive moves, If I try to turtle up, I just loose to attrition since he is far more defensive and outlasts my offense and his offense wins. I can't "win on objective" because by the time I can get any points hes usually WAY ahead.

Need a bit more info to give you any solid advice. What is your list, objectives, deployment and condition? Are you using competitive terrain rules or preset maps? What is the list your having trouble against or is it just clones in general?

24 minutes ago, Shadowhawk252 said:

Need a bit more info to give you any solid advice. What is your list, objectives, deployment and condition? Are you using competitive terrain rules or preset maps? What is the list your having trouble against or is it just clones in general?

Just Clones, Usually 2+ phase 2's 1-2 Phase 1s, Arc troopers strikes or fives 2-3. Anikin/padme. or Rex or Obi and new clone commander. he mixes up the commanders sometimes 1 sometimes 2.

I own all the commanders, All the Operatives, 3 stomies, 3 shores, 3 mortors, 1 scout team, 2 death troopers, 3 pairs of speeder bikes, AT-ST, ! special forces, 1 royal guard.

My go to commander is Iden, but ive used vader, Krenic, Veers, as well as officer. I usually run Shore, mortors. tried many combonations of the other units.

Terrain coverage and setup is pretty vital from what I've heard

13 hours ago, dennisharlien said:

Just Clones, Usually 2+ phase 2's 1-2 Phase 1s, Arc troopers strikes or fives 2-3. Anikin/padme. or Rex or Obi and new clone commander. he mixes up the commanders sometimes 1 sometimes 2.

I own all the commanders, All the Operatives, 3 stomies, 3 shores, 3 mortors, 1 scout team, 2 death troopers, 3 pairs of speeder bikes, AT-ST, ! special forces, 1 royal guard.

My go to commander is Iden, but ive used vader, Krenic, Veers, as well as officer. I usually run Shore, mortors. tried many combonations of the other units.

the best IMP list atm (IMHO) is iden with 3 shores, 3 mortars and 3 ISF with OP, Infiltrate your ISF to get them in a good position and unleash a heavy round 1 alpha strike with tactical strike to try and remove an activation or 2, this means that your later rounds will be easier and you will probably have a 3 activation advantage after round 1.

On 1/14/2021 at 8:18 AM, 5particus said:

the best IMP list atm (IMHO) is iden with 3 shores, 3 mortars and 3 ISF with OP, Infiltrate your ISF to get them in a good position and unleash a heavy round 1 alpha strike with tactical strike to try and remove an activation or 2, this means that your later rounds will be easier and you will probably have a 3 activation advantage after round 1.

This is a very strong counter imo. I would also add to infiltrate behind line of sight blocking terrain and be sure your ISF can pop out, shoot with 2 aims (offensive push and Iden's 3 pip card) then pop back behind cover. This allows you to have 4 large attacks round 1 and helps you have advantage toward objectives due to infiltrate and the damage allows you to basically start ahead on activations and points.

The infiltrate gimmick really only works if you can catch the clones out of cover and get lucky with your attacks.

The problem with ISF is they absolutely suck against clones in heavy cover. Especially if dodge tokens are available.

If the board allows clones to camp in heavy cover youre going to lose because clones are better than ISF point for point. And if you infiltrate and the clones are camped in cover, they now dont have to move, and can spend their actions generating tokens instead of moving. Thats a losing situation for imperials.

ISF are a really inefficient overcosted unit. They cost almost as much as deathtroopers while having significantly less firepower and survivability. And all youre really getting is infilitrate which may or may not even help you depending on the board layout. I also dont think moving your units into range 3 and letting the clones spend their actions on token generation instead of movement is generally the best strategy.

In my experience the best way to deal with clones is to soften them up with Range 4 weapons, force them to come to you and waste their actions on movement instead of token generation, and then finish them off with blast and sharpshooter weapons. The worst thing you can do against clones is let them camp and spend all their actions on tokens while you try to churn into them. Clones are straight up better than Imperials at range 3 and in a range 3 battle youll lose every time. Range 3 is exactly where imperials lose to clones. You wanna soften them up with range 4, force them to come to you, then use powerful range 2 weapons with blast/sharpshooter to outdamage them.

Deathtroopers and Boba Fett work great against clones. Shoretroopers and mortars also work well against clones but arnt very good against AT-RTs. Stormtroopers are a better alternative if youre encountering triple AT-RTs because you need impact to deal with them which the shoretroopers lack. The AT-ST with the grenade launcher is also good against clones and AT-RTs but not so good if they bring a Saber Tank. But if they do bring a Saber Tank your AT-ST is probably screwed because Imperials dont really have a good solution to the Saber Tank.

What commander option do I think is the best for Imperials? I think imperial officers are the best imperial commanders right now (although the clone officer puts it to absolute shame). Sadly all of the imperial commanders are pathetically underwhelming. None of them even come close to Rex or the Clone Officer. At least with two imperial officers youre getting two activations for 90 points which isnt that bad. Hopefully the extra activation can push you upto 11 activations so you have 1 more activation than the clone army. Why dont I like Iden? Because after her compulsory upgrades shes overcosted for what she is and the fact she doesnt have built-in sharpshooter or pierce on her repeater is a huge problem. Why dont I like Veers? because his command cards blow and for 10 points more I can get x2 imperial officers instead.

The clone list thats been dominating here is Rex + x6 Clone Units + x3 AT-RTs with 10 activations. It abuses the **** out of fire supported AT-RTs to wipe out your activations. Its only real weakness that ive been able to exploit is that its limited to range 3. So bringing lots of range 4 and strong range 2 with sharphooter/blast lets you force the clones to come to you, if they move they arnt generating as many tokens, and then at range 2 your sharpshooter/blast helps level the playing field.

On 1/14/2021 at 2:42 AM, Ilostmycactus said:

Terrain coverage and setup is pretty vital from what I've heard

definitely. but clones are way more forgiving when it comes to dealing with bad terrain setups than other factions. just because of the flexibility that token sharing and fire support provide. combined with the fact they have red armor saves and tons of scout moves to get them down field. clones are pretty much good to go on whatever terrain setup.

whereas abundance of line of sight blocking terrain hurts imperials greatly because it blocks their range 4 guns. And lack of line of sight blocking terrain hurts rebels and CIS greatly.

Clones are still the easy mode faction in this game. CIS is just as powerful but at least CIS makes you work for it.

The mortar is one of the best antiarmor options the Empire has. Or I am just extremely lucky with them

As for fighting clones, I see three solutions:

1. Take a good bid and pick objectives that force them to move.

2. Suppression. Clones don't have a good way of dealing with it. Yeah, fire support exists, but it reduces their flexibility and a fire supporting unit will not generate tokens. It is also good to soread it around to deny actions to multiple units.

3. Close combat. This is tricky if they are running Jedi, obviously, but in a list with no Jedi it is a good way to get around cover and throw a wrench in their plans. Dewbacks are suprisingly good at this, as are IRG (no surprise there).

19 hours ago, costi said:

2. Suppression. Clones don't have a good way of dealing with it. Yeah, fire support exists, but it reduces their flexibility and a fire supporting unit will not generate tokens. It is also good to soread it around to deny actions to multiple units.

Fire support doesnt reduce their flexibility, it increases their flexibility, because they have the option to fire support and other factions dont. Having the option to use fire support is only ever an advantage. And being able to use fire support to avoid panicking is way better against Imperials than people seem to realize. Since a common tactic for Imperials is stacking suppression to cause panic. That doesnt work at all against clones. Imperials vs Clones is essentially like playing against a faction that complete negates your faction's advantage and also happens to have units that are way better than your own. The matchup really showcases how underpowered Imperials are.

Also the problem with spreading suppression around is that it doesnt really work in practice, because multiple units with suppression are more likely to roll off the suppression since theres more rolls to remove suppression as well as the fact each each unit gets to automatically remove 1 suppression at the end of each turn. Spread out suppression is very easy to deal with and likely to do nothing. Youre almost always better off stacking suppression on specific units instead of spreading it around.

Thats why suppression is **** near useless against clones. Stacking it on their units doesnt work. And spreading it out doesnt work either.

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3. Close combat. This is tricky if they are running Jedi, obviously, but in a list with no Jedi it is a good way to get around cover and throw a wrench in their plans. Dewbacks are suprisingly good at this, as are IRG (no surprise there).

if clones lose to dewbacks they did something very wrong. Dewbacks are laughably easy to kill since they have pathetic armor, rarely have cover, and are hard to block LoS to.

IRG are decent though but you need to build the list around them with force barrier and some way of making sure they always have cover. otherwise they just get fire supported off the board. you also need the royal guard to help deliver a high threat character... which is where that strategy runs into problems. The main issue with the whole melee strategy is the crappiness of Vader. If Vader was as good as he should be, it might work, but hes !@#$ing awful. ive seen clones kill him easily with just their one black die each. Vader goes down way too easily because speed 1 means hes almost always half dead before he even gets into melee.

Melee lists also tend to be super gimmicky. Lists that rely on melee are almost entirely dependent on good terrain setups to do well. And neither of the autistic versions of Vader make the risk particularly worth it. Vader needs LoS blocking terrain to work against clones and if you dont get that he dies horribly to fire support and crits. Vader not getting the prerequisite buffs he needed is part of the reason Imperials are in this precarious situation against clones. And of course clones got a better version of Vader with Anakin... because practically every clone unit is better than its imperial counterpart. Clones keep getting better and better while Imperials keep getting garbage units.

But yeah youre right about forcing clones to move. Thats how you beat them. If you force them to move you deny them token generation. And the easiest way for imperials to force clones to move is to outrange them with range 4 weapons.

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The mortar is one of the best antiarmor options the Empire has. Or I am just extremely lucky with them

if youre facing a triple AT-RT clone list you really dont want to be depending on the statistically low chance for white dice mortars to either surge or crit. you need impact weapons.

with triple AT-RT hitting the meta I feel stormtroopers are worth taking another look at. I dont think x3 shoretroopers/x3 mortars all the time is necessarily the best corps choice anymore. the lack of impact leaves you vulnerable to AT-RTs which are incredibly devastating with fire support. I make up for the lack of mortars by taking two imperial officers as my commanders. that gets my activation count back up to 11,

Empire lacks a good reliable aoe attack.

Rebels got sabines crazy explosion command card where she can jump in from any hiding space with jump and speed 3 to bomb with 4 dice per unit hit, if you get both detonators at the same spot. Rebel sabs aren't bad of course, but not the most survivable.

CIS got grievous saber whirlwind, if he can get there. However the droid sabs are very mobile, tough (for a strike team) and the poison is very nasty for red save units.

Empire got a slightly worse sab than rebels and not a great way to get them forward. Bossk's gas grenade is nasty, but his playstyle is more a range 4 sniper dude.

Not that you must have an aoe, but it can really punish armies that stack like clones and to a lesser extent cis and imp.

You could bring extra at-st's. There's something to be said about the psychology of having multiple heavies that can cause people to over focus and allow you to maneuver in other ways.

1 hour ago, Ilostmycactus said:

You could bring extra at-st's. There's something to be said about the psychology of having multiple heavies that can cause people to over focus and allow you to maneuver in other ways.

This. Played a clone saber tank against a double at-st list once and those walkers tour through the saber by the end of round 3

If you want to beat clone balls, I recommend a boot to the crutch area.

I would say the biggest thing to work on improving, especially against clones, is terrain placement and objectives choice. Yes, you also need a focused army list, but in my experience, terrain and objective combinations are things players don't spend enough time on when they plan.

You alternate placing terrain, and they normally can't be closer than range 1 of each other, so do your best to layer LOS blocking buildings in such a way that your assumed objectives (you took a reasonable bid, right?) will be placed in such a way that clones have to either move a ton, or run their red armor out of cover to get them. Try and give your range 4 units a lot of avenues to pick off objective grabbers, or a nice perch to camp on. Give your close range units (flamer snow troopers, dewbacks, etc) some good, tall buildings to hide behind on their way to the clone death bubble. You'd be surprised how much of "Turn 0" is important in winning the game. The absolute worst thing you can do is allow clones to just park themselves on objectives and force you to come to them; you're gonna have a bad time.

Most units aren't really just plain "bad", some just require more pre-planning and strategy in other aspects of the game than others. What's your preferred units you like to run? If we have an idea of what you're comfortable with, then we can give more specific tactical advice.

It is worth noting that for competitive play the terrain will almost always be pre-determined so you rarely get to "sculpt" a battlefield that benefits your army.

This is why taking a descent bid is important in trying to securing blue player to use your battle card deck tailored to suit your Army. Being able to pick which side of the table to deploy on can sometimes be enough to give you an advantage you can leverage for victory.

7 hours ago, jocke01 said:

Empire lacks a good reliable aoe attack.

Rebels got sabines crazy explosion command card where she can jump in from any hiding space with jump and speed 3 to bomb with 4 dice per unit hit, if you get both detonators at the same spot. Rebel sabs aren't bad of course, but not the most survivable.

CIS got grievous saber whirlwind, if he can get there. However the droid sabs are very mobile, tough (for a strike team) and the poison is very nasty for red save units.

Empire got a slightly worse sab than rebels and not a great way to get them forward. Bossk's gas grenade is nasty, but his playstyle is more a range 4 sniper dude.

Not that you must have an aoe, but it can really punish armies that stack like clones and to a lesser extent cis and imp.

boba fetts flamethrower is quite good

the problem is boba fett even at 125 points is still too expensive. sabine is also 125 points but shes way stronger. boba fett should be cheaper than sabine because hes not as good. bounty just isnt good enough to make him cost the same as sabine.

imperial units are just straight up worse than other factions units. thats the biggest problem with imperials right now.

you can basically take any imperial unit, compare it to another factions equivalent unit, and itll be worse.

dewbacks are worse than tauntauns, boba fett is worse than sabine, vader worse than pretty much every other jedi, stormtroopers are worse than clones, speeder bikes are worse than barc speeder/stap riders, at-st is worse than saber tank/aat, imperial officer worse than clone officer, and the list goes on and on...

theres nothing that really stands out and makes you want to play imperials anymore. the faction needs some major buffs across the board. They keep getting stupid releases like tie helicopters instead of useful practical units like dark troopers or shadow troopers/jet troopers.

Imperials are where Rebels were pre point changes in that they had a couple of viable builds but were narrowly focused to 3 vehicles like tauntauns, 3 snipers and filler. Imperials have to frankly narrowly define their Meta because Vader is still bad as are a ton of options.

The biggest issue I see when talking about clone ball is which version are we talking about? You mentioned both a Rex and Obi build and frankly that is two different lists, what about triple ATRT? How about double Saber tanks? A palp imperial list (which has won a tourney) is very different from a Iden list. So the idea that you are facing an entire faction and looking for a list that wins against the entire faction is BS.

To beat clone ball generic which is a 10 activation Rex list and your combinations of phase 1's and 2's, ARCs, Imperials should try the old schools double ATST build. A tried and true tournament option from the past that is cheaper now with 10 activations. You can ignore fire support in that fire support most of the time is negative, has less worry about being out activated if a unit gets deleted on fire support. You can then rely on range 4 and 5 weapons in Imp infantry because you have good tankage.

The key to Dewbacks survivability is to end their activation in melee.

16 hours ago, Khobai said:

boba fett should be cheaper than sabine because hes not as good. bounty just isnt good enough to make him cost the same as sabine.

Bounty is not Boba's best feature, but having Sharpshooter 2. Sabine doesn't have even Sharpshooter 1 so I'm not seeing why is so apparently obvious that Boba should cost less than Sabine. Appart from this Sharpshooter thing that I think is pretty big, Boba has more courage, the choice to attack 2 units or concentrate both weapons on 1, and if that's not enough, he can attack at range 3 (sure, not a super strong attack, but it's an option), which Sabine can't. In the other aspects they're pretty similar: same defense, same HP, same speed, Impervious and Jump 2. If Sabine can make her 2 attacks, dice wise she's stronger than Boba, but if you take Sharpshooter 2 into consideration, then Boba's could be much better if attacking units behind cover. Boba even has better innate melee attack, unless you equip Sabine with the Darksaber which adds a bunch of extra points to her.

So why do you say that? I'm trying to understand if there's something in Sabine that I'm missing.

2 hours ago, Lemmiwinks86 said:

Bounty is not Boba's best feature, but having Sharpshooter 2. Sabine doesn't have even Sharpshooter 1 so I'm not seeing why is so apparently obvious that Boba should cost less than Sabine. Appart from this Sharpshooter thing that I think is pretty big, Boba has more courage, the choice to attack 2 units or concentrate both weapons on 1, and if that's not enough, he can attack at range 3 (sure, not a super strong attack, but it's an option), which Sabine can't. In the other aspects they're pretty similar: same defense, same HP, same speed, Impervious and Jump 2. If Sabine can make her 2 attacks, dice wise she's stronger than Boba, but if you take Sharpshooter 2 into consideration, then Boba's could be much better if attacking units behind cover. Boba even has better innate melee attack, unless you equip Sabine with the Darksaber which adds a bunch of extra points to her.

So why do you say that? I'm trying to understand if there's something in Sabine that I'm missing.

Bounty in reality is too hard to pull of consistently to be worth taking a unit because of bounty quite frankly. You need to pick a target before the game starts, you have to get the killing blow on the target and the bounty hunter has to survive till the end of the game. I don’t think I've ever seen a game where a bounty has been collected and it actually affect the outcome of the game, let alone actually seeing bounty's being triggered at all.

The one massive thing that Sabine has over Boba is her 1 pip card, if you can hit 4 or more units with the 2 bombs (which is not unreasonable) you get to roll an extra 16 or more attack dice with no cover.

If for any reason you were able to play either Sabine or Boba in a list I would take Sabine every time.