Has anyone received any clarification or come to a community consensus on whether or not an Ion Cannon can trigger a critical hit? This is one of the only areas of game that I find overly hazy. Most glitches at least lean strongly one way or the other. But in this case you follow all normal attack functions up to and including dealing a damage, and THEN cancel all die results. But if my only hit is a crit…does it count? I'm really torn over this one. In other games it would be easy to declare it 'auto damage' and be done with it, ignore crits. But in this you actually deal a damage card. So who's to say it isn't dealt face up? And it's only after this point that the results are canceled out. So yeah. I'm stuck. Opinions?

KarmikazeKidd said:

Think about it like this. Start off as you normally would for an attack.

1. Player 1 rolls his attack dice, and uses whatever abilities he has to alter the roll (e.g. Target Lock, Focus).
2. Player 2 rolls his Agility dice, and use whatever abilities he has to alter his rolls (e.g. Evade, Focus).
3. Compare results. If one or more hits get thru, your ship is considered "hit". (no damage dealt yet)

Then you would follow the card text.

1. Your ship suffers one damage, and no more (from the card, not from dice rolls). Then cancel all dice results.
2. Your ship receives one ion token.

If your ship is "hit", the damage received comes from the card and not the dice results which are cancelled. The dice results just determine whether or not your ship gets "hit". Since all of the dice results get cancelled, it is impossible to get critical damage from an Ion Turret.

Roy

My reading of the card is no critical hit.

For what it's worth, I think you're probably correct. But for the sake of argument, if it were intended to work that way it would be better phrased "If this attack hits the target, immediately cancel all die results. Then the ship is give an ion token and receives one damage." As it is currently ("If this attack hits the target ship, the ship suffers 1 damage and receives one ion token. Then cancel all dice results." it could be taken to mean simply that in place of any further damage beyond the first that may occur, it gets an ion token. The fact is that at the point the damage is dealt, the results of the roll are still relevant. Again, I tend to agree with you. But I think there is room enough for discussion here to be worth hashing it out, and it's the only thing as of yet I've been compelled to email them about.

Also, thanks for you thoughts and explanation of them. I appreciate it.

KarmikazeKidd said:

But 1 damage is not 1 critical damage.

KarmikazeKidd said:

I see what you're saying, but you have to think about the order that the card tells you to do things in, and not the normal order of events. Remember that " Some abilities on cards conflict with the general rules. In case of a conflict, card text overrides the general rules. " This is one of those cases. You first decide whether or not the ship has been hit by rolling and comparing dice results. Once the ship has been considered "hit", you do the next step on the card. Which is to suffer one damage and receive 1 ion token. If it was a critical damage, it would say suffer one critical damage. Then it says cancel all dice results. So any damage or critical damage from a dice roll is cancelled. So it never reaches the ship.

Roy

I was also confused about ion cannons, so thank you for the explanation. Here is another question that came up with my group; If the Ion cannon hits a ship with shields, i.e. TIE Advanced…

1. does the hit take out just a shield?

2. does the ship take one hit?

3. does the ion cannon take effect if there is a shield?

Thank you for the help.

Jim

1. If the ship hit by the Ion Cannon has shields, then it loses one shield token.

2. The ship takes one hit, but all shield tokens must be removed before it takes hull damage (See #1 above) i.e. there is no "bypassing shields" with an Ion hit.

3. Yes

Thanks for the clarification. My group ran into this one as well.