5 ships is as close to a swarm as a rebel fleet can get at 100 points.

Gold Squad Pilot

Gold Squad Pilot

Rookie Pilot

Rookie Pilot

Rookie Pilot - R5 Astromech.

Knowing that toe to toe the Rebel ships are just plain better, and knowing that most 'swarm fleets' are now running 6 ship builds, rather than 7-8 ship builds, can anyone see this fleet as being competitive?

Why? Why not? and has anyone actually tried it and can give feedback.

Things to worry about in this list, Everything you have will be going second when compared to the "Swarm fleets" and the reason of course being they are swarming to Pilot skill 9 with most their ships. So you will have to wether a hail of fire power and if your opponent is intellegent (which you should always assume they are) then they will focus fire and start with X-wings first as those will go down faster. If I was playing against you with the TIE swarm I have been playtesting now. I would try to knock out your two rookie pilots right away as then your fire power is drasticly reduced and if I swarm I would have a very good chance of doing that in my first round of shooting as long as my dice didn't hate me.

Also I didn't see Ion Cannons on the Y-wings, which to me is the only way to run those things as having the freedom to shoot at 360 degrees with 3 dice is nice. It means you don't have to worry about manuvering.

The positives of this list is a lot of good shooting resilient ships, there is something to be said about forcing your opponent to have to commit everything against one target at a time.

Now all those things considered no one is an expert and this game is designed well enough that there are few "bad builds". A lot of it is in playstyle and tactics, so go forth and playtest against people see how it treats you.

It feels like an all your eggs in one basket sort of thing.

But really it means you will pretty much always have lower skill, that means moving first and shooting last.

Moving first makes choosing your actions harder.

Shooting last means you will likely be dead before you get to go.

But if you are really good at reading your opponant, maybe it could work.

You might also be able to run interfearance with by forcing collisions with ships that move after you, but you will still be out numbered and you might lose oppertunities to shoot.

Big advise, loose your droids and pick up ion-cannons.

edit: you don't have droids to get rid of. But I would still try to find a way to add at least one ion-cannon.

Hi all, thanks for the thoughts so far.

For note: I'm not actually planning on running this build, it's more for philosophical/interest sake as I find these discussions deepen everyone's understanding of both the game and the meta-game.

As soon as you have a Y-wing with an ion cannon, you can't run a 5 ship build - it just won't fit. Hence the lack of anything save 1 droid.

As soon as you add ANYTHING to any of the ships, you have to drop a ship and be back at a 4 ship build.

So the question is, not what can be changed, but could this work effectively as is.

godofcheese said:

Well, that's not entirely true. You absolutely can have an Ion Cannon and a 5 ship build. You can have 2, even.

5x Gold Squadron Pilot, 2x Ion Cannon = 100 points

How viable is it? Well, I giggle just thinking about this squad and the term "viable" all in one sentence. I guess the one thing it's got going for it is there's a ton of shields and hull to go through. And I guess you could maybe, in theory, lock down a couple of ships with your Ions and get your other 3 Y-wings into Range 1 position behind them.

That's a BIG maybe, though.

I consider ion cannons to be mandatory on Y-wings, since without them the ship's poor maneuverability and two attack dice make it difficult to reliably damage Imperial fighters. In a mirror match you'll hit more, but your low evade dice make you a fun target for X-wings in general and Wedge in particular.

And with ions on all Y-wings, you can't build a 5-ship squad… Yet.

I really don't see how a five ship list could work for the Rebels. With two gold squadrons and three X-wings, the three X-wings get focused to death, and the Y-wings play little to no part at all until your enemy runs out of squishier targets to kill. And with 5 Y-wings it's easy enough to dance around them and pick off the Ion cannons as you're only rolling one agility dice. Right now, the rebels can't really pull off swarm tactics. Who knows though, maybe the new wave of expansions might bring the average points up a bit, what with the larger ships and more variety in general.

I would think of this as a paper tiger list, But please do some practice runs with this list. And let us know how it runs. Me personally I use 3 to 4 ship build, mostly making an evasive tanky build. but thats how i roll. i would love to see how well you list does.

Oddly enough, at this Saturday's league event we had a guy play this exact team (3 x-wing, 2 y-wing = 99 points) and he ended up coming in third place of the 8 players. I think a lot of this was due to this being an odd week where we only had 1 players bring an Imperial team, so he was able to get points leads on a lot of 3-ship rebel teams.

The first volley took down shields and maybe hurt a ship, but didn't kill it (luck possibly). He was then able to counter attack at his lower pilot skill turn and with 5 attacks able to typically take out one of the three targets. He always quickly lost his damaged ship the next turn, but his opponent used up most or all of his attacks to accomplish that, so his remaining 4 ships put a sizable dent in one of the other 2 remaining targets.

This is how he won his two games. Unfortunately I didn't get to play against him, but I hear the team that beat him was 4 ship Rebel team (named X-wing, 2 generic X's, Gold w/ ion).

I guess what I am trying to say is that the 5-ship team can work, but you are betting that you will be able to win the battle of attrition as losses don't mean as much to you as other Rebel builds. It didn't face the Imperial player.

Note: this was an unusual week for us as a lot of regular Imperial players all decided to run 3-ship Rebel builds for a change.

Highball said: