ForceM said:

When I'm playing against a block of tie fighters, I don't move in such a fashion that all of them can fire on a single ship in one pass without an asteroid inbetween. The problem with the normal formation of ties that I see is that they typically move as one really big ship - all of them follow the same movement but its 2-3 ships wide and 2 deep. This works great in the first pass if they can all get in range 1 or 2 of a ship and all fire at the same ship, but its a problem when the block approaches an asteroid. You either have to split up the big block of fighters, or risk damage pushing through the asteroids. Very rarely do I see people push through the asteroids, but instead they break the formation into two smaller groups. Once the formation breaks you can get 3 rebel ships against 3 or 4 ties before the ties regain the formation, and thats enough to swing the battle in favor of the rebels. By turn 4 or 5, I've killed enough ships that even though the second group of ties is shooting at me again, its 4 on 3 instead of 7 on 4.

@ ForceM,

There is a fundamental flaw in game design with expansions. Part of it is marketing, part of it is prolonging a game to get the most money out of that game’s run, and part of it is breaking up a completed game into parts to sell in stages. X-wing suffers from being a game that was broken up into parts.

I have no inside scoop into this game. I do have an inside scoop into others and I can tell you from experience that this game smells of the third flaw.

However back to wave two being the end all be all of Y-wing difficulties, I never directly said that. I did say it “will be the end of the swarm.” I’ll also be the first to say there is nothing wrong with the Y-wing. I’ll agree with you that the five squint lists will be brutal and I do plan on facing a ton of them at upcoming events. Do I think 4 Y-wings can crush this list? It is possible. Difficult as all Hell, YES! No question. With the PS of four the grey squadron Y-wing will shoot before these fighters. You need to Ion them and then maneuver so that you are out of their firing arch and set up to keep doing this. The downside is there is a squint moving around free no matter what till you drop one.

Back up to before wave two. People in events used to say there is no way a four Y-wing list could beat four X-wings. HOWEVER, I watched my girlfriend destroy two rebel lists with her Y-wings just by blasting them with ion canons and then moving out of their firing arch.

The Y-wing is the most underestimated ship in the game. I worry more about facing a player running four Y-wings and knowing how to use them than an eight-tie swarm. In all honesty the Y-wing should do better against smaller lists! Would I play four Y-wings, No. Doesn’t fit my playing style. Have I seen others play them and destroy? YES.

Also as for my thread, I haven’t posted all of my combos. There are some I’m saving for myself.

I only fly Rebels in this game.

I've only flown Y-Wings.

Last game I played I blew away 7 ties…and it was a Kessel Run winner.

Not claiming to be an expert…but that's all I know….that and the fact this game is a BLAST!

(and yes…I won that game against the swarm)

…but I don't necessarily win often with my Y only philosophy….to be sure.

Picasso said:

Ah someone read Rogue/Wraith squadron… Nice XD

I really doubt that wave 2 will be the end of the swarm since meta will counter it for a time, after all it was the dominant wave 1 build. But then elite builds will come up and will themselves be countered again. Probably by swarms as in any game, spam lists are a possibility of countering elite lists.

I think maybe swarms are not dead but not the game breaking problem as in wave 1. And thats okay.

But the Y-Wing stays overcosted and underpowered. Is it absolutely unplayable? No. It is though a seriously handicapped ship and very very situational. So i would not exactly say it is "fine" nor that it is okay because it is a "support" ship. (What is a support ship? Either you can hold your own or you can't and the Y-Wing cant against most other ships and their respective costs). Also the more Y-Wings you take, the bigger your problem gets usually. Against 3-4 dice attachers you will take 2-3 damage per shot and that means you go down extremely fast.

ForceM said:

People have explained that the swarm isn't the dominant list of the Wave 1 meta. They've explained that the Y-wing isn't overcosted, underpowered, or handicapped. People have explained what a "support ship" means. People have discussed successful Y-wing builds, both in theoretical and empirical terms.

In fact, in four pages, only one person has agreed with your opinion of Y-wings. As I mentioned way upthread, when something like that happens it's time to reconsider whether you might be mistaken.

@ForceM,

I'm not tryi g to be harsh on you but Vorpalsword is right, you need to learn to play the Y-wing. Every ship in this game has a learning curve and I don't think you hit it with the Y-wing yet. Honestly that's ok. It took me playing everyday and loosing over and over again before I got the swing of playing TIE swarms. Once I figured that out I had a much better understanding of the rebel ships and it took me no time at all to learn the x-wing and the Y-wing. It also helped that I play against someone who is devastating with Y-wings. I've seen her set up and do all the tricks.

My advice, mix it up. Try new things and expect to get your butt kicked. The Y-wing is the hardest ship to fly in the game.

I thought of something about The y-wing and wave 2. Wouldn't the y-wing be quite problematic against yt-1300s and firesprays

Karon said:

Remember it's two ion tokens to ion a YT-1300 or a Firespray.

Ions are. It isn't as destructive against the falcon because of the 360 ability however you can skirt the sides of a slave one and ion it all day without worry of being shot at. The three attack dice to the two evade on the slave one favors the ion cannon.

Karon said:

I wouldn't want to be a Y-wing pilot going up against either ship considering the firepower although I speak from the prespective of a real fight, not with models.

This thread is going around in circles now. ForceM isn't going to concede his point and neither will anyone else being this is the internetz, so everyone should agree to disagree and keep playing X-Wing OK?

And even if it was proven to be a fact that Y-wings are the worst thing ever in Star Wars I would still run them in my rebel builds. If you didn't then you aren't a real Star Wars fan =p

I let this thread repose for some time now, and did it on purpose because it was going in circles, and now that i have a full set of Wave 2 stuff finally, i have tested the Y-Wing again against lots of stuff. Also Vorpal would probably have come through the Internet cable and beat me up if i had continued XD Even if i still think i had a lot of points…

Firespray - Ion it twice takes some time, and Heavy Laser cannon rips Y-Wings apart. Also it is pretty ridiculous that a huge ship like this one has 2 agility and an evade symbol… Meaning even that huge machine is way more agile and manoeuvrable than a Y-Wing. My tip, park the Y in its way, works fine especially with your low skill pilots. I also found out that Y-Wings don't care about Krassis tokens since they go in soft circles anyway most of the time…

Interceptor - Eats Y-Wings for breakfast and if it has a stealth device, good luck hitting it XD. Thankfully has only 3 hitpoints and it is more expensive than standard Ties. So you have a shot at killing them before they kill you, which is actually good for Y-Wings… Also the Ion-Turret just got even more useful since Interceptors are so manoeuvrable, your other ships have a really hatd time getting shots at them at all… So despite them having a 3 attacks, they ate in my opinion less dangerous than 2 standard ties (for Y-Wings, not the other ships).

The good thing about the Y-Wing now is that in fact there seem to be much more elite builds also on imperial side, and you can setup some kills for your squad with a Y-Wing. You could also do this before Wave 2 but against 7-8 ships they would just not care to lose one and kill you dead before you could.

The bad news for the Y-Wing is really that HLC absolutely obliterates it, and of course that it is even moreso reduced to the ion turret. It made no sense to field Y-Wings without them before, but now, i would not even think about a "naked" Y-Wing.

One thing i really regret is that you have no pilot with a medal on Y-Wings because Push the limit would have assured some hits for your turret with your 2 actions and on top of that, Y-Wings dont care about stress tokens a lot. Really a pity it limits the builds you can have for Y-Wings by a lot. I also find it unrealistic that someone like Horton Salm who is the one that actually allows Rebels to capture Soontir Fel and saves Wedge Antilles live too, is not an ace pilot and doesn't have the Medal symbol.

I didn't have time to test it against the Falcon or A-Wings and i still have to figure out if i prefer A-Wings with missiles or Y-Wings with turret as cheap ships to fill up a squad.

By the way, i am a huge Y-Wing fan, that is why i started the thread at all, because i found it a pity they were apparently so awfully bad!

ForceM said:

I'm really quite a nice guy. I just have strong opinions. (c:

I think you're largely right in your analysis, but overstating your case. The HLC isn't nice to Y-wings at all, but will realistically take 3 shots to kill one. If your opponent wants to spend 2-3 turns with his 40+ point centerpiece taking out your 23-point Gold Squadron Pilot--while you're presumably savaging said Firespray with everything you've got--you've quite decidedly come out ahead on that exchange.

Interceptors are, as I think you've correctly recognized, something of a gamble: their firepower is dangerous to the Y-wing, but the ion cannon is pretty frustrating blow if it lands.

So I think massed fire from TIE fighters remains the biggest threat to Y-wings, and there will likely be less of that as Imperial lists appear to be shrinking from 6-8 ships to 4-6 ships. On the whole I think Wave 2 is pretty good news for Y-wings…

It would be nice to have an elite skill for Horton or Dutch….seeing as how the A-wing's Green Squadron Pilot gets one ;-) IMO.

I would also second a medal icon to Horton at the very least, if not Horton and the Gray Squadron (I could see why you might not give a medal to Dutch). I would run Gray Squadron and Red Squadron much more than I do if they had pilot upgrade options. Gray Squadron w/ Deadeye & 2 proton torps would be fun to try out at least once.

Actually, I was thinking that if Fantasy Flight does booster additions for pilots, it might be nice to get a Gray Squadron Leader Ship and a Red Squadron Leader ship that give benefits to other Gray Squadron and Red Squadron ships. Perhaps for 21 points you could get Gray Squadron Leader, and it gives other Gray Squadron ships the option for pilot upgrades?

Endgame124 said:

The problem with that is that Red Squadron and Gray Squadron already have leaders. Garven Dreis, Wedge Antilles (Dreis at Yavin and Wedge at Endor) and Horton Salm were the leaders of Red and Gray Squadrons.

Jim

Before I post I should probably explain my mentality when approaching X-Wing. I value firepower and dodge when considering builds and I don't usually have time for complex combinations of abilities. Rather than a clever combo of using Ion cannons to get optimal position and proton torpedoes, I would rather have an X-Wing with Target Lock to get into range 1 to vaporize that fighter and remove it for play. Or at least, drastically bring down the HP so that my opponent is less adventureous with it (especially TIE interceptors, since it hurts more when one of them goes down).

I find myself in agreement with ForceM. I wrote up my thoughts on the matter regarding the Y-Wing on BGG. A bit of discussion resulted, with some folks extoling the power of the Ion cannon, but I'm still convinced that presently the Y-Wing is the worst fighter in the game. It doesn't have to be, but when I look to build a Rebel list I see every other ship in the game as being a more attractive option. I would easily trade out a Y-Wing with an Ion cannon for an X-Wing, and happily blast a TIE fighter at range 1-2 over making one-damage Ion fun with the 360 cannon.

If I really wanted a turret I would find some way to take an outer rim smuggler.

The problems with the Y-Wing in my judgement are the lack of agility and the lack of offensive firepower. If the Y-Wing had a turret that could deal a decent amount of damage, that alone would be an improvement because flying a pack of turret'ed Y-Wings can fire in every direction and better take down more than one TIE fighter a turn. The agility cannot be helped, since that is hard-printed, but if the Y-Wing had better upgrade options the resilency could be combined with better firepower to make the Y-Wing a decent fighter. The Torpedoes are too ineffective against present Imperial fighters because ALL of them have the highest natural dodge in the game. The only good target the rebels will be using torps against is the Firespray, and the YT in tournaments.

I like to run TIE Swarms, and I was the only one to run 7 TIEs at our local Kessel Run Tournament of about seven players. Just about everyone else was a 3-4 ship Rebel build, and I destroyed my opponents in 45 and 30 minutes respectively before the final run. Asteroids are not a serious impediment to formaiton flying if you know what you're doing, set up properly, and can accurately judge how your fighters are moving. Howlrunner with a group of 3 attendant Obsidian pilots can focus-fire a Y-Wing into oblivion before it usually has a chance to fire. Once you pop the first fighter in a 3-4 ship formation things look much worse for the Rebels than if the Imperials had lost one ship.

This list HAS lost to a rebel player, but there were no Y-Wings in his list to do that.

I wouldn't call the Y-Wing completely useless, just that it is the least attractive fighter in the game as of Wave 2. Again for a Rebel list, I'd rather take other ships since the Y-Wing doesn't look attractive to me based on my approach to the game.

Now, my guess is with Wave 3 likely including two proton-torpedo users (The TIE Bomber and B-Wing), we'll see more torpedo options for the Y-Wing to take AND There will be more targets to viably use torpedoes against. Both of these fighters are usually portrayed as being low-agility, which means Protons would be great against them. In this case Y-Wings are a workable counter for TIE Bomber and B-Wing lists, since they have enough resiliency to survive most swarm attacks long enough to let their torpedoes go. Better if they fire before TIE Bombers, their likely adversaries, and destroy them before the Bombers let off their Torps in turn.

Its looking like Ions (dutch in particular) will to continue to be one of my go to ships, especially against the uber maneuverable Imperial ships like Turr, Soontir, etc. Playing with the 3 ship imperial build, I did great against a standard rebel X-Wing & A-Wing list, but I suspect I would have been crushed by a couple of Y-Wings as I would have lost all of the benefits of my maneuverability.

The Empire seems to be balanced more for large numbers of cheap ships, which would make them more vulnerable to Ions *shrug*

I do have to wonder if Rebels are better matched against other Rebels. The Ion cannon seems to be better at restricting the already restricted moves of their main fighters, and protons do better against ships with medium to poor agility dice (like every Rebel ship except the A-Wing).

Endgame124 said:

That's exactly the thing, the Y-Wing still does pretty poor against the swarm. A 4 X-Wing build is still the way to go against these "traditional" imperial builds. But a lot of the new Imperial lists are only 3-5 ships strong. They have lots of firepower of course and X-Wings just can't outmanoeuver the like of Fel, Phennir or any Tie with boost, barrel roll, Push the limit, but now the Rebels access to turret weapons, be it Y-Wings or the YT-1300 starts to make some sense at last. An ioned Soontir Fel is worth a lot more than an ioned Academy Tie… Since it makes up a third of the imperial force nowadays. Of course the new imperials have lots of firepower and they will make quick work of Y-Wings too. But at least they can not outmanoeuver a 360 Turret, no way! So the Y-Wing has found a niche, and can be seen as useful now i think.

After having a few games under wave 2 under my belt, i am positively surprised. FFG now seems to have achieved some kind of balance between elite builds and spam lists, big ships amd small ships, and even Rebels versus Imps. There is a counter to pretty much everything now. Swarm is beaten by A-Wings with missiles, X-Wings or even some elite Falcon builds. Elite Rebel builds can be beaten by Swarms or elite imperial builds… That's now a very different kind of game than it was with wave 1 only stuff. Also with gunners and rerolls, the evasion tokens seem a lot less frightening now. Empire also has to focus now sometimes instead of just evade all the time. If they wanna kill a Rampaging falcon killing them one after another fast enough to win, they will have to make some choices and press the attack whereas before they could evade all day long and just focus Antilles…

I would not have thought it but also the YT-1300 really has convinced me, especially Chewie or Lando plus two other ships (well before i played it i thought it would be at most a huge Y-Wing with a decent gun… ) And you all know how much i liked Y-Wings. Biggs is now even more useful having stealth device and something really big to babysit… i have to test the outer rim smuggler still, i have no real opinion about it right now.

I have to say i am really happy with where this is going now. I love it and had a real blast with the new stuff!

I'd recommend the outer rim smuggler with a healthy escort force. He's low point to allow you to take more ships to do more of the fighting. Less HP, lesser of an attack, more emphasis on being a setpiece in a ship formation than being a key player. Only has two crew slots and one modification slot for upgrades.

I used mine as a moving obstacle and supporting fire ship while a green squadron A-Wing pair and Wedge did most of the killing.

ForceM said:

Sounds like FFG got it right. For once I'm not let down by something with "Star Wars" written on it. Yay!

I want to add this without starting a hoopla. Last night I watched a good player use four grey squadron Y-wings with turrets take on two slave ones with heavy guns. Y-wings won. In the past few weeks I've seen Y-wings take on four squints and ion them to death. Game is in the player people. Not the ship.

Picasso said:

Yeah that's exactly the kind of squadrons, Y-Wings excell against. But such imperial builds just were inexistent before wave 2, the way to go was 7-8 ships and you can't beat that with Y-Wings (or at least i have too see it yet).

I might even try out a Smuggler plus 3 ionwings and a little equip. Little damage output, and no dodge to talk about, but what would that be… 34 hitpoints and no hiding from the turrets… Sounds like fun to me even if there are sure better uses for Y-Wings.

The only problem with Y wings is the amount of points that it cost to mount an ion turret.

Everything else is fair ties were designed to be fast moveable and have firepower but no shields or jump engines.

You look at how much it cost to mount gunners and weapons on slave one and compare the falcon.

I think if you reduced the y wing to five points or just extended the ion cannon to ranage three.

But if your swarm comes near my y wing my A wing and x wing will pick you off

ive got no concens about shooting you in the back.