I'm thinking of running 4 A-Wings. Mainly for fun and something different. I want to run 4 Y-wings one day but at the moment i only own 3.

Anyway, I think that 4 A-Wings can be pretty dangerous if they carry missiles but I might be wrong and want to ask you experts. How much damage can 4 missiles do? Will they seriously hurt a falcon? Will they really mess up a swarm?

For the A-wings to be effective I think they need a powerful first strike. If I run 4 A-Wings I definitely want to try out Tycho with Push the limit, and he does take a lot of points.


Tycho (26) Push the Limit (3) Homing Missile (5) 34pts

Prototype Pilot (17) Homing Missile (5) 22pts
Prototype Pilot (17) Homing Missile (5) 22pts
Prototype Pilot (17) Homing Missile (5) 22pts


The problem I see with the list above is low activation. Isn't it kind of wasting the boost action? Don't A-Wings need to boost away and stay out of trouble while simultaneously sneak a range 1 shot in from the flank to be effective?

Higher activation should mean a stronger mid to late game I think. So there is the option of Green Squad pilots but the trade off is less missiles.


Tycho (26) Push the Limit (3) Homing Missile (5) 34pts

Green Squad Pilot (19) Homing Missile (5) 24pts
Green Squad Pilot (19)
Green Squad Pilot (19)

That's 96 points there. 4pts left to spend can be anything from…

1 concussion missile
3 vet instincts @ 99pts.
1 Push the limit 1 vet instincts
1 shield upgrade
1 stealth device with vet instincts

Thoughts?

I like the second list with three Veteran Instincts, gives you a decent Pilot Skill rating… The lack of firepower could be a worry, though…

Maybe mix the two up alittle and see what results you get?

R2-EQ said:

I know Picasso has been running multiple A-wings for a while now, so hopefully he can give you a more experienced answer. From a theory perspective, though, 4 missiles can do up to 16 damage. They're likely to roll about 12-14 hits if you do it right, and depending on the target that might translate into anything from 3 to 12 damage.

But you have to be a little bit careful how you deploy missiles. I saw a lot of people in Wave 1 deploy missiles and torpedoes without any kind of support, and that's actually fairly likely to miss. What you want is more like what Vader does: you want to be able to use an action to buff the missile when you fire it. That means using Homing Missiles, which don't require you to spend your Target Lock when you fire (and therefore leave it around to use as part of the attack) or gaining multiple actions.

So these are my two front-runners for missile-carrying A-wings:

• Green Squadron Pilot (19) + Push the Limit (3) + Concussion Missile (4)
• Green Squadron Pilot (19) + Deadeye (1) + Homing Missile (5)

The named pilots are too expensive to still fit a lot of good missile boats in a squad, although Tycho + Push the Limit + Concussion Missile might be fun in a list along with some other Rebel ships.

glad i'm not the only one looking into it.. but my idea was this

Green Squadron Pilot x4 with Homing Missle x4 and Veteran Instincts x4

executor said:

My quibble with that--which I had pointed out to me several times, when I was having a similar idea for Interceptors--is that PS 4 already means that at worse you're tied with all other generic pilots. PS 6 gets you ahead of exactly five more pilots: Krassis, Chewie, Biggs, Winged Gundark, and Night Beast.

Firing ahead of every generic pilot plus a handful of named pilots isn't a bad thing, but at least where missiles are concerned, Deadeye goes one step further. Since you don't have to worry about Target Lock, you can easily fire missiles at any target in your firing arc, regardless of pilot skill.

Deadeye also means you're not telegraphing your intended target(s) to your opponent, which is handy because it means no one is safe and every pilot has to fly conservatively, rather than one pilot having to and that you're not limited to targets you picked ahead of time--if you kill or sufficiently cripple one enemy, you can go on to any other ship with the next missile.

Dead eye is a one trick pony. That being said for one point to shoot missiles at what ever target you want and put them into higher pS pilots. Possibly even taking them off the table. Worth it.

Vorpal Sword said:

you should re read the dead eye card, it states that when an attack instructs you to "spend" a target lock you may instead spend a focus instead.. but that doesn't mean you can fire off the homing missle just by having a focus, because homing missles does not re quire you to spend the target lock, only that you need one to fire it in the first place

so dead eye is a dead card with homing missels, it's better used on cluster, concussion missles and proton torpedoes

executor said:

Thats not entirly accurate. Read the first sentence of deadeye:

You may treat the Attack [Target Lock] header as Attack [Focus].

It then states that you may discard focus instead of a target lock for the attack, but homing missile doesn't require you to discard anything, so the second portion of Deadeye is not applicable.

As I read it, you're just fine using Deadeye to fire homing missiles.

Here are two lists with which I have been toying. They remain entirely theoretical since I have not gotten my A-wings yet.

Tycho Celchu, Push The Limit, Assault Missiles (34)
Prototype Pilot, Assault Missiles (22)
Prototype Pilot, Assault Missiles (22)
Prototype Pilot, Assault Missiles (22)

Or go with Green Squadron to make use of Deadeye.

Green Squadron Pilot, Deadeye, Assault Missiles (25)
Green Squadron Pilot, Deadeye, Assault Missiles (25)
Green Squadron Pilot, Deadeye, Assault Missiles (25)
Green Squadron Pilot, Deadeye, Assault Missiles (25)

The idea being to use assault missile to break up TIE swarms and other builds that require their ships to be tightly packed. Fire on separate targets to make the most of splash damage that cannot be dodged.

Rekkon,

I'm running that second list tonight. It's been on my mind for a while. However you might have more luck with homeing missiles.

I think if you're going to use either Homing or Concussion missiles, you really, really want to be able to stack both focus and the target lock together. Unfortunately, Green Squadron + Push the Limits + Concussion Missile comes out at 26 points, so you can't just stack 4 ships together. If you drop any of the green squadron ships to prototypes, then I think you want to bring along a buff of some form (squad leader, Garvin, or Dutch). Its not 4 A-Wings, but what about running 3 A-Wings and Garvin? Like this:

Green Squadron, Push the Limits, Concussion Missile
Green Squadron, Push the Limits, Concussion Missile
Protoype A-Wing, Concussion Missile
Garvin, R2 Unit

You can also do a similar list with Dutch, but I'm afraid that you run out of firepower pretty quickly after you fire the missiles, and you're not going to be able to effectively volley them as well in the early game:

Green Squadron, Push the Limits, Homing Missile
Protoype A-Wing, Homing Missile
Protoype A-Wing, Homing Missile
Dutch, Ion Cannon, R5 Unit

I do have a question for those more knowledgeable than me. I know that a Homing missile that has both target lock and deadeye yields an expected 3.75 hits (and the target can't use an evade token). What is the expected number of hits for a concussion missile with target lock + focus? I'm getting 3.5 hits expected, but I'm not 100% positive thats correct.

Picasso,

Possibly. I was thinking specifically of counting a TIE swarm led by Howlrunner that I faced once. My opponent had her behind four other TIEs, and even targeting one of the center two in the front rank would have put three others within range one. That would be a lot of incidental damage in a hurry. Three assault missile hits could potentially kill a TIE by blast damage alone, and those weakened by direct hits might get finished off by nearby strikes.

Four straight attack dice against three straight defense dice statistically yield 1.057 hits, 0.566 if the target has a focus token, which they should be doing automatically if they see you coming with homing missiles. That would mean 2.264 to 4.224 hits with homing missiles. With assault missile, your opponent could use evades, which drops the hits from a single attack to 0.441. Thus you could expect only 1.764 assault hits.

Including extra critical damage, each hit averages out to 1.2348 damage, so one could expect 2.796-5.216 damage from homing missiles and 2.178-5.216 direct damage from the assault variety, plus any splashes. Assuming maximum defensive action from your opponent, it would only take one assault hit producing one additional damage for the statistics to come out in favor of assault missiles. In a formation like my opponent used, a single hit could have resulted in four additional damage to surrounding ships. That is huge. And as noted above Deadeye means your opponent cannot focus his defensive measures on just the targeted ships, potentially reducing the firepower coming back at you. The A-wings will have great flexibility of placement for their missiles and will not have to worry about a kill preventing a launch. Obviously your opponent could spread out to avoid the blast radius, but if they brought a squad that plays heavily on range one adjacency bonuses like Howlrunner or Biggs, doing so would break what is probably their build's primary advantage, and spreading out might also reduce incoming firepower if a ship gets edged to range 3 or out of range entirely.

The above of course assumes you can get all four missiles off, and you do not get the chance to combine a target lock and focus on any of the attacks.

In any event, let us know how it goes. It is always interesting to see how an idea actually holds up in battle.

Endgame, check the tables here . They should answer your question.

executor said:

As Endgame correctly points out, Deadeye explicitly does allow you to "fire off the homing missle just by having a focus".

Addendum since I misread Endgame's post:

You get 0.6836 (1 - 0.75^4) additional hits from using concussion missiles under normal circumstances. If you spent the target lock to fire the missile, the focus token will not do anything extra with concussion missiles since the special ability does not involve rerolling. If you spent focus via Deadeye to fire the missiles, and saved target lock to reroll things get more complicated, but if I did my math correctly, you get another .093 hits for a total of 0.7766 additional hits.

Endgame124 said:

The expected number of hits for a Concussion Missile with Target Lock (discarded) and Focus (spent to convert eyeballs to hits) is 3.68.

It's actually fairly straightforward to work out: setting aside the Missile's text and looking solely at the Attack dice, the only two possibilities for each die is hit (75%) or blank (25%). So the distribution of hits is simply a binomial distribution of n successes in 4 trials, with p =0.75 :

• 4 hits: 0.75^4 * 1 = 0.316
• 3 hits: 0.75^3 * 0.25 * 4 = 0.422
• 2 hits: 0.75^2 * 0.25^2 * 6 = 0.211
• 1 hit: 0.75 * 0.25^3 * 4 = 0.047
• 0 hits: 0.25^4 = 0.004

Now when we add in the text of the Concussion Missile into account, we convert at most 1 blank result into a hit result. Basically, that means we bump everything up one spot in the damage distribution: "3 hits" actually means 4 hits, "2 hits" actually means 3, and so on. The distribution looks like this:

• 4 hits: 0.316 + 0.422 = 0.738
• 3 hits: 0.211
• 2 hits: 0.047
• 1 hit: 0.004
• 0 hits: 0

The expected value of a discrete distribution is a weighted sum--each result times the frequency with which it occurs. So the average number of hits on a Concussion Missile with Focus is 0.738 * 4 + 0.211 * 3 + 0.047 * 2 + 0.004 * 1 = 3.683.

For my money, that's so close to the 3.75 you get from a Homing Missile with Target Lock and Focus that if I expect to get two actions, I save a build point and downgrade from Homing to Concussion. YMMV, of course.

***

@Rekkon: I'm not sure what you mean, but Target Lock and Focus have the same effect in this case (since, as you point out, there's no other rerolling going on.) With Target Lock, you have a 50% chance of "success" with each die, and you reroll it on a "failure"--which, 50% of the time, will change the failure into an additional success. So each Target Locked die has a 0.5 + 0.5*0.5 = 0.75 chance to result in a hit. This puts us back into the binomial distribution illustrated above, with the same result.

The only thing that changes is that using Deadeye to discard Focus instead of TL means you have a slightly higher chance to crit.

I only hit with one missile. Lost two awings before they could shoot their missiles. One took a missile from Vader. Ugly. Not good. I'd rather have three A-wings and PTL.

My post was worded poorly. I got the same number you did for concussion plus focus (3.68), though I went about it in a less efficient manner. [4 regular attack dice with focus] + [probability of rolling at least one blank for 1 additional damage] = 3 + 0.68 = 3.68.

For the Deadeye/focus firing, perhaps I made a mistake in my method since I was doing it in the middle of several other things, but I again took the base hits for 4 dice plus target lock reroll (3) and added the chance of rolling at least one blank. However there is the additional chance of getting a blank on the rerolls if you did not get one originally. So I did:

[P1 of not getting any blanks on original roll] * [P2 of X focus results given that no blanks were rolled] * [P3 of rolling at least one blank of X dice]

The last two of course are more binomial distributions. Calculate for values of X and sum. Specifically my numbers were:

[P1] [P2] [X] [P3] [P subtotal]

0.3164 0.197530864 0 0 0
0.3164 0.395061728 1 0.25 0.031249383
0.3164 0.296296296 2 0.4375 0.041014815
0.3164 0.098765432 3 0.578125 0.018066049
0.3164 0.012345679 4 0.68359375 0.002670235

Total 0.093000482

Freel free to poke holes in that. I already see a better way to do it, and perhaps when I am feeling less lazy I will crunch it to see if the number match.

Picasso:

What build did your opponent have and how did he/she deploy it? Did you get any blast damage from the one hit?

I promised I wouldn't post about my opponents list. I will say it had Squints that shot before my A-wings and that was the key. He also flew my "Against missile" strategy that left no shots and caused two of my Awings to bump. With no action no focus and no missile to shoot.

Picasso said:

I've been following posts for a while now but missed this strategy. Can you elaborate? I thought at first it was just highspeeding to the missile carriers to break into their formation and cause them to collide with you but you said earlier that the opponent was firing first which should mean you move first and can get your actions.

As for 4 A-wings, I think it's over specialized and doesn't lead to much flexibility. That was ok in Wave 1 when there weren't completely different builds to contend with but without flexibility now, it seems that narrowly focused builds will be "figured" out and consistent strategies will be available to beat them. I like the idea of 1 or 2 A-wings with Missiles complementing a build though. And I really want to try Arvel as a large ship clean up option. The Crash-lock idea against a Falcon or Firespray seems pretty strong. I think it may be really tough to pull off though.

Rekkon said:

You actually poked a hole in my logic: I made (and have been making for a while) a very bad assumption in there about the distribution of blanks in the Target Locked case, and your comment made me realize that my answer was very wrong.

***

The simplest statement of the problem is that we want the number of hits rolled, plus the lower number of 1 and the number of blanks rolled. We're looking at the expected value of the sum of two random variables, which is axiomatically the sum of the two expected values (that is, E[ X + Y ] = E[ X ]+E[ Y ]). Your approach for Focus worked because E[ X ] is easy to figure out--it's 0.75*4--and the distribution Y isn't much more complicated. It's 0 where the number of blanks is 0, and 1 when the number of blanks is at least 1, so E[ Y ] = 1 - p(0). And we can apply exactly the same approach for Target Lock.

(As a quick note, what I'm about to do is fundamentally different from the previous post. What I did before was generate the entire distribution of the random variable Z = X + Y , and use the distribution to find E[ Z ]. Here I'm taking a shortcut straight to E[Z], but in doing so I lose the ability to talk about the distribution of Z .)

E[X] is still easy; it's the expected number of hits generated by 4 dice. The likelihood of a hit is p(hit on initial roll) + p(hit on reroll), or 0.5 + 0.5*0.5 = 0.75. We still have 0.75 * 4 = 3 expected hits.

Generating E[ Y ] is the same formula you used for the Focus version, but with a different probability. With the reroll thrown into the mix, the likelihood of generating a blank on any given die roll is p(blank or focus on initial roll) * p(blank on reroll), or 0.5 * 0.25 = 0.125. The likelihood of generating at least one blank, then, is 1 - (1-0.125)^4 = 0.4138.

So adding Deadeye actually makes the Concussion Missile less effective: the expected number of hits if you discard Focus and use Target Lock is 3.42, compared with 3.68 if you use Focus.

***

I know. Weird, right? So for purposes of comparison, I cheated and used the multinomial distribution to figure out the actual distribution of hits on a Target Locked Concussion Missile. Here 'tis:

• 4 hits: 0.527
• 3 hits: 0.369
• 2 hits: 0.094
• 1 hit: 0.010
• 0 hits: 0.000

Using a weighted sum to find the expected value yields the same result as above: 3.42 hits with Target Lock. This is also the distribution for a Proton Torpedo under similar circumstances (launched by a ship with both Target Lock and Focus, using Deadeye to discard the Focus and Target Lock to modify your results).

Space Monkey,

Sorry I'm not sharing this. I taught my cuz this strategy cause he is family. It is a tactic that I keep to myself. If you ever play me and use missiles you will learn it quick. I've upset several players with it as they watch their missile ships fall before they can shoot their payload.

Picasso said:

Ha! No worries, Picasso! I thought maybe this was just a reference I missed somewhere. Carry on :-)