I really like the idea of having one of each of the frontline Rebel ships together. How would you do it?

Garven Dreis (26)

Ibtisam (30)
B-Wing (28), Elusiveness (2)

Gold Squadron Pilot (22)
Y-Wing (18), Blaster Turret (4)

Green Squadron Pilot (22)
A-Wing (19), Push the Limit (3)

Perhaps not the best squad ever but I think it would work well enough.

22 Green Squadron Pilot, Push the Limit

30 Dutch Vander, R5-K6, Ion Cannon Turret

21 Rookie Pilot

27 Dagger Squadron Pilot, Ion Cannon

2 Ion and free Target Locks with a decent range of pilot skills.

Well, let's think about that shall we

at cheapest cost - you have

A - 17 - excels at evasion
B - 22 - offense and maneuverability + flexibility
X - 21 - offense (balanced defense)
Y - 18 - flexible upgrades

(Heh, note that you could just swarm A B B X Y

That costs 78 points, leaving you a whopping 22 points for squad building with this chassis formula. So - how can we spend our points? From here, no elite talents, because we've got no medals... that leaves us to think about the following

Pilot Skill (Pilots cost from 2 - 9 points each, up to 13 points when we look at elite talents as well) (Max 4 slots)

Secondary Weapons (Cost from 3 - 7 points each) (Max 5 slots)

droids and system upgrades (Cost from 1 to 4 points each) (Max 3 slots)

Modifications.(Cost from 3 - 4 points each) (Max 4 slots)

22 points is about 5.5 points per ship - but, let's throw out that idea, and instead try to make some other judgements about where to spend our points. When we look at our current list in order of Attack Power and Defense - Ive made some choices about higher maneuverability helping offense and defense (avoiding arcs, finding targets) as well as HP, Guns, Agility and PS. - you might value things a little differently.

Offensive strength: (HIGH) - B - X - A - Y -> (LOW)

Defensive strength: (HIGH) - A - Y - B - X -> (LOW)

Let's try to make these the same - and if we can, we probably want to up our Pilot Skill, as right now we're only really going before academy pilots - and that's with initiative for the a-wing.... So, let's up the defense of our B-wing and X-wing, and up the offense of our A-wing and Y wing, and try and look for synergy as we do it!

I'll start by upping everyone's Pilot Skill to the 4 area, and see what kind of points we have to work with.

Red, Grey, Green and Dagger brings us to 86 points.... leaving 14 left

If we jump to Biggs, Stealth and R2-f2 - we eat up 8 points, and This drops our surplus to just 6. We succeed at protecting our B-wing, while upping our B-wing defense (due to the biggs factor). Let's go with this for now... and spend some points on our AY offense. We have no way to take advantage of torpedoes or a blaster canon on our y-wing (no stacking actions) so, let's keep it simple and give him an ion canon for 5, adding some control to the mix, and a pretty good single point damage source. While simultaneously we want to add PTL to our A-wing, firing with focus and target lock is about as good as rolling 3 dice to begin with, so we get some nice offense increase, and we can turtle if we need to.... PTL costs 3... For those of you following with math, we're at 102 points....

So we can shed 2, by dropping something, or hit 100 nicely by dropping our grey squad pilot to a gold squad. Unfortunately, if we look back at Biggs, we see he has to spend an action to activate R2-f2 and an action to focus for stealth. He's got no one helping to give him focus tokens, which is going to really help with our defense... So instead of dropping pilot skill, lets drop our r2-f2, in favor of using the focus action for biggs. - we have one point left! There are really only droid options left, so let's put an r2 on our y-wing so that it can stay a bit more maneuverable with the group, and arrive at our first list!

ABXY LIST ONE

http://x-wing.voidstate.com/view/21464/abxy---balanced

Biggs Darklighter + Stealth 28

Grey Squadron + Ion Canon 26

Green Squadron + Push the limit 22

Dagger Squadron 24

All in all, it relies a bit on the focus action, biggs up's our b-wing, defense but is still an x-wing himself, everyone has some maneuverability and some punching power, and we'll go before many swarm squads, but those elite pilots are still gonna have something on us... , looking at the previous entries, it's interesting how simmilar this list is to the one above....

Edit, I had some time, so here's a little extra - these may be extreme cases of each type, and don't represent the best possible list, but hey!

I think, we'll see a few types of ABXY builds,

A single ace and a bunch of rookies,

http://x-wing.voidstate.com/view/21463/abxy---skill-balanced

A balanced Squad with maybe a mid range pilot

http://x-wing.voidstate.com/view/21464/abxy---balanced

A Weapons Loaded Squad

http://x-wing.voidstate.com/view/21466/abxy-payload

A Bare-bones multi Ace Squad.

http://x-wing.voidstate.com/view/21465/named-aces

Anything else and we start to run out of points for 4 ships... (I was gonna go with a rookie X-wing for payload with an ion canon on the y-wing and an extra torpedo somewhere, but - the Garven + Blaster turret seemed like a good last minute tradeoff) - (Also, I actually love how all the PS6 named pilots randomly turns out to be exactly 100 points!)

Ravncat, interesting squad builds? Could you do that for the Empire ships?

I also liked your assessment:

How might you rate the imperial ships?

blue B-wing ion cannon

gold y-wing ion cannon turret

biggs r2d2

prototype a-wing assault missiles

99 points

Ravncat, interesting squad builds? Could you do that for the Empire ships?

I also liked your assessment:

Offensive strength: (HIGH) - B - X - A - Y -> (LOW)

Defensive strength: (HIGH) - A - Y - B - X -> (LOW)

How might you rate the imperial ships?

I can probably put together something when I have some time... as a quick assessment of just the ties...

Now, of course, some people might value things differently (For example the interceptor is as squishy as the tie fighter) I put the interceptor above the fighter because of its enhanced maneuverability. The Bomber is in some weird places - it could be much higher offensively and much lower defensively (as it has less Agility than the other ships) I've treated it here as being without missiles or other upgrades - hence the low offense, and without weapons, and with a higher hull, it is a less inviting choice to target than the other ships, so it will probably survive longer, toss advanced protons onto it, and it gets offensively better, and defensively worse as it becomes a target...

Ravncat,

Thanks

Well one of my favorite lists I recently put together looks like this:
Dutch - BlasTurret, ProTorp (31)

Garven - R2 (27)

Rookie (21)

Rookie (21)

I like the Garven/Dutch combo a lot, but it would be easy enough to drop the 42 points worth of Rookies in favor of a cheap B- and A-wing combo.

Maybe replace one with a Prototype pilot, the other with a Blue Squad with a Sensor Jammer for a little extra survivability?

My main advice would be this: rank the ships in the order of which you like the best - or at least which one you most want to build around, down to whatever ship you maybe don't care as much about but are including because it fits the theme. If you'd not a big A-Wing fan you might want to just throw in a Prototype. If you like them ok you may want a Green Squad with PTL or something. If you think it's the best ship ever, maybe you go full on Tycho and build from there.

I find it helpful to prioritize like that, THEN try to tweak their loadouts/pilots to fit the offense/defense ranking scheme that is so popular. Not to say that your favorite ship has to be the top of the offense and defense rankings as you draw them up, but so you don't accidentally turn it into a glass cannon, or a whatever the opposite of a glass cannon is (think an A-Wing with zero ability to increase its offensive output).

You're probably going to get 4 generic pilots with decent kit, 3 generic pilots and 1 high ps named guy with toys, kind of a 2 and 2 (like Garven/Dutch + generic A+B wings), or some combo like that. So I would start with your favorite ship or pilot, decide if you want kind of a generic squad loaded for bear or one or two name pilots to build around and go from there. I like to do one centerpiece ship, one support ship (a Garven or Biggs, for example), and a couple of flank/harassment ships that do damage while drawing heat off of your big guns.

The x goes in first and draws some fire to retreat and heal up some hits with R2D2 before returning to the fight.

The A wing will be a super harrier with PTL and flanking on enemies

The Y will be an ion shooter ( but will have the B wing as backup) and is the setup man.

The b wing with advanced sensors will action before moving (taking barrel rolls to the flank to maneuver into firing position) it will also have an ion cannon to set up other ships and help out the Y.

This list would be a simple 'throw it on the table and have fun with it' list.

If I'm not mistaken a Y-wing cant use an ion cannon. Just the turret.

I would probably try this setup:

http://x-wing.voidstate.com/view/21613/abxy

The theme of this list is positional advantage - PTL A-wings are good at getting out of enemy fire arcs, Garven with R2 has more options post-Kturn without sacrificing the ability to focus, the Y-wing can focus and has a lot of move 1/2 options with a 360 degree fire arc and the B-Wing can take actions before red moves (focus/TL + K-turn for offensive manuevers, barrel roll + move for unpredicable dogfighting). You have great offence with 3 ships in the list.