I had a revelation tonight, while building a 6 Tie Fighter swarm (the number of Tie Fighters I can borrow casually):

Scimitar Squadron Pilot runs in at 16 points. Six of them leaves 4 points left over for a single Cluster or Concussion Missile, OR a Proton Torpedo.

Focus and Barrel Roll are shared between them, so Action-wise its a difference between Target Lock and Evade.

The Bomber has twice the HP of the Fighter, at 2/3rds the evasion dice.

The Scimitar Squadron Pilot is even a level 2, so it will shoot before a Tie Swarm.

The biggest problems I foresee are the Movement Wheel and the possibility for the Tie Swarm to have useful named pilots. Even then, a 5 K-turn is pretty useful for unpredictability.

Still, though. 36 total hull, vs 18 in a 6 v 6, and one of these teams have Target Locks.

What do you think? I haven't gotten to play either team yet, so I'd love to hear your input!

What do you think? Does it have potential?

I think 5 scimitar bombers with one missile/torp a piece might be more effective. 5 cost 80 points even, leaving 20 pts for missiles/torps. Sacrafice one bomber for 5 with at least one powerful attack a piece. You might lose a bomber early with its payload but with all 5 armed you are likely to get most of those attacks off.

It might work against other low attack ships. Against anything rolling 3 dice or more, though, it doesn't take long at all for 1 less defense die and no evade action to cost you those 3 hull points.

Otherwise, inclined to agree with oddeye.

It works just fine. Against high attack dice, it actually works better. A four dice, TL and Focused attack has a very good chance of a one shot kill against a TIE, and zero chance of one against a Bomber. 3 dice, TL and Focused attack is pretty sure to get 3 hits. One bad die roll, especially if your ship has used it's focus (or didn't have one), and a TIE goes boom. It will take two attacks like that to drop a bomber, giving you 4 dice to defend.

Doing the math, 6 bombers is flat out harder to kill than 6 regular TIEs, and by a significant margin.

Having said that regular TIEs are cheaper by 4 points, which is a healthy discount. 6 Bombers, 2 with Seismic Charges, is a solid list. 5 Bombers plus Howlrunner and a single Seismic Charge works pretty well also. I actually played a game recently with 5 Bombers, 4 of them with a Proton Bomb. It won, despite poor play on my part, just because it took so long for my opponent to kill them.

I have flown 5 scimitars with 3 proton bombs and 2 seismic twice now and won twice but not the most secure list.

Looking to try 5 scimitars, 1 seismic and howlrunner next.

Jonus + 4 scimitars seems like a solid mix too. 3 scimitars get missiles and jonus gets squad leader.

Hate to be picky here (its the pedant in me honest!) but a 4 dice attack has higher then a 0% chance, thanks to crits that could cause double damage (or secondary explosions), though still rather low

Now I've got that out of the way, I am yet to use bombers yet, as I just haven't gotten around to using a list with them. If you were just running bombers for their shooting I could see adding howlrunner would be a good choice, or as mentioned above 5 with 20 points for ordinance.

I too prefer using seismic charges for the sure 1 damage, over losing an action and rolling 3 dice. Though I am yet to use the proximity mine, the few times I've used charges they've done well, though maybe thats cos I'm good at predicting where my friends will move their ships, and with the firespray.

I like the 5 ship swarm with concusion missile (since they are usually fired early in the game, I prefer concusion to proton torps)

But I like this even better

Captain Jonus + Squad Leader + Concussion Missiles

Scimitar Pilot + Cluster Missiles x 3

Academy Pilot

First turn Jonus fires his concusion missile (actually the least important part of the build, you could get rid of it to get a better TIE)

Second turn three Scimitar Pilot each fires their cluster missiles 3 attack dice (reroll 2 of them) then do it again.

(I love Jonus helping out cluster missiles. Can we say dead Falcon)

The TIE is just there becasue I didn't have enough points for another bomber with missiles. But never undeestimate the great value of just having another TIE

I just wished Jonus's ability worked on himself.

It works just fine. Against high attack dice, it actually works better. A four dice, TL and Focused attack has a very good chance of a one shot kill against a TIE, and zero chance of one against a Bomber. 3 dice, TL and Focused attack is pretty sure to get 3 hits. One bad die roll, especially if your ship has used it's focus (or didn't have one), and a TIE goes boom. It will take two attacks like that to drop a bomber, giving you 4 dice to defend.

Six of one, half dozen of the other. Everything you say is true, but neglects several other factors. Sure, you can lose a TIE Fighter on one bad roll. Or you can get lucky and have it survive an unexpected number of attacks. You can also guarantee that you evade one attack per round. With the bomber, you know pretty much what you're getting: a ship that's very, very likely going to die under 2 turns of fire.

Now, that's true of a lot of ships, but if that sort of certainty is what you're looking for, I might recommend you walk over here to the other end of our showroom and check out one of our new X-Wings, which are sporty yet reliable, with lots of power up front.

Scimitar x2 = 32

Scimitar + missile= 21

Howlrunner 18

Mauler 17

6 tie swarm with a missile and the usual rerolls. Drop down to backstabber or take a homing missile instead and you get a seismic charge.

You could drop down to 2 bombers total for an academy tie and end up with points for more missiles (meh) or safety measures for howl/mauler (probably a good idea) or just ensure you have seismic charges for both bombers. That sounds pretty nice but its no longer a "bomber" swarm.

Two Bombers with four "escorts" seems a bit logical even if it's a not a "bomber swarm".

If you insist on going five or more Bombers without loading up on secondary weapons I'd say Howlrunner will be as good or better than the sixth Bomber. Going full bomber over fighter gives up attack dice and rerolling a blank can help fix that problem.

I just played a friend today who ran with Turr, a Black Sqaudron TIE, Night Beast, and two Gamma Squadron pilots (one with a proton bomb, and another with an assault missle), and his bombers outlived the rest of his squad by several turns. He still lost against my Biggs, Rookie, Dagger, and Roark squad, but I'd say his bombers were the biggest thorn in my side the whole game. In fact, he might've won if he hadn't have rolled 4 blanks with his assault missile mid-game, haha.

The more I look at it the more I'm convinced that 6 tie swarm that happens to have a few missiles is the better list. Gonna play a couple variations tomorrow.