The number of ships you need to lose also gets smaller as your ships begin to cost more.

The loss of total squad hull and attack value isn't worth 12 points of SD, in my opinion. The endgame point squad point difference should, on average, easily be in favor of more total victories with the extra AP over 4x SD. I have no hard data to back that up, other than to say that some of the best placing squads in major tourneys have always fielded more ships over more upgrades. Also, more firepower tends to yield less games going to time in the first place.

That being said, I say give it a go. I find SDs unreliable at best, especially once multiple enemy firing arcs have you bracketed; but maybe it could work out.

Yup. So if your first action was to evade, and your second was to focus, then PTL gives you a stress token which would give you another focus token.

So it seems like a lot of people are digging Night Beast and Dark Curse. Good.

They get outshined a lot by having Backstabber at the same cost and Howlrunner only 2 moreand are just more expensive than academies but now that a lot of 7 ship swarms are looking at 6 ships they might see a little more fly time.

The loss of total squad hull and attack value isn't worth 12 points of SD, in my opinion. The endgame point squad point difference should, on average, easily be in favor of more total victories with the extra AP over 4x SD. I have no hard data to back that up, other than to say that some of the best placing squads in major tourneys have always fielded more ships over more upgrades. Also, more firepower tends to yield less games going to time in the first place.

That being said, I say give it a go. I find SDs unreliable at best, especially once multiple enemy firing arcs have you bracketed; but maybe it could work out.

The combat "power" of a squad is proportional to the SQUARE of the number of ships present. So going from 6 ships to 7 ships is a 36% increase. Adding 4 stealth devices will probably not reduce your damage intake by 36%, so the 7th ship is probably a better bet.

The loss of total squad hull and attack value isn't worth 12 points of SD, in my opinion. The endgame point squad point difference should, on average, easily be in favor of more total victories with the extra AP over 4x SD. I have no hard data to back that up, other than to say that some of the best placing squads in major tourneys have always fielded more ships over more upgrades. Also, more firepower tends to yield less games going to time in the first place.

That being said, I say give it a go. I find SDs unreliable at best, especially once multiple enemy firing arcs have you bracketed; but maybe it could work out.

The combat "power" of a squad is proportional to the SQUARE of the number of ships present. So going from 6 ships to 7 ships is a 36% increase. Adding 4 stealth devices will probably not reduce your damage intake by 36%, so the 7th ship is probably a better bet.

Does that assume that all ships are in range every round and have an action every round? That can be a problem with the 7 and 8 ship builds - having actions on all of them and having them all in range.