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I Recently Started playing and noticed that a lot of rebel fighters have the options to take torpedoes or missiles however they seem to be rather expensive option for a one time use option. Are they more effective than I have realized?

Well, as secondary weapons, they don't give your opponents the extra defense die at range 3, so you have an opportunity to lock, shoot, and soften the enemy a bit as you close range.

The Assault Missiles are great to have on hand just in case you run into a TIE swarm. Either they have to break formation (and lose Howlrunner's bonus) or KABOOM!!! Lots and lots of damage.

Advanced Protons are straight up amazing on one of the named TIE Bomber pilots (the one that can adjust his range band- his name escapes me). They are sheer brutality.

As far as the rest, I sort of agree with you that they're really quite expensive.

Major Rhymer. Very nasty with APT and Jonus flying his wing.

They're expensive, but they can be worth it. X-Wing uses opposed dice, so what matters is the difference between attack and defense dice, not the number of dice you roll. Which means that:

1) Unlike, say, 40k, going from 3 attack dice to 4 attack dice is way more than a 33% increase in firepower, plus the advantage of automatically turning an {eye} into a crit instead of just a standard hit. And of course going up to 5 dice that are essentially an automatic 5 hits (since you never fire without focus available unless it's an act of desperation) with advanced torps is a massive increase in firepower that is well worth the cost if you have the ability to set it up properly.

2) Torps are often fired at range 3, which means that you're also taking away the bonus defense die that your opponent would have had against your primary weapon. In that situation you're gaining a +2 advantage in dice, turning those weak opening shots into a fatal alpha strike.

The biggest problem with torps isn't the cost, it's the need to target lock before shooting. Low-PS pilots would be great torp carriers otherwise (25 points for a rookie with a one-shot alpha strike), but in many situations they'll struggle to get good shots. They move before high-skill pilots, so very often your rookie/prototype/etc will move and find nobody within range 3 to target lock, and then the higher-PS ship moves within range 3 after it's too late for a target lock. And then you have problems with ships moving into range 1 and ruining your shot, higher-PS pilots in your list killing your torpedo target and leaving the carrier with nothing to shoot at, etc. Meanwhile high-PS pilots like Wedge can do nasty things with them and don't need to worry about target lock issues, but then you start to get into problems with investing too many points into a single ship.


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12thRonin wrote:
Major Rhymer. Very nasty with APT and Jonus flying his wing.

I wouldn't bother with Jonus. PTL on Rhymer gives you the focus + target lock to make APTs an automatic five hits, so Jonus is paying a lot of points to give you another chance at getting crits (which won't matter if they have shields or you one-shot them with raw damage) by re-rolling everything that isn't a crit. And that's just not worth it, spend those points on another offensive threat instead of a redundant support ship.

Torps aren't terrible for 4 pts.

- 4 attack dice is a big deal
- defender doesn't get an extra green die for range three
- built in "pseudo focus" helps needing TL, especially on TIEs where that extra potential crit won't bounce off shields

You're pointing a lot of threat at the enemy, a potential one shot kill against a TIE, and that should put the pressure on the target. But it still comes down to luck on a one-time weapon without rerolls.


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@Peregrine: You just set up a nice supplemental argument for why torps belong on X-Wings moreso than Y-Wings. If someone moves into range one on an X-Wing to avoid the torp, they still have to deal with four red dice. It's a pity the Z-95s can't take torps. They would become de rigueur

ah thanks

Take it for what it's worth, but in addition to what others have said in this thread (especially Manch), I besides functioning as a way to increase attack dice, torps also usually get you further down the road to critting your opponent.

OP, if the guys you usually play with don't use big ships, and especially if you play Rebels a lot, you probably won't have much use for torps. If your opponent uses big ships, sticking crits on them is one of the best ways to try and reduce it's effectiveness without having to devote all your time and Attacks towards killing it outright and hoping you score a crit on it 1/8 of the time.

good to know, Unfortunately Im not really familiar with the local meta yet. though I have seen some large ships

Yeah good point about big ships and crits, although watch out for Chewie. To me, the torps are really for early game TIE sniping/threat projection (i.e., swarm disruption).

Had a game last night against a stealthed firespray. Despite multiple attacks, I could not get a damned hit on it until I unloaded my proton torps at it. Once stealth was removed, it was easy enough to knock shields off with primary weapons. Amazing the difference a dice makes!

 Eggs wrote:
Amazing the difference a dice makes!

Seriously! I assume (hope, maybe?) that I'd have figured this out eventually anyway, but having Peregrine explain how adding a die is non-linear in X-Wing was a huge revelation. It definitely gave me an enormously useful took in evaluating ships, weapons, and upgrades.

The proton torpedo is 100% intended for early tie killing, it creates an very large mismatch early in the game.

-At range 3 the torp will have 4 attack dice vs 3 evade dice, while the tie returning fire will have only 2 attack dice vs 3 evade dice.
-The impact of the torps is greater against high evade ships rather than beefy low evade ships, which can be better dealt with via a high volume of regular fire.
-The torp has a very good chance of sticking a crit on a ship, but only if it does not have shields. Firing at a shielded ship wastes the most significant portion of the card text, and waiting for shields to drop results in the following:
-Every turn you wait to fire the secondary weapon means you are "floating resources" (similar concept to RTS), as well as increasing the chance that the weapon carrier will be destroyed.

As such the most effective target for photon torpedoes is one with no shields, low hull points, and high evade. Meaning, Tie fighters and Interceptors.


Missiles are a little different given that Tie advanced and A-wings only have 2 attack die regularly, so homing missiles and concussion missiles act as a straight one time heavy shot. Most effective vs high evade ships like photon torpedoes, but have a broader range of viable targets, due to not relying on the crit text included in the cost.

Assault missiles and the new flechette missiles are utility weapons dependent on their card text.

I'm relatively sure that the purpose of the torpedoes is to blow gak up.