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I decided to try out the shuttle with 2 tacticians. I fielded two of them with Oicunn, who had Ruthlessness, a Rebel Captive, and Moff Jerjerrod.

I played two games against Scum with 3 Syndicate Thug Y-Wings with Ion cannons, BTL-4A, and the R4 Agromech, and two naked Binayre pilots.

Lost the first game, as it'd been months since I flew a shuttle but won the second.

I also managed, on the second game, to ram a ship with one hull point with Oicunn. That made me feel pretty good.

My next experiment is with three fat shuttles. 3x Omicron Group Pilot with AS, Engine, and 2x tacticians. Probably gonna ask my friend to run a TIE swarm, since he's good at that.

So you can stack crew abilities ( I'm assuming you're trying to double stress the defender so they can't perform an action. How do you keep them at range 2?

What is a

buckero0 wrote:
So you can stack crew abilities ( I'm assuming you're trying to double stress the defender so they can't perform an action. How do you keep them at range 2?

Fly casual.

buckero0 wrote:
So you can stack crew abilities ( I'm assuming you're trying to double stress the defender so they can't perform an action. How do you keep them at range 2?

What is a

I practice flying and have faith in the fact that, point for point, shuttles are tougher and/or hit harder than anything else.

Eliminate red maneuvers and encourage the enemy to fly green, and maybe it'll work out.





... or fly casual.

If you want a bit more flexibility in stressing people out, consider swapping one tactician for a mangler cannon.

It has advantages and disadvantages, but it's an option.

Sensor/Engine shuttles are beasts of dogfighters once you get used to them.

I've been playing tournament games recently so I've been sticking to what I know, but I've got a casual game on Monday and I've been pondering a mass stress list since I saw this thread. Probably going with:

Rear Admiral Chiraneau (61)

VT-49 Decimator (46), Predator (3), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Flechette Torpedoes (2), Engine Upgrade (4)

Captain Kagi (39)
Lambda-Class Shuttle (27), Fire-Control System (2), Flechette Cannon (2), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Engine Upgrade (4)

I get the feeling it'll either completely shut down an enemy fleet looking to maximise actions (Fel etc) or it'll die horribly against a swarm. Either way, it'll be nice to fly something a bit different for a change...

 Riquende wrote:
I've been playing tournament games recently so I've been sticking to what I know, but I've got a casual game on Monday and I've been pondering a mass stress list since I saw this thread. Probably going with:

Rear Admiral Chiraneau (61)

VT-49 Decimator (46), Predator (3), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Flechette Torpedoes (2), Engine Upgrade (4)

Captain Kagi (39)
Lambda-Class Shuttle (27), Fire-Control System (2), Flechette Cannon (2), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Engine Upgrade (4)

I get the feeling it'll either completely shut down an enemy fleet looking to maximise actions (Fel etc) or it'll die horribly against a swarm. Either way, it'll be nice to fly something a bit different for a change...

Exchange Predator for Ruthlessness... I've had fun with it and Oicunn. Nothing like that one-in-a-dozen game where you kill two ships in a turn.

 Riquende wrote:
Rear Admiral Chiraneau (61)

VT-49 Decimator (46), Predator (3), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Flechette Torpedoes (2), Engine Upgrade (4)

Captain Kagi (39)
Lambda-Class Shuttle (27), Fire-Control System (2), Flechette Cannon (2), Tactician (2), Tactician (2), Engine Upgrade (4)

This seems like overkill. Flechette cannons can't stress a ship that's already stressed so it won't be doing all that much, and putting more than two stress tokens on a ship is usually redundant. It's nice to get two so they can't take actions even after they do a green maneuver, but since they're so predictable you should be able to just hit them again next turn and add more stress. You'll rarely get much benefit out of having 3+ tokens on a ship, so spend some of those points on firepower or defensive upgrades instead.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Exchange Predator for Ruthlessness... I've had fun with it and Oicunn. Nothing like that one-in-a-dozen game where you kill two ships in a turn.

Strongly disagree. Ruthlessness is something you take when you've already got consistent firepower and can reliably inflict the splash damage. This is a list that has predator as its only firepower upgrade, and a two-ship list with no dice modification is just not enough. That decimator needs to be hitting as hard as possible and getting enemy ships off the table since even stressed and actionless ships are going to have no problem putting lots of damage on a decimator or shuttle. Having a dozen stress tokens on every enemy ship doesn't help much if they're still alive and taking your last HP away.

Yeah, Ruthlessness is a non-starter for me. Our meta tends to more elite smaller lists, so I don't expect chances for it to come up to happen all too often.

You're right about more than 2 stress being redundant. I've changed it slightly by dropping the torpedo and changing the flechette to an Ion cannon. I figure that Ion+2 stress is pretty good, and on the Decimator I've dropped one tactician for a Rebel captive. I was thinking Mara Jade at first but I've tried her before and it just never paid off.

 Peregrine wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Exchange Predator for Ruthlessness... I've had fun with it and Oicunn. Nothing like that one-in-a-dozen game where you kill two ships in a turn.

Strongly disagree. Ruthlessness is something you take when you've already got consistent firepower and can reliably inflict the splash damage. This is a list that has predator as its only firepower upgrade, and a two-ship list with no dice modification is just not enough. That decimator needs to be hitting as hard as possible and getting enemy ships off the table since even stressed and actionless ships are going to have no problem putting lots of damage on a decimator or shuttle. Having a dozen stress tokens on every enemy ship doesn't help much if they're still alive and taking your last HP away.

I'm just not a huge fan of Predator on a Decimator. 9 times out of 10, I'm going to be using target lock as an action. After all, it stays if you don't need it and you will rarely be rolling defense dice (the alternative use being what makes focus so handy). Since you can only reroll a die once, Predator seems to only be useful if you want to use focus a bunch. On Chiraneau, who has even less incentive to focus, this is doubly-true.

Plus, throwing an auto damage on a 3-agility ship is always fun. Might convince them to spread out/make them easier to digest.

... and more than two stress can be useful. 4 is ideal (and can happen when jousting with a large ship). Sometimes, an opponent will just give up on getting rid of said stress, making their offense and defense worse by eliminating their rerolls/focus/evade/arc dodging.

More importantly, if they try and get rid of it, it gives your shuttles time to run, spin around, and line up for another joust. Not many things have green turns. Without droids, it's just the A-Wing and TIE Interceptor, both ships the Decimator deals with pretty easily. I suppose less so if an opponent uses auto-thrusters.

Speaking of which, has anyone tried running a 3-Interceptor list with PTL and 2 autothrusters on every ship? Seems like something hard to chew through... but my meta has a guy who LOVES using bombs, so...

 EmpNortonII wrote:
9 times out of 10, I'm going to be using target lock as an action.

This might be true in some cases, but the decimator in the quoted list has an engine upgrade and will presumably want to use it fairly often. Having predator combined with the "focus" pilot ability gives you consistent damage even when you're boosting out of arcs or into range of a key target.

Plus, throwing an auto damage on a 3-agility ship is always fun. Might convince them to spread out/make them easier to digest.

The problem here is that spreading out is easy in the current "lots of elite ships" metagame. A 2-3 ship list doesn't have to try very hard to avoid ruthlessness, and if they do spread out it means that you have to be very careful to keep your own ships away from range 1 of your target. You're spending a valuable EPT slot on an upgrade that is inconsistent at best and can often do more to hurt you than your opponent.

... and more than two stress can be useful. 4 is ideal (and can happen when jousting with a large ship). Sometimes, an opponent will just give up on getting rid of said stress, making their offense and defense worse by eliminating their rerolls/focus/evade/arc dodging.

But all of those things happen with just two stress tokens. One token forces a green maneuver, and two tokens take away actions even after a green maneuver and encourage them to give up on clearing stress. But beyond that you're really not accomplishing much with additional stress tokens. Yeah, it's nice to force even more consecutive turns of green maneuvers, but the biggest difference is between "I can clear this immediately with little drawback" and "I'm not getting my actions next turn no matter what I do" and that comes at two tokens. And usually you'll be able to keep adding more stress once you cross the threshold of two tokens since your target becomes so predictable. Adding two tokens per turn until a ship is destroyed is just as good as adding ten tokens per turn.

And remember, the question is not just "how many stress tokens would I like to inflict", it's "how much do I want to pay for stress tokens beyond the second". Obviously if adding more stress is free then you add more stress, but in the real world you have to pay points and spend upgrade slots to get that stress. Once you have the key second stress token you're almost always better off spending those points and upgrade slots on improving some other part of your ship.

Speaking of which, has anyone tried running a 3-Interceptor list with PTL and 2 autothrusters on every ship?

This is not legal. The title card that allows you to have multiple upgrades explicitly states that you can't take duplicates.

 Peregrine wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:

Speaking of which, has anyone tried running a 3-Interceptor list with PTL and 2 autothrusters on every ship?

This is not legal. The title card that allows you to have multiple upgrades explicitly states that you can't take duplicates.

You are right. feth me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:
The problem here is that spreading out is easy in the current "lots of elite ships" metagame. A 2-3 ship list doesn't have to try very hard to avoid ruthlessness, and if they do spread out it means that you have to be very careful to keep your own ships away from range 1 of your target. You're spending a valuable EPT slot on an upgrade that is inconsistent at best and can often do more to hurt you than your opponent.

My plan was that most large ships would be boned after jousting with a pair of shuttles. 4 stress is hard to come back from... Whisper, Gods damn her soul, might be able to prevent that... but most elite ships won't, I think. My meta might just be that far behind a lot of others.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
My plan was that most large ships would be boned after jousting with a pair of shuttles. 4 stress is hard to come back from... Whisper, Gods damn her soul, might be able to prevent that... but most elite ships won't, I think. My meta might just be that far behind a lot of others.

But the point is that coming back from two stress has 95% of the difficulty of coming back from four stress, especially since double-stressed ships become predictable and very often get two more stress tokens next turn. And by only paying to inflict two stress on your target you leave points and upgrade slots free to increase firepower and/or defense. For example, putting Isard on your decimator for an extra evade every turn means keeping it alive longer and will probably benefit you more than the slight improvement of overkill stress vs. double stress.

 Peregrine wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:
My plan was that most large ships would be boned after jousting with a pair of shuttles. 4 stress is hard to come back from... Whisper, Gods damn her soul, might be able to prevent that... but most elite ships won't, I think. My meta might just be that far behind a lot of others.

But the point is that coming back from two stress has 95% of the difficulty of coming back from four stress, especially since double-stressed ships become predictable and very often get two more stress tokens next turn. And by only paying to inflict two stress on your target you leave points and upgrade slots free to increase firepower and/or defense. For example, putting Isard on your decimator for an extra evade every turn means keeping it alive longer and will probably benefit you more than the slight improvement of overkill stress vs. double stress.

4 points per shuttle... if you wanna bring shuttles, it's not much. Next game, I intend to try out 2 troll shuttles with advanced sensors and Curvy Whisper (VI+Recon+FCS(debatable)+Advanced Cloaking Device).

I keep convincing myself I don't like flying her, that she's difficult to fly, that it's too much thinking when I'm *going* to be tired before any tourney I show at... and she works out every time I forget that. Claimed twice her points last epic game I played.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
4 points per shuttle... if you wanna bring shuttles, it's not much.

4 points is Isard on your decimator, Mara Jade to keep your opponent from getting in close to avoid the tacticians, almost enough for gunner, upgrade Oicunn to RAC, etc. X-Wing is not a game where you can afford to spend points on borderline upgrades and expect to win. If you aren't getting maximum return on your investment then you need to pick one of the upgrades that will give you more. Even a 4-point initiative bid is going to be more useful than the difference between two stress tokens on a ship and a thousand stress tokens on a ship.

Next game, I intend to try out 2 troll shuttles with advanced sensors and Curvy Whisper (VI+Recon+FCS(debatable)+Advanced Cloaking Device).

Be sure to check out the new FAQ/errata, where decloaking has changed significantly. It's a major nerf that entirely changes how phantoms fly, especially against lower-PS ships with boost/BR. But overall the phantom + stress option is a decent plan. Stress keeps your opponent from chasing Whisper/Echo as easily, and the 4-dice gun on the phantom ensures that ships are dying instead of just being annoyed a bit.

 Peregrine wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:


Next game, I intend to try out 2 troll shuttles with advanced sensors and Curvy Whisper (VI+Recon+FCS(debatable)+Advanced Cloaking Device).

Be sure to check out the new FAQ/errata, where decloaking has changed significantly. It's a major nerf that entirely changes how phantoms fly, especially against lower-PS ships with boost/BR. .

... did someone think that BBBBZ wasn't doing well enough? Crap... maybe I should just start running Warthogs and go scum.

I noticed that Dauntless got buffed. Might be time to give Oicunn a second look.

How do you feel about FCS?

 EmpNortonII wrote:
.. did someone think that BBBBZ wasn't doing well enough?

It's not just BBBBZ, it's a big buff for everything that isn't PS 9+ anti-phantom lists. The pre-nerf phantom was just frustrating to play against and even when you brought the counters it was still annoying to have to build your list around beating one ship. Now you have a lot more options to deal with Whisper/Echo without being limited to a few specific anti-phantom ships and that's a big buff to the neglected mid-PS pilots. In fact, BBBBZ might suffer from this change because the likely result is a lot of PS 1-2 lists moving up to PS 3+ now that the mid-PS options are more appealing. That makes BBBBZ's PS 2 more of a liability, and it has no spare points to fix that problem.

(And really, if you want to nerf BBBBZ tell your local TO to stop having 60-minute rounds. A big part of why BBBBZ works is having a short time limit that doesn't give the other player enough time to kill the b-wings, especially if the BBBBZ player slow plays a bit. Play with 75-minute or untimed rounds and BBBBZ starts to look less like a dominant list and more like a free win for every warthog player.)

I noticed that Dauntless got buffed. Might be time to give Oicunn a second look.

It's not a buff, it's just clarification of how the rules already worked. It was a complicated situation that needed clarification, but everything in the FAQ can be figured out if you read all of the relevant rules very carefully and pay close attention to the exact timing of each event.

How do you feel about FCS?

Depends on the ship/pilot. Obviously it's a major firepower upgrade for a very reasonable price if you can keep shooting at the same target (and you very often can), but the FCS vs. AS debate doesn't really have a clear winner.

 Peregrine wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:
.. did someone think that BBBBZ wasn't doing well enough?

It's not just BBBBZ, it's a big buff for everything that isn't PS 9+ anti-phantom lists. The pre-nerf phantom was just frustrating to play against and even when you brought the counters it was still annoying to have to build your list around beating one ship. Now you have a lot more options to deal with Whisper/Echo without being limited to a few specific anti-phantom ships and that's a big buff to the neglected mid-PS pilots. In fact, BBBBZ might suffer from this change because the likely result is a lot of PS 1-2 lists moving up to PS 3+ now that the mid-PS options are more appealing. That makes BBBBZ's PS 2 more of a liability, and it has no spare points to fix that problem.

(And really, if you want to nerf BBBBZ tell your local TO to stop having 60-minute rounds. A big part of why BBBBZ works is having a short time limit that doesn't give the other player enough time to kill the b-wings, especially if the BBBBZ player slow plays a bit. Play with 75-minute or untimed rounds and BBBBZ starts to look less like a dominant list and more like a free win for every warthog player.)

I noticed that Dauntless got buffed. Might be time to give Oicunn a second look.

It's not a buff, it's just clarification of how the rules already worked. It was a complicated situation that needed clarification, but everything in the FAQ can be figured out if you read all of the relevant rules very carefully and pay close attention to the exact timing of each event.

How do you feel about FCS?

Depends on the ship/pilot. Obviously it's a major firepower upgrade for a very reasonable price if you can keep shooting at the same target (and you very often can), but the FCS vs. AS debate doesn't really have a clear winner.

75 minute rounds would have me leaving for work before the end of the tourney. *le sigh*