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Seems there are some spoilers on the FFG Forum...

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/102795-decloaking-spoiled/

(I'd post picks, but I'm not sure how- can someone more tech savy than me get them please?)

Anyways, The TIE Phantoms special cloaking action...

1) During the action phase, it can take a Cloaking action
2) This increases its agility by 2
3) The token doesn't disapear at the end of the turn.
4) The ship cannot attack while cloaked.

Before moving, it can spend the token to barrel roll 2 or execute a 2 straight maneuver.

Sweeeet!

Was really afraid they would make it game breaking like ST:AW, but of course they are way above that level of design . I love FFG. This while super strong, seems fair enough. And the ships it is on are expensive as heck anyway. An awesome new dimension.

Yeah, the FFG Forum (Can we call it F43G? Forum For Fantasy Flight Games?) is buzzing. The potential shananigans with:

Phantom
Advanced Sensors
Navigator
Engine upgrade

Were noticed imediatly, but it is a very expensive ship, with the durability of a Z-95 (for 3 times the cost) without cloak.

...Yes...the FFG forum now has a droid name: F4-3G. Maybe F-43G instead, protocol droid template. More fitting

That was my concern was efficiency, if the blister came with more Stealth Devices though....Might be all you need.

Force them to a board edge chase, drop behind them with one and uncloak,...I don't know, I'm starting to see something of an opportunistic strike fighter.

KnuckleWolf wrote:
I'm starting to see something of an opportunistic strike fighter.

I think that's exactly what it is- decently hard to hit while cloaked, hard to get a firing arc on (especially at close range), and with enough firepower to devote its action to maneuvering instead of focusing. However, it will probably die in a straight fight.

Forget the TIE-D. And the E-wing. This is the ship I am excited about.

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
Were noticed imediatly, but it is a very expensive ship, with the durability of a Z-95 (for 3 times the cost) without cloak.

I think this is the obvious problem, there are lots of fun tricks (though the one with multiple decloaks in a single turn for ridiculous movement distance is not legal), but the point cost is going to be suicidally high if you use them. Even if you're effectively perma-cloaked four defense dice are far from complete invulnerability (just ask any interceptor pilot) and with only 4 HP a single round of bad dice can be fatal.

I guess it's really going to depend on the meta. If the Headhunter will make a large impact, the characters on the E-wing might enable some rebel character list. IF, and ONLY if, the meta shifts to a more 'two/three super ship' format, and breaks down somehow the viability of dual falcon, will this guy truly get to shine. I'm concerned about a release in which you only get one new viable competitive ship. I have to believe FFG knows more than we do.

I don't see the viability of dual falcon going away, if anything the upcoming cards are making my list even nastier. And I've seen some people run obnoxious things on the FFG site-things that should be scoring 0-comp in any tournament using comp scores at all.

One of these days I'm going to have to try this alleged dual falcon thing. I think I see how it works and yet, keep thinking good piloting just wrecks it.

KnuckleWolf wrote:
One of these days I'm going to have to try this alleged dual falcon thing. I think I see how it works and yet, keep thinking good piloting just wrecks it.

Too many hit points and my list has both pilots getting two actions a turn. Chewie's second comes after Lando moves, so he gets to survey the field before choosing the second. I don't get the Han/Chewie bromance on the table-Lando and Chewie ftw.

I've looked at it and I thought the Land-O-Wookie was the way to go myself. Like I said I just have to try it before I can make a educated judgement. It's no more HP than XXBB technically. Lower agility too. 75% roughly the firepower. I'll know more when I play it.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I don't see the viability of dual falcon going away, if anything the upcoming cards are making my list even nastier. And I've seen some people run obnoxious things on the FFG site-things that should be scoring 0-comp in any tournament using comp scores at all.

Comp is a thing no decent game does. Because it's a bunch of passive-aggressiveness where one player tells others how they should enjoy their game. Thank god, no game does it besides GW games, as a crutch to cover terrible-as-hell balance.

Considering how Dual Falcons didn't win any major events in the last 6 months compared to Tie Swarms and combos of X and B wings, that's actually pretty good. FFG's a LOT better at balancing than that, and the meta will shift accordingly.
Plus, talk of 120 point standard games really will mix up viable lists.

Wait, what is this talk of 120 pt standard games?

Oh God, I'd LOVE to see 120 plans!!

Not to be sour puss but I personally don't. Every time we've gone over the standard 100 points in our local group, the game broke. It is so tightly balanced to 100pts that even going for a quick small game under 50pts, the game broke. The lowest we managed to call balanced was 90pts, and never anything over 100, not even 5pts. Which is one of the things I love about FFG and this game: how balanced it is.

If the game is balanced at 100points, I'm struggling to see why it would break a little above or below that. All the same options exist for both players. What made it broken in your eyes?

 Eggs wrote:
If the game is balanced at 100points, I'm struggling to see why it would break a little above or below that. All the same options exist for both players. What made it broken in your eyes?

Possibly that heavy hitters like tie spam become too clogged and bogged down? Not a criticism under any circumstances, I just suspect this is the build hurt most by higher points-becomes too much to maneuver.

You could always try running two smaller Tie swarms, or a swarm with something else. It maybe changes up your list, but I don't think that makes it necessarily broken. I'm already planning a 250 point list on a 6x3 table for the near future. I like the thought of epic battles, and I'm looking forward to the epic play format, whatever that entails. I do think the 100 point size is excellent at getting you to make some difficult decisions on what to take, and making every point count, but I certainly don't see the game as broken at higher point levels. Just different.

(Preface: IMHO, personal opinion, my own experience, yada yada yada. I accidentaly wrote an essay, I'm sorry. Moving on.)

Great question. And contrary to speculation it has nothing to do with maneuvering. We(my gaming group) discovered that even in the biggest throw downs of 2v2, 100pt each. We ended up getting all grouped up on one of the two 3x3 mats we laid out, and even after distributing the normal 6 asteroids to each mat, and having 8 Rebel ships versus 14 Imperial ships, we were quite comfortable maneuvering. what few bumps happened were normal to be expected ones and ironically only into our own ships, only once did we bump enemy ships together and then it was on purpose. And all that was with each player flying even formations.

What we quickly realized was that the value of an action was so diminished that only certain actions were even worth bothering with, and even those were coins in a wishing well with a quick prayer behind them that invariably ended in disappointment. Target lock just for the assault missiles(which were the only good missile/torp at that size game.) and the carry over to Focus afficiency was about it. Focus never saved you unless you were a 3 firepower ship attacking, so much for versatility. Evade stopped one hit, too bad there were plenty more ships shooting at you to make it worth it. Boost/Barrel Roll never got you out of fire arcs, just into new ones or out of range. One of the most important steps of the game was rendered kinda useless and ultimately boring and pointless. Stupidly, playing on two 3x3's side by side penalized the Rebels severely. The assault missiles were wasted as there was plenty of room for the imps to spread out their initial run, and then too big to force them into tough maneuvers even when they did all squeeze in the same 3x3 area. BTW, that game ended with the rebs wiped and all said and told 6 out of 14 imp ships destroyed. Embarrassing for the rebs as they had the two better players of the four :/

Then there was how each piece of the game is designed. When you take a 'Howlrunner' in a 100pt list for instance, you don't just pay 18pts, you lose an entire ship out of your squadron. And that has nothing to do with the power of her ability costing 6pts over an academy pilot. It's to keep her ability from benefiting onto that seventh TIE. So yes even though we knew the parameters before the game, certain choices were just obviously not good or busted. Biggs for instance does nothing but dictate one of the two ships the rebels lose first. Whoopee. He dies and the same turn they have enough fire left to still kill one of our assault missiles...before it fires too...great.

So if you want to play your crazy large game, go for it. I wish you good hunting and great times. But honestly I will tell you now that there was a guy who came in one day and was chatting us up about our X-wing game and said "Our group played a capital ship versus capital ship game! It was awesome! There were 72 tie fighters on the field alone!" We all kinda looked at each other later and mutual concensus was that it sounded like a terrible game. Worth noting that that game he told us about apparently was conceded to the Imp side, and over...in three turns. I kid you not. Took them an hour and a half to play anyway. An hour to set up.

To give you an Idea of how balance sways in this, lets look at a Star Trek: Attack Wing game: Worst Battle of DS9 ever? If your not asking what the point of this game was, take a moment. IMHO worst game I ever took ten minutes to watch. Might be a bit low of me. Just saying. To be nice I never commented on the video, they seemed to enjoy it, so what the hell. I only decide what games I want to play, and share from my experience. As do we all.

I think that the key with big games is to just admit that you are here for fun, and to use some kind of scenario which forces players to spread out- for example, scatter objectives over a much larger area, and have the attacker have to destroy so many in X number of turns. The attacker splits up to attack the objectives, the defender splits up to counter, fast ships zip between skirmishes, and much fun is had.

Is it super tournament-worthy? Probably not. Is it fun? Well, if all you want to do is re-create an attack on a Star Destroyer, yes.

Also, it is the only time I have felt A-wings were really useful.

I've played a biggish game before, and didn't see what you saw, but to be fair, most players were new (it was an easy way to demo the game with six players). Players tended to pair off to fight each other, and that worked well. Maybe as carnifex says, with a scenario to keep it spread out, it could be interesting.

You're right on the money. If players pair off, or objectives are scattered enough, you can create several smaller games under the arch of 'one big game' because the mechanical breakdown of each engagement on the board is tied to it's own balance fulcrum, you'll never see the game break under it's own weight. There was an event posted not to long ago on this forum where the event was built to similar specs and by all accounts played well, and appeared to keep a lot of the games impressive balance. Hell I wish I could have played it my self.CLICK HERE

Either way, though contrary to what many players might prefer, the game can keep a bit of the same enjoyment at many higher point levels if you strictly follow the multiplayer rules on pg20 of your rule book. Some groups I've found ignore these and do so at their own discretion. The open knowledge and can't share maneuver dial info has a drastic impact. My problem with that was it just zapped some of the fun out of the idea of playing as a team of coordinated fighter pilots. Thus player penalizing. I dislike penalizing mechanics.

Yeah, I made a point of telling folk about the open knowledge thing. I thought it was quite good - kind of like hacking each other's comms. The scenario you linked to looks good! Nice board too.

Over the last several months i've been playing in games with 600-800points on the field, and never had anything but fun. the game does take on a new dynamic though. you really do have to screen your important ships to get them into attack enemy targets. Though yes, you do have a faster ship loss rate, you also have 3 or 4 times the ships on the board. epic scale games are far from broken, they are not balanced for the same tactics as the 100 point games. the only broken points level i've played at, imo, was 75,

75? Really? How so?

KnuckleWolf wrote:
75? Really? How so?

Rebels struggle to get anything worthwhile, and tie spam just drops two ships. That's probably the biggest factor.

Man, it sounds in this thread like I hate tie spam. Lol. I don't, it's just that it's considered top dog still, and certain changes benefit it greatly because those changes hamstring other builds while it only loses 4 shots at PS1.

BTW how is 21 Black Squad Pilots all shooting at PS 9, some of them covered by Howlrunners buff, not broken? Or at the least not a threat of an auto forced Assault missiles spam? This sounds like 40k, not X-wing. Is that what your wanting to play?

Didn't you just ask about 75 point games? Now, I'm not a genius (as far as I know), but I'm relatively certain you can't cram 21 Black Squad Pilots into 75 points. What answer would you like? It's kinda hard to answer if you jump topic to topic without any response to the answers you get.

KnuckleWolf wrote:
BTW how is 21 Black Squad Pilots all shooting at PS 9, some of them covered by Howlrunners buff, not broken? Or at the least not a threat of an auto forced Assault missiles spam? This sounds like 40k, not X-wing. Is that what your wanting to play?

Because the enemies gate is down.

And how are you getting all the Black squadron to PS 9?

Sorry for the confusion, thought that was edited into the other post haha I jumped topic, my bad! I know we found in one 50pt game two Ion Y-wings was cheesy but whatever, still curious what broke at 75. As was mentioned, we couldn't do less than 90pts with out things getting funky, although I demo with the quick start rules at 25pts and under and that works. There's also an extended demo I do at 50pts that works well. But both those cases have pre-designed lists that are intentionally cheese-less.

Anywho! I was curious what a 600pt game would look like so i rushed to squadron builder and said okay, how is do? So the busted TIE swarm I mentioned above uses this list for a mock up squad that you can take with 400pts(399 actually, YEAH INITIATIVE! WHOOT!):
Darth Vader + Swarm Tactics
Howlrunner + Swarm Tactics
21x Black Squadron Pilots each with Swarm Tactics
and a lone Academy Pilot

Thanks to Swarm Tactics, at the start of combat you choose the order the swarm tactics resolve, so you have Vader buff Howlrunner to PS 9, who buffs a Black Squad to PS 9 since she has that PS now till end of turn, and then chain it to each other ship in your blob/formation, with the last ship to receive the buff being the glorious point-man, your lone Academy Pilot. TIP OF THE SPEAR! In total 24 batches of 2 dice all at PS 9 many of which will be Howlrunner buffed. This does work, it has been officially FAQ'd.

Edited: Numbers were confused. Hoo-ray for 3 AM posts