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On mobile, can't do the image cut and paste thing easily, but there's the article.

Obstacle destruction is now a thing alongside obstacle placing.

So, fluff wise, I'm pretty stoked to see Asajj Ventress in there. But overall the ship seems pretty cool.

And you now have a reason to fill those torpedo slots *if* you have points to spare, to clear the battlefield.

 krodarklorr wrote:
So, fluff wise, I'm pretty stoked to see Asajj Ventress in there. But overall the ship seems pretty cool.

I suspect Asajj will make her way into quite a few lists. Autostress an enemy at R1-2 in the MFA? Suck it Quis. GFY Soontir.

Looks like some fun toys, maybe not all deathmatch dogfight calibre but bringers of shenanigans none the less

I think that the rigged cargo chute is a wicked little card. just imagine flying through the gaps in the map and blocking them as you pass.

Cargo, Ketso, and Seismic Torps all seem like game-changers at first glance.

The Seismic Torpedoes will hurt lists that rely on terrain as part of their list-building structure. IE: Captain Yorr's Debris Clouds.

Ketso might become a big thing for scum as the current-meta-killer.

Cargo is silly and yet an interesting way to cause problems for Whisper or large ships.

I am glad that the Seismic Torpedoes exist to counter the Cargo.

Latts Razzi is also amusing - and is essentially a one-card hard counter to Rage/Push The Limit Tycho.

On a more practical level, there are quite a few pilots she's essentially a cheap, recycling evade against (the Push The Limit crowd, for starters).

Seismic Torpedoes are nice. They're not amazing because you can't use them to attack a ship in isolation, and because the target rolls the dice (subject to palpatine dice-ju-ju-ing) but the fact that you could easily fit 3-4 of them in a squad means that they're very nasty for squads of generics who don't want to knife fight in asteroids; it's not an amazing squad, but four Rookie Pilots with Seismic Torpedoes, Targeting Astromechs and Integrated Astromechs are good jousters who can clear themselves space to joust in if they need to....

First (and second) impressions:

Basic ship: Just going to repost my comments from the first preview because nothing is new here. The mobile arc thing is just plain worse than having a turret. You seem to save a few points compared to an equivalent ship with a real turret, but you lose so much damage by having to spend actions to turn your arc that it's just not worth it. If you're dealing with this inefficiency you'd better make good use of the special abilities involving the mobile arc. The shield/hull ratio is bad, but having the second green die and the evade action is good. No maneuvering actions (and only getting boost from a modification) hurts a lot when you don't have a 360* turret. Crew and double illicit isn't a bad upgrade bar, but it's not great. I think a lot of the final verdict depends on how good the dial is. With a good dial it could be fun, if it gets a limited dial then it's probably going straight to the garbage pile.

Title: as stated before it's an auto-include. Don't let the fact that it costs points fool you, it would be very difficult to come up with a plausible situation where you don't take this. Free tractor beam tokens are just that good.

Ketsu Onyo: my initial impression stands. Her ability is really, really nasty if you can make it work. Automatic tractor beam followed by a 4-dice primary shot and a pile of red dice from your other ships makes even the toughest aces go away. On the other hand PS 7 and no maneuvering actions is a bad combination for in-arc abilities. The dial is going to be the deciding factor here, I think.

Asajj Ventress: good, but is she the best? A range 1-2 automatic stress token is obviously a powerful effect, but PS 6 is a huge drawback. Even with VI you can only get to PS 8. And taken in isolation I'm not convinced that her pilot ability is really better than Ketsu's, so what exactly do you get from losing that important point of PS? It does at least only require a target in your mobile arc, not mobile and primary, so maybe if the dial is bad and Ketsu can't get primary arc targets reliably enough it might be worth a try?

Sabine Wren: again, standing by my initial impression. PS 5 and no EPT is bad, and very bad combined with a pilot ability that requires a target in your arc AND an action. She's almost completely dependent on drugs, and therefore a dial with a lot of green to even have a chance of being viable. And defensive abilities tend to be weaker than offensive abilities. Auto-tractoring a target into a kill shot is usually better than adding an extra evade result, and there isn't much difference in price to make up for that power gap.

IG-88D: whoa. Did not expect this to be a one-point upgrade. Obviously this makes your list-building options very small, but you get a ton of power in return. A free evade action, HP regen, and "gunner" with cannons are all abilities that would be worth way more than a single point on "normal" crew. This upgrade may have one of the most difficult paths to viability because you're committed to spending another ~50 points on an IG-88, but if IG-88 + other ship is a viable list idea IG-88D is going to be incredibly powerful.

Latts Razzi: too situational IMO. Yeah, she gives you "free" evade results against PTL ships, but then you're freeing up their dial next turn and they still have a good chance of getting damage through against your two green dice. And she's almost a blank card against anything that isn't PTL aces. I think, given how many powerful crew options there are, it's going to be difficult to justify taking something so situational when it isn't even a crippling hard counter to its one target.

Ketsu Onyo: powerful on paper, but how effective will she really be? The in-arc restriction is not a big deal because all of your tractor beam sources (outside of stupid stuff like taking a Syck with a tractor beam and Ketsu on some other ship) are in-arc effects. But the main appeal of a tractor beam ship is that you can absolutely wreck a target in a single turn of shooting. Making a target keep its tractor beam tokens is a concession that your kill shot failed. It's not a bad consolation prize, in isolation, but shouldn't your crew slots be spent on something that either makes your kill shot hurt more or makes the tractor beam itself more reliable?

Rigged Cargo Chute: adding extra obstacles is a double-edged sword. It does potentially make things bad for your opponent, but with a large-base ship it's something that can very easily sabotage your own future maneuvering options. And no, it's not a bomb even if it deploys like one, and bombs are hard enough to use effectively on ships that get buffs to them. I think the end result is going to depend on the exact rules for deploying a debris cloud on top of a ship. Can you hit them like a conner net, inflict immediate stress, and then give them another stress when they execute their maneuver and the template hits the cloud? That's a big question in weighing the value of extra obstacles vs. drugs.

Seismic Torpedoes: these are pretty interesting. It's potential damage, in a way that is independent of PS or evade dice (though note that the victim rolls the die, so Palpatine can negate it) and opens up maneuvering options. And, unlike debris clouds, it goes in an upgrade slot that sees very little use right now. On the other hand, like adding obstacles, removing them is a double-edged sword. You can't put them back no matter how much you'd really like your opponent's ace to have something a little more complicated than an empty table when they're making maneuvering choices. But IMO the low point cost and low-value slot make them appealing as a speculative tool even if you don't always want to use them.

IG-88D: whoa. Did not expect this to be a one-point upgrade. Obviously this makes your list-building options very small, but you get a ton of power in return. A free evade action, HP regen, and "gunner" with cannons are all abilities that would be worth way more than a single point on "normal" crew. This upgrade may have one of the most difficult paths to viability because you're committed to spending another ~50 points on an IG-88, but if IG-88 + other ship is a viable list idea IG-88D is going to be incredibly powerful.

Latts Razzi: too situational IMO. Yeah, she gives you "free" evade results against PTL ships, but then you're freeing up their dial next turn and they still have a good chance of getting damage through against your two green dice. And she's almost a blank card against anything that isn't PTL aces. I think, given how many powerful crew options there are, it's going to be difficult to justify taking something so situational when it isn't even a crippling hard counter to its one target.

Agree on Latts that she's very situational, but then she doesn't have to trigger much to be very powerful. I know shield upgrades aren't a competitive choice, but for effects that add damage mitigation, it's a useful meterstick. To equal a shield upgrade, you have to trigger it once every other game.

Would you? Well, as noted, taking stress off a PTL ace stops a hit but also opens up their dial. The question is; are they going to take advantage of that? Someone like Soontir or the Inquisitor is generally doing a green move 80-90% of the time anyway. Being able to swap from a speed 2 to speed 1-3 turn is nice, but only does so much. It's still not like they're going to K-turn if they can avoid it - and that probably goes double for Countess Ryad and her bloody green K-turns.

Equally, Dash Rendar with Kanan Jarrus is going to bin off that stress regardless, so you might as well make it work for you.

Tycho/Rage isn't exactly setting the game on fire, but is literally just an annoying fly against this card.

Jumpmasters do suffer. Since they clarified how R4 was supposed to work in lines of the timing changes in the Force Awakens core set, a lot of the time when you see Jumpmasters they're packing Overclocked R4s - if they want a focus token to modify a torpedo shot, it's going to give them a stress token which is going to translate into a free evade for you.

Dengar with Overclocked R4 and Manaroo tends to be knee-deep in stress tokens, too.


The biggest problem is going to mostly be the crew slot - I wholeheartedly agree that scum have some very, very good 2-3 point crew cards, and not many slots to put them in.

If I was forced to use it, my first reflex would probably be to put it in a YV-666. With three crew slots, you can afford to give one up - you're not going to 'dodge' attacks, but you don't have to trigger latts that many times to deflect a meaningful chunk of damage, and meanwhile, a cannon plus two scum crew can still make for a dangerous ship (Dengar & Zuckuss, for example).

IG-88D is nice. Again, it's dependent on giving up your crew slot, but that's still giving you a lot of nasty power. Again - because of the crew space - I wonder if YV-666's might be the way to go; you're going to want to make a ship which is good by itself anyway, rather than being dependent on IG-88's 'imported' ability - so the YV-666's multiple crew slots are kind of tempting.

Seismic Torpedoes: these are pretty interesting. It's potential damage, in a way that is independent of PS or evade dice (though note that the victim rolls the die, so Palpatine can negate it) and opens up maneuvering options. And, unlike debris clouds, it goes in an upgrade slot that sees very little use right now. On the other hand, like adding obstacles, removing them is a double-edged sword. You can't put them back no matter how much you'd really like your opponent's ace to have something a little more complicated than an empty table when they're making maneuvering choices. But IMO the low point cost and low-value slot make them appealing as a speculative tool even if you don't always want to use them.

I think that's the main thing. Rebel snubfighters tend to come laden with empty torpedo slots at the moment. It'd only take a couple of seismic torpedoes to seriously change the dynamics of a game, and change the normally manoeuvrability-favouring tight-packed obstacle field into a bit of a deathtrap for fragile ships and - especially - swarms.

Re: the Seismic Torpedoes. If a player is going to use his Palpatine dice shenanigans one a single dice of damage off a torp (granted, it might save a ship with only a single Hull left) then you've just cleared the way for other attacks at multiple dice to punch through potentially a lot more damage. I really don't see it as a loss.

I can see seismic torps being potentially handy, though I really wish they were missiles.

At 2 points I can see it being more useful than flachette torpedoes as an "afterthought" munition on a bomber (TIE ) that already has something like homing missiles for long range. And even the presence of something like that can make your opponent a lot more shy of obstacles and limit her/his moves.

Also, it's an action. Not an attack. Unless I'm wrong, you can only drop 1 bomb, but I haven't seen anything about only one missile per turn...

No, but you're explicitly prevented from performing the same action more than once each turn.

Yeah, but if you are a ship with multiple slots, A Splash-Missile + Seismic Torpedo means AOE (if very situational and requiring a previous turn Target Lock). Shooting a Missile =/= Performing an action.

I think the Seismic Torpedoes will be handy for big-ship lists that need to clear the Ace Player's large obstacles. Again, it can also work toward taking away the advantage of "The Real Definition of Stress-Hog" known as Captain Yorr who can make the debri clouds only a problem for the enemy.

Fairly sure you can fire a Seismic and another missle/torp in the same turn

The Seismic is an action rather than an attack, so whilst you couldn't PTL to blast two rocks due to the same action rule its most likely okay to blast the rock in the action phase and then shoot the ship behind the rock with a torp or missle (assumung you had the TL or whatever)

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
Fairly sure you can fire a Seismic and another missle/torp in the same turn

The Seismic is an action rather than an attack, so whilst you couldn't PTL to blast two rocks due to the same action rule its most likely okay to blast the rock in the action phase and then shoot the ship behind the rock with a torp or missle (assumung you had the TL or whatever)

This is correct. In fact, you could even fire two missiles/torpedoes in one turn (for example, with Dengar's ability) if you want and have the opportunity to attack twice. The only problem is being able to get enough actions to set up both "shots".

Also, note that the free action with PTL has to be one from your action bar, so even without the "no taking the same action twice" rule you still couldn't PTL a double seismic shot. This is a subtle detail about PTL that people often miss.

The double Munitions: Weapons Engineer with Dengar could do it, but that;d be a not very... good build?

What ships have a Missile and a Torpedo Slot? Assault Missile + Seismic Torpedoes could be an interesting double-tap to sneak damage onto swarms or aces that hug asteroids. Of course, unless you have Airen Cracken or PTL... action economy is rough.

"Major Rhymer" (or any other double-taker) with Assault + Seismic Torpedoes could be good due to how cheap Seismic Torpedoes are? If you encounter a cargo-dropper you are guaranteed a double-tap...

Me teacher! Me!

A K-wing could, technically, drop a seismic charge when revealing a maneuver, then move, take a target lock and use Experimental Interface to launch a Seismic Torpedo. Come the time to attack, launch its Assault Missile.

And for a measly 2 points, do it again next turn!

Has anyone thought of maybe using both? fly up with the shadow caster and a bomber of some sort shoot off the the torps destroy the obstacle and then drop another with the shadow caster. if that all made sense...

This is correct. In fact, you could even fire two missiles/torpedoes in one turn (for example, with Dengar's ability) if you want and have the opportunity to attack twice. The only problem is being able to get enough actions to set up both "shots".

Also, note that the free action with PTL has to be one from your action bar, so even without the "no taking the same action twice" rule you still couldn't PTL a double seismic shot. This is a subtle detail about PTL that people often miss.

I guess this is where Thane's Free Action means that for a couple of points you've got the torp shot up your sleeve.

Other options might be Airen Cracken or Lando?

locarno24 wrote:
I guess this is where Thane's Free Action means that for a couple of points you've got the torp shot up your sleeve.

Might be worth it, but it's probably not enough to redeem a pilot who is otherwise pretty weak.

Other options might be Airen Cracken or Lando?

And with those you're well past the point of "way too complicated for minimal return". Taking seismic torps as a tool in your toolbox is maybe worth it. Spending points on stuff to set them up without spending your normal action doesn't make much sense.

It is funny though that Thrane was supposed to graduate best of his class and he is PS 4.

 Da Kommizzar wrote:
It is funny though that Thrane was supposed to graduate best of his class and he is PS 4.

... for a TIE pilot, that's in the upper tier of generics.

And with those you're well past the point of "way too complicated for minimal return". Taking seismic torps as a tool in your toolbox is maybe worth it. Spending points on stuff to set them up without spending your normal action doesn't make much sense.

Agreed. I definitely wouldn't want to take Lando or Cracken just to get torps to fire - which is why I wouldn't take experimental interface (because an X-wing with an XI probably hasn't got anything else to spend the action on, making it expensive) - but seismics give you something to spend cracken or lando's actions on - any squad which generates plenty of free actions needs things to spend it on, and X-wing and Y-wing analogues generally lack anything meaningful to do once you've got both a target lock and a focus out.

Garven's much the same - his ability is nice regardless of whether you're handing a ship a 'second' focus, or giving them the focus they would have had if they hadn't used a torpedo.

It is funny though that Thrane was supposed to graduate best of his class and he is PS 4.

Well, PS4 is 'best in the regular military' level - Red Squadron, Black Squadron, and so on. It's quite believable that a class of pilots wouldn't have anyone better than that.

Had this pop up on Facebook. Couple of un-previewed cards, and the dial. For those of you not wanting to read sideways, here's what they say:

Gyroscopic Targeting: 2 points, Lancer-Class Pursuit Craft only modification. At the end of the combat phase, if you executed a speed 3,4 or 5 maneuver, rotate your mobile firing arc.

Black-Market Slicer tools: 1 point Illicit. Action to target a stressed enemy at range 1-2. Roll an attack die, and on a hit or Crit deal 1 facedown card and remove one stress token.

Yeah, I saw all the dials during my lunch break. Does that mean that 1)Shaky cam illicit pictures are the exclusive domain of the GW fan and 2)are they closer to hitting market than late Q4 as rumoured?

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
Gyroscopic Targeting: 2 points, Lancer-Class Pursuit Craft only modification. At the end of the combat phase, if you executed a speed 3,4 or 5 maneuver, rotate your mobile firing arc.

Good, but not great. It's the weakest possible time to rotate the arc, but it's still a free rotation and the speed restriction isn't very hard to deal with when you have all greens at speed 3. The main issue is that the ship has no maneuvering actions by default, and taking the free rotate means giving up engine upgrade. Is the limited free rotation really that good? I don't know.

Black-Market Slicer tools: 1 point Illicit. Action to target a stressed enemy at range 1-2. Roll an attack die, and on a hit or Crit deal 1 facedown card and remove one stress token.

Oh god, WTF FFG. Take a metagame that is already u-boat heavy and give u-boats a counter to the only other list in the metagame? And simultaneously make those 2 HP rebel aces even less viable than they are now? This is just plain stupid and should never have been printed, to the point where I'm really losing faith in FFG's ability to make a balanced game.

The slicer tool should have removed the stress regardless of the hit or crit being rolled or not.

Gyroscopic Targeting is pretty trash. 2 points to move my mobile arc AFTER I need it pointing somewhere, when I will probably have to move it again on my next turn anyway? AND I can't take Engine Upgrade? Nah, not a chance.

Slicer Tools... what is it with FFG and wanting Scum to suddenly remove stress from enemy ships? I mean, this is a WAY better reason to remove stress than Latts Razzi's crew card, and cheaper to boot. It even fits on Scum Zs...

Oh god, WTF FFG. Take a metagame that is already u-boat heavy and give u-boats a counter to the only other list in the metagame? And simultaneously make those 2 HP rebel aces even less viable than they are now? This is just plain stupid and should never have been printed, to the point where I'm really losing faith in FFG's ability to make a balanced game.

It's the Range 2 that really surprised me. Range 1 and it's essentially a variation on the Feedback array - giving up your action is still better than giving up a shield and your move, and it's cheaper, but it only works half the time. This thing just looks hideous for anyone other than TIE defender players....

Not least because you can quite happily field a Z-swarm with these things....