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Without knowing the dial (but assuming it is like the lambda but with white hard turns at least) but noting it has two unique things going for it, it has an EPT, and it has two tech slots been messing around with a "Fat Ren" build

Kylo(pilot) + PTL + Adv. Sensors + Recon Specialist + rebel captive + sensor cluster + weapons guidance + engine upgrade + title = 56 pts

pretty expensive for a ps 6 ship but can do the following.
With advance sensors it can take its action (focus) then PTL for Coordinate or boost, reveal a green, remove stress from PTL and will "always" use both its focus for attack and "always" have 1 evade. When shot at for the first time it gives out a stress and can use its title (if in range 1-2) and th
With coordinate I was also thinking Omega ace could be useful with com relay/juke and able to get both TL and focus in a single turn as well as juke which then could trigger SYTDS with one of the crits (or any other ship that can make crits)

Could also ditch title and rebel captive and could take omega leader with com/juke + another 25 pt ship

Aside from the not knowing the dial what are your thoughts about this fat ren setup?

Oberron wrote:
Aside from the not knowing the dial what are your thoughts about this fat ren setup?

Way too fat. PTL + EU is wasted points, it's just not going to be maneuverable enough to be a PTL dogfighter and EU is marginal on a PS 6 ship. Sensor cluster + weapon guidance is wasted points, how often are you really going to have enough focus tokens to use both? Rebel captive is not bad, but Palpatine is game-breaking so you take Palpatine. Overall you've got 56 points on a ship that is dead weight once your other 44 points are dead, and that (unlike a Palpatine shuttle) doesn't help your remaining 44 points get the job done. Your opponent is free to kill whatever you take with the shuttle and then finish it off whenever they feel like it. And with 100 points of enemy ships focusing on 44 points of shuttle escort you're probably going to be down to the shuttle rather quickly.

The other issue with trying to figure anything out for specific setups is that we know it's going to be getting new tech upgrades that are probably more appropriate for a support shuttle. You're almost certainly not going to be taking sensor cluster and weapon guidance, but what will you be taking instead? What crew might be needed to support this plan if Palpatine is finally banned?

 Peregrine wrote:
if Palpatine is finally banned?

Why would they ban Palpatine?

Why would they ban Palpatine?

Because people keep whining about it. I'm pretty sure they won't; their response is more subtle - Palpatine is an amazing card because one guaranteed dice modifier is a massive deal in a list with 2 gunned-up, dice-dependent aces but largely irrelevant in, say, a TIE swarm.

Give people better tools to deal with aces and Palpatine is no big deal - and they don't just deal with the problem by reverting to 3 aces instead of 2 aces + Palpatine.
The 'problem with the metagame' - if you feel there is one - is that it's a game of extremes. Generally, event-winning squads are super-manoeuvrable, super-evasive green dice monsters (Soontir Fel &The Inquisitor + Palpatine) or super-tanky super-red dice modifying alpha strike monsters (3 x Contracted Scouts with Torpedoes).

A 'balanced' squad - one of 3-4 medium-weight fighters - can easily be built to engage one of the above but it's hard to build a squad which can fight both because the tricks you need are - if not mutually exclusive - at least hard to fit both into a squad in sufficient capacity......meaning that you end up facing a seriously unpleasant match one way or the other at some point in an event; which people say is the reason Rebels (who are largely built around medium/heavy fighters) have been very unsuccessful this year at events, and those that have have generally been rebel 'big ship' squads (Like Dash Rendar & the Ghost).

PTL + EU is wasted points, it's just not going to be maneuverable enough to be a PTL dogfighter and EU is marginal on a PS 6 ship

It's going to depend on the dial a lot. If there's no white hard turn, there's a lot to be said for an engine upgrade in order to be able to come about in a reasonable timeframe.


Personally, with 12 hit point to burn, I'd rather use the Electronic Baffle, though. It will cost you the odd shield but at 1 point for the whole thing, it's a lot more cost efficient than Advanced Sensors + Engine Upgrade. Plus, allowing you to 'stop' (if it can) when already stressed is actually a VERY nice trick.

The big thing about the upsilon is that you can't afford to use it as a 'palpatine truck'. On a lambda shuttle, you're essentially spending just shy of 30 points on the Emperor Palpatine card plus an occasional 3-dice attack.

With the Upsilon, you NEED to use the shuttle as the core of your fleet. It's more like a decimator - by the time you've equipped it, you've spend enough points that you can't get two 'proper' aces (Vader/Inquisitor/Fel) and are stuck with either two 'pocket aces' (omega Leader/Wampa) or one decent ace and some chaff.

Furthermore, you're paying for a four dice primary attack. You need to be firing that big stick repeatedly if you intend to get your money's worth.

Recon Specialist + sensor cluster + weapons guidance

Just because you have two slots, you don't necessarily have to use them.

Sensor Cluster maybe. Weapons Guidance no.
The value of both cards is that they give you a new way to spend a focus token......
....actually that's not true.

They allow you to spend a focus token in a way you already would (to increase the number of hits and evades on attack and defence rolls) but loosen the restrictions on when you can do it.

The value in the card is therefore how often you can spend a focus token when you wouldn't be able to without it.

This means rolling at least one blank (since you need one to spend a token) and no focus results.


With a 4-dice attack roll, you've got nearly a 70% chance of getting at least one focus result, at which point weapons guidance does nothing.

With a 1-die evade roll, you've got only a 25% chance of rolling a focus result. Plus a green die has more blank faces, and plus, an extra evade generally means a point of damage prevented even if it doesn't make the attack miss entirely. With Recon Specialist, you've got 2 guaranteed 1 evade results in your pocket, which can be useful.

Pairing Rebel Captive and Kylo Ren's shuttle is not as great as it sound - because Kylo Ren's Shuttle ability only works on unstressed ships.


We won't know exactly how to make the ship work until we see the dial and the new tech (and pilots).

I do think that Omega Squadron characters (as you suggest) are probably a good choice. Both of them benefit hugely from being able to acquire a free (to them) target lock.

If you really want to use and abuse Kylo Ren's ability, you could do worse than pack Vader on board, since he pairs ridiculously well with his Grandson. Since it's an "attack me and you'll regret it" ability, Rebel Captive might be a better choice than the title.

If you're going to use it as a Palpatine caddy, then I think it would work best with just FCS and nothing else. Kylo Ren is possibly a good choice, seeing as how this will draw fire, but that limits how much you can spend on the rest of your squad (which limits the efficiency of Palpatine). There's a reason the Decimator was never a very popular Palpatine caddy. The big question is how useful the Coordinate action will be to a palpmobile.

As it stands right now: your paying something like 10 extra points for 2 extra health, an extra attack dice, and double tech upgrades. That will probably be a better deal when we get more useful Tech upgrades. I'm guessing the basic Upsilon shuttle is something like 30 or 31 points, and that's probably the right price. Kylo Ren strikes me as a bit much for what he can do.

An interesting idea the other day, if on the off chance the middle grade generic pilot has an elite pilot Talent, you could really do some interesting things. Otherwise, you'll just have to deal with the mediocre ability of kylo Ren and whoever else the name the pilot is for elite pilot talents.

You could potentially take expose on both ships, Advanced sensors on both, and experimental interface on one of them. This will allow you to boost your attack even higher before you move, using coordinate to give an Expose action to your nearby friendly ship, and exposing yourself through the interface. Then after you do your move and clear your stress, you can focus or Target lock, using either Recon Specialist, or what I like to use: weapons engineer to enhance your damage.

I also am wondering about potentially putting kylo Ren and his grandfather Darth Vader on the same shuttle. This way, when I use my free actions to give a nearby ship the condition from kylo Ren comic I can ping myself for to damage through Vader and immediately assign My Chosen card to them.

I don't think it'll be wise to spend anything more than 10 points in upgrades on Ren. I say that based on experience with Bossk. Anything more than 45 points and he felt like a liability.

You could potentially take expose on both ships, Advanced sensors on both, and experimental interface on one of them. This will allow you to boost your attack even higher before you move, using coordinate to give an Expose action to your nearby friendly ship, and exposing yourself through the interface. Then after you do your move and clear your stress, you can focus or Target lock, using either Recon Specialist, or what I like to use: weapons engineer to enhance your damage.

Unfortunately, Advanced Sensors doesn't let you do this - unlike Sabine Wren or BB-8, if you get your pre-manoeuvre action it costs you your standard 'perform action' step.

I do think Kylo Ren and Darth Vader on the same ship has potential. Whether I'd put it on the Upsilon or the Lambda depends on the former's dial - it's tougher (good), shootier (largely irrelevant if using your action on I'll Show You The Dark Side for unavoidable damage) and more expensive (bad). It largely comes down to whether the dial improves enough (giving you more shots) to justify a more expensive doomshuttle.

Darn, I forgot about that. Well in either case, I'm still able to expose both ships, and get an extra action on at least one of them. The ship that has the experimental interface will move first, coordinate off an expose action to the other ship, and interface and expose action itself. Then it will move to relieve the stress. The second ship can then either Focus or Target lock itself, or coordinate off and extra action to the interface ship. This will be especially useful if the interface ship carries Vader.

If you're going to put Darth Vader on the shuttle piloted by Kylo Ren (If it's a fat Ren, I would then call him Extra-Kilos Ren), it would behoove anyone with a modicum of Photoshop skills to make a new card and change the title to Darth Vader's fire-mangled helmet. Leave the rest of the text unchanged.

At a minimum.

I'm still not sold on the Upsillyon, the 4 red dice is neat but at some point its going to have to try and turn round, which will most likely take 2 or 3 turns of not shooting, its too hot to do the sums to figure out if the extra red dice outweighs a 360 arc Decimator

 Peregrine wrote:

Oberron wrote:
Aside from the not knowing the dial what are your thoughts about this fat ren setup?

Way too fat. PTL + EU is wasted points, it's just not going to be maneuverable enough to be a PTL dogfighter and EU is marginal on a PS 6 ship. Sensor cluster + weapon guidance is wasted points, how often are you really going to have enough focus tokens to use both? Rebel captive is not bad, but Palpatine is game-breaking so you take Palpatine. Overall you've got 56 points on a ship that is dead weight once your other 44 points are dead, and that (unlike a Palpatine shuttle) doesn't help your remaining 44 points get the job done. Your opponent is free to kill whatever you take with the shuttle and then finish it off whenever they feel like it. And with 100 points of enemy ships focusing on 44 points of shuttle escort you're probably going to be down to the shuttle rather quickly.

The other issue with trying to figure anything out for specific setups is that we know it's going to be getting new tech upgrades that are probably more appropriate for a support shuttle. You're almost certainly not going to be taking sensor cluster and weapon guidance, but what will you be taking instead? What crew might be needed to support this plan if Palpatine is finally banned?

I think you missed out on recon specialist, that gives you both focus needed for sensor cluster and weapon guidance. But otherwise not a bad post.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Mr ghoti wrote:
An interesting idea the other day, if on the off chance the middle grade generic pilot has an elite pilot Talent, you could really do some interesting things. Otherwise, you'll just have to deal with the mediocre ability of kylo Ren and whoever else the name the pilot is for elite pilot talents.

You could potentially take expose on both ships, Advanced sensors on both, and experimental interface on one of them. This will allow you to boost your attack even higher before you move, using coordinate to give an Expose action to your nearby friendly ship, and exposing yourself through the interface. Then after you do your move and clear your stress, you can focus or Target lock, using either Recon Specialist, or what I like to use: weapons engineer to enhance your damage.

I also am wondering about potentially putting kylo Ren and his grandfather Darth Vader on the same shuttle. This way, when I use my free actions to give a nearby ship the condition from kylo Ren comic I can ping myself for to damage through Vader and immediately assign My Chosen card to them.

Vader's crit won't proc Show you the dark side, Vader is after an attack and SYTDS is during an attack.

Isn't vader's critical damage BECAUSE I performed an attack? I wouldn't be able to use his ability if I didn't attack. So this has to be damage from an attack.

Mr ghoti wrote:
Isn't vader's critical damage BECAUSE I performed an attack? I wouldn't be able to use his ability if I didn't attack. So this has to be damage from an attack.

Fairly sure it doesnt work as 'I'll Show you the Dark Side" trigger is 'during an attack' and Vader triggers 'after an attack', I've misplaced the my FAQ flowchart about the order of stuff triggering in an attack but think the wording is clear, it's still very easy to trigger, Palp, Adv Target Comp, Chirpy, etc

Mr ghoti wrote:
Isn't vader's critical damage BECAUSE I performed an attack? I wouldn't be able to use his ability if I didn't attack. So this has to be damage from an attack.

Vader's damge isn't an attack nor is it during an attack, it is after an attack. ISYTDS is only during an attack, not after. You can use vader but the crit isn't during an attack.

locarno24 wrote:

Recon Specialist + sensor cluster + weapons guidance

Just because you have two slots, you don't necessarily have to use them.

Sensor Cluster maybe. Weapons Guidance no.
The value of both cards is that they give you a new way to spend a focus token......
....actually that's not true.

They allow you to spend a focus token in a way you already would (to increase the number of hits and evades on attack and defence rolls) but loosen the restrictions on when you can do it.

The value in the card is therefore how often you can spend a focus token when you wouldn't be able to without it.

This means rolling at least one blank (since you need one to spend a token) and no focus results.


With a 4-dice attack roll, you've got nearly a 70% chance of getting at least one focus result, at which point weapons guidance does nothing.

With a 1-die evade roll, you've got only a 25% chance of rolling a focus result. Plus a green die has more blank faces, and plus, an extra evade generally means a point of damage prevented even if it doesn't make the attack miss entirely. With Recon Specialist, you've got 2 guaranteed 1 evade results in your pocket, which can be useful.

Pairing Rebel Captive and Kylo Ren's shuttle is not as great as it sound - because Kylo Ren's Shuttle ability only works on unstressed ships.


We won't know exactly how to make the ship work until we see the dial and the new tech (and pilots).

I do think that Omega Squadron characters (as you suggest) are probably a good choice. Both of them benefit hugely from being able to acquire a free (to them) target lock.

If you really want to use and abuse Kylo Ren's ability, you could do worse than pack Vader on board, since he pairs ridiculously well with his Grandson. Since it's an "attack me and you'll regret it" ability, Rebel Captive might be a better choice than the title.

Weapons guidance isn't wasted if a focus is rolled. You could always spend both focus on the attack, one for the focus roll, and one for a blank result into a hit result. A before anyone brings up the recent faq

Focus, evade, and target lock tokens cannot be spent for their normal effect
more than once during the "Modify Attack Dice" and "Modify Defense Dice"
steps. For example, a ship cannot spend 2 evade tokens to add 2 evade
results. However, a ship can spend more than 1 of each token on different
effects, such as spending 1 focus token as the cost for Calculation and
another focus token focus token for its inherent effect

you quite clearly CAN use both focuses in that case. You do lose out on having a focus for evade that turn but if you really need to push out damage you can. Just as likewise as you said about using both focus for evade dice if being focused fired its great for two guarantee evades. That just improves its flexibility with its focus dice since its ps 6, if it shot at multiple times and you need to evade you can, on the other hand if you don't need to at first you can swing away with 4+ dice and get almost a guaranteed 4 hit/crit in.

As for rebel captaive and kylo ren's shuttle my thought on it was that it can still be useful to either stressing two ships or super stress 1 ship, aside from certain pilots, both outcomes are kinda sucky. If both of those are a no-go, or for more points to free up for another ship both of them could be dropped for an extra 5 points. 51 pts is a little better but still over half the list.

Another thought is to toss on another recon specialist since they aren't limited. 3 focus so you can always max out your attack and still have one for an evade, or even preventing a damage from 3 shots, but I don't think that is the most efficient set up and better to just have more points for other ships.