Pictured: Vader in the middle of discarding the Raymus Antilles upgrade card. |
- This trigger window is upon the reveal command dial step, so you may discard a squadron command dial you just revealed if you wish.
- Obviously, it's generally preferable to discard a token when you can instead of a whole dial.
- Tokens are discarded, not spent. This is generally a meaningless distinction except for effects that work on spent tokens, like Wulff Yularen, who can "save" a spent token but not a discarded token.
- Discarding a squadron token or dial doesn't count as a resolution of that command, so you can still resolve a squadron command using a remaining dial or token or from an upgrade like the Pursuant title.
- Because the squadron command is resolved after you reveal your command dial, the boarding team triggers first and squadrons would be activated afterwards.
- Remember that you can premeasure at any time, so make sure the enemy ship you want to hit is at close range before attempting to board them!
All right everyone, line up in order of most to least facial hair! This is the sacred way of engineers. |
- Look at all of the facedown cards currently assigned to the target ship.
- Choose a number of them equal to your engineering value.
- Flip those cards over, one at a time, and resolve their effects.
That said, I think they definitely have a stronger case when fielded with a few other fleet elements:
- Dodonna does amazing things for Boarding Engineers because when you hit the enemy ship for a face-up card, he can choose crits that do something nasty and then flip back over (like Structural Damage or Comms Noise or Injured Crew), which allows you to reuse them with Boarding Engineers later.
- Anything that gets damage cards to sneak through shields and stick to ships early makes Boarding Engineers better and less of a "win more" card. Primarily this means cards that can deal damage through shields, like Luke Skywalker, Assault Proton Torpedoes, and Proximity Mines, although you can also help a bit with some well-timed ramming.
"The artist didn't give the rest of us eyes so we're counting on you, Greg!" |
Boarding Troopers are a circumstantially powerful upgrade, most notoriously when used in combination with the Avenger ISD title, which prohibits exhausted defense tokens from being used against its attacks; any ship with a free weapon team and offensive retrofit slot that can deliver a solid wallop at short range and has a reasonable chance of getting there can benefit from Boarding Troopers, however, because spending defense tokens forever to lessen the impact of a big salvo is unappealing regardless of the circumstances.
Overall, I find Boarding Troopers are better than Boarding Engineers because they don't need as any things to go right to make them useful. In particular, there's no desire to hold them back for later - they want to mess with defense tokens ASAP, preferably in combination with several upcoming attacks, which helps destroy enemy ships much more quickly than flipping damage cards usually will.
Boarding engineers might aswell be stapled to my hammerheads, they always hit their mark and provide good results for my games. Never had any luck with the troopers as rebels they seem like an ISD imperial thing.
ReplyDeleteIn general the Troopers are thus far very much an Imperial thing, although I know John has had some limited success trying them on Torp Hammerheads with External Racks and Task Force Organa for his rerolls. When they get to their big External Racks power turn, they pop the Troopers to tap out the brace on whatever they're going after and then let rip with 6 dice. I wouldn't say it's amazing, but it's better than you might think at first.
DeleteI would also agree that Boarding Engineers are likely best on Hammerheads at the moment, but they count on lining up a lot of things to work successfully. So far I haven't been terribly impressed with them, but that may change at some point.