B-Wings: Doom Turtles!

Completing the last of the original Rebellion squadrons, we'll round things off with B wings.

Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.

A Wings: Jumping Off the Deck, Shove it into Overdrive

So you've been reading Rebel Squadron articles, wondering how you're supposed to beat Imperial TIEs with their speed 4 and their blue dice and everything? Just like a mediocre NFL Quarterback*, throw it deep with the A-Wing!

Start playing Kenny Loggins.  Danger Zone is my recommendation, but if you want to cut Footloose...

Imperial-specific upgrades

To bring the original two factions into line with how we'll be managing articles for the two new kids, it's time for me to give the Imperial-specific upgrades their own section. I'll be ignoring upgrades for Imperial ships that go in a unique slot, like the Interdictor experimental retrofits or the Onager superweapons, given those get covered in their respective articles. That leaves us with the non-officer more conventional upgrade slots here. Let's get to it!

The Empire's not all bad - look, they're turning those star destroyers into treehouses with rope ladders for the kiddos!

Imperial commander review: Admiral Screed

It's time to review the monster that absolutely dominated the meta in wave one: Admiral Screed!

They all laughed when I said I wanted to be an admiral and also the Terminator! Well who's laughing now?

Imperial commander review: Admiral Motti

Welcome to the first of many Imperial commander reviews! Let's begin with Admiral Motti.

You may remember him sass-mouthing Vader before getting force choked in A New Hope.

Eric 1.5 updated articles and timestamp changes going forward 12/8/2020

One of our most frequent frustrations here at CGYSO is someone will recommend one of our articles but mention "it's old, though, look at the timestamp but it's still pretty good" on an article we just updated or reviewed a few weeks ago. The issue being that the timestamp remains from when the article was originally released but does not reflect the fact that we review and, when necessary, make updates to articles pretty frequently. Other than our new clone wars articles, articles we write about tournaments, and hot take articles, every article that's linked in the sidebar has already been updated at least once and often many more times than that.

Usually an article get updated whenever:

1. Something from a new wave offers new/competing options with something we've already written about.
   
2. Our opinion about something we've written earlier changes due to our own experience.
3. We want to trim the fat a bit to shorten an earlier article.
4. A reader points out something new to add to an article and we agree it bears inclusion.
5. We're fixing up little typos or formatting issues or whatnot.

Typically we'll edit articles for several of these reasons put together, but the short version is we're dedicated to keeping the blog up to date and relevant in perpetuity even if the timestamps don't necessarily reflect that. Enter Blogger making some UI changes a few months ago. We now have the ability to republish old articles using a new up-to-date timestamp. This will make timestamps more reflective of when any moderate to major changes were made to articles (minor fixes like typos, eh, who cares). It also means that updated articles will jump back up to the top of the scroll, so don't be alarmed by that.

Thanks for all your help buddy, but you get hair everywhere in there.

With all that spelled out, I'm going to be running through all my old articles (anything that's linked and intended to be kept updated, like ships, commanders, squadrons, upgrades, and objectives) starting with the oldest and working towards the newest. In many cases, minimal changes should be required but I want to try to be meticulous in scrolling through and updating everything to 1.5. With that said, I've updated the following articles:

• TIE Fighter
• A little bit of cleanup and a new hyperlink added to the new Imperial squadron groups article.
• TIE Fighter aces
• Mauler Mithel Intel interaction modernized to 1.5 rules.
• TIE Advanced
• Minor editing, republished mostly to show that yes, this has been updated since it was first published 3 years ago.
• TIE Bomber
• Intel interaction changed to 1.5 on several different sub-entries here.
• TIE Interceptor
• Went into more detail about Reserve Hangar Decks.
• Again removed old Intel references.

It'll be a while but sooner or later I'll be completely caught up on my articles. Expect more short updates like this one for quite a while summarizing what's been changed.

Imperial squadron review: TIE Interceptor

Last but not least of the wave one Imperial squadrons, we have the extremely zippy TIE Interceptor!

It's like a regular TIE Fighter, only with more triangles.

Imperial squadron review: TIE Bomber

Time for us to focus on the TIE Bomber, the cheapest bomber squadron in the game:

Haven't I seen this airbrushed on the side of a van somewhere?

Imperial squadron review: TIE Advanced

Moving on to the second (and shorter!) review of the wave one Imperial squadrons, we have the TIE Advanced:

It was in Star Wars: A New Hope that one time ever, how could you not recognize it?

Imperial squadron review: TIE Fighter aces

One last bit of TIE Fightery goodness before proceeding on to other matters!

So we covered the basics (and then some) of TIE Fighters in my previous article. Here I'd like to briefly go over their unique counterparts...

For when only the Emperor's most committed masochists can get the job done.

Imperial squadron review: TIE Fighters

So let's begin with the smallest building blocks in an Armada player's arsenal: squadrons. We'll be moving on to ships as we get there. John tends to love his squadrons the most and there's definitely some meat there for Imperial players as well. I don't intend to focus on only squadrons, but I'd like to start with one particularly key squadron that's frequently misunderstood and underappreciated: the humble TIE Fighter squadron. This is a particular focus of mine, so get comfortable as this article is going to be long. Buckle up, prime your twin ion engines, and let's launch...

Proudly bringing green lasers and pew pew noises since 1977

Imperial Squadron Groups

Time to get hip with the new Clone Wars kids and break out the example Imperial squadron groups into their own separate thing. This is also a good chance to update them to 1.5 compliance, which means a max of 4 aces for 400 points. This is going to result in a fair bit of changes to these examples given how ace-heavy a lot of 1.0 Imperial squad groups got at higher points values.

So fancy!

Separatist squadron groups

Much like the article John published earlier for the Republic, it's time to cover some Separatist squadron groups as examples of your options for different squad builds. 

Gotta love how droid squadrons have those angry eyes on everything.

Separatist squadron review: Vulture-class Droid Fighters

TIE Fighters were the very first squadron review I ever wrote (it's been updated over the years, don't worry!) so it's only fitting that I get started on Separatist squadrons with the very similar Vulture Droids.

What if a TIE Fighter and an evil Segway Scooter had a baby?

Merry Shipsmas!

As you can probably tell, all of our Clone Wars content went live this morning. We're still working on getting everything added to the indices but that should be done within an hour or so of this post. We've got lots of work yet to do but the Clone Wars stuff is up! There's over 20 new articles so keep scrolling ;).