Armada: Rogue Squadrons

Firesprays are out of control in Wave2 Armada.

With Wave2 just around the corner, there's going to be a good amount of players running the new Rogue and Villians squadrons with their ships.  The best part about having a large batch of ships with the Rogue keyword is that they're entirely self-sufficient.  You don't need a dedicated carrier to make them work, they can cover ground and do their job without you having to babysit them.  Since they activate just like they were issued the command, they can fire and move in the same turn; drastically increasing their ability to stick onto enemy ships that might be trying to run away.  That is seriously good.

When you think about it, it's almost entirely not worth dedicating one the ships in your list to be a fleet carrier.  To take it a little further, it wouldn't even be worth having one of your ships issue a Squadron command because a ship with Rogue will be able to do that himself later in the game.  In some cases, you can run a good amount of Rogue squadrons (coincidence?) without needing carriers at all.  All you need is the points to buy them.

In terms of getting the best bang for your buck, I would seriously considering taking the Firesprays when you're fielding Imperials.  If your running some double Motti ISD bully list for example, spending the rest of your points into Firesprays can drastically increase your list's effectiveness because of how multi-purpose they are.  They have 3 attack dice on squadrons, 2 blues on ships and carry the Rogue and Bomber keywords.  This makes them extremely efficient at attacking all targets, and with 6 HP to boot, you can't really get better value.  For the Rebels, you get the YT-2400, which moves at speed-4 and packs 4 blues vs. squadrons, but they don't have the essential Bomber keyword that makes Firesprays so lethal against all targets.

Just to give you guy a picture of what I'm talking about here, today I fought against a list running 134 points of Firespray death.  It had Boba, Dengar, Rhymer, and 4 Firesprays that moved in a tight formation.  That's a lot of hull right there and a ton of anti-ship firepower that can threaten from blue-range.  If we throw down some quick math, you're looking at 9 blue dice and 2 blacks that you're throwing out with Bomber and your opponent has 47 hull to chew through, 3 of which are hero ships with brace and scatter tokens, and they all have Counter 1 because of Dengar (which acts as a pseudo +1 blue dice).  That's a lot of points right there, but it most certainly provides results against ship heavy lists.  I know, I've fought against it and other Firespray-heavy variants and they are disgusting to fight against with my 3-ship Ackbar list.  It's just too much for me to handle even when I'm playing flawlessly.

Over the last couple of days, I've been tuning my Ackbar Control list a lot.  I've tried the solo Dash, 2x-3x A-Wing, heavy Intel and without, and now I think I've found something that's a good balance overall.

Current iteration:
MC80 Command, Home One, Ackbar, Intel, ECM, Leading Shots, XI7s
MKIIB, Gunnery Team, ECM, XI7s
MKIIB, Gunnery Team, ECM, XI7s
Tycho, 2x A-Wings

I've found over a ton of games that the Intels were not really needed on the Whales because of the free accuracys Home One hands out.  Engine Techs have also been removed in this current iteration because I haven't really found myself straying too much out of speed-2 for the most part.  Leading Shots are in because I was really getting sick and tired of me rolling epically fail dice when I needed the shots to matter.  Tycho is in over the stock A-Wing because I wanted someone who can stay in the fight a little while longer while being able to move around freely.  I'll tell you one thing's for sure though:  I'm probably going to regret not having those Engine Techs when I really need them.