Musings about Epic: Action stations!

After we covered the basics of how Wings and Huge Ships actually work, it's time to get down to some more detailed stuff. So, what comes after executing a maneuver? Say it with me: taking an action! Unless you're stressed, overlapping an obstacle etc. of course. Duh, you might say, what about it? Nothing in the rules changes what actions I can take. Wait a bit, I reply. As everything Epic, action selection has to cope with the format.

So, let's start with wings. While the wing leader can execute any action, his wingmates are restricted more. They can only execute Focus, Target Lock, Evade, Reinforce and Calculate actions.They can, however, passively participate in SLAM and Cloak actions, as we'll see later. Crucially, this leaves out the repositioning actions - Barrel Roll and Boost - as well as Jam, Coordinate, Rotate Turret and Reload.

This has serious consequences. For example, your wing of bombers cannot reload their torpedoes while in formation. A hypothetical wing of Sheathipede shuttles would not be able to coordinate (besides, it's a stupid idea). If your left flank is juuuuuust out of reach, no Boost for you. And so on.

However, at least when it comes to repositioning, not everything is bad. In fact, the disadvantage of not being able to do these kinds of actions comes with the gigantic advantage of getting them for free if the Wing Leader executes them.

A classic example for this is a wing of three T65 X-Wings. Imagine your wing leader being Wedge Antilles (because why not). You can close Wedge's wing, dial a 3-bank and boost afterwards. Your wing of two other T65 prevents a strong deterrent for shooting Wedge (we talked about this), they are placed next to Wedge AFTER the Boost (which they technically can't even do because their wings are open!) and can take a Focus or Target Lock. All at Initiative 6, mind you.

This means that repositioning actions matter only on your wingmate, but there, they matter A LOT. I can see you looking slyly at Afterburners already, can't I?

Aside from Boosting with just one closed S-Foils T65, another trick I often use is to dial a 1-Turn with TIE Swarms and then rolling. This moves the whole swarm by essentially 90°, and if you happen to be close to a Huge Ship, you will likely get 3-6 shots at Range 1 and 2 on the sucker, depending on the size of your wing. 1-turn and Barrel Roll are hardcore, is what I'm saying.

So when it comes to your Wing Leaders, have an eye out for these repositioning actions. They affect your whole wing. But what actions should the wingmates take? My headspace of the meta so far tells me that surviving is more important than dealing damage, at least when you have a Raider or CR90 in your fleet. Dealing damage is their job. When a wing sucks up shots without dying, unmodified dice are fine. With so many ships, chance evens out.

So, usually I prioritize Focus and Evade over Target Lock. I have yet to fly a wing that would make use of Reinforce or Calculate. The latter comes with not being a CIS player, while the former...yes, a wing of Auzitucks is something I'd really like to try, but I'm not buying two more of these useless things just for that sensation.

The biggest problem so far seems to be reloading. However, I'm unsure as to how important that really is. A wing of bombers that burned through the whole of its ordinance and is still intact and in formation indicates that the game is going really well for you anyway. I guess in that case, you could split the wing, dial maneuvers that keep you in Range 1 of the leader (how they end up is irrelevant as long as they're in range; just consider the leader), reload once or twice and snap back in formation. That will cost you two to three rounds, though, and I'm a bit unsure if you're luck is holding THAT long.

Another issue is rotating turrets. Flying a wing of Y-Wings, for example, doesn't allow you to turn their turrets. The same is true for RZ-2 A-Wings. So you're left with the undesirable choice of either breaking formation to turn the turret or to build the list in a way that avoids the issue.

Another piece of bad news concerns pre-movement actions. If you equip Supernatural Reflexes to the wing leader, you will ever only be able to Boost with it. The positions for a Barrel Roll are closed off by your wing mates. This makes equipping these upgrades a doubtful proposition.

Before we close that chapter, let's quickly cover Cloak and SLAM. The rule for SLAM is simple. Like any repositioning action, your wing will come along with you. In this case, however, there's a caveat: they'll only follow if they can slam as well. If they can't, they split from the wing. And if they do, unlike with Barrel Roll and Boost, they share in the fallout and gain a disarm token.

With Cloak, it's similar: When the wing leader cloaks and their mates lack the Cloak action, they'll split. However, if they do, they'll share the benefit and still get their own action. Neat! When the wing leader decloaks, so does the wing. This may severely restrict your decloaking options, so be careful.

That covers wings, as far as I'm concerned.

So let's move to single ships. While medium and large ships are flown more or less like they would in normal games, there are some other uses. Let's talk "normal" medium and large ship first. So far, I'm unsure as to why you would include something like the Falcon in an Epic game, they just die FAST. In Epic, the more green dice, the better. Because of the sheer number of shots, dice mods will run out fast, and the amount of rolls equals out, at least when wing leaders come into play. And you know what medium and large ships usually lack? Don't break your head, it isn't a trick question. Wings and green dice.

However, not all is bad in the land of big bases. Some of the most important support ships can in some variant of medium or large. And these ships usually have access to the Jam and Coordinate. And boy, are these two important. The obvious applicability of these is to help out the Wing Leader when they repositioned; for example, Wedge would also gain a Focus token in the example I gave above.

However, I'm not a fan of doing this. Having so many points with you to boost that one ace a bit more seems like a waste when you could simply add one more warm body to the wing and increase their survivability and firepower by so much.

No, the real value of Coordinate comes with the Huge Ships. Huge Ships have several attacks, and usually, these attacks are very strong. They also have abilities dependent on specific tokens being present, like Target Locks or Calculates. They also gain some unique actions, like the Tibanna Gas Reserves. So I assign my supporters to the Huge Ships per default to make them more powerful. I would even go so far as to say that a coordinating ship is mandatory to get the most out of your big boy.

With that out of the way, let's look at the big boys. Every Huge Ship has two actions instead of one. When in the thick of fighting, one of them will be Reinforce, just as likely as not. If you have a swarm of TIE Fighters in your flank, practically guaranteeing that none them will do more than one damage is too good to pass up, and when a Raider is coming at you, reducing the damage of all that ordinance by one could make the difference of surviving or blowing up. Don't hesitate not to Reinforce when there aren't many attacks incoming; it's a waste to Reinforce against one Turbolaser attack.

Every Huge Ship will likely be able to once per round link into a white Calculate (we'll cover that in more detail when we get to list building), so this makes two tokens that should be on your ship before you even activate (because of the Coordinate...). Now we have two actions for ourselves. One is likely a Target Lock, because rerolling is good, and the Raider is utterly dependent on it anyway. The other is oftentimes Focus.

That is, of course, unless other things present themselves. Raiders absolutely need to Reload from time to time. The Gozanti and the GR75 will likely Coordinate themselves quite a lot. In these cases, even two actions seem not much, which is why I don't like Coordinating or Jamming with the Raider and the CR90. They have better things to do, and in the CR90's case, the Coordinate is even red (that's a hint, I'm certain).

This leaves us with one action I deliberately left out so far: Jam. I'm not talking about the tasty stuff you put on your bread. It's the one action you usually don't use because it's only Range 1, and because it's often even red, and why bother? And this is true for 200 point games a lot of the time. I mean, FFG made the Jamming Beam FREE. That shows you how little regard for this they have. In Epic, don't let that fool you. Jam is the most important thing when you have Huge Ships on the table, and your list MUST have something to deal with it, period.

Let's be clear. Jamming Beam should not be free in Epic. It's ridiculously powerful. In a 200 points game, why would I ever sacrifice a T70 shot to inflict Jam tokens? But in Epic, because of the dynamic I laid out above, there are many tokens on the same target. When a wing has clear shots, sacrificing one of these to fire a Jamming Beam, preferably at a high initiative, is killer.

The Reinforce token I talked about earlier that will neuter the swarm? The swarm leader can kill it. Target Locks, so mandatory for any self-respecting Raider? Gone. Calculate tokens granting higher or lower range for vital weapon systems? Poof. You NEED Jam. Jam is power. Jam wins and loses you games.

And the sheer presence of Jam means that you need to be able to cope with it. There are possibilities for it, many of which will become our topic when it comes to list building, but for Huge Ships' action economy, there follows one simple thing: you NEED to be able to conduct certain actions during the Engagement phase. Your initiative values do not allow you to sit out Jamming attacks. If you're not able to at least get a target lock during shooting as a Raider, you're a dead Raider.

Yes, that means Targetting Battery is an auto-include, and you need to have one energy at the beginning of the Engagement Phase. But this already ventures into list building, and this article is already running long. I'll leave you with this for now. Until next time!