Getting Good at Swarms and Boxes, Part 2

Introduction

 Hello, and welcome back to the Salt Mines X-Wing Podcast blog page! In this article, we would like to continue our discussion of swarms.

Lat time we talked about swarms as a win condition, and how they essentially are lists that want to joust the arc dodgers and arc dodge the jousters, essentially creating a turret through strategic placement of many arcs. This is best shown through the creation of the box and use of the box as a win condition.

This time, we’d like to spend some time talking about a topic that is commonly used as podcast filler content: listbuilding. Let us be clear right now: general listbuilding can sometimes get kinda boring. It is completely possible to go look up a list that has won online and fly that, so the listbuilding phase is not some sort of skill that should drive who wins the game, it’s more of an impediment that can cause you to lose. What is interesting and relevant about listbuilding is understanding why a list works, and what the list is doing that makes it work. How are the pieces of your list coming together? Why does your list work? Is there a piece that you can trade out for something else that would make it better?

Listbuilding with Swarms

It's perfectly acceptable to fly something that other people have discovered works. Which is not to say you shouldn’t experiment. All we’re saying is that there’s always a couple good swarms at any given time, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. At the time of writing, some form of carrier for Admiral Sloane and four 34-point 3-die-rolling generics is a good Imperial swarm, and Drea Renthal and a whole bunch of Quadjumpers, Z-95s, M3-A’s, or other cheap filler is a good Scum and Villainy swarm.

Where the true importance of listbuilding comes in is understanding why these things work. What is the best Sloane carrier? Is Whisper best for being able to defensively token stack and protect Sloane? Is it Echo for greater maneuverability? Is it Sai for increased offense and action economy? Should your Lambda have Tractor Beam to decrease the defense of the enemy?

So with that in mind, let’s jump in and examine some general elements of swarm ships.

A Brief Discussion on Archetypes

Many of you have probably heard the old rock paper scissors metaphor for X-Wing. You’ve got arc-dodgers, turrets, and jousters: the arc-dodgers don’t let the jousters play the game, the jousters punch the turrets in the face, and the turrets don’t let the arc-dodgers do their job. That is extremely boring and bad for the game taken to its logical conclusion. Hopefully nobody wants a game that is won in the listbuilding phase. If you sit down at the table and know that the game is already over based on your matchup, where is the fun in that? What is important about this metaphor is to understand its implications on ships, which is that individual ship elements fill specific roles in a squad, and are better at different jobs.

The jobs ships can do are most certainly not the three we’ve all heard. Turrets are essentially arc-dodgers, because their real advantage is not having to face their opponent to shoot, and thus they can outmaneuver the enemy. This is slightly different from an ace such as Soontir Fel that gets to reposition twice after everything has moved, but it still more or less falls under the same category of ships that pay extra to have a positional advantage (we’ll call this whole category “reposition” for simplicity). This leaves jousters, which are better classified as “efficiency”. Anything that the various forms of mathwing could have predicted were good can fall under this category – it essentially boils down to how many points of MOV your ships statistically lose and gain in combat, mostly ignoring positioning. Finally, we have the third often forgotten category, “control”. Denying your opponent options is a crucial aspect of the game and can take many forms. Most obvious are the things that assign red and orange tokens to the enemy, such as tractor, jam, and stress. But other forms of control are baked into the inherent statlines of ships and upgrades. For example, low-initiative ships can control the enemy by blocking them. High-initiative ships are also a form of control as they deny your opponent information: for example, Wedge is more of a control element against Guri, rather than a repositioning ace. He denies Guri the knowledge of his final location, and thus reduces the effect of her high amount of reposition options. Finally, arcs are a form of control – Proton Rockets and Heavy Laser Cannons severely punish your opponent’s ships for being in a specific spot, forcing them to move away.

These three elements, reposition, efficiency, and control, never exist in isolation. All ships have some quantities of all three. However, this is an almost entirely wrong way of thinking about ships. What is more important is discovering in each matchup how to make your ships fill these roles and use these elements to your advantage. You might be bringing X-Wings for their efficiency, but if you run into something joustier like Kimogilas your X-Wings might have to use their relative repositional advantage more. As a simple example.

Using this to help figure out your win condition is important. It means that you are always ready to follow different strategies with the swarm. Last time, our Z-95 Headhunters spread out a wide net to force Whisper to joust us, since we were at an advantage in terms of efficiency. But we also controlled Sai with our placement, causing blocks and denying actions. If we’d run into a list more efficient than ours, we might have used the barrel rolls more.

One thing we will say about listbuilding here is that mixed swarms are a pretty good idea. Identical generics look cool and are easy to build, and also have the advantage of messing up an opponent’s targeting priority (they can’t quickly choose one ship to destroy to decrease your squad’s effectiveness and so often end up splitting damage across ships and helping you win). But having a sort of toolbox of various swarm ships is often a very good idea, such as adding in some ships with higher reposition ability as flankers, or some ships with better control elements.

An Example of a Mixed Swarm with All Three Elements

Here we show off a swarm that has all three elements that we’ve been talking about here. Neither list here is what we’d consider competitive at the highest tier, but they make for an interesting game. In our list, the Starwings serve as a control piece, allowing us to tractor enemy ships into the box. Interceptors serve as flankers, allowing us to quickly build boxes using their superior reposition options. Finally, the Bombers serve as our efficiency elements, offering tons of health for a low price, and their 2-dice attacks might do damage when paired with the tractors of the Starwings.

Our list:
Nu Squadron Pilot          35
XG-1 Assault Config.     0
Tractor Beam                  3
(x2)

Alpha Squadron Pilot     34
(x2)

Scimitar Squadron Pilot  28

(x2)

Opponent’s list: 
Warden Squadron Pilot   40
Barrage Rockets               6
Skilled Bombardier          2
Proton Bombs                  5

Luke Skywalker              62
Supernatural Reflexes     12       
Servomotor S-Foils          0

Sabine Wren                    38
Crack Shot                        1

Captain Rex                     32

This game, our opponent has chosen to give us the first player, so we place our entire list first. We place our list in a wide phalanx that can move to engage anywhere on the board:

Our opponent sees this set up on the right side of the board and places the joustier elements of the Rebel squad on the opposite side and the aces in the middle so they have more options:

On the first turn, we pivot the squad in towards the center, preparing to build a box around the opponent’s squad:

Our opponent moves both sets of ships straight forward. Next turn, we decide to build a box for the aces, in case they go through the middle of those two large rocks:

Our opponent is a smart player though, and sees this box forming. Sabine and Luke both bail out to the side using their pre-maneuver rolls and boosts (both had dialed in straight maneuvers again):

In the first exchange of shots, the Starwing is exceptionally unlucky and loses all three shields to Luke, and the Interceptor is lucky and avoids Sabine’s entire shot. However, Sabine is not free of the box. She is unlucky in her rolls against the Starwings, which tractor her right into the box, and she loses a shield on the rock. The box then has no trouble finishing her off, since her agility is now 1. Next turn, the box pivots to go after the K-Wing and Rex:

The K-Wing is blocked and then Rex is blocked into the K-Wing. Unfortunately for our opponent, since we have the first player, we get to tractor the K-Wing onto the rock and deny its shot:

Both the K-Wing and Rex take damage and the swarm is untouched, as Luke could not turn around quickly enough. Next turn, the red Interceptor uses its low initiative to intentionally block the blue Bomber and prevent either from hitting the rock, which allows another box to set up to kill the K-Wing:

The K-Wing’s bomb does some damage to the yellow Interceptor, but the K-Wing is destroyed this round. Next round, the yellow Interceptor uses its double reposition to be out of the way of the other ships turning around, and the swarm is in good shape for the endgame:

Hopefully now you have a good idea of how disparate elements can work together towards a common goal in a swarm. Some questions to ask about this battle are:

If we had brought only Bombers, would this have gone as well? Or only Interceptors? Or only Starwings?

How might our opponent have approached differently? Are there particular ships that should have been targeted first? Is it possible to approach the swarm without the Starwings controlling you into the box?

What are the different elements in the opponent’s squad? How might these elements also be used to build a box using control, efficiency, and reposition? Does the opponent’s squad count as a swarm too?

Article by @Kieransi