Monday, November 2, 2015

Synergy: BB-8 and Push The Limit/Experimental Interface

So in playing HotAC with my friend Tyler, we've come across a few interesting combos that have really good synergy, and I want to share a few of those combos here.

The Combo

One of the combos we've used a lot is BB-8 and either Push The Limit (PTL) or Experimental Interface (EI).
BB-8 grants a free Barrel Roll action before your maneuver if you reveal a green maneuver, and PTL/EI allow you to execute another action after taking an action in exchange for receiving a Stress token. This combo also only works right under the new rules because of timing...

Example

So lets look at an X-Wing with BB-8 and Push The Limit.
The way this one works is this:

  1. You reveal a green maneuver like a 2-straight, which triggers BB-8 for a barrel roll free action. 
  2. You execute the barrel roll which triggers PTL. Note that you must barrel roll for this to go off, as you need the action to happen to trigger PTL.
  3. Using PTL, you choose to Focus (or other actions, given range and appropriateness), and assign a stress token to yourself to complete resolving PTL. 
  4. Now you resolve the 2-straight which is a green maneuver, which removes a stress token.
  5. Once you've completed your maneuver and you have no stress tokens, you can take an action, allowing you to Target Lock (or other actions you might have due to other upgrades, such as Marksmanship or Expose).


If you have an Action upgrade, you can use Experimental Interface anywhere you see PTL in this combo with equal effect, triggering the upgrade instead of one of the actions on your ship.

This combo lets you get off 2 maneuvers of your choice and a barrel roll with no real penalties other than restricting yourself to green maneuvers and ships that have astromech slots. So your Y-wing, X-wing, T-70, and even E-wing can be super efficient (to the point of broken, in the E-wing's case... more on that in a minute).

Campaign Extra

The extra awesomeness that happens in the HotAC campaign mod allows you to add pilot abilities to this, such as Keyan Farlander, who lets you remove one stress token to change all your focus results into hits. At this point, you can combine BB-8, PTL, EI, Advanced Sensors (AS), something like Marksmanship, and Keyan's abilities to grant you an action before the maneuver with AS, a barrel roll before the green maneuver with BB-8, an action for a stress with PTL, an upgrade Action for a stress with EI (4 actions!), the green maneuver removing one of the two stress tokens generated, and then Keyan's ability consuming the other stress token, leaving you clear the next turn to use the same sequence of actions. 

This is part of why the E-wing isn't really valid in the campaign: you end up with a Boost from AS and an Engine Upgrade, Barrel Roll from BB-8, Target Lock from PTL, and Expose from EI on a 3-straight green maneuver (or a 2-bank green), with a stress to trigger Keyan's focus-like ability. You can slice in to range 1 while out of arc of your target and throw a 5-attack focused & target locked doom on just about anything. Add in Autothrusters and you can go from a 5-defense range 3 on the previous turn, dash in to drop 5-attack out of their arc for a turn, and then zoom back out to range 3 before they can maneuver to get you in arc. Yeah, that's why E-wings aren't in the campaign, and I'm OK with that.

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