Starbird Slashing & You: The Value of Strain

 

Heralds of Hope is here and when the points were revealed last week one of the things that got the strongest immediate responses was that Starbird Slash was only 1pt.

Already one of the cards that players were looking forward to just from the thematic point of view of performing Maverick-style flypasts of opponents ships it seemed like players were really expecting Starbird Slash to cost more as the ability to give Strain tokens was something they really valued.

I'd actually been hoping that Starbird Slash was going to cost so little because I wasn't prepared to pay 2pts for what I thought was an effect that was both hard to pull off, and of limited value when you landed it anyway.

In this blog I'm going to explain a little bit why I think that - we'll look at Starbird Slash in a bit more detail and also the value of a Strain token in general.

The Awkwardness of Starbird Slash

First let's look at Starbird Slash, which wants you to fly through an opponent's ship (overlap it with your maneuver template), in order to give the enemy a Strain token.

Landing the Strain token onto the enemy you want to fire at is less straightforward than it may seem and there's different hoops for you to jump through depending on whether your ship is moving before or after the opponent's ship.

Starbird Moving First

• The opponent may perform a blue maneuver and clear the Strain before you attack  
• The opponent may move out of firing arcs after you gave them Strain
• If they don't move out of firing arcs they're likely to move a range band further away and reduce the value of the Strain token anyway
• In the ultimate worst case (eg. vs Boba Fett) you could find yourself strained by landing in his rear arc then have him do a blue maneuver and clear his stress so your Starbird Slash was actually hurting you and not affecting the opponent at all!

Positives - you know where their ship is and can be sure of hitting it with your Slash maneuver.

Starbird Moving Last

• You have to predict where the opponent's ship will be in order to fly through it
• In a dogfight the natural flow of ships turning around means opponents are more likely to have moved behind you or to places you can't reach with your Slash maneuver
• Opponents can deliberately set dials or reposition to avoid (or block) obvious Slash maneuvers

Positives - if you land the Slash maneuver successfully the opponent cannot avoid the Strain affecting them.

I'm not sure yet which of these two situations I prefer and I wouldn't want to underplay just how awkward either one can be.  For high initiative ships with Starbird Slash I can foresee that a lot of the time that enemy ships are close enough for you to Slash them they might also be close enough to k-turn in behind you.  with low initiative pilots I think you'll find it easier to land the Slash but derive much less value from the Strain tokens you hand out - not least because half of them are going to be given right back to you when the opponent performs a blue maneuver!

Thinking a bit further... I suspect there's elements of different range control to these two options as well.  If you're moving your Starbird before the opponent's ship you want to engage  them in pretty close (R1 ideally) so you can overshoot them safely next turn.  However if you're moving your Starbird after the opponent's ships you probably want a R2-3 engagement that would mean they're closer to you after their next move so they're easier to overshoot, and which also means less likely to be able to k-turn past you as your ship will be in the way.

The Value of Strain

In general terms, I think players tend to overvalue how bad a Strain token is.  

In the way I see players respond to things that hand out Strain tokens I feel like they're mentally assuming that a Strain token is roughly equivalent to 1 damage being suffered, or at least close to it.  However, as I found when I first mathed out how good the First Order Provocateurs were, it turns out that the average value of a Strain token is a lot less and you don't need to be so scared of them.

On average a Strain token is just 0.3 damage.

The actual expected damage value of a Strain token depends entirely on what number of dice are being thrown (red and green) and how many dice mods are available.  The table below has a pretty detailed breakdown of what you can expect, but there's a useful shorthand to remember... the better both ship's dice modification is, the better a Strain token is.  

If the green dice are well modified then there's more chance that the dice the opponent didn't get to roll (because of Strain) would have ended up as an Evade.  At the same time if the red dice are well modified there's less chance of one of them being a blank that the opponent didn't need an Evade for anyway so he dodged the damage even with one less green dice.

Throw unmodded red dice at unmodded green dice and a Strain is only ~0.2 damage on average.  Throw focused red dice at focused green dice and a Strain is worth more like ~0.5 damage ... a lot better than 0.2 but still less than I think most players assume when they cower in fear from the sight of those Strain tokens.

ASIDE: this is why I'm a fan of Seventh Fleet Gunner on a LAAT Gunship instead of Clone Commander Cody.  Cody hands out a Strain when the opponent cancelled a hit result from the LAAT's attack so you know there was already a chance for the opponent to have spent Focus on the LAAT's attack.  If they did spend focus then it's reduced the value of Strain taking a green dice off them in the next attack.  Seventh Fleet Gunner adds a red dice to the attacking ship, which we know we have great dice mods for as Fire Convergence will be online to help reroll those dice.  

It's often the difference between Seventh Fleet Gunner adding a red dice which has a 7-in-8 chance of being hit vs removing a green dice with Strain that only had a 3-in-8 chance of being an Evade.  Seventh Fleet Gunner costs a lot more than Cody but it delivers a lot more benefit too (and being able to use the gunner on high Initiative attacks and get PS-kills is extra gravy).

But enough about Seventh Fleet Gunner, let's talk specifically about Starbird Slash.  You're going to see Slash on A-Wings, and mainly on RZ-2 A-Wings who can capitalise on the overshoot with their rear arc.  I've mathed for Focus in that table able, but lets add Heroic and Advanced Optics and assume that we're using Starbird Slash to try and crack the A-Wing's nemesis - a 3 Agility ship with a Focus token.  This is the sort of target that A-Wing players are really hoping Starbird Slash will kick in against as they struggle to deal damage currently.

It turns out that being able to get a Range 1 shot with a 3rd red dice is hugely important for Slash - you get +0.5 damage from Starbird Slash at R1 but only +0.3 damage at R2.  This is because when you're only throwing 2 red dice the opponent still has a pretty good chance of dodging it with 2 focused green dice.

And this reinforces the importance of whether your ship is moving before or after the opponent, which I talked about earlier.  If the enemy ship moves after you it's got a really good chance of at least moving into Range 2 when it does so, and that alone takes 40% of the value from Starbird Slash away even if they don't perform a blue maneuver and take away 100% of the value by giving you the Strain token back!

So, Do I Like Slash?

I do.  Because it's cheap and it's good against what A-Wings were struggling with anyway (ships with good green dice that 2 highly modified red dice tended to bounce off too often).

But I still don't love it.  I don't think it's going to do enough to switch those hard matchups into easy matchups so I still expect that a single-issue squad like 5A (five A-Wings) is going to hit a lot of problems that Slash won't solve single-handedly.

I'd probably put it onto RZ2 A-Wings before Heroic.  I probably wouldn't put it onto Rebel A-Wings.  Like Heroic I'd be happy when Starbird Slash does something but not go out of my way to force it to happen... because it's just 1pt invested.  And it's not worth 2pts.  Which is where we came in, so the circle is now complete.