Rogue Squadron- Defensive Brobots

Welcome to Rogue Squadron, pilot! In this series we will be looking at different squadrons you can fly in Fantasy Flight Games X-Wing miniatures game. We give you the squad, what expansion pack all of the upgrades come from and then give you the low down on how best to fly it. Strap in and get ready to fly…

All Wings Report In

Aggressor “IG-88B” (IG-2000 Expansion) (50 pts)

Once per round, after you perform an attack that does not hit, you may perform an attack with an equipped Cannon secondary weapon.

Title– IG-2000 (IG-2000 Expansion): You have the pilot ability of each other friendly ship with the IG-2000 Upgrade card (in addition to your own pilot ability).
Elite Pilot Talent- Wired (TFA Core): When attacking or defending, if you are stressed, you may reroll 1 or more of your Focus results.
Modification- Autothrusters (Starviper Expansion)- When defending, if you are beyond Range 2 or outside the attacker’s firing arc, you may change 1 of your blank results to an evade result. You can equip this card only if you have the boost action icon.
Cannon- Heavy Laser Cannon (Hounds’ Tooth/Lambda Shuttle/YT-2400/Slave-1 Expansions)- Attack (4, range 2-3): Immediately after rolling your attack dice, you must change all of your results Critical to Hit results.
System- Sensor Jammer (Lambda Shuttle Expansion)- When defending, you may change 1 of the attacker’s Hit results into a Focus result. The attacker cannot reroll the die with the changed result.

Aggressor “IG-88D” (IG-2000 Expansion) (50 pts)

You may execute the (Left S-loop 3) or (Right S-loop 3) maneuver using the corresponding (Hard Left 3) or (Hard Right 3) template.

Title– IG-2000 (IG-2000Expansion): You have the pilot ability of each other friendly ship with the IG-2000 Upgrade card (in addition to your own pilot ability).
Elite Pilot Talent- Wired (TFA Core): When attacking or defending, if you are stressed, you may reroll 1 or more of your Focus results.
Modification- Autothrusters (Starviper Expansion)- When defending, if you are beyond Range 2 or outside the attacker’s firing arc, you may change 1 of your blank results to an evade result. You can equip this card only if you have the boost action icon.
Cannon- Heavy Laser Cannon (Hounds’ Tooth/Lambda Shuttle/YT-2400/Slave-1 Expansions)- Attack (4, range 2-3): Immediately after rolling your attack dice, you must change all of your results Critical to Hit results.
System- Sensor Jammer (Lambda Shuttle Expansion)- When defending, you may change 1 of the attacker’s Hit results into a Focus result. The attacker cannot reroll the die with the changed result.

Lock S-Foils in Attack Position

We’ve covered “Brobot” lists before in this series. I hadn’t originally planned to go bad to them, seeing as there are quite a few variations of just how to build the combo. But I took the above build to a store championship recently and went 4 and 1 with it so I thought it was worth talking about. I only missed making the top four because of a really bad match up in the final round. A seven ship bug-zapper list (Z-95’s with Feedback Array) eats Aggressors for lunch combined with the half-point rule for large ships meant my MOV just wasn’t high enough (despite having beat the eventual tournament winner earlier in the day).

This list’s strength is against turrets, especially TLT, as Sensor Jammer triggers on both shots and they’ll only have one focus token (unless it’s Recon HWK’s). Combined with Autothrusters makes you pretty difficult to hit. What really helps this combo is Wired. Because you’ll often be taking red maneuvers to keep your target, about half the time at least one of your ships will be stressed. With Wired, you don’t have to worry about those dreaded triple Focus defense rolls preventing you from using Autothrusters. Instead you just reroll them, have good odds of getting at least one Evade and a blank to turn into an Evade.

I faced a four ship Rebel build (two B-wings, Biggs and a TLT Y-wing), Special-K (K-wings with Tactician), Dash+dual TLT Y-wings and a Vader/Redline/Palpmobile. The only list I came close to losing against among those was the Special-K and he went on to win the tournament. The Brobots just were to hard to hit to be damaged faster than their HLC’s could hurt my opponent. However, they almost always dropped below half health, which contributed to my missing top 4 because of the MOV.

The best tactic for positioning tended to be alternating taking a red maneuver. That made it fairly easy to hit and fade so that your opponent would have to switch targets and you could keep them in firing arcs. If they ever both get stressed you can run into trouble.

Variations

Infinite. There are so many variations on dual Aggressors they each qualify as their own builds. Sticking to this one’s core features means you can only really modify the EPT or the cannon. Dropping to Mangler gives you three points per ship so could upgrade the EPT to something like Predator or add some bombs or illicit upgrades. However, losing HLC really lowers your damage potential.

The EPT could be switched to Veteran Instincts or Cracked Shot for a strong list. Wired saved my ships a few times as it really synergizes with the whole defensive theme and mitigates the downside from constantly using the S-loop.