With some of the clone wars squadron leaks that led to the new Intel piece I wrote we got some new keywords as well for squadrons so let's take a look at that. We have Protective Screen and Scout, let's start with scout.
Scout reads, to the best of our translation skills as the leaks where in German “While deploying fleets you may be placed beyond the deployment zone and don't have to be within distance 1-2 to a friendly ship. You have to be beyond distance 1-5 of enemy ships or squadrons.”
Okay so scout is pretty interesting first it lets you throw out squadrons with this keyword pretty far at the start of the game and that's cool, but what about its piratical application? Well it does something kind of interesting in that if you have two of these fighters you could deploy them before you deploy any of your ships as you don't have to deploy within distance 1-2 of a friendly ship. This gives you better information on how deployment will play out before you really commit any ships to the table. I also assume that the beyond distance 1-5 of enemy ships or squadrons only applies when deploying squadrons with scout and that nothing prevents a player from deploying a ship or squadron at distance 1-5 of a deployed scout squadron otherwise with a massive bid and two scout squadrons you could invalidate your opponents whole deployment zone.
So we get some ability to delay in deployment what else, if a squadron has rouge and scout that could be a really cool way to get a few early hits in on turn one in the squadron game. However it would seem that this scout ability is exclusive to aces because we have seen the bases for each generic during the in flight report and none of them have the scout symbol on their base so at the end of the day I am not sure how or what to feel about scout if there is a way to give squadrons scout with an upgrade or something it might be impactful, but as it would appear to be exclusive to some Republic ace I am not sure how impactful it will be.
There is one other thing to note Scout reminds me a little bit of squall. Now you might think I am a little crazy, but squall lets you move squadrons an extra 1-2 before activating them giving them a little more range and is often used to jump on opponents ships on turn one. If there is some kind of upgrade that gives squadrons scout it could in effect give every faction a squall like ability that might minimize squalls impact on the game. This is complet conjecture, but with boosted comms and/or relay it is conceivable to activate scout squadrons to get the jump on players turn one, but again it really depends on the prevalence of the scout ability, but it seems like an interesting idea to me.
Next up is Protective Screen this reads “while defending you gain the keyword Evade 1 for every friendly squad without the keyword Protective Screen that is engaged with your attacker to a maximum of 3.” if you forgot how evade will work here is its wording “while defending against a squadron during the spend defense token step you may choose X attack dice to be re-rolled” X being the number of evade you have evade 1 or evade 2 etc. this is a pretty cool ability it is only found on the Belbullab-22 in the separatist pack it acts as a incentive to attack your less valuable squadrons. This ability simply increases your ships survivability and/or encourages your opponent to attack other targets first kinda like a wierd escort.
There are also lastly the new AI keywords for the droid fighters AI battery and AI anti-squadron they are pretty simple if a ship activates a squadrons with AI they may add a die of a color that is already in your attack pool. This provides some interesting flexibility to the vulture droids depending on who they are attacking if they are attacking a scatter ace they will want to add a blue to get that accricay and in nearly all other cases it will want to add a black to get damage to be more consistent as its natural anti squadron is 1 blue one black, I assume that the droid tri-fighter will have a 3 die armament with at least two colors of dice as well. AI battery is the same you add a die but this time to your battery I don't expect this to give you flexibility in the way AI anti-squadorn dose as that implies you would have more than one battery die (anti-ship die) meaning with AI battery you would get 3 dice I just don't see that AI battery will just make your bombers better at killing ships, but if you are not activating your squadrons with a ship command you are kinda doing it wrong.
So there are the new keywords that were spoiled in the German leaks. Scout seems interesting, but I will have to see the ace that it comes on and or if there are ways to give other squadrons scout, if there is not I am not sure scout will really be all that impactful at all. Protective screen is just good it's basically escort without having to take escort and since it appears that the separatist don't have an escort it will be very nice for them. What are your thoughts on the new keywords? Until next time have a great week!
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