Just saw that on the Gold Squadron Podcast Stream during the Atlanta System Open. A player with a TIE swarm of 6 TIEs. He had the wrong formation as he was moving with a 3×2 but had to turn by 90°. He did something with banks, and it arguably cost him the game due to a bad opening engagement. But how do you change formation?
One key thing to keep in mind:
If two ships have to keep the formation and they do turns, the inner ship has to do a 1hard and the outer ship 3hard.
The problem
What if there is an opponent coming from the top? You want to turn in, but you can’t simply 1hard.
You can try to work around it by making some wonky barrel rolls. Or you can quickly learn how to properly do it.
The solution
Red and Yellow do a 1hard. Pink does a 3hard. Teal does a 1hard. White and Green do 3hards. Generally: the 3 upper/inner ships take the 1hard. The 3 ships more in the back take the 3 hards. The order does barely matter. Only Teal, as you can see, has to move after Yellow. All others fit past each other.
I was not very careful with the setup, and it still works nicely. Flying a swarm on the table takes some actual manual skill to keep them nicely aligned. But even with imprecise maneuvers, you can still make the correct choice and benefit a lot from it!
Bonus: Change formation into a 4+2!
Maybe you want more guns in the front? Easy! But at the additional cost of a barrel roll action for everyone except teal and pink! White and Green technically don’t have to, and Red is just so at range 1 of Green. But if for example White and Green are Howlrunner and Iden, you want both at range 1 of everyone, and then you should roll sideways.
Just do 1 hards + rolls with Red and Yellow. The other 4 get the same maneuver, all do a 3 hard. And as mentioned, Teal and Pink won’t roll sideways. Now, this time it matters much more to do the maneuver in the correct orders. If you want to roll right, then the ship on the right has to move first. Otherwise you can’t roll further right.
I hope that helps!
