"All leads must be pursued."

–Agent Kallus

Deploy your probes. Deploy your fighters. Pursue all leads of Rebel insurgency and make short work of those you successfully hunt down. The Imperial Assault Carrier Expansion Pack for X-Wing™ is now available at retailers throughout the United States!

Designed for use within the game’s Cinematic Play and Epic Play formats, the Imperial Assault Carrier Expansion Pack contains one Gozanti-class cruiser miniature, two TIE fighter miniatures with a variant paint scheme, eleven ship cards, twenty-six upgrade cards, and all the maneuver dials, damage decks, tokens, and game pieces that you need to fly your Gozanti cruiser and its escort fighters. Additionally, the expansion includes a set of four new missions for Cinematic Play, as well as rules for docking up to four starfighters and deploying them straight into battle.

Deploy Your Fighters

Equipped with the Docking Clamps upgrade, your Gozanti-class Cruiser can carry as many as four docked starfighters. They can be TIE fighters, TIE interceptors, TIE bombers, or TIE Advanced, but they must all share the same ship type and must be docked before the game begins.

While these fighters are docked, they are considered inactive for all purposes. They do not reveal maneuvers, they cannot attack, and they cannot be attacked. In fact, they are completely safe from your opponent's weapons so long as they remain docked.

However, while your fighters are docked, they are also doing nothing for you, apart from tying up the squad-building points that you invested in them. Naturally, you will want to find an appropriate time to deploy them.

The rules for deploying your docked ships work a lot like those that allow players with the Hound's Tooth Title to deploy the Nashtah Pup from their YV-666 just before it explodes. Step by step, you simply select a maneuver for the ship you wish to deploy, fit the matching maneuver template to the front or back of the Gozanti, and fly your ship to the opposite end. Then, so long as your ship didn't collect a stress token or overlap an obstacle or another ship, it can perform a single action.

Here, though, you will find one important distinction between the rules for deploying the Nashtah Pup and those for deploying your Gozanti's docked ships; the ships that your Gozanti deploys can attack at their pilot skill value immediately in the Combat phase. They do not suffer a round's delay like the Pup.

This presents you a range of tactical options that takes the idea of docking ships to your Gozanti far beyond the thematic appeal of using it to transport fighters without their own hyperdrives. Because you activate your huge-base ships after all small- and large-base ships have already activated, you gain an element of surprise, positional advantages, and an extra burst of speed. Moreover, depending upon the Title you equip for your Gozanti, you can even gain the opportunity to fire earlier in the Combat phase than you normally would.

Tactical Advantages

Outmaneuvering your opponents is one of the greatest challenges in X-Wing. Done right, it is also one of the game's most rewarding aspects. However, it is much easier said than done. Each round, you and your opponent must secretly plot the maneuvers for each of your ships, and to outmaneuver your opponent, you must guess the likeliest end position or possible end positions for each of his ships. Knowing your opponent's ships' range of maneuvers is helpful, here, but then you still have to account for the possibility those ships will perform barrel rolls or boost.

Likewise, you must anticipate the flow of the round and determine where to maneuver your ships. You will want to position them in what you expect are the most advantageous positions, but your opponent will expect as much and might try to block your ships by flying into their paths. So you might want to maneuver into a less likely position—one that still offers an advantage, even if slightly mitigated—but are you just hurting yourself with all this second guessing?

To a large extent, then, the greatest strength that the Gozanti brings to your Epic fleet is the fact that it allows you to bypass this guessing game for your docked fighters, even while it forces your opponent to pay an extraordinary amount of attention to the threat they pose.

Because you deploy your docked fighters after all the small- and large-base ships have executed their maneuvers and performed their actions, you can select their maneuvers and perform their actions with full and perfect knowledge of your opponent's fighter screen. Want your Alpha Squadron Pilot to get the drop on Wedge Antilles or Tycho Celchu ? When you deploy it from the Gozanti, you can pick a maneuver that gives you a shot and denies their shots, and there is nothing they can do about it. You can even strip enemy ships of their defensive tokens by using the Suppressor Title and acquiring two target locks with a Weapons Engineer .

The ships you dock on the Gozanti can also get into battle much more quickly than they could on their own. After all, instead of maneuvering them from the edge of your deployment zone, you can now maneuver them from the front of a huge-base ship that has already surged forward on its own initiative.

This could be a good way to get early shots from the torpedoes on your TIE bombers or from the missiles on your TIE Advanced. Many of your X-Wing ships have different efficiencies in Epic Play than they do in Standard Play, and the Gozanti can help a bomber wing led by Captain Jonus perform a truly terrifying alpha strike—one that could very easily shape the course of the ensuing battle, especially if it involves four TIE bombers all deployed simultaneously from the Vector .

Finally, the Gozanti's Requiem Title allows the fighters that you deploy to fire at a pilot skill value of "8" later in the Combat phase. In this way, you can catch your opponent off-guard with your Academy Pilots or Alpha Squadron Pilots, or you can have your unique pilots fire in the order of your choice. For example, you could have Commander Alozen wear down an opponent's shields with his Cluster Missiles before you have Maarek Stele follow up against the same opponent, thereby increasing his chances of scoring a critical hit.

Fly to Battle

Whether or not you use it to carry your docked fighters directly into the heat of battle, the Gozanti-class Cruiser in the Imperial Assault Carrier Expansion Pack marks a significant maturation and shift in the dynamics of X-Wing Epic Play. Your huge-base ships become more potent and meaningful than ever, and the expansion's TIE fighters and upgrades offer new squad-building options for both Epic and Standard Play.

You can learn more about the Imperial Assault Carrier Expansion Pack from our previews, "Epic Tactics" and "Swarm Tactics," or you can simply head to your local retailer to pick up your copy now! The Imperial Assault Carrier Expansion Pack is available at retailers throughout the United States. Availability in other regions may vary.