Synergy, from the greek synergos, is “working together”. With the rather meager size of the Resistance, (especially following *Trigger Warning* The Last Jedi), working together seems pretty important.

Following up my (still popular? being read at least – holy sh*t, thank you dear readers. Some point costs have changed, but mostly still relevant) Action EfficienT-70 article, the somewhat recent Resistance Transport expansion offers a whole new selection of Resistance shenanigans. This time with more synergy and working together, rather than the individual T-70s being strong.

Coordinate

Possibly the simplest form of synergy and working together, giving your action away to a friendly ship (at range 1-2).

Prior to this wave, Resistance had limited access to this incredible action, with only the Squad Leader talent, and C-3PO crew cards and neither of these means seemed to be explored much. C-3PO got some play, but for the double calculate rather than the red coordinate, and personally I never got around to trying out a Squad Leader Initiative 1 A-Wing for cheap coordinate (don’t recall seeing/hearing about it anywhere else either). But to take some words from the First Order enemy: “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to” and now it’s…

The first paragraph of C-3PO’s ability can actually do something now! (With a bonus of no points hike to ‘compensate’.) BB-8 in the Transport Pod has the calculate action, and new crew members GA-97 and PZ-4CO both grant the calculate action to their carriers. I don’t imagine there’s too much to be gained coordinating to BB-8, more likely to be a candidate for carrying C-3PO, but I suspect there will be some good degenerate options coordinating to a YT-1300 or StarFortress carrying GA-97 or PZ-4CO. Unlimited range coordinate sounds pretty good. And with PZ-4CO, there’s even more options with C-3PO throwing an action to PZ from across the table, then PZ passing a token to another friendly at range 1-2 at the end of activation. Shenanigans!

There are still more options for coordinate. The Resistance Transport itself has it natively as a red action, and is quite possibly the reason for the points increase on Tactical Officer.

(Side note – at least some people might stop burning 2 points on Tactical Officer now. Was well overused where it wasn’t always necessary. Yes, great in some spots, but not all of them. L3-37?? Look at that dial, and tell me why you need to do white moves over blue moves.)

The action being red isn’t entirely a detriment with Nodin getting a bonus action afterwards, and Pammich still being able to perform red maneuvers. The Resistance have a bunch of interesting interactions with stress, red actions, red maneuvers. Or it can equip an R4 Astromech for 2 points, to opens up the blue options on the dial immensely. Equipping R4 comes with the opportunity cost of taking M9-G8 on the transport, and upping it’s support capability.

An M9-G8 equipped Transport gets to double down on the support capability, with the persistent M9-G8 lock effect in addition to coordinating. Whether is worth the points or not (7 points…), I’m not sure, but I haven’t seen this idea anywhere else, though I doubt I’m the only one to have thought of it.

Suggested Build: (by no means an original creation)

Nodin Chavdri Resistance Transport (36)

Korr Sella (6), R4 Astromech (2) – Total: 44

This Nodin can take a Coordinate action to support a friendly ship, then take another action for himself (focus or lock) or even provide more support by jamming an enemy ship. This lands him with 2 stress, but he can clear both stress with one of many blue maneuver options from R4 astro and Korr Sella. A neat trick with Korr Sella is to fly through a debris field with a blue maneuver and then still clear all the stress to be able to take a regular action. Efficiently costed at 44 points, seem good.

The other ‘option’ for coordinate is Leia. But at a whopping 19 points, I somehow don’t think she’s worth taking just to hand out coordinates. Not to say Leia is bad, but not the best choice for a coordinator.

Another unlimited range effect!

One of these is going to be a big problem sooner or later,

*cough* Manaroo, Palpatine *cough*

The possibilities for Leia seem limitless, some include:

– Rey can have her precious white sloops back

– More blue maneuvers for Poe, could be disgusting with BB-8 (or T-70s in general, BB-8 Nien, getting to pre-maneuver boost or barrel roll on any basic 3 speed, then Black One SLAM into a Talon roll, PA action, clear stress etc etc…)

– Starfortress or Resistance Transport zero stop forever. Not fortressing per the rules (not overlapping), so lets call it Starfortressing

Further than Starfortressing, the Resistance Transport also has reverse maneuvers. White reverses are what a Quadjumper wishes it could do, never have to go forward. Put Leia on Cova Nell to get bonus attack and defense dice with all your white reverses (though doing regular maneuvers sometimes and utilizing Leia on other ships as well is almost certainly better).

Putting Leia on Rey can give Rey a 3rd force point, and open up white sloops, but Rey can still only recover 1 force per round, and so the extra way to spend force may simply lead to Rey being force starved. A better option might be to have Leia on a ship accompanying Rey, so the squad can recover 2 force per round to maximise Leia and other force usage.

Best place for Leia? Well, there are only 2 ship options (YT-1300 or Resistance Transport), but I’m really not sure. Leia is certainly powerful, but the 19 points and 2 crew slots are a steep price.

*Trigger Warning* And from one Resistance leader to another…

Why doesn’t she get her title on her card?

General Hux doesn’t isn’t referred to by his first name of Armitage…

Vice Admiral Holdo is yet another interesting crew piece for the Resistance. There is for sure a broken combo waiting to happen here. Don’t know what it is, but I reckon its out there.

Passing tokens seems good, especially with no limitation as to which type of tokens (only that the receiver does not already have one of it). Holdo passable tokens (not markers) include: Calculate, Evade, Focus, Reinforce, Cloak, Disarm, Jam, Tractor, Ion, Lock, Strain and Stress.

So many options here. And the support goes both ways. The Holdo carrier can be support ship (pass a green token, take a red token), or get supported by another ship (pass a red token, take a green token). Working together. Synergy.

Also more Starfortressing. Do red stop maneuvers and pass the stress with Holdo. It’s almost as though stuff is being designed to not move at this point….

The big thing holding Holdo back, and a key piece of the puzzle to solve, is the timing window for the ability. Depending on the tokens involved the earlier Holdo can go off the better, but high initiative crew slots are limited to Han at I6 and Rey at I5 (and soon Paige at I5 in the StarFortress with the upcoming card packs). But yeah, I don’t know what it is, but I reckon there’s some nasty combo out there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to be discovered.

Stress and Stress Management

From action linking RZ-2 A-Wings, to the Scavenged YT-1300’s action bar/dial, the Resistance seems to have close affinity to stress. And then you notice all the cards with this phrase:

“… you have 2 or fewer stress tokens…”

The Resistance Transport expansion doubled the number of Resistance cards with this stipulation. Here’s the full list

Ello Asty

Primed Thrusters

Rey’s Millennium Falcon

Pammich Nerro Goode

Nodin Chavdri

Larma D’Acy

Outside of Resistance, the only other card I could find with a similar stipulation is Hera Syndulla crew. So breaking the rules by doing extra stuff while stressed is mostly a Resistance faction thing, and its generally pretty useful. (At least for 2nd ed, there’s the limitations to 2 or fewer stress, *cough* R3-A2 *cough*)

Most of these abilities promote multiple self stressing (the ability gained also costs you a stress), so are quick to turn themselves off and hence not easily repeatable.

Maybe they’re trying to throw Hyperspace Scum a bone with all this self-stressing? There’s a couple of abilities there that benefit from an opponent doing this Lando’s Millenium Falcon, Koshka Frost, BT-1. But not just Hyperspace Scum; Latts Razzi (crew), Admiral Sloane, Seventh Sister (crew), Deathtroopers and Petty Officer Thannison (pilot and crew) can all benefit.

Morale of the story: worth checking the opposing squad before giving yourself stress.

But hey! Resistance has some cool tricks for dealing with stress.

Leia Organa (2x crew. After a friendly ship reveals its dial, you may spend 1 force charge. If you do, the chosen ship reduces the difficulty of that maneuver.) Give any dial in your squad all the blue maneuvers to clear stress, or remove all the red ones, to not get stress in the first place!

(2x crew. After a friendly ship reveals its dial, you may spend 1 force charge. If you do, the chosen ship reduces the difficulty of that maneuver.) Give any dial in your squad all the blue maneuvers to clear stress, or remove all the red ones, to not get stress in the first place! Korr Sella (crew. After you fully execute a blue maneuver, remove all of your stress tokens.) Mentioned earlier on the suggested Nodin build, Korr works well with the many ways to multi-stress a ship, from the obvious of using Rey’s Millenium Falcon to stack the stress, to the more complex of using Pattern Analyser to perform a red action.

(crew. After you fully execute a blue maneuver, remove all of your stress tokens.) Mentioned earlier on the suggested Nodin build, Korr works well with the many ways to multi-stress a ship, from the obvious of using Rey’s Millenium Falcon to stack the stress, to the more complex of using Pattern Analyser to perform a red action. Jaycris Tubbs (T-70 pilot, 49 points. After you fully execute a blue maneuver, you may choose a friendly ship at range 0-1. If you do, that ship removes 1 stress token.) I haven’t seen much any talk about the Loving Father but with the Resistance’s ability to stress themselves, I could see a place for him in a clever squad build.

Conditions

Conditions still feel like relatively unexplored design territory in game, with only nine of them, but of those nine, three of them are Resistance only.

It’s The Resistance: Assigned by GA-97 crew before placing forces.

Fun Fact: GA-97 is the droid at Maz’s Castle that informs the Resistance about BB-8’s presence there. When this card was first spoiled on FFGLive stream, me (being the jerk that I am) fairly quickly came up with a way to break it. Stream timestamp here, or transcribed below. Evan – “So we have a brain teaser in here for you Brooks from Nathan Squadron. Okay, so he’s saying, what happens if the reserved ship can’t deploy because my 8 TIE Fighters block off range 3 of all board edges.”

Brooks – “It could happen.”

Evan – “It does seem very unlikely”

Brooks – “Based on the cards we have out so far, Boba Fett crew for Scum there’s a similar situation, a very fringe case, but you would just deploy it on as normal. That is what I’ll go with right now. But obviously we have some time, and if it turns out that is problematic… Also I will point out, that if you are up against an 8 TIE swarm, GA-97 is optional, “you may”, so you can just not do it.”

And it turns out, you actually only need 4 ships to block range 3 from all board edges. But the off-hand answer after being put on the spot is fine, unless is actually becomes problematic. Because yeah, it’s unlikely to happen (unless they make GA-97 a compulsory upgrade at a competitive event…), it’s really not that great an ability.

Timed right with an appropriate ship, you could get yourself a good flanker, (L’ulo for example). But setting up a flanker on the board is easy enough, and you don’t need to time it so many turn out.

You could do a silly 2 ship squad with GA-97 on Han Solo and one other ship to assign the condition to, so none of the squad deploys normally. You put Han anywhere at I6 and ignore your deployment zone.

GA-97 could also be entertaining at a casual cross faction event. Give an Autopilot Drone its the Resistance for a fun time bomb!

Vi Moradi’s Compromising Intel condition is some more sneaky synergy as knowing where the opponent’s most important piece is going helps everyone out. Rattled could also be synergistic in a dual Starfortress squad with lots and lots of bombs, but probably restricted to only helping Ben Teene.

Side tangent about Finn

Relegated to side tangent because he isn’t squad synergy, just a good ship by himself, no big deal really …

Get over yourselves internet warriors, its pretty clear how the rules and his ability work, no ‘ruling’ required. Bit of a strange interaction, but whatever. Like that’s never happened before, or will never happen again. Maybe the strain cost was only meant for attacking, but it writes easier this way (‘defend or perform an attack’, rather than 2 separate sentences). We don’t know. Move on. It’s not a big deal Silly discussion about the mechanics aside, he’s really good. No crew, Perceptive Copilot, C-3PO or Rose; Heroic, lots of good choices. He will probably get a points bump in a few months. But he doesn’t need an errata or a change to the rules. Shout out to GreenDragoon and his excellent blog on his Big XXX Deal squad (the cycle of bloggers patting each other on the back continues).

It’s been a while between articles, but that’s all folks! It hopefully wasn’t too disjointed or outdated, I started writing this ages ago, as the cards were revealed and points were released, but has been a slow piecemeal effort. Should be more regular articles in the future, I have a Hyperspace Trial tournament report in progress, coming next few days/week.

-Nathan