Treatise on Starfighter Tactics

After flying it for a bit with my A-Wing mini-swarm using the offset formation, I realized that my original take on the offset formation was a little too wide and was causing my ships to take damage when trying to fit between asteroids. 

I’ve been playing around on Workbench some more and managed to tweak my offset formation to make it tighter. I realize I am probably reinventing the wheel here, but figuring this stuff out on my own and then sharing it with you guys helps give me a deeper understanding of how and why it works and also makes it more comfortable for me when I’m setting up.

Here’s the new and improved offset formation:

Now instead of putting the front and rear ships left nub to right nub, you just need to place them left nub to left corner. The trade off is that you will need to give the front and rear ships as much space between them as you can, although they should still bank together comfortably. 

You can actually create a flush box formation that can bank together if you place the rear and front ships as far apart in the the deployment zone as you can, but their corners will be almost touching when you bank, and if you are not extremely precise with your maneuver templates you could end up bumping, so I don’t recommend doing this.

If you want to try your hand at the Pinwheel formation, here is a graphic I found that explains how it works and how to do it. You can also see more examples here, as well as some interesting discussion in the comments on when you should use the Pinwheel formation over other formations.

http://teamcovenant.com/klutz/2014/04/29/understanding-the-pinwheel-formation/