The death of TRC is grossly exaggerated

 

All the TRCs

TRC isn't dead. I touched upon it in my 1.5 turbolaser evaluation earlier this week, but then came across more than 1 person who thought TRC was gone for good. So I figured I'd take a second, in-depth look at one of the staples of Armada (esp Rebels).

Let's look at the facts:

TRC has a new contender in Linked Turbolaser Towers (LTT). LTT has "unlimited" rerolls, whereas TRC is a recurring exhaust. That's a significant difference there, and not in TRCs favor. LTT doesn't offer any guarantees of double hits. TRC does. If you roll enough red dice, there is likely to be a blank. When rerolled, it'll come up with 0.75 damage on average, with a 1/8 chance of an acc. TRC gives you full control over your dice - turn a blank into a double (or a crit, which can sometimes be better) 100% of the time. When double arcing, LTT gets your two rerolls, but TRC only triggers once. Sometimes that will be a problem for TRC, sometimes you only need the double on one shot. It's hard to quantify exactly when LTT is better and vice versa, but a lot of TRC's appeal is that you KNOW the result of the dice mod. With red flak LTT becomes better still, so on a Muni there is no competition at all. But Munis don't have any evades, thus irrelevant. I'm still of the opinion that TRC is superior on any small base ship with 2 evades. Unless you expect to do a lot of flak, in which case the "super attack" ability of LTT shifts the balance. Caveat: if you're running rebels with a lot of blue flak and Toryn Farr, the ball shifts to TRC again.

Evade got better, which means it's defensively more valuable - and can also reroll that sweet double you set. But come on. All (or almost all) the TRC ships will now be smalls with 2 evades. So there won't be any ships who can discard evade to affect an extra die. And how often will one of your small TRCs be shooting another ship with evade at close range? It will happen, surely, but how often? It's only close range that's been changed: medium and long range evades are EXACTLY as before. And TRC was doing great then, so tell me, what's the big change? Oh, and in case you didn't realize: evade works the same on dice that's been rerolled into doubles with LTT...

On anything with only 1 evade or anything bigger than small, I think the equation changes quite a bit in favor of LTT, though I wouldn't rule out TRC on Arq and Neb gunlines.

Summary: CR90A and MC30 Scout are both very solid platforms for TRC. Some fleets with Arqs (Needa and Reeva work well) and Nebs (gunlines) also. For all other ships, LTT is a serious contender indeed.