With the introduction of even higher agility dice, like the tie phantom which can have 4 or more and now even higher hull value with the new imperial wave 5 ship with 12 hull and 4 shield. It raises the question for me, what is more valuable in the game for defense, having high hull/shield value or having a high agility value or even having a good combination of both (like the firespray-31). Is there some statistics or math behind your theories, very interested to hear peoples thoughts.

Without giving agility or hull values, not a question possible to answer.

In terms of averages, high agility/low hull, mid agility/mid hull and low agility/high hull tend to be about the same-ish, but it's not a wholly linear thing, going from one evade to two I think is more valuable than two to three or three to four. I think I remember one of MajorJuggler's posts stating the Decimator, on average, comes out around B-wingish on survivability. ¹ Twice the health but every hit it takes, it takes.

Ultimately, it comes down to the certainty of Hull Points versus the more risky (but potentially more rewarding) agility. The advantage of Hull is that you know roughly how long the ship's going to last. It can take X shots and then it's toast, but it will take those X shots. The Decimator goes down after you sink 16 dice into it, (excluding the occasional Direct Hit). It's not going to take more than 16 dice, but it will take 16.

High Agility has a higher variance, it's more a gamble: it could dodge every shot and last much longer than the equivalent durability average of hull, but it could also get one shot through at Range 3 through an asteroid by an A-wing.

EDIT: 1: Remembered incorrectly. This is the actual quote. "Conclusion: 12/4 hull/shields is nice, but it actually has less durability than the YT-2400, named YT-1300, or Firepsray due to its 0 agility. (estimated results)."

To have success in a lot of games the #1 goal is to take randomness out of the game. If you have a proven plan and stick to it. Formation flying, concentrating fire, die modification are some of the aspects of this philosophy.

Looking at it from that perspective, are interceptors that have stealth devices better than b-wings? Take players out of it. The decimator is a known quantity(well, as much as has been spoiled). At face value outside of dice you should have a very good understanding how it will perform every time.

You can break it down other ways too. One 5 point proton bomb can one shot a phantom. The least it would be would be 6 to kill the decimator.

But maneuverability and player skill are wild cards. When in doubt, play!

To have success in a lot of games the #1 goal is to take randomness out of the game. If you have a proven plan and stick to it. Formation flying, concentrating fire, die modification are some of the aspects of this philosophy.

I am curious if you have also noticed that a lot of the newest elements from as early as ImpAces, and definitly since Wave 4 has been directly designed to counter that philosophy?

I dont think it will ever fully be erased, but I am starting to see that based on the new upgrades, ships, pilots, and abilities, FFG has been promoting risk taking over consistancy.

The survivability of a ship depends not only on its agility value and hit points (shield plus hull) but also on the kind of attacks it is submitted to. As for the example of the VT-49 and the B-Wing, they are not even close to being similar in terms of durability.

Generally, averages are not a great statistic to look at when trying to determine how sturdy a ship ultimately will be. Even when you take the associated variances into account as well, you will easily get a wrong picture because the underlying distributions are not normal. In order to understand what is going on when ship A attacks ship B, you have to use the full probability mass functions for A's attack rolls (optionally including focus and target lock) and B's defense rolls (optionally including focus and evade tokens). These can then be combined to get the full probability mass function of this one damage exchange, and multiple of these can be convolved to see how a ship holds up under sustained fire and how many attacks it takes to bring it down.

This is what we are interested in when we are asking about a ship's defensive capabilities.

The math involved is not very advanced but still tricky to do by hand because the attack PMFs alone are four-dimensional; and convolving four-dimensional functions on paper is not my idea of fun (I am a computer scientist, however, and writing code that does exactly that for me just so happens to be my idea of fun).

So, here's a bit of data for you:

Let's look at unmodified attack and defense rolls for a moment, and let's pretend we have the matchup that was mentioned above, a B-Wing fighting a VT-47 (it is a nice example because if we assume range 2 all the time and assume that both can shoot every turn they do have the same attack).

With the method outlined above we can calculate how many attacks the B-Wing needs to destroy the VT-47 with at least 50% probability (we could also use any other percentage as a cutoff, but 50% seems a useful bit of information). It turns out that we can expect the VT-47 to withstand an average of 11 unmodified 3-dice attacks before it will go down in half the cases.

Vice versa, we can only expect the B-Wing to eat up an average of 7 unmodified 3-dice attacks before it's gone with at least 50% probability.

Simply speaking, the VT-47 can take significantly more of a beating than a B-Wing and this is reflected in its cost. (As a side note: when normalizing these values over the cost of the ship they are almost the same again).

If you have a look at the fully expanded probability tables you will notice a (fully expected) trend:

Ships with less agility but more hull are sturdier against fewer but higher-quality attacks with many red dice.

Ships with more agility but less hull are sturdier against more but lower-quality attacks with less red dice.

Example:

A cloaked TIE-Phantom (4 evade, 4 HP) can take an average of 5 attacks from an unmodified HLC (4 red dice) before it goes down with >50% probability. At the same time, it can be expected to withstand 16 unmodified A-Wing attacks (2 red dice).

A Lambda Shuttle (1 evade, 10HP) can take an average of 6 attacks from the same HLC but will fall to the A-Wing in half of the cases after 14 attacks.

To sum things up:

1) High Agi / low HP are not at all same-ish as low Agi / high HP. They are very different defensive profiles and have different strengths and weaknesses depending on your opponent's offensive capabilities and plan of attack.

Cheers,

sune

---

P.S.: I may be writing an in-depth article on statistics and the defensive capabilities of all ships if anyone is really interested in the math stuff.

P.P.S.: The most efficient ship in terms of defense for its cost is... the TIE-Bomber

The survivability of a ship depends not only on its agility value and hit points (shield plus hull) but also on the kind of attacks it is submitted to. As for the example of the VT-49 and the B-Wing, they are not even close to being similar in terms of durability.

Generally, averages are not a great statistic to look at when trying to determine how sturdy a ship ultimately will be. Even when you take the associated variances into account as well, you will easily get a wrong picture because the underlying distributions are not normal. In order to understand what is going on when ship A attacks ship B, you have to use the full probability mass functions for A's attack rolls (optionally including focus and target lock) and B's defense rolls (optionally including focus and evade tokens). These can then be combined to get the full probability mass function of this one damage exchange, and multiple of these can be convolved to see how a ship holds up under sustained fire and how many attacks it takes to bring it down.

This is what we are interested in when we are asking about a ship's defensive capabilities.

The math involved is not very advanced but still tricky to do by hand because the attack PMFs alone are four-dimensional; and convolving four-dimensional functions on paper is not my idea of fun (I am a computer scientist, however, and writing code that does exactly that for me just so happens to be my idea of fun).

So, here's a bit of data for you:

Let's look at unmodified attack and defense rolls for a moment, and let's pretend we have the matchup that was mentioned above, a B-Wing fighting a VT-47 (it is a nice example because if we assume range 2 all the time and assume that both can shoot every turn they do have the same attack).

With the method outlined above we can calculate how many attacks the B-Wing needs to destroy the VT-47 with at least 50% probability (we could also use any other percentage as a cutoff, but 50% seems a useful bit of information). It turns out that we can expect the VT-47 to withstand an average of 11 unmodified 3-dice attacks before it will go down in half the cases.

Vice versa, we can only expect the B-Wing to eat up an average of 7 unmodified 3-dice attacks before it's gone with at least 50% probability.

Simply speaking, the VT-47 can take significantly more of a beating than a B-Wing and this is reflected in its cost. (As a side note: when normalizing these values over the cost of the ship they are almost the same again).

If you have a look at the fully expanded probability tables you will notice a (fully expected) trend:

Ships with less agility but more hull are sturdier against fewer but higher-quality attacks with many red dice.

Ships with more agility but less hull are sturdier against more but lower-quality attacks with less red dice.

Example:

A cloaked TIE-Phantom (4 evade, 4 HP) can take an average of 5 attacks from an unmodified HLC (4 red dice) before it goes down with >50% probability. At the same time, it can be expected to withstand 16 unmodified A-Wing attacks (2 red dice).

A Lambda Shuttle (1 evade, 10HP) can take an average of 6 attacks from the same HLC but will fall to the A-Wing in half of the cases after 14 attacks.

To sum things up:

1) High Agi / low HP are not at all same-ish as low Agi / high HP. They are very different defensive profiles and have different strengths and weaknesses depending on your opponent's offensive capabilities and plan of attack.

Cheers,

sune

---

P.S.: I may be writing an in-depth article on statistics and the defensive capabilities of all ships if anyone is really interested in the math stuff.

P.P.S.: The most efficient ship in terms of defense for its cost is... the TIE-Bomber

Well said, I would have to agree with this. It really all boils down to what type of attack is coming at you. For example cluster missiles is a very good attack against ships with no agility dice, because you get 6 dice basically against their 0. While advance protons torpedos are extremely effective against high agility ships. This is why personally I am a fan of ships like the Firespray-31, it has resilience to both high and low attack values.

I also am curious about the effectiveness of focus vs evade actions depending on your agility value. For example I find that focus can actually be more beneficial in defense than an evade if you have 3, 4 or more agility dice because you have the ability of getting more than one evade result with the focus. I think this also depends though on the attack coming at you. Against low attack dice I think the evade is the better bet because you will most likely not need more than one evade result. However against high attack dice, the focus is better because you need all the evade results you can get. One last thing worth mentioning I think is that it is always possible to get more evade results with a evade token because it adds the result to your dice pool, so if you rolled all evades on your dice you would get those plus the evade token to exceed the amount of evades you could get with just a focus.

I would be very interested in reading your article about the statistics, this kind of stuff fascinates me

If you have lots of HP, you have very low variance.
If you have lots of Agility, you have higher variance.

A ship with 16 HP and 0 agility is very predictable in its survivability. It will last a certain number of turns of concentrated fire. No more, and no fewer.

A ship with 3 HP and 3 agility is very unpredictable in its survivability. It could easily be 1-shot, but it could also easily last 10 rounds of concentrated fire.

The Phantom and the Defender are both odd ducks.

The Phantom's cloaked agility is such that it surpasses the inherent superiority of 3 attack dice, and with 4 hp is very unlikely to be 1-shot anyway.

The Defender with High Agility, and Mid-HP clearly has a survivability bonus. However, it costs so much that we are having difficulty figuring out if it's got a good Survival-Damage-Cost ratio.

Like Sith Sinner said, If you have lots of low atack dice attacks it is better to have more agility, because you get your agiility dice against every attack. Examples, Cluster Missiles, TIE Fighters, A-wings.

If you are fighting fewer ships that have more attack dice, it is more to your advantage to have more hull/shields. A single agility dice will only cancel about 1/2 hit per attack.

If you are fighting rebels (their fleets are mostly YT-1300, X-wings, B-wings) I think lower agility/higher hull/shields is preferable.

If you have lots of HP, you have very low variance.

If you have lots of Agility, you have higher variance.

A ship with 16 HP and 0 agility is very predictable in its survivability. It will last a certain number of turns of concentrated fire. No more, and no fewer.

A ship with 3 HP and 3 agility is very unpredictable in its survivability. It could easily be 1-shot, but it could also easily last 10 rounds of concentrated fire.

The Phantom and the Defender are both odd ducks.

The Phantom's cloaked agility is such that it surpasses the inherent superiority of 3 attack dice, and with 4 hp is very unlikely to be 1-shot anyway.

The Defender with High Agility, and Mid-HP clearly has a survivability bonus. However, it costs so much that we are having difficulty figuring out if it's got a good Survival-Damage-Cost ratio.

Very true, I have had Soontir one shoted even when I had a evade and 2 focuses and on the other hand I have had games when my opponent could never kill Soontir. However ships like the Falcon have a very predictable life span.

The survivability of a ship depends not only on its agility value and hit points (shield plus hull) but also on the kind of attacks it is submitted to. As for the example of the VT-49 and the B-Wing, they are not even close to being similar in terms of durability.

Generally, averages are not a great statistic to look at when trying to determine how sturdy a ship ultimately will be. Even when you take the associated variances into account as well, you will easily get a wrong picture because the underlying distributions are not normal. In order to understand what is going on when ship A attacks ship B, you have to use the full probability mass functions for A's attack rolls (optionally including focus and target lock) and B's defense rolls (optionally including focus and evade tokens). These can then be combined to get the full probability mass function of this one damage exchange, and multiple of these can be convolved to see how a ship holds up under sustained fire and how many attacks it takes to bring it down.

This is what we are interested in when we are asking about a ship's defensive capabilities.

The math involved is not very advanced but still tricky to do by hand because the attack PMFs alone are four-dimensional; and convolving four-dimensional functions on paper is not my idea of fun (I am a computer scientist, however, and writing code that does exactly that for me just so happens to be my idea of fun).

So, here's a bit of data for you:

Let's look at unmodified attack and defense rolls for a moment, and let's pretend we have the matchup that was mentioned above, a B-Wing fighting a VT-47 (it is a nice example because if we assume range 2 all the time and assume that both can shoot every turn they do have the same attack).

With the method outlined above we can calculate how many attacks the B-Wing needs to destroy the VT-47 with at least 50% probability (we could also use any other percentage as a cutoff, but 50% seems a useful bit of information). It turns out that we can expect the VT-47 to withstand an average of 11 unmodified 3-dice attacks before it will go down in half the cases.

Vice versa, we can only expect the B-Wing to eat up an average of 7 unmodified 3-dice attacks before it's gone with at least 50% probability.

Simply speaking, the VT-47 can take significantly more of a beating than a B-Wing and this is reflected in its cost. (As a side note: when normalizing these values over the cost of the ship they are almost the same again).

If you have a look at the fully expanded probability tables you will notice a (fully expected) trend:

Ships with less agility but more hull are sturdier against fewer but higher-quality attacks with many red dice.

Ships with more agility but less hull are sturdier against more but lower-quality attacks with less red dice.

Example:

A cloaked TIE-Phantom (4 evade, 4 HP) can take an average of 5 attacks from an unmodified HLC (4 red dice) before it goes down with >50% probability. At the same time, it can be expected to withstand 16 unmodified A-Wing attacks (2 red dice).

A Lambda Shuttle (1 evade, 10HP) can take an average of 6 attacks from the same HLC but will fall to the A-Wing in half of the cases after 14 attacks.

To sum things up:

1) High Agi / low HP are not at all same-ish as low Agi / high HP. They are very different defensive profiles and have different strengths and weaknesses depending on your opponent's offensive capabilities and plan of attack.

Cheers,

sune

---

P.S.: I may be writing an in-depth article on statistics and the defensive capabilities of all ships if anyone is really interested in the math stuff.

P.P.S.: The most efficient ship in terms of defense for its cost is... the TIE-Bomber

My head hurts...

As for the example of the VT-49 and the B-Wing, they are not even close to being similar in terms of durability.

Yeah, I remembered that wrong. The quote was

Conclusion: 12/4 hull/shields is nice, but it actually has less durability than the YT-2400, named YT-1300, or Firepsray due to its 0 agility. (estimated results).

The Defender with High Agility, and Mid-HP clearly has a survivability bonus. However, it costs so much that we are having difficulty figuring out if it's got a good Survival-Damage-Cost ratio.

Not sure what you would regard as a good survival/damage/cost ratio but here's at least a comparison of survival/cost ratios between ships with similar damage (why are we having difficulty figuring these out?):

Defender:

• survives 9 unmodified 3-dice attacks (or 5 focussed 3-dice attacks) 50% of the time
• survival/cost = 0.33 (for unmodified rolls)

E-Wing:

• survives 7 unmodified 3-dice attacks (or 4 focussed 3-dice attacks) 50% of the time
• survival/cost = 0.26

Firespray:

• survives 11 unmodified 3-dice attacks (or 7 focussed 3-dice attacks) 50% of the time
• survival/cost = 0.33

YT-1300 (Chewbacca):

• survives 11 unmodified 3-dice attacks (or 7 focussed 3-dice attacks) 50% of the time
• survival/cost = 0.26

And some ships with less offensive potential:

TIE-Advanced:

• survives 7 unmodified 3-dice attacks (or 4 focussed 3-dice attacks) 50% of the time
• survival/cost = 0.33

A-Wing:

• survives 6 unmodified 3-dice attacks (or 3 focussed 3-dice attacks) 50% of the time
• survival/cost = 0.35

Cheers,

sune

Is that a Chardaan A-wing?

(why are we having difficulty figuring these out?)

Probably because he's factoring the ability to not get shot at all which is down to actions, the dial, the playstyle and psychological factors: how long it lasts and dishes out rather than how much of a sustained barrage it can take. That information we only get from playtesting and is situation and strategy dependent: it's impossible to truly quantify.

For example, the numbers aren't what keeps the Advanced out of tournaments, it's the belief that it's not worth running. The numbers indicate that belief is justified, but the belief is what keeps it out.

Is that a Chardaan A-wing?

(why are we having difficulty figuring these out?)

Probably because he's factoring the ability to not get shot at all which is down to actions, the dial, the playstyle and psychological factors: how long it lasts and dishes out rather than how much of a sustained barrage it can take. That information we only get from playtesting and is situation and strategy dependent: it's impossible to truly quantify.

For example, the numbers aren't what keeps the Advanced out of tournaments, it's the belief that it's not worth running. The numbers indicate that belief is justified, but the belief is what keeps it out.

And also the damage side of the equation. 3 attack dice, while healthy for a single ship, is a bit low at 30 points.

Basically, is the damage from the 3 Primary attack dice, when spread over the number of turns the Defender will survive, worth 30 points?

Is that a Chardaan A-wing?

(why are we having difficulty figuring these out?)

Probably because he's factoring the ability to not get shot at all which is down to actions, the dial, the playstyle and psychological factors: how long it lasts and dishes out rather than how much of a sustained barrage it can take. That information we only get from playtesting and is situation and strategy dependent: it's impossible to truly quantify.

For example, the numbers aren't what keeps the Advanced out of tournaments, it's the belief that it's not worth running. The numbers indicate that belief is justified, but the belief is what keeps it out.

No, it was the stock model, no upgrades.

With your second comment, I wholeheartedly agree. The dial and the player's ability to use it defensively in a game situation to dodge arcs is nothing we can easily crunch the numbers on. But the topic of this thread was to assess the static defensive capabilities of ships (hit points and agility) and this is something we can, in fact, do mathematically.