So we all know that points on ships are almost always better spent than points on upgrades and even more so if you end up fielding Clusters against TIE's or Assaults against a 3 ship build. Same holds true for many other upgrades and that is especially irritating in one off causal games between friends where "tournament meta" is not a thing.

In order to incentivise people to use more upgrades in casual games we can simply separate the list building into two phases:

1. Both players pick ships only and show each other what they picked;

2. Then both players secretly pick upgrades and then they show their complete lists.

This also eliminates the "Oh, so you picked X? Then I'll swap my Y with Z!" argument, esentially leading to a more casual and friendly game.

Thoughts?

We just blindbuild. You can wander over and look at what the other person is doing but only after you've declared your squad "locked," preventing you from changing it.

So we all know that points on ships are almost always better spent than points on upgrades and even more so if you end up fielding Clusters against TIE's or Assaults against a 3 ship build. Same holds true for many other upgrades and that is especially irritating in one off causal games between friends where "tournament meta" is not a thing.

I don't think the casual meta and tournament meta are all that different, unless your ship collection is a wave behind or something like that. With Wave IV, the rule of thumb of "more ships is better, leave the upgrades at home" doesn't really work any more.

Building blind (as Lagomorpha suggests) is probably the best way to squad-build in any case. Otherwise, you can rock/paper/scissors all day if you're building within sight of your opponent, and vice versa. Revealing your ship selections and then working on your upgrades seems like it would give both players an opportunity to tailor their squads to the other's weaknesses, which seems like the opposite of what you're hoping to achieve. So it probably is best to just build blind, don't change your selection once you reveal it, and play with your best guess.

We do similar. Another variant we enjoy is to set a point limit and then run a small scenario. As an eg I told my opponent that his rebel scum had intel that Lord Darth Vader was known to be transiting a portion of space in a shuttle with a limited escort. His mission launch his snub fighters to find and destroy. I built an extremely expensive doom/buzz saw shuttle (far too many upgrades) guarded by 2 royal TIES. He brought x wings. It was a good fight with the scum winning by 2 xwings both with only 1 hull left.

I've enjoyed great success with cheaper ordinance - flechette torps, ion pulse missiles, seismic charges and proximity mines are all cheap enough to take en masse, and chuck around everywhere. My last proximity mine one-shotted carnor jax. Bargain for 3 points...

And for we Solo Wingers : build a few cool list for the defending squad/fleet that will be ran by X-Wing AI.

Build our attacking squad/fleet.

After we have our attackers list done we pick one of the Defender list randomly by a Di roll.

I build from 4 to 6 list for the AI and use good ole Dragon Dice so you are rolling either a D4 or D6.

This approach works like a champ.

The joy of kicking your own ass because you are doing things right and not cheating is actually more of a challenge IMO.

Could be pretty cool OP. Could be pretty cool.