This may be a question for math/stats inclined folks. Maybe Majorjuggler can help.

I believe the graph between the # of ships and winning percentage is still an exponential one - even with wave 4 (non-epic), right?

A curve which shows the more ships in your squad, the higher your chance of winning.

I am curious if wave 4 have done anything to lessen this? FFG has been consciously giving us more things to counter swarms and lower PS ships. With wave 4 allowed tourney thus far, are we starting to see a bell-like curve centering on either the 4, 5, or 6 ships squads?

Will there be a day when we see this graph look like a flat line - equal chance of winning with 1 ship squad to the 8 ship swarms. I don't really think so. For a single ship squad to win, it would need to have the ability to attack multiple times against multiple ships in a round. It would therefore be a monster. I don't think there is a non-epic ship in the Star Wars universe that can be this awsome.

I am guessing 4-5 ship builds stand the best placing at the moment. But it's a bad comparison, because most of them are whisper / fat solo + Cheerleaders.

And the next post below gives you your answer I think.

It's not exactly as simple as "MOAR SHIPS = BETTER!" but generally that is the case.

There are of course a whole bunch of statistics on Regionals, read up on what the different columns mean, and then see the Squad Archetypes section on this post:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/105107-2014-regionals-results/?p=1195948

Boom I have telepathy. Mad skillz

/thread

Gencon was a 2 ship vs a 3 ship. I don't it's necessarily think its about the number of ships but more like hp.

Gencon was a 2 ship vs a 3 ship. I don't it's necessarily think its about the number of ships but more like hp.

HP is part of it. Number of attacks also helps, though slightly offset by the number of green dice your opponent gets to roll against those red dice. Eight TIEs get sixteen red dice against a B-Wing, but that B will average three evade rolls over its eight defenses.

OK, real math answer time.

A squad's entire jousting value is:

( total attack power ) * ( total durability )

So if you increase the number of ships by a factor of N, then you increase the jousting power of your squad by a factor of N².This is why a ship's value is proportional to the square root of its attack power times durability, all else being equal. The math gets more complicated as you try and fit that model into a 100 point limit, and try to figure out exactly how durable ships are, or how much attack they have, but that's the general idea.

But pure jousting numbers are not everything, you can have a lower jousting value but still come out ahead because your squad is more efficient. (PS, abilities, maneuvering, etc).

You'll have squads like Fat Falcon + Corran Horn do well, which have absolutely miserable jousting power on paper. But the late game durability is very good on both ships (typically R2-D2 regeneration on Corran), and you spend most of your time boosting out of arcs to keep your opponent's efficiency very low.

A huge part of this rule is luck and the tournament structure. Most X-Wing tournaments have barely enough rounds to determine a single winner, so losing even one match means you're out of first place and desperately hoping for tiebreakers to get you any kind of prize. And since matches are single games instead of best of 3/5/etc like in other games you can't afford to lose any of them. A single moment of bad luck can cost you a game, which then costs you the tournament.

So, how does this impact ship choices? Well, low-number lists are often based around elite pilots that have powerful offensive and arc dodging abilities but limited, if any, upgrades defensively over a PS 1-2 generic. This makes them incredibly vulnerable to bad luck. A TIE swarm that rolls all blanks and loses an academy pilot early still has most of their squad on the table. An interceptor aces list that rolls all blanks and loses Fel early just lost at least a third of its power and has very little chance of winning the game. And it's the same problem, though less extreme, on offense. If one of your four rookie pilots rolls badly and wastes an attack it's much less of a problem than if Wedge rolls badly and wastes your squad's main threat for a turn.

So in a tournament context you see three "low numbers" archetypes:

1) Big ships with enough dice modification (gunner, C-3P0, etc) to overcome randomness to a large degree. A well-equipped Falcon has a lot of raw HP that doesn't depend on dice, gunner/predator/etc to get consistent hits even when you roll badly at first, and C-3P0/Chewbacca to provide even more dice-independent HP.

2) Elite ships that offer a favorable enough risk/reward balance to justify the chance of bad dice. For example, a phantom can roll blanks and explode in a game-costing disaster, but when it works it's pretty much unbeatable for a lot of lists. You just get such powerful arc dodging and firepower that it's a viable option, while interceptors that have similar dice luck issues but less power are pretty much ignored.

3) Anti-phantom lists. Because of FFG's complete screwup with the phantom and ACD low-PS mid-numbers lists like XXBB are suicide. You can't swarm the table and cover every possible move the phantom can make, and the phantom player gets to wait and see where all of your ships are going before they commit to their own move. So there's a lot of pressure to take higher-PS ships even when the rest of the game is screaming "DON'T DO THIS", just to have a chance against the phantom. Take away the phantom and these lists disappear entirely.

This sort of leads to the question -

If you have 12 pts to spend on upgrades or add a ship, which direction will you go?

Upgrades can tip the balance in your favor or is it the additional ship?