So many problems here.

To be honest I play the Fat Han quite a bit since Gen-Con where I saw its potential instead of just musing to myself what it might do in theory. It hasn't lost. In preparation for a 60pt mini-tourney we tested it out before the event. The set-up was Four players, they all know I'm bringing a fat Han and can bring any counter they want...in three games straight the falcon took 6, 5, and 6 damage. Never had more than 1 damage card on it. Yes the game is balanced to 100pts not 60, but there's some scaled data for you.

I do not care in the slightest about the 60-point game, since balance there is all but irrelevant to balance at 100 points.

It's stupid easy to fly, forgiving as hell, and consistent on damage. As an experienced player I do not consider setting up a chase position for my opponent intentionally to be 'good flying'. PLEASE chase me. Your moves in chasing the falcon either must close the gap or cut an angle to set up for close range later. Very easy to predict or just not care about. I move last so when you get too close and bump, yay for me. And by knowing your dial and target range getting myself somewhere decent is not hard. When I'm winning games by casually flying away from my opponent and my only skill input is really gaming my attack dice and knowing when to use my re-rolls? Not so good.

What you're saying is that as long as your opponent does what you want and expect, and knowing the dial and target range of your opponent, and presumably as long as you don't run out of room on the board or into an asteroid, it's pretty easy to make good choices.

But for what ship is that not true?

The Fat Falcon is not invincible but it is overly strong, with very few and dictated counters to it in both flying an squad building.

Then where are those counters in the metagame? If Fat Falcons are (as someone upthread claimed) 60% of top-tier lists, and there are only a few counters, why aren't those very specific (and therefore easily identifiable) counters showing up and knocking the stuffing out of it?

That's not a rhetorical question, by the way: I genuinely don't know why a list with known weaknesses and known counters has taken over the metagame.

If there wasn't something wrong with the falcon you would not get constant QQ, now I've killed and been killed by the falcon it's not indestructible by any means but turret ships in general invalidate good maneuvering.

I'd argue with this, but I'm getting tired of repeating myself. Turrets require good maneuvering, which is the opposite of invalidating it.

Which is frustrating when you show to the store with a group of Tie Ints with PTL or any other build that requires actual skill when moving your ships across the board. Turrets make arc dodging an impossibility. Arc dodging is one of the few aspects of the game that actually require tactics and skill.

Why are so many players convinced that arc-dodging is the epitome of skill in X-wing? If you move late in the round, and you have PTL and access to boost and barrel roll, an eight-year-old who's new to the game can figure out how to reliably dodge firing arcs. (Not hyperbole: I've taught two kids how to do it.)

You misunderstand I'm not on about the falcons movement I'm on about the ship's it's shooting at, a well flown interceptor can't escape getting shot at and anyone who plays empire knows three green dice don't offer that much protection.

When people want to fly interceptors but don't dare because of one ship that's an issue, we know it's an issue because the devs have spent time and effort in designing a card to help fighters against turret ships.

You misunderstand I'm not on about the falcons movement I'm on about the ship's it's shooting at, a well flown interceptor can't escape getting shot at and anyone who plays empire knows three green dice don't offer that much protection.

True, but three green dice with both focus and evade tokens does offer quite a bit of protection.That means you can't arc dodge of course, but you adapt your tactics for different opponents.

You misunderstand I'm not on about the falcons movement I'm on about the ship's it's shooting at, a well flown interceptor can't escape getting shot at and anyone who plays empire knows three green dice don't offer that much protection.

True, but three green dice with both focus and evade tokens does offer quite a bit of protection.That means you can't arc dodge of course, but you adapt your tactics for different opponents.

Except you can very easily roll all blanks or have to use the token on the first round of shooting only to have gunner fire again and roll blanks and eyeballs.

The tactic for using interceptors against falcons is don't, we've seen that very clearly.

Well. Congrats on the civil attitude 9 pages in and 6am in the morning.

Some of this makes me want to cry though.

Honestly, I feel like the lists are getting too strongly powerful in one aspect: ex. damage nullification/turret, or maneuverability. This extremity leads to hard countering, which leads to rock/paper/scissors meta/build planning. Soft counters allow for more list variety and player skill as everything has a certain way to deal with something else.

This was something that the Starcraft 2 designers have learned slowly over time. Magic designers have also learned to create new formats and increase format size to combat the audience figuring out the meta too quickly. The cards have also tried to be more diversified and have more varied powers and responses versus anything being too versatile in power (see: counterspells for everything, mana leak ex.)

Really, wave 3 meta seemed more open than the current wave 4 meta.

Nowadays, you really aren't going to beat a Phantom and Fat Han list with a bunch of bombers. Just give it a try. Go.

If it really works, I want to know immediately, so I can have fun playing it too.

Diversity of choice is a good thing. It also creates player style and experience, when you can pick something that is your speciality and you can deal with many different things simply by playing a little differently with the same list.

I haven't been part of the FFG community very long, but it's clear that this is a very hot topic that everyone has an opinion on.

Fact is, I think I've said before, most games have 'the thing to beat.'

I personally do two things to deal with things like this:

1- play as it to get a first-hand understanding of the gameplay (which I have done).

2- keep playing against it. Luckily, my wife actually enjoys this game, so I have her pilot various Han lists and I just keep playing over and over again (often losing) with various lists. With your losses, you learn things. Much more than when you win, usually.

I don't want to say something that sounds like I don't feel for you. I do. But really, the proper response to people compalining about Fat Han (or any Falcon) is "suck it up." Keep playing. You will learn to deal, and learn to lose graciously at the same time!

And you will also learn to win eventually! No matter what, as long as you are analyzing your games, and finding ways to improve and fix mistakes, you only get better. The curve seems steep with an opponent like the Falcon, but who cares? Enjoy the game anyway. If you hate it that much, even with this mindset, then quit the game.

I haven't been part of the FFG community very long, but it's clear that this is a very hot topic that everyone has an opinion on.

Fact is, I think I've said before, most games have 'the thing to beat.'

I personally do two things to deal with things like this:

1- play as it to get a first-hand understanding of the gameplay (which I have done).

2- keep playing against it. Luckily, my wife actually enjoys this game, so I have her pilot various Han lists and I just keep playing over and over again (often losing) with various lists. With your losses, you learn things. Much more than when you win, usually.

I don't want to say something that sounds like I don't feel for you. I do. But really, the proper response to people compalining about Fat Han (or any Falcon) is "suck it up." Keep playing. You will learn to deal, and learn to lose graciously at the same time!

And you will also learn to win eventually! No matter what, as long as you are analyzing your games, and finding ways to improve and fix mistakes, you only get better. The curve seems steep with an opponent like the Falcon, but who cares? Enjoy the game anyway. If you hate it that much, even with this mindset, then quit the game.

"There are no lessons in victory, but a thousand in defeat." - Sun Tzu

Except you can very easily roll all blanks or have to use the token on the first round of shooting only to have gunner fire again and roll blanks and eyeballs.

The tactic for using interceptors against falcons is don't, we've seen that very clearly.

Or you could roll three evades in the first round of shooting, use your evade token in the second, and still have a focus to shoot at Han with. Or Gunner could kick in and Han could roll one hit and a focus, use his reroll and get three blanks.

Them's be how the dice kin roll, boy. I didn't say it was impenetrable, I said it offers quite a bit of protection. Either way, more often than not it'll take Han (even with Gunner) two turns to kill a 3 hit dice ship with 3 evade dice, and that's without any token support.

That's not a rhetorical question, by the way: I genuinely don't know why a list with known weaknesses and known counters has taken over the metagame.

Because too many players have a superglue adherence to "metagame wisdom" they read on the internet, people netdeck far too much and once something gets to the top it stays there.

STEP 1: TIE phantom hysteria. All the swarms disappear because their players read that the phantom will kill them (wrong, the phantom kills formations). Mass screams of "OP" before it's even been released, when it murders the formation squads of those entrenched in "metagame wisdom" even more cries of OP. All the swarms run away. Likewise, forum criticism of the IMO pretty competent TIE defender leads to an initial near total absence of it. I don't think MajorJuggler appreciates quite how much power his jousting values have over shaping the metagame.

STEP 2: Lots of people try out the Falcon as a phantom counter. Someone skilled wins something high profile with a Falcon. The netdeckers, the people who's idea of list design is copy the championship squads, copy the Falcon list. They try it and win a few games (the Falcon's a ship you have to know how to counterfly). Falcon numbers rise.

STEP 3: Rising Falcon numbers mean more Falcons taking part. More participating Falcons mean more winning Falcons and more losing Falcons. Only the winning Falcons are reported and more netdeckers (and a few non-netdeckers start to be convinced that there must be something here if there are so many Falcons) jump on the Millenium Bandwagon. Falcon numbers rise leading to a rise in Falcon wins leading to a rise in Falcon numbers leading to a rise in Falcon wins. The Falcon's a good list that's not that difficult to get a grip on compared to, say, the TIE fighter swarm so it's very easy for a large number of players to adapt to. The Phantom Menace fails to materialise, mostly due to Falcons, partly due to it having been a balanced ship all along.

STEP 4: Mass proliferation of Falcons (and continued absence of the firepower swarms that best them) leads to complaints on the forums by players that denounce anything that beats them a lot as OP. This further reinforces the illusion of the Falcon being a superlist and leads to even more Falcon players. More forum threads, illusion is propagated, problem deepens.

STEP 5: Falcon throughly entrenched in top rankings, so many Falcons that most wins are Falcons. More players playing Falcons. Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons Falcons. Somehow NOBODY is playing the counterlists, preferring to instead join Team Falcon. Falcons are beatable but their mass duplication is killing variety.

The Millenium Falcon is dominating through numbers, not through some sort of overpowered quality. It's got to the top and it'll stay there until a new big thing knocks it off. That's Leaderboard Inertia: a list that hits the top stays there by standing atop all the copies of it. Once again, we don't report losses: all the failed copycat lists go unseen.

So how do we remove the Falcon from dominance?

Not by banning it, that just gives the idea that it was worth banning: no, we need to break the illusion of overpoweredness that surrounds it.

Two possible community drives:

1. Set up some sort of community agreement not to play the Falcon for a few months. This forum has a huge quantity of the high level playerbase: once Falcons disappear from the leaderboards they'll stop being copied from them and will simmer back down to a normal list again.

2. The biggest TIE swarm X-wing has ever seen. Make a similar agreement, but it's for the next month or so to play almost exclusively hard Falcon counters such as TIE fighter swarms. Either we persuade the high level Falcon players to stop playing it to lower it from its pedestal, or everyone else plays hard counter to shove it off. Once it drops out of the top rankings, the netdeckers will move on to whatever pushed it off and variety can return.

The Falcon may reappear in the rankings a few times, it's a good list. It just needs trimming back because its numbers are out of control.

3. We wait for Christmas and for FFG to release its countercard.

Then, next time, we need to try really, really hard not to stoke up hysteria on the forums for Wave 5 and 6, lest we catapult another list into the self-replicating fame the Falcon has today. Cries of OP are self-fulfilling prophecies.

The only way to beat the Falcon is to push it off the Top 8 rankings for a few tournaments. Then whatever won that will be copied.

I don't play rebels, but it seems to me a fairly competently built Corran Horn would also do very well against Han. Especially if you were to give him something like Outmaneuver, Predator, Lone Wolf or Push the Limit. I mean, his biggest strength is that he can bleed tokens and other things from opponents. Isn't the Fat Han build all about tokens?

Likewise, forum criticism of the IMO pretty competent TIE defender leads to an initial near total absence of it.

Oh Lawdy, bless your sweet heart for saying this.

If you were attempting sarcasm text isn't a particularly apt conveyor.

If you were attempting sarcasm text isn't a particularly apt conveyor.

Sarcasm? Are you kidding me? I've been extolling the virtues of the Defender for months!

Seriously though, the Defender has everything you need to be instrumental to taking a Falcon out. Cannon slot, high evade to pad out your not inconsequential health, good pilot abilities, a 1-bank, shields… it's all good!

Another issue with Fat Han being so popular is that there are some fun pilots who can't really function well alongside anything else right now. I think the YT-2400 will change that somewhat.

Oh gods. I don't want to live in a fat Han fat dash with 4 dice turrets and fat kenKirk world.

Anyone?:

Dash

Outrider title

Hlc

Predator

Gunner

Engine upgrade

I will be happy to see any one taking a Gunner with the Outrider title. A waste of 5 pts only works to my advantage.

Nowadays, you really aren't going to beat a Phantom and Fat Han list with a bunch of bombers. Just give it a try. Go.

If it really works, I want to know immediately, so I can have fun playing it too.

But you can also adapt your deployment, since you won't face Han and a Phantom in the same list. (Decimator/Phantom lists will be scarier, but we don't have those to deal with quite yet.) And particularly at Range 3, multiple arcs that only overlap slightly can make it hard for a Phantom to escape completely. Then you're hoping for a decent dice result, particularly against Buzzsaw Echo who will be defending with 4 dice + focus + evade, but with Jonus' support you have acceptable odds of ending the encounter with any given piece of ordnance.

I'm undefeated with Bombers against Falcon builds, and about 2-3 against Phantoms--which aren't great odds in the abstract, but if you consider the relative frequencies of each list in the metagame right now, it starts to look like a pretty decent all-around list.

(slice)

I really like Your post, let Us all play mass swarm of TIE swarms (I like backstabber + 7x AP = 17 attack dices)

So I wanted to point out the absurdity of Fat Han. When you have most squads battling it out you have to account for maneuvering, order of movement, final placement of ships, etc. This is where the entire strategy element of this game is located. Fat Han can ignore 99% of this. As long as he avoids flying off the board or landing on a rock he doesn't care. Because Fat Han involves no strategy, no maneuvering. All Fat Han does is pull the arm of a rigged slot machine. Did I get 3 cherries? No? Pull the arm again! No? Again! No? Again! It's stupid.

Now to prevent this from being a simple rant I want to point out my glimmer of hope on the horizon. A glimmer that is the steely glint on the chassis of a merciless killing machine named IG-88. I think IG-88 will be rock to Han's scissors.

I've been running the following:

Mauler- TC and Squad Leader

Delta- HLC

Vessery- HLC

and we have quite a few "fat Han" kills under our belt. Also, outmaneuver neuters fat Han.

*snip*... 3. We wait for Christmas and for FFG to release its countercard.

Then, next time, we need to try really, really hard not to stoke up hysteria on the forums for Wave 5 and 6, lest we catapult another list into the self-replicating fame the Falcon has today. Cries of OP are self-fulfilling prophecies.

The only way to beat the Falcon is to push it off the Top 8 rankings for a few tournaments. Then whatever won that will be copied.

I for one welcome our new Wave5/Scum & Villany overlords. Seriously though, great post Lagomorphia. The current prevalence of Falcon lists is a product of Phantom hysteria and meta-following rather than an indication of the actual abilities of the ship itself.

I'm just glad that the X-Wing community hasn't fully cottoned on to the TIE Defender yet; it's slipped almost entirely under the radar so far, but once people start to realise just what a beastly little monster it can be we'll see the meta shifting again in a different direction...

"Living in a Fat Han fat dash with 4 dice turrets and fat kenKirk world..."

Is that a song by Madonna?

The current prevalence of Falcon lists is a product of Phantom hysteria and meta-following rather than an indication of the actual abilities of the ship itself.

While I agree that's a big part of it, to be fair, Han is a good pilot in a good ship and that is a factor as well.

Fat Han is not unbeatable, and is not breaking the meta, and isn't even OP'ed, a big part of why you see it so often was covered by Lagomorphia quite effectively. But meta-following and phantom paranoia won't make a bad ship win games.

Then, next time, we need to try really, really hard not to stoke up hysteria on the forums for Wave 5 and 6, lest we catapult another list into the self-replicating fame the Falcon has today. Cries of OP are self-fulfilling prophecies.

The only way to beat the Falcon is to push it off the Top 8 rankings for a few tournaments. Then whatever won that will be copied.

Thank you for this post. That's exactly what I meant with my reply in the 'Problem with player retention' thread. If nobody try to counter it, of course you will see the build everywhere.

While I agree that's a big part of it, to be fair, Han is a good pilot in a good ship and that is a factor as well.

Fat Han is not unbeatable, and is not breaking the meta, and isn't even OP'ed, a big part of why you see it so often was covered by Lagomorphia quite effectively. But meta-following and phantom paranoia won't make a bad ship win games.

Oh, absolutely. The Falcon is balanced and can be competitive. HSF (and FalconFortress, and ChewieTanks) have been popular lists since the Falcon was released. They haven't done amazingly well at higher level tournament play of course because, well, two attacks per turn is two attacks per turn.

Amusingly, everyone playing a bad ship will make a bad ship win games, though. If everyone played nothing but TIE Advanced builds then the TIE Advanced would be winning Worlds.

You have a point there sir

The current prevalence of Falcon lists is a product of Phantom hysteria and meta-following rather than an indication of the actual abilities of the ship itself.

While I agree that's a big part of it, to be fair, Han is a good pilot in a good ship and that is a factor as well.

Fat Han is not unbeatable, and is not breaking the meta, and isn't even OP'ed, a big part of why you see it so often was covered by Lagomorphia quite effectively. But meta-following and phantom paranoia won't make a bad ship win games.

Of course, it does need to be both good and easily playable for this to happen, but that doesn't make it overpowered.

FalconFortress

If you mean the actionless Falcon fortress, it really isn't any good.