I wasn't in any way criticizing any of MajorJuggler's analysis. I was talking about one if the things to think about when one is thinking about durability.

Same here. And honestly, I don't understand MJ's work enough to judge it anyway. I'd love to see some example of how to apply it. I use to use some tables that listed attack vs agility, and a rough survivability formula that Theorist used in an old TC post, but recently I've just messed around with various squads until I found something that I like.

Nothing you've aaid can't be taken into account by what MJ does. I fail to see the exact criticism of his work.

As it's said. Jousting efficiency stat line tells you how much "magic" you need to make happen with the dial and dodging and other shenanigans. If you can't make up that difference you simply are running something with less attack and less defense and deserve to lose.

I wasn't criticizing him at all. I'm saying more people should be using a particular one of his tools as a way to understand what they can expect from particular ships and combos, and about the overall survivability of a list.

Durability comes in two forms in a miniature game. How much damage it can take, and how much damage it can negate, also known as endurance and damage reduction.

Endurance is fairly easy to calculate as all you have to do is add the hull plus shields and get a hit point value. It takes the same number of hits to take down an interceptor as it does a Tie fighter and the same number of hits to take down a Y-wing and a B-wing.

Reduction is fairly trickier as it involves damage reduction which is mostly designed around chance in order to keep the balance instead of giving it a straight up value. You could split this up into 2 forms of reduction chance and constant.

Chance is fairly easy, green dice is the first thing that comes to mind however it also represents the fickleness of depending on it. We all have heard of how Soontir met his fate with 6 green blanks. Yet when the defender has to stop a 3 dice attack and get 3 evades it is great for the defender while the attacker just shudders in disbelief.

Constant is something that has to remain fairly low in order to keep balance. Constants are like C-3PO and evade actions which will always stop 1 hit if they get shot at.

As for shields it is kind of funny because you tend to use them as endurance yet they have a certain damage reduction element. As far as damage reduction it is best to calculate how much of the hit points are shielded sort of a % instead of just how much shields. A B-wing has better damage reduction than a Y-wing because the shields can stop more critical hits than a Y-wing. Still I would classify shields as more of a chance reduction instead of a constant because it depends on if a critical hit was rolled or not.

Now this is all for individual ships. Calculating squadron list durability is something completely different. Say take the 4B-Z95 and compared with the 4X-Z95 lists. For durability stats (shields and hull) they all stack up or add up. the 4BZ list is known to have 22 shields and 14 hull where as the 4XZ has 10 shields and 14 hull. But as for agility the statistics do not stack instead it is more of an average. The average agility for the 4BZ is a hair above 1 while the average agility for the 4XZ list is 2.

Another thing with squadron durability is it depends on what part of your squadron is vulnerable. Biggs can put a lot of durability on the list with the drawing of fire but once it is gone and all you have are Z-95s the durability of the list is greatly reduced.

Well stated.

A few commas short, here and there, but ultimately correct.

I'll also mention that "Reduction" comes in an additional two vectors: "Prevention" and "Mitigation".

Prevention lowers the damage the opponent can deal

Mitigation reduces the incoming damage.

R7 Astromech, Sensor Jammer, Elusiveness, and the tactic of Arc Dodging are examples of the former, as are Dark Curse's and Carnor Jax's abilities.

Anything that deals with die cancelation (Green dice, for example) are examples of the latter.

The distinction is more important as the offensive steps gain Penetration; the ability of offensive ships to ignore defenses.

Currently, penetration upgrades are not yet powerful (Homing Missiles, Outmaneuver, Carnor Jax, Intimidate, et c.), so Reductive upgrades fall by the wayside more often than not.

Can you give me an example. I base my targeting priority on what I see as the biggest threat, best closer, and easiest target.

Also, don't get me wrong, I'm not discounting your analysis, it's interesting work (the little bit of it I can understand). I know you take the TIE fighter as the baseline for jousting efficiency, but they just don't work for me. So regardless of what the math says, I'm most likely going to loose a match when I use them, unless I'm doing a full swarm, which isn't my style (and I only have 5 TIEs).

I think you have the right approach. The jousting values are generally more intended as a high-level design and analysis tool to see how well ships line up, and how many tricks they need to have up their sleeves to hit their cost metrics. If your squad has a higher jousting value than your opponent, then you generally want to force the joust.

For specific matchups, always kill the glass cannons first. If the glass cannons are in the back and well-protected, then on that turn they might not actually be the glass cannons, so other targets may take priority.

Same here. And honestly, I don't understand MJ's work enough to judge it anyway. I'd love to see some example of how to apply it. I use to use some tables that listed attack vs agility, and a rough survivability formula that Theorist used in an old TC post, but recently I've just messed around with various squads until I found something that I like.

Yeah, at some point I may put together some more tactical instead of strategic analysis, but there's nothing planned for the immediate future.

Edit: P.S.:

The final durability numbers that are in the MathWing thread consider both "endurance" and "reduction" as you put it, because it is based on the number of shots to kill. So for BBBBZ you can add up the total durability of each ship as shown there, which I believe is what Vorpal did.