I would remove defense dice from the game. Oh boy it would go so much faster that way!

this might work but ud still need to give the high agility ships some benefit i return - perhaps 'super evade' tokens that they place on their ship and can only use once and only at long range? so not as useful as shield tokens but can still simulate how evasive ships are hard to hit unless u get in close? or what about the 'super evade' token can be used to shrug off a crit as well similar to determination??

Suppose a turreted ship has 4 firing quadrants: Bow, starboard, stern and port. Suppose the activation and movement mechanics are the same. But a subtle difference for turreted ships. At the start of the activation phase, every turreted ship declares which quadrant their turret is going to be facing. When the turreted ship moves It declares its action in its action bar and may be given an additional free turret action (regardless of bumping or obstacles). This free action allows the turreted ship to reposition the turret into another quadrant (in any clockwise/counter clockwise fashion). Consequently subtract the pilots skill relative to the amount of quadrants the player moved (to a minimum of 0). Then combat carries on with this alteration.

So very much this!

In a "2.0" I'd love to see turreted ships with attachable "turret arcs" that fit over the lower peg and could be rotated to the applicable quadrant.

The base ship would be cheap, but the gunner for each turret would increase the cost appropriately. A falcon, could fly with 0, 1 or 2 active turrets depending on how you crew it.

It might make for extra FUN to be flying up against or using a turreted ship ... imagine TIEs wheeling around a falcon, while the falcon tries to get his turrets to cover as many TIEs as he can.

I'd drop this though as the pilot is not doing the "gunning" - this would be dependent on the crew you purchased to drive the turrets.

I would like to see a system that allows an advantaged ship (a ship on the enemies six o'clock) to react to the disadvantaged ships dial choice. I can have an X-Wing right behind a Tie fighter and if I guess wrong the Tie is out of arc.

This game kind of mimics dogfighting and I think it would benefit from a tailing rule set.

That effect is sort of handled by the fact that no maneuver can take a ship out of its former position's arc. If you are behind a ship (and have a higher PS) you can plot a maneuver that will put you in his just vacated position and know that you will have him in arc. Of course, position changing actions blow that right out of the water, but that is the advantage of arc dodgers.

That's very interesting. But what facing does the tailing ship need to have? The same as the tailed ship before? I also assume this does not take into account boost/barrel roll?

Ideally you are maneuvering to exactly occupy the space the ship you are following just left. Of course, you can never be that exactly positioned, but close is generally good enough in this kind of thing. And yes, like I said, position changing actions like boost or barrel roll can screw that up, and if the dials of the two ships are very different then the ship you are chasing might be able to loose you anyway, but really, the way it works in x-wing is probably a more realistic representation of following someone than a kludgy, extra mechanic bolted onto the system would be.

A simple system for adding inertia:

All ships can only accelerate 1 speed step and decelerate up to 2 steps from the current speed on the dial.

Ships that use a boost action adds one more speed step to the dial and this is the starting speed for the next turn.

I'm not sure if this fits, but I would add new Damage Cards to deal with astromech and crew upgrades.

it's funny that a lot of these things

(sorta four turret arcs, no defense dice, inertia)

have all already been incorporated into Armada

now the ship arcs are different than how they should work for X-wing minis, but it places an amazing amount of emphasis on the positioning and facing of these ships and I kinda wish X-wing miniature turrets had to make similar considerations

oh well, different games are different, but Armada is there if you want to experience as much as possible how these changes to core mechanics would affect a FFG game

The internets ate my long response so her's the short version:

Elite dice over more dice.

Better/different obstacles

King and starviper on "wide bases" and hwk and maybe ywing on "long bases".

Force upgrades

Different damage deck

Having the Attack and Defense die parallel each other is nice and accessible... but I feel it leads to some very awkward situations.

It is possible in this game to have a ship that is literally untouchable no matter what you throw at it, because it can get a defense bonus and all you have left are ships with low Attack. That doesn't make any sense. No matter how evasive a pilot is, you fill space with enough lasers, and there is nowhere to dodge.

To me, this is one of the main contributors to the game often feeling too dice dependent. It doesn't make sense that a ship gets a theoretically infinite number of chances to evade (once for each attacker) in the finite time frame of one turn.

I wouldn't want it where outnumbering the opponent was strictly more useful, and I don't want to make defense useless. Overall, I think defense needs to be a bit more reliable in exchange for strategy, rather than stats, being able to overcome it.

You could have all attacks rolled against a target that turn be rolled against their one defense pool, but that throws off turn order, among other things. Obviously a change like this would ripple through the whole game, but I think it would improve a lot of things and allow for more distinct ships.

Ships might end up being cheaper with the expectation that more ship destruction would happen and thus you'd want more ships. Or you could boost everyone's defense values to compensate. Health and Shield values could be tweaked as well in such a system. Some ships might embrace the idea that dodging is hard against swarms by simply being able to take that many hits. Multiple attacks might have to be a thing in such a system.

Anyway, I haven't really thought hard about solutions, but it's a problem that really bothers me and I wanted to acknowledge.

the game's too far gone to redesign green dice without redesigning the entire game

the two other game systems I play deal with defense in an imo far less frustrating manner

Armada

- defense tokens

Warmachine

- separate stats for accuracy (i.e, hitting the thing) and armor (absorbs X damage before the model is actually hurt)

attacks are made by rolling to hit the target (stat + 2d6) and you hit if (stat + 2d6) >= target's defense (how dodgy it is)

if the attack hits, the attacker rolls to damage (Stat + 2d6) and deals damage = (Stat + 2d6) - target's armor.

which would have been absolutely great for Star Wars games with flightly, hard to hit Ties and slower, tankier rebel ships and eliminated the annoyances of having green dice cancel all your damage when it really shouldn't have

but the green dice are just more of a silly annoyance of this game, and ofc I'm always hypocritically happy when my own Tie shrugs off HLCs with nothing more than sheer belief in the power of RNGesus

Everything is more difficult than FFG makes it. That's why the standard firing arc covers 90 degrees of space and elevation is irrelevant.

*80 degrees

I'd like to see an armor mechanic. But crits always pierce armor.

I'd like to see turrets require a crew member to fire- but turrets would have an attack in addition to the ships primary attack. (Similar to how Huge ships work)

I'd like to see cannons add dice and/or effects to primary weapons, instead of being wholly different weapons systems.

I'd like to see munitions work differently. Not sure how.

2nd edition core set, than add upgrade kits for all those with the 1st edition.

What will be in it? I don't know maybe some more damage cards for the deck (a couple of ships for discarding astromech or crew. another pilot and a couple more direct hits to keep the direct hit ratio on even with the current set.

Also how about the 4 turns and bank templates, because why not. Updated rulebook. Core set 2nd edition will have 1 imperial 1 S&V and 1 Rebel ship.

4 turns and 4 banks for small ships only would be a good inclusion, to avert the speed advantage big ships currently have.

2nd edition core set, than add upgrade kits for all those with the 1st edition.

Given their track record with Descent, this sounds like a good idea, and what I'd hope for, however, the implementation would be interesting...

In Descent you only had one of each "hero" and a set number of "monsters" of each type, in X-Wing, the ships are purchased individually and in varying quantities by each player... how would the upgrade kits cover this? It would seem to me that they would ever have "too many" or "not enough" cards for each (generic) ship type.

For example: Let's say you buy the "Imperials 1.0 > 2.0 Upgrade Kit". Yes it comes with one copy of every unique pilot, but how many Academy Pilots? One? Four? Eight?

Let's assume they're generous and give as many cards for a given Generic that can fit within 100pts... how many ship tokens do they include?

Would there be an updated model/paint scheme for previously released ships?

I would think this would be a possibility... or re-issuing the same ships with "2.0" prominently displayed on the blister

Hmmm... or 1 First Order 1 S&V and 1 Resistance...

Given where all the new Star Wars goodness is coming from in the future, this is inevitable surely...

I'll have a go.

• Crits bypass shields. Any Wookie ability to deny crits only work on pilot/weapon abilities that flip cards. Natural crits go in (because why should anyone be invulnerable to hard rolled crits?)
• Ion cannons deal no damage to Hull, but roll 4 dice of damage to shields (don't cancel the roll). Crits count as two shield hits. Still deal out one Ion token after hits are resolved.
• Going fully evasive. Everyone should be allowed to forgo their attack and action to add one die to their green dice pool.
• All turrets capped at R2. Shps with turrets can still fire out to R3 out of their printed arc.
• Everyone gets a Barrel Roll. If you've got the BRoll printed on your bar or have EH equipped, you don't take stress for the action.

My changes:

1) Breaking Lock on's for non ordnance only allow you to re-roll 1 dice. When breaking a lock on to fire Ordnance, you may re-roll any of the dice.

2) Turrent;s only get +1 attack die at range one when the target in in your primary arc.

Oh, and I would make breaking Astromechs and Crew members a thing.

The OP's topic gave me an idea...

Mechanic

Crew 6pts

Action: You may either flip a faceup damage card with the Ship trait to facedown, or discard one facedown damage card.

It is not a game mechanic, I know, but i can't resist a good pun. And I really can't resist a bad one.

2nd edition core set, than add upgrade kits for all those with the 1st edition.

Given their track record with Descent, this sounds like a good idea, and what I'd hope for, however, the implementation would be interesting...

In Descent you only had one of each "hero" and a set number of "monsters" of each type, in X-Wing, the ships are purchased individually and in varying quantities by each player... how would the upgrade kits cover this? It would seem to me that they would ever have "too many" or "not enough" cards for each (generic) ship type.

For example: Let's say you buy the "Imperials 1.0 > 2.0 Upgrade Kit". Yes it comes with one copy of every unique pilot, but how many Academy Pilots? One? Four? Eight?

Let's assume they're generous and give as many cards for a given Generic that can fit within 100pts... how many ship tokens do they include?

Would there be an updated model/paint scheme for previously released ships?

I would think this would be a possibility... or re-issuing the same ships with "2.0" prominently displayed on the blister

Core set 2nd edition will have 1 imperial 1 S&V and 1 Rebel ship.

Hmmm... or 1 First Order 1 S&V and 1 Resistance...

Given where all the new Star Wars goodness is coming from in the future, this is inevitable surely...

Possibly the Light Side (rebels/resistance) the Dark Side (imperial/1st order) and the Shadow side (S&V/Zahn Consortium.).

Two things would come up my mind:

1st:

I would try to prevent one shots by how the attack and defense work. It's jsut a pretty big balance issue if out of bad luck you lose a fighter in the first round. there several ways to do it. Tendency for more HP, changing attack and defence dice. Maybe have a maximum dmg output or giving hit penalties if you try on a ship thats not the closest to you (so you could position yourself in a way that not all enemy ships can focus fire on one of your ships).

2nd:

Maybe i would try to make it 3 dimensional. I liked the system of Aeronautica Imperialis (if someone know that one) were in addition to your speed and maneauver you also had 9 height-levels. Maybe i wouldve streamlined it a bit more than having 9 levels, but i like the idea that it was suppossed to be 3D and Aeronautica was a WH40k Jet-Fighter game so it would be even more fitting to a space game to have 3 dimensional maneauvers.