There is a lot of choices for these now but why does no one use them. For example how many were used in Regional's/National's, which is the test to see if anything is competitive.

Possibly the main reason for them not being used is that they are only one shot. A HLC has 4 non initial crit attack at range 2-3 for the whole game at 7 points. Whereas proton torps are only one shot spending a TL to fire same amount of attack dice(better chance of at least one crit) costing 4. How many times would someone fire a secondary weapon turret in a game?

One-shot, pricey, many don't allow you to spend the TL you used to fire them on the attack roll meaning they're only a marginal improvement over a modified primary-weapon attack, the difficulty of getting firing solutions with low-PS ordnance-carriers both in terms of having a target in range and arc and of getting a usable TL, probably a couple of other reasons I'm forgetting.

For more information, look at every thread on the forum that isn't about turrets or fixing the X-Wing.

No one uses them because they mostly suck. There are several reasons that combine to make them that way.

One-Shot, as you say. You are paying points for a weapon that you only get to use once.

Too expensive. Ordnance tends to cost a lot of points, too many points for the effect you get.

Action economy. Most ordnance requires a target lock that you spend just to fire them. That means you can't use the target lock to reroll the dice. Mathematically, 3 dice with a TL or focus token is better than 4 dice with no modification. If you want to be able to modify your ordnance attacks you either need to invest more points in upgrades or squad mates to enable it, or spend multiple turns to bank a TL so you can focus when you fire it, making one of your other attacks worse in the process.

So basically you are paying a lot of points to make an attack that is probably worse than what you could do with your primary.

Now, FFG has been releasing better ordnance lately. They are aware of the problem and are producing cards designed to help fix some of these issues, but so far it hasn't been enough to get ordnance even close to effective, except for some gimmicky ones like flechette torps and ion missiles that have effects in addition to raw damage.

It's really too bad they didn't build a reload mechanic into place from the very beginning, because it's too late to fix now.

No one uses them because they mostly suck. There are several reasons that combine to make them that way.

One-Shot, as you say. You are paying points for a weapon that you only get to use once.

Too expensive. Ordnance tends to cost a lot of points, too many points for the effect you get.

Action economy. Most ordnance requires a target lock that you spend just to fire them. That means you can't use the target lock to reroll the dice. Mathematically, 3 dice with a TL or focus token is better than 4 dice with no modification. If you want to be able to modify your ordnance attacks you either need to invest more points in upgrades or squad mates to enable it, or spend multiple turns to bank a TL so you can focus when you fire it, making one of your other attacks worse in the process.

So basically you are paying a lot of points to make an attack that is probably worse than what you could do with your primary.

Now, FFG has been releasing better ordnance lately. They are aware of the problem and are producing cards designed to help fix some of these issues, but so far it hasn't been enough to get ordnance even close to effective, except for some gimmicky ones like flechette torps and ion missiles that have effects in addition to raw damage.

Yep, this pretty much covers it.

It's really too bad they didn't build a reload mechanic into place from the very beginning, because it's too late to fix now.

A reload mechanic would have been better then nothing, but still a typical round by round game example of a ship with a reload mechanic would probably usually go like this:

1 - Move, out of range for engagement

2 - Get a lock but fire with primary so you have a focus next round.

3 - Can't get shot at Soontir because he is no where near your arc.

4 - Fire Torpedo, spending lock, using focus token at Soontir with stealth. He rolls 1 evade and 2 eyeballs, spends his focus and evade tokens, no damage

5 - Reload

6 - Get a lock but fire with primary so you have a focus next round.

7 - You're dead.

They suck because you usually need to spend a target lock to fire them so you can't modify the results.

So you spend 5 points to roll four dice to get one hit one focus you can't use and two blanks.

Alot of the times your ships will die never having fired the bloody things.

Cannons you can use over and over and will get their points back, currently torps don't even compare to HLC for effectiveness.

The wierd thing to me, ignoring reusability for a second, is that torps/missiles hit instantaneously.

If torps/missiles hit a turn or two later, you'd have time to build up an action cache for the actual dice rolling. It'd look something like this:

1. Get TL
2. Spend TL to launch torp/missile, assign target some "homing tokens" (or something, FFG does LOVE their tokens)
3. remove one homing token per turn. Let's say target got two tokens
4. next turn, TL target. Target removes 1 token
5. next turn, focus. Target removes second token, dice are rolled, attacker has TL+Focus

Now, you could scale homing tokens by range, so that if you launched at, say, range 1, the target would only get 1 homing token (relative speed favours defender), and you'd have only one turn to get ready, but if you made the launch further away (relative speed favours ordnance), you (and they) would have more preptime.

The wierd thing to me, ignoring reusability for a second, is that torps/missiles hit instantaneously.

If torps/missiles hit a turn or two later, you'd have time to build up an action cache for the actual dice rolling. It'd look something like this:

Building on that. I'd've loved it if you launched a missile or torpedo token that would fly at the end of combat at top speed in a straight line, hitting the first ship it encounters (or asteroid, possibly removing that?). If it misses, it'll just keep on going.

Then you could dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge your way out or try and shoot it out of the sky in a frantic bid to save your ships.

Based ordnance would be interesting, but I think it's too bump-prone to work well in the physical game.

I do not think that missiles or torpedoes suck. There are challenges to using them. The biggest being that without any sort of combo or special character, you can't alter the dice for most of it. That means you spend a sizable chunk of points for an attack that COULD just roll bad. That's the real crux of the problem.

With that said, there are combos and characters and tricks you can do to mitigate this. There are options for which missiles or torpedoes you use, as well. Extra Munitions and Munitions Failure go a good ways to resolve this. There are ways to make this work, but people are so used to hearing that they suck that they don't bother trying them out. I hope that people might start to try them out with the latest Wave coming out. They are a great way to blast a single, low-agility target to bits. I've used a 4 Tie Bomber list with Jonus to great effect.

They don't suck, but they aren't the best use of points to use straight as they are. You have to use combos to make them work well. People read online that they suck and just don't try them out.

Example: Horton Salm with Extra Munitions and Proton Torpedoes will be a real menace. Fires from R 2-3 and can re-roll all the blanks he gets. One eyeball turns into a crit. What's not to love about that?

I've used a 4 Tie Bomber list with Jonus to great effect.

EDIT: Did you mean "4 bombers and Jonus" or "4 bombers, one of which was Jonus"?

Jones was one of 4. Sorry for confusion.

Jones w/ homing missile, shield upgrade, seismic charge.

Scimitar w/ seismic and assault missileScimitar w/ seismic and Concussion Scimitar w/ seismic and Proton Torp.

With EM, you can drop Jonus and go with Homing Missile for all 4. More missiles/bombs and better flexibility.

The fact that they're one-shot is probably the most ridiculous part.

Ships with warheads generally carry, at a minimum, 6 warheads. And usually much, much more than that. Which is more than you would ever be likely to use in a standard game.

Even the card titles are pluralized, but the thing still only shoots once.

It's really too bad they didn't build a reload mechanic into place from the very beginning, because it's too late to fix now.

This is ordinance in a nutshell.

Badly designed from both a lore, and gameplay perspective, but unfixable without rewriting the core rules.

There's zero reason why reloading should take a round, or an action, or anything. Launchers reload themselves.

the one-shot portion is literally the worst part about them

"one shot" is almost impossible to balance, because you have to thread a fine line between "worthless" (mostly what we have now) and "broken" (imagine a torp so efficient it'd one-shot soontir or corran reliably). Bombs forgo this problem, being one-shot but also bypassing attack/defense mechanics completely.

EM sort of helps, but since it only adds one shot we're left struggling with the inefficiency of the weapons (must have lock, often must spend lock) instead of trading it off for unlimited uses.

Wave 7 offers some minor hope for Cluster Missiles in the form of AC Tie Advance, Glitterstim N'dru, and Redline (+vess, who has more buddies to pal around with)

The game has been slowly evolving to exploit it's biggest flaw: green dice. The easiest way to do that is to make as many attacks as possible for as much as possible, while not relying on green dice.

Think about it. In the early days, when there was no method to double stack TL and focus (ie no predator, ptl, FCS, etc), x-wings had serious trouble punching through 3 agility tie fighters. They relied on either luck, or setting up the perfect attack over multiple rounds. Ordinance was a way to make that multiple round setup be a kill shot. Now a days, there are more efficient methods to setup that double stack, which can be used multiple times.