Just played a bit of HotAC on Friday with the creator and some friends.

Josh wanted to playtest shared XP for kills where you tally all the XP that was accumulated at the end of the mission and divide it evenly (remainder gets distributed point-by-point starting from lowest PS).

His reasoning was that it's more fair to players who want to play as support ships. It also eliminates players racing each other to shoot the 1-hull TIE.

I enjoyed it a lot more this way. There seemed to be more cooperation and talking through who should shoot first etc. And Squad Leader was actually used!

That's good to hear, as I've been planning to try shared XP since I first started planning to run a campaign. I was actually kind of surprised that it wasn't the default when I looked at the XP system.

Just played a bit of HotAC on Friday with the creator and some friends.

Josh wanted to playtest shared XP for kills where you tally all the XP that was accumulated at the end of the mission and divide it evenly (remainder gets distributed point-by-point starting from lowest PS).

His reasoning was that it's more fair to players who want to play as support ships. It also eliminates players racing each other to shoot the 1-hull TIE.

I enjoyed it a lot more this way. There seemed to be more cooperation and talking through who should shoot first etc. And Squad Leader was actually used!

Yes, it's much better. The "default" HotAC in my group is with XP poll.

Competitive XP grabbing just doesn't happen in my group. We discuss and play cooperatively, rather than treat the cooperative campaign as pseudo-competitive.

That's good to hear, as I've been planning to try shared XP since I first started planning to run a campaign. I was actually kind of surprised that it wasn't the default when I looked at the XP system.

When we brought it up in interview, he sounded like he wants to make it the default.

Just played a bit of HotAC on Friday with the creator and some friends.

Josh wanted to playtest shared XP for kills where you tally all the XP that was accumulated at the end of the mission and divide it evenly (remainder gets distributed point-by-point starting from lowest PS).

His reasoning was that it's more fair to players who want to play as support ships. It also eliminates players racing each other to shoot the 1-hull TIE.

I enjoyed it a lot more this way. There seemed to be more cooperation and talking through who should shoot first etc. And Squad Leader was actually used!

Are the XP gains the same as in the regular setup? Do you still get XP for the first hit on a ship each round? Leftovers could roll over to the next round or be rewarded for special acts, I like this a lot better.

Hey everyone,

after some more pilots got released and I really enjoyed the work done, making the custom pilot abilities I added my own ones and thought I'd share them here for others to download. I rehosted the 2 earlier versions made by someone else (sorry I can't find the right page in this massive thread by now but good work!).

Here's the 2 sheets with earlier versions:

And here are my new ones:

If anyone wants to do their own version of this, I have a GIMP file where you can neatly fill everything in, it has several dozen layers so you can easily adjust everything, if anyone wants it I can upload that as well.

Any suggestion for better names for the abilites or other improvements are welcome. Hope you enjoy.

Hey everyone,

after some more pilots got released and I really enjoyed the work done, making the custom pilot abilities I added my own ones and thought I'd share them here for others to download. I rehosted the 2 earlier versions made by someone else (sorry I can't find the right page in this massive thread by now but good work!).

Here's the 2 sheets with earlier versions:

And here are my new ones:

If anyone wants to do their own version of this, I have a GIMP file where you can neatly fill everything in, it has several dozen layers so you can easily adjust everything, if anyone wants it I can upload that as well.

Any suggestion for better names for the abilites or other improvements are welcome. Hope you enjoy.

Good work!

No immediate suggestion, but maybe you could simplify some of the abilities' names.

Competitive XP grabbing just doesn't happen in my group. We discuss and play cooperatively, rather than treat the cooperative campaign as pseudo-competitive.

And then I inevitably get called a kill-stealing bastard anyway.

But that may be just that my friends are jerks.

I think the easiest way to help out the support ships is to expand what is considered an "assist" to any kind of beneficial action given to a player that results in damage (instead of requiring it to cause a kill), or the avoidance of damage then cap it at 1 per turn. This would expand the opportunity for support ships to gain XP for doing that job. For targets with more hull, the incremental damage is important, and the Assisting player should get credit for that contribution.

Tweaking the rule in that manner will allow Assists to be valuable to the player groups who don't want to pool XP. After all, every good fighter squadron story has an ace in it. Might as well let that player be the ace, rather than shackling him to the rest of the team.

Yeah we switched to using a shared XP pool around half way through and I think it has encouraged more cooperative play. We keep individual XP pools until the end when they are combined and split. So if a player gets destroyed, their XP is in danger of being reduced. That encourages other players to help keep them alive.

We're still tweaking the assist points since Josh hasn't updated his current changes. Currently we dole out an assist point for doing any action that potentially helps another player regardless of the end results, and we deal an assist point for each enemy affected by a negative game effect - adding stress or an ion token, or doing damage with bombs. When a player would be awarded a third assist point they are awarded an XP instead and their APs are reset.

The bomb tweak seems fairer to bombers. In the current rules a well placed bomb might damage 4 or more ships but the player would only receive 1 XP without destroying a ship. So we give the 1XP plus an AP for each ship damaged. But we also remove an AP for each friendly ship caught in the blast!

To clarify, we don't award APs for enemy ships that get destroyed since the kill awards 1 or more XP anyway. So if a player drops a bomb that damages 4 enemy tie fighters and destroying 1, they would get 1XP for doing damage, plus 1XP for the kill, plus 1XP for 3 assists (damaging 3 ships)

The bomb tweak seems fairer to bombers. In the current rules a well placed bomb might damage 4 or more ships but the player would only receive 1 XP without destroying a ship. So we give the 1XP plus an AP for each ship damaged. But we also remove an AP for each friendly ship caught in the blast!

To clarify, we don't award APs for enemy ships that get destroyed since the kill awards 1 or more XP anyway. So if a player drops a bomb that damages 4 enemy tie fighters and destroying 1, they would get 1XP for doing damage, plus 1XP for the kill, plus 1XP for 3 assists (damaging 3 ships)

You give extra XP to bomb users? Wow, I've found bombs to be great in the game, especially proton bombs dealing out crits.

I downed 2 Tie Interceptors and crippled another with a bomb on our 3rd mission gave me 5 points in one go, and then shot the 3rd interceptor killing it, giving me 2 more that turn for a total of 7 that turn!

I think 1 assist point like you have it is good if you dont kill any with the bomb, but if you do I think it shouldnt be given out...bomb users with Extra munitions in the cmapaigns I've played have never ever needed more EXP if they use the bombs right.

On the subject of Bombs- Sabine's Assault Shuttle Pilot ability is really good for helping get a bomb in the right place at the right time.

The bomb tweak seems fairer to bombers. In the current rules a well placed bomb might damage 4 or more ships but the player would only receive 1 XP without destroying a ship. So we give the 1XP plus an AP for each ship damaged. But we also remove an AP for each friendly ship caught in the blast!

To clarify, we don't award APs for enemy ships that get destroyed since the kill awards 1 or more XP anyway. So if a player drops a bomb that damages 4 enemy tie fighters and destroying 1, they would get 1XP for doing damage, plus 1XP for the kill, plus 1XP for 3 assists (damaging 3 ships)

You give extra XP to bomb users? Wow, I've found bombs to be great in the game, especially proton bombs dealing out crits.

I downed 2 Tie Interceptors and crippled another with a bomb on our 3rd mission gave me 5 points in one go, and then shot the 3rd interceptor killing it, giving me 2 more that turn for a total of 7 that turn!

I think 1 assist point like you have it is good if you dont kill any with the bomb, but if you do I think it shouldnt be given out...bomb users with Extra munitions in the cmapaigns I've played have never ever needed more EXP if they use the bombs right.

On the subject of Bombs- Sabine's Assault Shuttle Pilot ability is really good for helping get a bomb in the right place at the right time.

Well the scenario you described doesn't happen very often now, does it? In all of our games, never did a proton bomb even kill a fighter (but our residence bombing guy keeps using them and trying to be effective with them), so he "only" gets 1xp in theory, but we upped that as well to receive another amount of assists equal to the other fighters you damaged.

It's the same with Assault Missiles. It's epic if you hit that cluster of TIEs with it that bonked each other in the centre of the map, scoring a hit on the main tie and assigning 1 damage to all others. But killing 4 of them in 1 go? Even more unlikely than killing 3 Interceptors in one go because with Proton Bombs there's at least a chacne to deal 2 damage instead of one. And waht do you get for that? 1xp because you did 1 damage and didn't kill anything. Blergh. We count all other hits as assists, so that's at least 2xp then, maybe something dies for another additional one.

I don't think bombs in the original HotAC manual sense without the modified assist rule (damage on other ships / ion tokens /etc. count as assist) are worth it at all, because if you don't kill anything with it you have gotten 0xp from that bomb (because you likely deal damage with your main gun this turn (assuming you use a turret on the y-wing). It has to be modified to either count as its own seperate damage xp so with bomb and normal gun you can score 2xp per turn if you damage something, or count assists for these aoe-bombs.

No it doesnt happen very often with interceptors, but I hve found it does happen quite a lot of the time with regular foursomes of TIES.

As for Assault Missiles it happens more than you'd think, especially if two or 3 people take Assault Missiles and stick together trading off shots at the groups of fighters...instantly eliminating a group of ties, or doing serious damage.

Now it also helps if you count all crits done to regular TIE fighters only, as 2 damage...the proton bomb becomes well worth it over any other bomb. Especially since on the way into droppng a bomb (the prior turn) you have likely shot at least one of them.

And yes your method of giving an assist seems good, but Id say monitor how much experience the bomb users get, most bomb users again wont need it, and most certainly Ywings usually dont.

And also experience for a bomb isnt the best part of bombs, its doing damage to multiple targets so you can eliminate the TIES quicker as a group so you can complete the mission.

Also successfully dropping a bomb on TIEs especially the special types of TIES is huge amounts of fun since using bombs in regular games is not all that common.

In my opinion another of HOTAC's appeal is doing things/stunts t(like making bombs work to great effect, or firing torpedoes from a B or Y over the course of a game and thus making your bomber an actual ordanance beast!) that you dont usually get to do in the standard 100point game

Ran our first campaign today, got through the intro and first mission of Rebel Rescue. There were 5 of us and we had a blast. I took a Y with TLT and targeting Astromech, I should have take R2 Astro for the greens. We decided to pool our xp, made it easier for us in the Ys. I definitely need to read the book again but we had a blast and can't wait for the next time. I grabbed some proton Torps and I am thinking of adding deadeye when I level up over predator.

Wife and I ran the intro mission today, twice. First time I felt I screwed up the rules too many times for it to be a valid run of the AI, so we re-played it this evening to much better results.

We both ran a pair of X-wings (four total). First time around, we had a total of four kills for the entire mission; second time, we missed only an interceptor and one fighter. The AI comes up very good (curse you, dice gods!) and punishes mistakes.

The four X-wings were all female pilots (callsigns Allure [a Zeltron], Net [a human with a fondness for traps], Splash [a Nautolan], and City Girl [a Coruscanti native]) and came through both missions intact, though the first time through the grinder two of the X-wings were down to a single hull point left. Each of them is running a different astromech, though two of them are using the same modification. We're tinkering to develop each one separately and see what happens as the game continues, assuming we don't have any casualties.

We often have ships down to one or two HP at the end of our games. We don't tend to hyperspace out though as it really adds to the atmosphere when we're desperately trying to protect our fellow pilots through any means necessary.

I just saw a HotAC app on googleplay.

I just saw a HotAC app on googleplay.

Is the X-Wing AI - Aturi Cluster?

Interesting. I'm checking it out now.

Edit: It seems to work ok. Should definitely save time when playing. It also has movements for ships that aren't in the campaign, such as the TIE Punisher and Rebel/Scum ships.

The bomb tweak seems fairer to bombers. In the current rules a well placed bomb might damage 4 or more ships but the player would only receive 1 XP without destroying a ship. So we give the 1XP plus an AP for each ship damaged. But we also remove an AP for each friendly ship caught in the blast!

To clarify, we don't award APs for enemy ships that get destroyed since the kill awards 1 or more XP anyway. So if a player drops a bomb that damages 4 enemy tie fighters and destroying 1, they would get 1XP for doing damage, plus 1XP for the kill, plus 1XP for 3 assists (damaging 3 ships)

You give extra XP to bomb users? Wow, I've found bombs to be great in the game, especially proton bombs dealing out crits.

Yeah, i don't think I've ever encountered a situation where we thought "Wow, that Y-Wing pilot isn't getting enough XP. Let's give him way more, despite the fact that he's getting a second opportunity to get XP in a turn when everyone else only gets one."

Bombs are super easy to use in HotAC as it is, since the TIEs won't behave predictively. Giving bonus XP to bombs seems both exploitative, and unnecessary. Y-Wings aren't at some kind of disadvantage in the game where their ordnance should have an offset. That example literally gives that Y-Wing 4-5 XP in a single attack (potentially more if he manages to destroy an elite or large craft). The most a direct-fire attacking ship like an A-Wing or X-Wing could ever gain is 4. The Y-Wing then has a chance to further gain XP by finishing off one of the wounded ships with its turret attack.

I don't think this is a good house rule. In terms of odds, the likelihood of a fighter recouping the value of their Torpedoes/Missiles in a single attack is fairly low, and those attacks require a to-hit roll, and most of them require some kind of combination of action-usage. The bomb is just dropped, then the ship continues on its normal turn.

More mathematically, Proton Torpedoes cost 4 points. The only way to recoup 4 points in a single hit is to destroy an Elite Large Base craft with it. Elite Large craft represent an extremely small percentage of the ships in the game. The average XP gained from destroying a craft with Torpedoes is going to be 2-3 points. However, that's assuming you destroy your target. With a Focus at Range 2, even if shooting at a 3 AGI TIE with no tokens, the average damage dealt is only 2. With an Evade token it is 1. Which means the typical Proton Torpedo shot isn't going to gain any more than 1 XP under most circumstances.

You will, on average, have to fire Proton Torpedoes 3-4 times to recoup 5 XP. The example of dropping a bomb on 4 TIES and getting 5XP is five times what a player will typically receive from firing their Proton Torpedoes.

The bomb tweak seems fairer to bombers. In the current rules a well placed bomb might damage 4 or more ships but the player would only receive 1 XP without destroying a ship. So we give the 1XP plus an AP for each ship damaged. But we also remove an AP for each friendly ship caught in the blast!

To clarify, we don't award APs for enemy ships that get destroyed since the kill awards 1 or more XP anyway. So if a player drops a bomb that damages 4 enemy tie fighters and destroying 1, they would get 1XP for doing damage, plus 1XP for the kill, plus 1XP for 3 assists (damaging 3 ships)

You give extra XP to bomb users? Wow, I've found bombs to be great in the game, especially proton bombs dealing out crits.

Yeah, i don't think I've ever encountered a situation where we thought "Wow, that Y-Wing pilot isn't getting enough XP. Let's give him way more, despite the fact that he's getting a second opportunity to get XP in a turn when everyone else only gets one." Bombs are super easy to use in HotAC as it is, since the TIEs won't behave predictively. Giving bonus XP to bombs seems both exploitative, and unnecessary. Y-Wings aren't at some kind of disadvantage in the game where their ordnance should have an offset. That example literally gives that Y-Wing 4-5 XP in a single attack (potentially more if he manages to destroy an elite or large craft). The most a direct-fire attacking ship like an A-Wing or X-Wing could ever gain is 4. The Y-Wing then has a chance to further gain XP by finishing off one of the wounded ships with its turret attack. I don't think this is a good house rule. In terms of odds, the likelihood of a fighter recouping the value of their Torpedoes/Missiles in a single attack is fairly low, and those attacks require a to-hit roll, and most of them require some kind of combination of action-usage. The bomb is just dropped, then the ship continues on its normal turn. More mathematically, Proton Torpedoes cost 4 points. The only way to recoup 4 points in a single hit is to destroy an Elite Large Base craft with it. Elite Large craft represent an extremely small percentage of the ships in the game. The average XP gained from destroying a craft with Torpedoes is going to be 2-3 points. However, that's assuming you destroy your target. With a Focus at Range 2, even if shooting at a 3 AGI TIE with no tokens, the average damage dealt is only 2. With an Evade token it is 1. Which means the typical Proton Torpedo shot isn't going to gain any more than 1 XP under most circumstances.You will, on average, have to fire Proton Torpedoes 3-4 times to recoup 5 XP. The example of dropping a bomb on 4 TIES and getting 5XP is five times what a player will typically receive from firing their Proton Torpedoes.

VaeVictis, thank you for explaining and putting into words what I was thinking.

If anyone who likes HotAC didn't know, we did an interview with the creator or HotAC for our podcast. Link is in my sig. It's not the latest, but the one before. It's a great interview and might help answer some questions.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/872507722883025/

This 3 or so week old facebook group dedicated to the Aturi Campaign of all types (heroes, and villains, and eventually scum) is a good place to share resources in one place, and also has some small discussiosn on theAaturi Cluste games/builds.

also what do people think of the new Restance and Uwing pilots etc for builds in the Campaign?

I think Han's new ability might work well if you play the rescue the Hwk mission late in the campaign, giving it some more of an escort.

The bomb tweak seems fairer to bombers. In the current rules a well placed bomb might damage 4 or more ships but the player would only receive 1 XP without destroying a ship. So we give the 1XP plus an AP for each ship damaged. But we also remove an AP for each friendly ship caught in the blast!

To clarify, we don't award APs for enemy ships that get destroyed since the kill awards 1 or more XP anyway. So if a player drops a bomb that damages 4 enemy tie fighters and destroying 1, they would get 1XP for doing damage, plus 1XP for the kill, plus 1XP for 3 assists (damaging 3 ships)

You give extra XP to bomb users? Wow, I've found bombs to be great in the game, especially proton bombs dealing out crits.

Yeah, i don't think I've ever encountered a situation where we thought "Wow, that Y-Wing pilot isn't getting enough XP. Let's give him way more, despite the fact that he's getting a second opportunity to get XP in a turn when everyone else only gets one."

Bombs are super easy to use in HotAC as it is, since the TIEs won't behave predictively. Giving bonus XP to bombs seems both exploitative, and unnecessary. Y-Wings aren't at some kind of disadvantage in the game where their ordnance should have an offset. That example literally gives that Y-Wing 4-5 XP in a single attack (potentially more if he manages to destroy an elite or large craft). The most a direct-fire attacking ship like an A-Wing or X-Wing could ever gain is 4. The Y-Wing then has a chance to further gain XP by finishing off one of the wounded ships with its turret attack.

I don't think this is a good house rule. In terms of odds, the likelihood of a fighter recouping the value of their Torpedoes/Missiles in a single attack is fairly low, and those attacks require a to-hit roll, and most of them require some kind of combination of action-usage. The bomb is just dropped, then the ship continues on its normal turn.

More mathematically, Proton Torpedoes cost 4 points. The only way to recoup 4 points in a single hit is to destroy an Elite Large Base craft with it. Elite Large craft represent an extremely small percentage of the ships in the game. The average XP gained from destroying a craft with Torpedoes is going to be 2-3 points. However, that's assuming you destroy your target. With a Focus at Range 2, even if shooting at a 3 AGI TIE with no tokens, the average damage dealt is only 2. With an Evade token it is 1. Which means the typical Proton Torpedo shot isn't going to gain any more than 1 XP under most circumstances.

You will, on average, have to fire Proton Torpedoes 3-4 times to recoup 5 XP. The example of dropping a bomb on 4 TIES and getting 5XP is five times what a player will typically receive from firing their Proton Torpedoes.

I still fail to see the difference to bombs. Are you seriously saying all your dropped bombs are killing 2 fighters? If that is so, you have my deepest respect. As all the action-drop bombs only target exactly one fighter anyway at most you can kill a fighter. That is 1 additional xp to your turn. Only damage? That's 0 additional xp this turn becaue you're likely to hit with your TLT anyway to get a damage.

With the AoE bombs, alright you can hit more than 1 fighter, possibly 4 or 5 at the same time (has to be insanely well placed) but this still is not a guarantee to actually kill more fighters. Unless the whole group tries to distinctly hit all TIEs down to 1 hp before someone can place a bomb perfectly in the middle. Not sure? We always focus fire to remove more or less one at a time, maybe two if we're split up.

So what I see here is, putting a bomb will only give me another xp if the bomb actually kills a fighter. And either you use a bomb that only targets one anyway, so that's at most 1xp more, or when dealing AoE bombs you're highly unlikely to kill more than 1 fighter, that is not a chance, it has to be actively set up. And if you put that work into it I think the additional xp are deserved, I mean it takes good prediction and flying to put a bomb so it kills multiple fighters in one go.

Also, the same goes for Assault Missiles. You can potentially do 6 xp with assault missiles when you kill the whole bunch of them each with only 1 hp left. But just like the bomb multi-kill it doesn't happen. You will not kill 5 TIEs with it (unless it is orchestrated a lot with 3 people doing 3 Assault missile attacks after another, etc.). I'd say it's even easier to get 2 kills with the Missiles tahn with the Bomb because you deal full damage on the one you target (could be a 3 hp tie) with a 1hp tie nearby so you deliberately choose the full hp tie in order to get a possible double kill.

And about the return of investment: Have to fire proton torpedoes 3-4 Times to pay off 4xp? Yea sure, I expect something like 3 attacks, 1 kill for 2xp and 2 times hit for 1xp, sounds about right. But the bomb will do exactly the same. A proton bomb is 5xp, and it provides no additional xp this turn unless you kill a fighter with it. It will take at least the same amount of time, I think even more to pay off for itself. 3 deployments would have to kill 5 fighters or 4 fighters and a non-tie or 3 fighters and an elite. Highly unlikely, unless your games go far different from ours (which is a possibility, maybe we're just crap with bombs )