Based on the Heavy Scyk mini swarms that many of us have either seen or used (to varying degrees of success) I personally think the Scyk just needs one simple upgrade card ... based loosely on the B-wing/E2 unique modification upgrade card and the Comm Relay Tech Upgrade:

Scyk/D (M3-A Scyk Only. Modification.)

"During the End Phase, do not remove unused evade tokens from this ship. You may have more than 1 evade token at a time."

Cost: 0

This retains the current cost structure of Scyk and leaves the ship just as squishy if hits get through, but it makes the Scyk that much harder to hit (assuming that the player stockpiles evades whenever possible) ... and it fits with the idea of keeping the Scyk unique rather than just turning it into a boring Scum A-Wing or a Scum TIE/FO as some people suggest.

* I drop the mic and walk out of the room.

I really like this suggestion. It is original, but synergizes well with the existing cannon titel, as the Scyk is envisioned as a low-cost weapons-platform. It is still a glass-cannon, but this upgrade just lets you extend the durability, such that you have a chance of getting your secondary weapon investment back. Perhaps it should be capped to a maximum of 5(?) evade tokens, just to prevent you from completely avoiding battle for the first 30mins and then be practically immortal (not sure if this will happen though, but I have run a Moldycrow-HWK which at some point ended up with 9 focus tokens...). The only problem is that "as-is" this modification, competes with guidance chip, so would not help the torpedo/missile titles.

So I will allow to paraphrase your suggestion to:

Scyk/D (M3-A Scyk Only. Modification.)

"During the End Phase, do not remove unused evade tokens from this ship. You cannot have more than 5 evade tokens at any time. Once per round, you may spend 2 evade tokens to change 1 blank or 1 eye result to a hit when attacking with a secondary weapon."

Cost: 0

Even just a -1 Heavy title would let you run with 5 HLC's. Heavy title should be 0pts,and there should be a Light title that brings it more in line with a tie, except a bit slower.

Based on the Heavy Scyk mini swarms that many of us have either seen or used (to varying degrees of success) I personally think the Scyk just needs one simple upgrade card ... based loosely on the B-wing/E2 unique modification upgrade card and the Comm Relay Tech Upgrade:

Scyk/D (M3-A Scyk Only. Modification.)

"During the End Phase, do not remove unused evade tokens from this ship. You may have more than 1 evade token at a time."

Cost: 0

This retains the current cost structure of Scyk and leaves the ship just as squishy if hits get through, but it makes the Scyk that much harder to hit (assuming that the player stockpiles evades whenever possible) ... and it fits with the idea of keeping the Scyk unique rather than just turning it into a boring Scum A-Wing or a Scum TIE/FO as some people suggest.

* I drop the mic and walk out of the room.

I really like this suggestion. It is original, but synergizes well with the existing cannon titel, as the Scyk is envisioned as a low-cost weapons-platform. It is still a glass-cannon, but this upgrade just lets you extend the durability, such that you have a chance of getting your secondary weapon investment back. Perhaps it should be capped to a maximum of 5(?) evade tokens, just to prevent you from completely avoiding battle for the first 30mins and then be practically immortal (not sure if this will happen though, but I have run a Moldycrow-HWK which at some point ended up with 9 focus tokens...). The only problem is that "as-is" this modification, competes with guidance chip, so would not help the torpedo/missile titles.

So I will allow to paraphrase your suggestion to:

Scyk/D (M3-A Scyk Only. Modification.)

"During the End Phase, do not remove unused evade tokens from this ship. You cannot have more than 5 evade tokens at any time. Once per round, you may spend 2 evade tokens to change 1 blank or 1 eye result to a hit when attacking with a secondary weapon."

Cost: 0

I can totally see the argument for capping the evade tokens somewhere between 3-5 evade tokens ... but even 10 evade tokens aren't going to make you immortal if you have bad rolls and your opponent is focusing fire with multiple ships (or multiple TLTs).

Just watch one of the YouTube videos of the 2015 Worlds Final (Paul Heaver vs. Nathan Eide). About mid way through the match Nathan loses his Corran Horn (which had an evade token) when he rolled nothing but eyeballs and takes multiple hits ... then a second ship finishes off Corran with a single hit. If Nathan had rolled a single evade during that first attack (or had taken a focus instead of an evade for his action) then Nathan's Corran would have survived at least another round and that "might" have dramatically changed the outcome of the Final.

Evade tokens do not equal immortality (especially if you're being stressed and cannot take an evade) ... but being able to hold onto unused evade tokens would certainly improve the odds of the Scyk staying on the table instead of consistently dying from one-shots of 3-4 attack dice ... and makes the Scyk more desirable and fun to play.

I like your idea of being able to use 2 evade tokens to score a hit, but that might be OP if you're running 4 Heavy Scyks with Mangler Cannons and you're running the suggested Scyk-only modification that lets you stockpile evades. Of course, if you do burn your evades like that then you won't have them for defense, so it might not be OP.

Side note: Even if we never see a Scyk-only modifcation like this I really appreciate the discussion in this thread because it shows that players want to improve weak ships so that they get more play.

I took a long hiatus from X-wing for a while until the end of December/beginning of January, and the main reason that I gave up on X-wing a few years ago was that I got bored always flying TIE swarms. I really, REALLY want X-Wing to continue to evolve in a way that EVERY ship can be a strong ship if it's in the right squad list with the right upgrades.

I hate flying the same squad list or constantly flying against the same (or similar) squad lists all the time.

... Perhaps it should be capped to a maximum of 5(?) evade tokens,...

I wouldn't feel good with a limit any higher than 3. Dice are extremely important to the fun of this game, far more than most anyone realizes, and subverting that with guaranteed damage reduction will make the game much more dull and frustrating.

Evades that stick around are almost exactly the same as shields, so what you have here is a regenerating ship. Those are already demoralizing, and if you give it 3 defense dice like Corran Horn and also let it charge up unlimited pseudoshields if you don't attack it right away you're going to have a very miserable ship to play against.

It might be better to make Scyks better flankers by discouraging your opponent from engaging them, rather than by making it so that it becomes enormously powerful while flanking and encouraging opponents to prevent that by engaging it.

... Perhaps it should be capped to a maximum of 5(?) evade tokens,...

I wouldn't feel good with a limit any higher than 3. Dice are extremely important to the fun of this game, far more than most anyone realizes, and subverting that with guaranteed damage reduction will make the game much more dull and frustrating.

Evades that stick around are almost exactly the same as shields, so what you have here is a regenerating ship. Those are already demoralizing, and if you give it 3 defense dice like Corran Horn and also let it charge up unlimited pseudoshields if you don't attack it right away you're going to have a very miserable ship to play against.

It might be better to make Scyks better flankers by discouraging your opponent from engaging them, rather than by making it so that it becomes enormously powerful while flanking and encouraging opponents to prevent that by engaging it.

That is a fair point actually, since with 5 evade tokens it effectively becomes as tough as a faster B-Wing with more evade dice. 3 does sound like a good limit for it as that would bring it up to about E-Wing+R5-P9 toughness (needing the action to regen).

I really like the evade banking idea, but rather than capping it at three to prevent it being OP, why not let it be OP, but make it unique? It would make Laetin A'shera hard to kill, but the Rebels and Imps already have plenty of hatred to kill Aces, like Poe, Miranda and Soontor. The Scyk would go from never used to the basis of a potentially meta relevant Scum archetype to compete with Brobots.

Sure, it would mean you'd only ever see one Scyk on the board at a time, and I'm sure people would still want a fix for generics (see my ideas for those fixes here: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/196271-a-possible-scyk-tweak/)but at the worst it'd bring the Scyk to where the E Wing is now - maybe slightly better, because you could bring either Laetin or Serrisu).

I really like the evade banking idea, but rather than capping it at three to prevent it being OP, why not let it be OP, but make it unique? It would make Laetin A'shera hard to kill

I ran a simple simulation: 4xTLT thug shooting to Laetin who has uncapped evade bank (starts the combat with 2 tokens), assuming that all thug get to attack in each turn, have focus for each attack, and noone shoots back at them. In average it takes ~4.5 rounds to take him down hit him. The most extreme result was 78 round. I think 'hard to kill' is a bit of an understatement.

(Update: Without the bank, the average result is 1.3)

Yeah uncapped evade bank would be ridiculous on any ship. It's better than R2-D2 or R5-P9 because they don't allow you to go above you're starting durability, they just replenish what you lose.

The world's finals is not a very good example. If you take an evade action, and roll terribly, then it only takes 2 ships to kill a ship with ONE evade token? If Corran had 7 evade tokens, it wouldn't have mattered how catastrophically bad the dice were that turn. He'd still be unscathed.

It would be easy for a list with 5 scyks to spend 3 turns piling up tokens. That's a pile of 15 guaranteed cancellations of dice. That bank grows every turn for every scyk not getting shot at. Focus fire becomes absolutely mandatory and bad attack rounds could be game ending.

And worse, the list would be absolute garbage on offense, so while they'd win every match it would never be a crushing win, just a bunch of 20 point margin snooze fests.

It would be beyond broken while at the same time being boring as hell.

The more I play x wing, It is brighter to me that the M3 is a sinkhole because you need to pay 2 pts to do it heavy". You do not pay for a Heavy X wing, Defender...

Two weeks after M3 release my game group decided to made the Heavy Title a free one. I am not trying to sell you this idea, because we are a bunch of friends playing casual. A M3 + Ion gun is one of my favourite ships, nimble, agile, and very low HP. But cheap and easy to keep flying if you are a the leader of a small cartel. A Mangler M3 is too quite popular in my group.

But I have never seen one in a LGS game.

Yeah uncapped evade bank would be ridiculous on any ship. It's better than R2-D2 or R5-P9 because they don't allow you to go above you're starting durability, they just replenish what you lose.

The world's finals is not a very good example. If you take an evade action, and roll terribly, then it only takes 2 ships to kill a ship with ONE evade token? If Corran had 7 evade tokens, it wouldn't have mattered how catastrophically bad the dice were that turn. He'd still be unscathed.

It would be easy for a list with 5 scyks to spend 3 turns piling up tokens. That's a pile of 15 guaranteed cancellations of dice. That bank grows every turn for every scyk not getting shot at. Focus fire becomes absolutely mandatory and bad attack rounds could be game ending.

And worse, the list would be absolute garbage on offense, so while they'd win every match it would never be a crushing win, just a bunch of 20 point margin snooze fests.

It would be beyond broken while at the same time being boring as hell.

Yes, that is what I thought as well, and was why I added an initial cap of 5, but I agree it should perhaps be as low as 2? And to avoid the "boring-ness" that why I suggested that you could spend evade-tokens to increase the hit chance of a secondary weapon, inorder to encourage the use of secondary weapons and the titles.

You're treading over some rather pregnant design space with evades what with such things as the Comm Relay, Juke and new titles for the ATP and Defender.

It'd be nice to get an extra hull on the heavy or that the missile/torp wasn't a wasted premium sure but let's look somewhere new.

How about something along the lines of "While unstressed when attacking or defending you may take 1 stress to reroll 1 blank result"

I was talking with my brother today about this Evade Crow fix and he thought it sounds like a good idea, Although an alternative that he proposed which sounded good at the time but OP the more i think about it was that as an M3-A only mod, when you take the evade action you gain two evade tokens instead of one (that drop at the at the clear tokens phase), that would prevent constant pooling and would force the focus attack/defend or double garanteed evade choice (which would end up more powerful when fighting low numbers or low attack targets since 1v1 it'll be immune to any 2 attack ship beyond range 1 and TLT, yeah Fat Han is tanky but he takes the large part of your points, not a third at most).

I was talking with my brother today about this Evade Crow fix and he thought it sounds like a good idea, Although an alternative that he proposed which sounded good at the time but OP the more i think about it was that as an M3-A only mod, when you take the evade action you gain two evade tokens instead of one (that drop at the at the clear tokens phase), that would prevent constant pooling and would force the focus attack/defend or double garanteed evade choice (which would end up more powerful when fighting low numbers or low attack targets since 1v1 it'll be immune to any 2 attack ship beyond range 1 and TLT, yeah Fat Han is tanky but he takes the large part of your points, not a third at most).

Thanks for the suggestion "Gajavi" and give my regards to your brother. Certainly an interesting idea, and as "Caladesque" points out there has been a recent "rise-of-the-evade-token-to-fix-things", so original ideas are always welcome, and the "double-evade" is certainly novel and worth considering.

We all know that the recon-specialist crew giving us double focus is worth its 3 points. However, once you can use the evade both for attack and defence and without "banking", taking the evade every time suddenly becomes the most preferable option, over taking a focus or a target-lock, and since most missiles/torpedos need that target-lock, you would first have to get the target-lock, and then in a subsequent round take the evade/attack, all while signalling who you want to attack. My personal opinion is that this becomes too difficult to use for missiles/torpedos.

Here the "evade-banking" is preferable as you can spend two rounds flanking saving up evades, and then start your attack run, where you can use your 2 evade tokens for defence or attack.

On 2/4/2016 at 4:25 AM, warrasmus said:

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PS. 4 Inaldra: Once per round When you suffer damaged you may chose a enemy ship at range 1, that ship suffers One damaged. Ept. 17p.

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Close!... very close...