Everyone knows the impact that the addition of autothrusters has had on the survivability of arc-dodging ships.

TIE interceptors are the best example - they were were unknown in competitive events prior to ATs - now they're a staple of the Empire. IG-88 is also a primary user, as are (to a lesser extent) A-wing and Starviper. Finally the TIE Advanced prototype will almost certainly want to equip ATs too.

All of this has come about due to the drastic increase in survivability granted to arc-dodgers, who were previously hard-countered by turrets. There's no point in dodging an arc if your opponent will just shoot you anyway, right? I don't think many people dispute that they're a much-needed balancer inX-Wing.

But when ATs had been spoiled but no one had yet used them, there was a second question that was asked - would autothrusters actually promote better piloting from turrets?

One of the hallmarks of a turret is that, by its very nature, maneuvering for a shot is much less important. It was theorised that, by giving the enemy ship an advantage outside of arc, it would encourage players to maneuver to the the Autothrusting ship in arc. Perhaps a turret could even (gasp) k-turn!

I've seen plenty of evidence that ATs give arc-dodgers the additional toughness needed to compete with turrets. But figuring out if turrets are flying better is a lot harder to come by. So have ATs achieved this, or have they simply changed the numbers rather than the maneuvers? Thoughts?

I haven't seen many turrets since then, but my joust loving opponents sure have improved

But when ATs had been spoiled but no one had yet used them, there was a second question that was asked - would autothrusters actually promote better piloting from turrets?

That's kind of a trick question as there wasn't anything inherently "bad" about the piloting of turret ships. Trying to keep your opponent in arc prior to Autothrusters would have actually been poor piloting. Good players adapt.

I think your question highlights your internal bias.

Implicitly you're calling all turret flyers bad pilots before AT, but I would argue that by flying to the strengths of their ship they are actually good pilots.

Now it's true turrets were a hard counter to arc dodgers, but giving arc dodgers more resilience be turrets is not the same thing as "forcing turret ships to fly better" or however you want to word it.

A turret ship must have a strong incentive to joust because that is ordinarily a losing strategy. That's not what turret ships are supposed to do and how they are supposed to win. It's a balancing act, and pretty sensitive, so big changes are usually bad. Arc dodgers will run rings around a large based ship and it's arc. There is no point pouring yourself in a terrible position just to give yourself a 20, 30 or even 50% chance to get them in arc. You're much better off bring defensive and just take the 3x longer to kill them.

Implicitly you're calling all turret flyers bad pilots before AT, but I would argue that by flying to the strengths of their ship they are actually good pilots.

They still choose what ships they fly though.

By choosing to fly a ship that doesn't require good flying, they imply that they are bad pilots, regardless of whether they actually are or not.

thrusters certainly made PWTs at least a game, instead of a sh*tty dice fest

they added an actual objective for you and your opponent to fight over instead of ceaselessly running in circles and throwing dice. You can even get some half-decent against PWTs if most of your squad has them, such as one game against kenkirk palpie running thruster Poe and Asty (but the guy who flew kenkirk is our reisdent mad scientist and also brought proton bombs to make things really interesting)

that would be a no. though, i see circumstantially when they try and face in the right direction.

Just finished playing a local game store x wing night, first time flying against AT interceptors, with Dash, HLC turret. I lost the match and realized I needed to think more about firing the turret in arc to counter AT. Your post made me think about the match I played. It's tougher on Dash, because of the donut hole, but I wish I had been flying differently and will definitely change my strategy if I face a list like that again.

I'm not experienced enough to speak about what I've seen overal regarding turrets and AT, but their relationship was definitely on my mind tonight.

fun thing about Dash is, if you're very skilled at putting obstacles between you and soontir such that you can afford to PTL a focus + TL, you stand a very good chance of getting four hits and landing damage past thrusters anyway

Autothrusters are a counter to turrets, so naturally it is more difficult to fly against them. Whenever I fly turrets, one of the first things I check about my opponrnts squad is whether they have autothrusters or not and fly very differently against them to not against them.

At the beginning of X-Wing, arcdodgers were meant to counter jousters. Because a jouster could rarely get a dodger in arc, the few times it could had to have a good chance to blow it up. And because of that, dodgers were very flimsy.

But then turrets were supposed to counter dodgers. A dodger could be hit by a Y-Wing out of arc, and while not being able to destroy it in one hit (the ion cannon turret is capped at 1 damage), it would leave the dodger vulnerable to the jousters next round. Dodgers could avoid it by playing smart and outfly the turret ship staying at range 3, out of the turret's reach. It sounded good on paper and probably worked fine.

Then came into scene the Primary Weapon Turrets. These turrets could shoot at all ranges, extra dice at range 1, and deal up to 3-4 damage per attack, crits included. Considering how flimsy arcdodgers were, that wasn't just a counter to them. That was total anihilation. There was no way to outfly that. No range 3 safe zone, no second chances. Arcdodgers were blown up easily for their cost. Primary weapon turrets killed the arcdodgers.

Also, primary weapon turrets were given a dial that was, in general, much faster and forgiving than that of the best jousters, and also had plenty of upgrade options that would let them mitigate, recover or even dodge most of the damage thrown at them. Primary weapon turrets killed the jousters.

Then this led to the dark age of the Phantom and PS bid: the only way of consistently defeat a PWT was to attack it first, attack it hard, and defend with 4-5 dice and focus.

What Autothruster did was to soften the countering of turrets towards dodgers by making dodgers less flimsy versus turrets. When they have one guaranteed Evade result per defense, that is like giving them one extra hit point every time they would be hit out of arc. At the same time they remain squishy versus jousters, as they are supposed to.

While this was enough to buff dodgers, PWT and Phantoms were still quite overpowered against everything and needed to be dealt with in other ways (MoV changes, TLT, Phantom errata).

A good turret pilot should fly in a way that gets a shot on an opponent while the opponent cannot get a shot on him. That's not different from other archetypes.

What Autothrusters changes is that the turret pilot knows that his attack damage output with be at least countered by the free evade, so he needs to counter that by flying better with either the turret ship or its escorts.

- Maybe he sends another ship to block the dodger so that the free evade is the only evasive action the dodger gets.

- Maybe he tries to get range 1 shots to get the extra attack die.

- Maybe he runs to make the dodger chase him, while his escort jousters deal with the dodger.

- Maybe he flies thru asteroids to make the dodger spend his actions in movement rather than in dice modifications.

- If the turret ship has some benefits to attack in arc (stress generator), maybe he tries to put the dodger in his arc.

At least, Autothrusters make a turret player have to do something to counter them. A good pilot will try to do as much as possible to counter them, while a poor pilot will just move his turret ship in circles not giving a ****, and then whine about turret ships being hit too hard with the nerf stick.

At this point, I actually believe that turrets have shifted their role, and currently they are more effective counters to jousters than to Autothruster arcdodgers, precisely because jousters usually have little agility and no means to mitigate the turret's incoming damage. Turrets are, however, still great at countering non-autothruster arcdodgers, like TIE Phantoms or TIE Advanced.

Then this led to the dark age of the Phantom and PS bid: the only way of consistently defeat a PWT was to attack it first, attack it hard, and defend with 4-5 dice and focus.

It was even worse than that! The Phantom itself caused the initial PS bid, and it just so happened that the best answer to it was the PS9+ Fat Han. So the Phantom entered a scene with already hurting arc dodgers, and made things worse by encouraging even more aggressive use of the best arc dodger counter. Then came wave 5, with two more PWT that could be used against the Phantom (or with it to great effect), seemingly putting the a nail in the coffin of ships like the Interceptor. Luckily for us, the developers figured out a way to fix the problem!

I don't get this arc dodgers are the hard thing to play and only for experience players while turrets are for people who can think. New players will crash their expensive turret ships upon asteroids and lose their powerul shots and new players will bump darth and sontir and lose them in 1-2 rounds of shooting, some things might have a bigger learning curve sure but I never felt playing a ps9 ace with 3 actions to be much harder than anything else.

PLaying Sontir or Jake is not that hard, you get 3 actions and it's not rocket science that boost+ barrel roll will let you get out of alot of enemy arcs and get them into yours. It's not like sontir was useless before AT but other ones like turr or jax didn't really have enough defense to survive gunner pwt before AT.

Auto Thrusters did give some fragile ships the means to fight back against turrets but it also boosted them vs jousters. If you want to play something hard then try a t-65 vs sontir and watch him dodge any dmg at range 3 and dance around you at 1-2.

I did praise the upgrade when it was first spoiled and I still think it did a good job at nerfing turrets in a fair way, when out of the fire arc it's harder to hit them. the range 3 thing is a bit weird since it makes ships capable of taking them so increadible hard to hit at that distance by primary weapons but with orndance getting a buff I think this will eaven out.

difficulty is relative

soontir has an arc and is therefore leagues harder to pilot successfully than anything with a primary turret, especially given how allergic he is to bumping and obstacles. The action independent han and cheri builds are by far the easiest archtype to use, as they offer the most flexibility and lose the least out of any ship in the game when denied actions

jousters, the most limited ship type, are arguably the most difficult to use successfully

Implicitly you're calling all turret flyers bad pilots before AT, but I would argue that by flying to the strengths of their ship they are actually good pilots.

They still choose what ships they fly though.

By choosing to fly a ship that doesn't require good flying, they imply that they are bad pilots, regardless of whether they actually are or not.

easier to use ships should != worse player

their ease of use is completely independent of the player flying them

this is true of all games with more forgiving "beginner" factions/units

skilled players can and will fly PWTs. Beginners will probably fly PWTs with better overall results than any other ship type due to ease of use, both in the lazy design of the mechanic and in having less ships to manage and less consequences for failure

mileage my vary due to TLT counters

Aww hell no people are not seriously saying flying turrets is harder than flying arc Dodgers are they?

One tiny mistake kills fel or whisper, same is not true of most turret ships because they have the hit points to survive.

People freely admit they fly turrets because it's less draining over a long day of playing and I respect that over 12 hours you want to keep the stress as low as possible.

Everyone knows the impact that the addition of autothrusters has had on the survivability of arc-dodging ships.

TIE interceptors are the best example - they were were unknown in competitive events prior to ATs - now they're a staple of the Empire. IG-88 is also a primary user, as are (to a lesser extent) A-wing and Starviper. Finally the TIE Advanced prototype will almost certainly want to equip ATs too.

All of this has come about due to the drastic increase in survivability granted to arc-dodgers, who were previously hard-countered by turrets. There's no point in dodging an arc if your opponent will just shoot you anyway, right? I don't think many people dispute that they're a much-needed balancer inX-Wing.

But when ATs had been spoiled but no one had yet used them, there was a second question that was asked - would autothrusters actually promote better piloting from turrets?

One of the hallmarks of a turret is that, by its very nature, maneuvering for a shot is much less important. It was theorised that, by giving the enemy ship an advantage outside of arc, it would encourage players to maneuver to the the Autothrusting ship in arc. Perhaps a turret could even (gasp) k-turn!

I've seen plenty of evidence that ATs give arc-dodgers the additional toughness needed to compete with turrets. But figuring out if turrets are flying better is a lot harder to come by. So have ATs achieved this, or have they simply changed the numbers rather than the maneuvers? Thoughts?

Well, this is pretty misleading on several fronts :

First of all, Soontir Fel had a strong competitive presence well before autothrusters was legal. In 2014 Rick Sidebottom won the North American National Championship with Soontir Fel, an event that is arguably at least as large and tough as Worlds, at a time when Fat Falcons were running rampant. Similarly, one of the biggest 2014 Regionals in the midwest was won by Macar, who was flying Soontir, Jax, and another unique interceptor.

Second , the myth that turret players were "flying on easy mode" or not worrying about "good piloting" is a joke. Lots of noobs ran fat turrets back in 2014 and would finish at the bottom of tournaments. Top-tier turret players were some of the best pilots in the game, because to win a game with fat turrets you had to manage a lot of elements of the attrition war to make sure you're relatively few expensive attacks could outgun lists with radically increased fighter power. If you watched the 2014 Gencon Top 4 match between Paul Heaver and Jeff B, it was some of the most brilliant flying this game has seen as each heavyweight player vied for a more advantageous relative position to one another, despite each using fat turrets. Jeff B ended up winning that game, and Paul H ended up later going to Worlds with a variant of Jeff's "Super Friends" droid-Falcon and winning Worlds with exceptional piloting (unlike the dozens and dozens of less skilled Fat Turret players that racked up losses and dropped).

Autothrusters hasn't really improved turret flying, but rather created a no-win situation for Fat Turrets. If you're flying to maintain arc, you're not balancing the dozen other considerations you had to balance to win an attrition war with a fat turret. So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. With autothrusters triggering even in arc at Range 3, it basically means that you can't even K-Turn or set up a long approach that will necessarily turn off auto-thrusters. Combined with TLTs and Palpatine and Rebel Regen, autothrusters have all but made Fat Turrets extinct because no matter how you fly them, they can't deal enough reliable damage to make up their points against Palp-Protected and Regen-Protected Autothrusters, whilst also suffering in the attrition war against TLT spam.

Relevant Note : Jeff B won the 2015 North American Championship using Dash in an era of autothrusters, but he did it with Anti-Pursuit Lasers on Dash in order to kill the Fels he ran up against. In his pre-game interviews, he noted that there wasn't even really a point to shooting a Dash-HLC at Soontir because it was very unlikely to ever land damage in an autothruster world, so Jeff had been relying on his fighters and his APL to deal with autothrusted Soontir. And he's arguably the second best player in X-Wing, perhaps right up there with Paul H, and he seemed pretty convinced that no matter how you piloted or flew your Fat Turret you could not realistically hope to deal with Autothrusters via attack dice.

Aww hell no people are not seriously saying flying turrets is harder than flying arc Dodgers are they?

One tiny mistake kills fel or whisper, same is not true of most turret ships because they have the hit points to survive.

People freely admit they fly turrets because it's less draining over a long day of playing and I respect that over 12 hours you want to keep the stress as low as possible.

So go fly a Fat Turret and win a Nationals or Worlds, if it's so damned easy. I assume you're a multi-year Store and Regional Champion, at least, yes?

Jeez, people on these forums are so content to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Aww hell no people are not seriously saying flying turrets is harder than flying arc Dodgers are they?

One tiny mistake kills fel or whisper, same is not true of most turret ships because they have the hit points to survive.

People freely admit they fly turrets because it's less draining over a long day of playing and I respect that over 12 hours you want to keep the stress as low as possible.

So go fly a Fat Turret and win a Nationals or Worlds, if it's so damned easy. I assume you're a multi-year Store and Regional Champion, at least, yes?

Jeez, people on these forums are so content to talk the talk without walking the walk.

he missed his chance to fly fat turrets

that was last year's worlds

Paul heaver did not miss his chance

Aww hell no people are not seriously saying flying turrets is harder than flying arc Dodgers are they?

One tiny mistake kills fel or whisper, same is not true of most turret ships because they have the hit points to survive.

People freely admit they fly turrets because it's less draining over a long day of playing and I respect that over 12 hours you want to keep the stress as low as possible.

So go fly a Fat Turret and win a Nationals or Worlds, if it's so damned easy. I assume you're a multi-year Store and Regional Champion, at least, yes?

Jeez, people on these forums are so content to talk the talk without walking the walk.

he missed his chance to fly fat turrets

that was last year's worlds

Paul heaver did not miss his chance

And you missed my point...

if your point was "if it's so easy why not trololo through worlds?" or "because you didn't win worlds/regionals with them, your opinion is invalid", then it was a point worth missing

besides, you can't roll through the competitive scene with fat ships anymore. We kinda had a whole mov nerf for that very problem, which is really all the proof you need for how they were easier to pilot than any other list.

that is to say nothing against the players who used them, because those players have to leverage everything including their skill and including abuse of a crappy scoring system to not fall behind other competitors

nowadays, fat turrets have to worry about TLTs being able to hit them almost as easily as they can hit the TLTs as well as powerful autothruster lsits (brobots, palp aces) that actually make them respect their firing arcs. At the base level, they're still by far the easiest ships to use, but the game finally caught up with them by introducing upgrades that let other ships compete against them with similar levels of ease

above all, the mov change forcing fat turret's hand is about the most influential; even moreso than thrusters. It actually forces the fat turret to risk its hide a bit, forbidding it from crutching on a few lucky hull points and winning on the fatness of its point cost

TLTs and thrusters are next on the list for forcing more playstyle changes (actually have to care about arc), and then defense mitigating upgrades/abilities such as crackshot and omega L help pull the PWT further down to a more reasonable spot

Aww hell no people are not seriously saying flying turrets is harder than flying arc Dodgers are they?

One tiny mistake kills fel or whisper, same is not true of most turret ships because they have the hit points to survive.

People freely admit they fly turrets because it's less draining over a long day of playing and I respect that over 12 hours you want to keep the stress as low as possible.

So go fly a Fat Turret and win a Nationals or Worlds, if it's so damned easy. I assume you're a multi-year Store and Regional Champion, at least, yes?

Jeez, people on these forums are so content to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Yeah no that's not even close to a valid counter argument you do realize less than 10% of any community plays competitively right?

Being a tournament player does not make you some elite individual that's better than every one else or give your view more weight, it just means your a minority member that likes more competitive settings.

Paul heaver may be the best tournament player but he may not be the best x-wing player out there, the best players may have zero interest in that aspect.

Walking the walk means squat, so how about you get that chip of your shoulder it's ruining your posture.

Implicitly you're calling all turret flyers bad pilots before AT, but I would argue that by flying to the strengths of their ship they are actually good pilots.

They still choose what ships they fly though.

By choosing to fly a ship that doesn't require good flying, they imply that they are bad pilots, regardless of whether they actually are or not.

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

Even in turrets ships you need to fly good to prevent arc dodgers from playing to their strengths. Depending on your setup, playing with the right range, adding burst of damage on a joust or just at least shacking those nasty interceptors from your six at range one. It not about bad or good flying, it about flying to the strengths of your ship, while exploiting the weaknesses of the enemy ships or at least trying to prevent them to play to the strengths of their ships.

And better balance helps in this regard everyone to fly better. As I believe that autothrusters are a decent counter to a maybe a little too strong turret meta, I would say that auto-thrusters are something that makes EVERYONE flying better in the long term. And I think last years worlds are a strong indicator for that as we got turrets and X, A, Y and E-Wings in the latest finals.

Aww hell no people are not seriously saying flying turrets is harder than flying arc Dodgers are they?

One tiny mistake kills fel or whisper, same is not true of most turret ships because they have the hit points to survive.

People freely admit they fly turrets because it's less draining over a long day of playing and I respect that over 12 hours you want to keep the stress as low as possible.

true skill is having no post dial movement and no out of arc attacks

only a z95 swarm is pure