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.

Wrong. You assume they are bad pilots. Ship choice does not imply talent.

Of course I do.

If you're a race car driver, but you drive around in a hatchback, why would I think you're a race car driver?

If you fly a ship that doesn't take skill to fly, I'm going to assume you don't have skill.

That assumption might be wrong, but so what? If you aren't going to display your skill, who cares if you actually have any or not?

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.

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.

Fat Turrets with Engine Upgrade are the best arc dodgers in the game. Their turrets afford them the ability to always have a shot, so unlike an arc-based ship they can fly in a purely defensive manner and still have a shot. And of course engine upgrade on a large base.

What's funny about this is that fat turrets counter arc dodgers, yet fat turrets are the best arc dodgers. So your best option during the Turretwing era was just to fly your own turret. We see this now with quad TLT vs. Fat Turrets, quad TLT simply doesn't care how good your obnoxious super TIE Fighter dial and large base boost is, you're still taking 8 attacks because turrets.

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

no, too efficient too easy

T-65s are the only true mark of respect one can bear

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

no, too efficient too easy

T-65s are the only true mark of respect one can bear

Honestly, truest test of skill is quad R7, quad T-65, quad Integrated Astromech. You're rewarded massively for being good at predicting what ships you should be R 7 locking.

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

no, too efficient too easy

T-65s are the only true mark of respect one can bear

Honestly, truest test of skill is quad R7, quad T-65, quad Integrated Astromech. You're rewarded massively for being good at predicting what ships you should be R 7 locking.

R7's two points, not one.

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.

so instead of

Joust>turret>dodge>joust paper-rock-scissors

we first saw

Joust<Boosting EUTurret>dodge>joust

and then AT came out and now

Joust<EUTurret<ATDodge>Joust

I won't say word "balanced" here

I've got nothing against casual players or competitive players or anyone inbetween, and this game can certainly be enjoyed in any setting and at any level and there's no right or wrong way to play. But don't be some casual-only basement-meta with no tourney experience and fly around on these boards making judgmental claims about what ships are skillful/mindless at the competitive level what's more or less competitive or what tourney wins were skillful/unskillful. Jeez.

"Backseat pilot" know-it-alls.

Yikes, I didn't mean to start an argument...

The way I see it, flying in X-wing involves four elements:

1 - Getting a shot on your opponent

2 - Avoiding your opponent's shot

3 - Dealing with blockers, obstacles and the board edge

4 - Controlling range for offensive and defensive purposes (this may be part of 1 and 2)

Up until the invention of Autothrusters (and even now in games against ships without them), turrets didn't need to worry about #1 at all. Someone flying a turret can be just as capable as anyone else, but I don't think there's much arguing that, with one of the primary maneuver elements of the game removed, they've got an easier time of it than a pilot who has to worry about #1 as well. Autothrusters had the potential to add #1 back into the game for turrets, hence the question.

I'm genuinely curious as to whether regular turret players now try and consider #1 when flying in addition to the other points, or if the other advantages of flying a turret means they don't still don't worry about getting in arc, and just take the damage output hit.