I personally found the article a bit muddled - his points were not very clear nor backed up with much actual evidence.

I thought iPeregrine over on the Xwing subreddit had a good response:

I agree with the argument that mid-agility ships need a buff because their green dice aren't worth much.

I disagree with the idea that spammed generics should beat aces, and this will fix the problem. Generics don't lose to aces because they don't have enough tank, they lose because they don't have high-PS maneuvering actions to keep the aces in arc or enough red dice to get through an ace's tank when they finally do manage to get a shot or two. If you buff generics so that XXXX beats Fel/Vader/OLeader it's going to be through offensive buffs and make the supposed red dice problem even worse.

I feel that he's right on a few parts. Most particularly the part that an attack + focus just isn't enough these days. The trend towards hyper-accurate attacks is a bad one imo so I can agree with that.

I think it stems from the fact that red dice determine both if the attack hits and how much damage it does. Increasing that sole stat (how many hits you get) becomes the most important when building a list. Because if you can't roll enough, not only will you not hit, but you'll also deal 0 damage.

For example, how different would it be if a tie fighter had a high chance of 'hitting' the enemy, but only dealt a maximum of 1 or 2 damage? Any 2 att ship for that matter. It'd be pretty close to the mechanics used in imperial assault and armada, which were made after the lessons of x-wing.

But what can be done about it now? I really don't know. But I think the Theorist is right in another aspect: it's going to get worse if it doesn't get better.

Honestly, the red dice of the game needed to shift. The core dice math of the initial game was its biggest failing by far in the early days. Equal Red vs Green being a 50/50 shot (or worse, depends on a lot of things) meant that when you got that great maneuver in, half the time you didn't accomplish anything.

Wave 3 was awful. I didn't even like the game back then and mostly just collected the pretty ships. It's only fondly remembered for being pretty good before Whisper completely broke the game and narrowed it to only a couple viable options. Also, lets be honest; 2 red was never good. The only reason it was ever a thing is because Howlrunner's absurd ability essentially grants 3 red in a game with rather low success rates.

So... yeah... I guess I'm in favor of the red dice improvements, more interesting ships and less spam. On the whole its been a vast improvement in my opinion.

I think that someone's personality and social skills have nothing to do with their ability to produce a rational argument. I think that getting emotive about it is unhelpful and obstructive to sensible discussion.

While Vorpal Sword disagrees with everything Theorist says (rightly or wrongly, I make no implication) he also fails to provide any evidence to support his own arguments apart from "Theorist is a bad person and I don't like him".

For those who are calling Theorist wrong, do you have an alternative explanation as to why Jousting essentially doesn't seem to exist any more except for 4BZ and people running old school TIE swarms? Aces don't joust. Large Ships don't joust. Turrets don't joust. Doesn't that imply that ships that function through jousting need to see some love? I'm open to being proved wrong on that point, I have no emotional investment nor intellectual attachment to any part of this debate.

I'm just happy to finally be able to play Defenders in every single goddamn game without feeling like I'm hamstringing myself.

What he says is one of the reasons I think Imperials are struggling to find more than 1 or 2 builds that are tournament competitive. With the numbere of ships throwing 3+ dice accurately plus a lot more turrets, having high agility/manueverability is not nearly as good as it use to be

Uh.

Attack and Health SHOULD be more valuable than Dodge in a game, because the goal in a game is for something to happen. Each side rolling three dice and the defender somehow Dodging all three hits is a miraculous, celebratory event the first time it happens -

If it was the norm, if the game was no more than "I roll my dice to hit, oh wait, I miss, oh well, I'll just wait til my next turn to roll dice" then it gets boring FAST.

So the argument of his article's first part is flawed: Dodging (Agility) MUST be weaker than Attack just to keep the game moving forward and exciting, and raise the value of maneuver to avoid damage.

That being said, he's right about the fewer options for dodging/mitigating damage options versus the options of raising Attack. Attack and Health is TOO good right now, and Dodge is TOO bad. But it's important they keep the right ratio.

As for the second part...

Saying that "Mass swarm versus skilled pilots should be slanted towards swarms" is just a bit silly. More than a bit silly, actually - it's thematically inappropriate to a Star Wars game. A game's rules should ALWAYS follow theme, especially in an established property like this one. You can't always follow the universe exactly, otherwise Darth Vader would cost 100 points and wipe out a squad by himself, but you should make sure that in-universe better characters ARE better than the chumps.

One of the more exciting things I've been seeing lately in thought development is the rise in mid-PS pilots to avoid/destroy Alpha Strike lists before they get their shots off, and the corresponding attention to PS as more than just "PS1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11."

I think that someone's personality and social skills have nothing to do with their ability to produce a rational argument. I think that getting emotive about it is unhelpful and obstructive to sensible discussion.

While Vorpal Sword disagrees with everything Theorist says (rightly or wrongly, I make no implication) he also fails to provide any evidence to support his own arguments apart from "Theorist is a bad person and I don't like him".

For those who are calling Theorist wrong, do you have an alternative explanation as to why Jousting essentially doesn't seem to exist any more except for 4BZ and people running old school TIE swarms? Aces don't joust. Large Ships don't joust. Turrets don't joust. Doesn't that imply that ships that function through jousting need to see some love? I'm open to being proved wrong on that point, I have no emotional investment nor intellectual attachment to any part of this debate.

I'm just happy to finally be able to play Defenders in every single goddamn game without feeling like I'm hamstringing myself.

This is a game of maneuver and planning, not "Let's drive our ships towards each other as fast as we can and see who rolls better." Jousting defeats the whole IDEA of a game of maneuver, it's all about who can roll more dice, better dice, and get luckier in the process.

If you want the kind of game where all that matters is rolling better dice, I hear that Games Workshop needs people to buy their stuff...

But once again, it goes back to theme. Star Wars dogfights are supposed to be won by who's the better pilot, not who has the bigger guns. It may not always be successful in that regard, but saying, "ZOMG Jousting is awsum gaiz I hat the game now it don't work" defeats the core idea of X-Wing.

For those who are calling Theorist wrong, do you have an alternative explanation as to why Jousting essentially doesn't seem to exist any more except for 4BZ and people running old school TIE swarms?

But... It does, a joust list literally won worlds. Z95+tlt gold+stresshog+Poe is 4 joust ships. Poe even with vi and r2d2 is just a joust bro, tlt y's are interchangeable with b's basically and they both joust, stresshog jousts with extra benefit and z95 blocks or (weakly) jousts.

What he says is one of the reasons I think Imperials are struggling to find more than 1 or 2 builds that are tournament competitive. With the numbere of ships throwing 3+ dice accurately plus a lot more turrets, having high agility/manueverability is not nearly as good as it use to be

That is wrong, either thats about what the other factions have as well (Scum only having Brobots) when you apply a high standart or there is a lot more than that when you lower your standarts.

I made 3 cuts with jousters (7th place with 3 khiraxz and twice with t-65's including a win) this year in store championships, and once last year during the height of the phantom's reign.

3 attack with a solo modifier is fine. The game is more open and free than it ever has been. Play the game, get better, and you'll notice the wins start coming in.

I think Theorist is dead on in that there are a lot of anti-AGI cards out there that make life hard for ships that rely on AGI to live, and those are most basic 2 and 3 green dice ships. The high AGI aces rely on automatics like tokens, maneuvering, regeneration and pilot/crew abilities to guarantee their defense. The problem is that I don't think his solutions will change a lot. Specific anti-low AGI/high HP tech is pretty much DOA, because no matter how badly you can run B-wings and Y-wings over the coals, if you can't hit high AGI stuff, you're SOL. You build your squad to take on the hardest targets.

I observed this for years with 40k, in that you always made sure you had enough anti-tank weapons before you put anti-infantry weapons in a list. AT weapons could kill infantry, albeit inefficiently, but anti-infantry weapons did zero damage to tanks. Even more so in X-wing, because everything that works on high AGI also works on low AGI, it's just a little less efficient.

Honestly anyone could of simply looked at the dice and seen this was an issue. There are more hits/crits on a red dice than there are evades on an evade dice.

This alone shows agility as a stat is below the attack, so health has always been the stronger option from the get go. Oddly it seems like FFG missed that when they started stacking extra ways to deal damage rather than extra ways to gain evades.

Honestly anyone could of simply looked at the dice and seen this was an issue. There are more hits/crits on a red dice than there are evades on an evade dice.

This alone shows agility as a stat is below the attack, so health has always been the stronger option from the get go. Oddly it seems like FFG missed that when they started stacking extra ways to deal damage rather than extra ways to gain evades.

You need to kill things to win games. Next question.

Honestly anyone could of simply looked at the dice and seen this was an issue. There are more hits/crits on a red dice than there are evades on an evade dice.

This alone shows agility as a stat is below the attack, so health has always been the stronger option from the get go. Oddly it seems like FFG missed that when they started stacking extra ways to deal damage rather than extra ways to gain evades.

This isn't actually true, because Green wins ties. Naked, 3 red vs 3 green only has a 51% chance of dealing any damage at all. They're pretty even, with green actually getting stronger at lower values.

The biggest problem with green dice is that, generally, you can't really afford to spend your focus on them. This is kind of a problem for 3 green ships, but you can usually expect a bit of mitigation. It's rather crippling on 2 green ships though, because at that point the expected value is less than one and you can be expecting to blank completely almost half the time.

The game has always sort of had a rotten bit at the heart of its combat engine with dice that aren't particularly reliable and that cap out at a rather low count. Red dice without modification lead to games in which nothing happens, but at the same time, green dice fail to provide reliable mitigation. The game runs on a very fine line. When greens get more than one success, its very hard to make anything in the game happen, but when they get less than one, they fail compared to raw health.

I think the emphasis on damage is largely good for the game and 3 green ships work well enough that you can make them pretty tanky by stacking evades or focus or the like to where they work out ok. 2 green is an issue, but not one I'm completely sure how to deal with.

Honestly anyone could of simply looked at the dice and seen this was an issue. There are more hits/crits on a red dice than there are evades on an evade dice.

This alone shows agility as a stat is below the attack, so health has always been the stronger option from the get go. Oddly it seems like FFG missed that when they started stacking extra ways to deal damage rather than extra ways to gain evades.

You need to kill things to win games. Next question.

"JOHN MADDEN HERE, YOU KNOW IF THEY DONT START SCORING POINTS IT WILL BE HARD TO WIN THE GAME"

Honestly anyone could of simply looked at the dice and seen this was an issue. There are more hits/crits on a red dice than there are evades on an evade dice.

This alone shows agility as a stat is below the attack, so health has always been the stronger option from the get go. Oddly it seems like FFG missed that when they started stacking extra ways to deal damage rather than extra ways to gain evades.

You need to kill things to win games. Next question.

I know, my point is that it appears the 'flaw' has been there seemingly by design since the get go. The only 'issue' if you can even call it that, is FFG has added ways to buff attack without as many ways to buff agility or health. But i hardly think its at all out of hand yet.

I've been in on the Theorist / Vorpal Sword thing since literally the beginning. In general, I side with Robert on it. I'm weighing in here because it sorta sounds like Robert is going off the deep end a little bit, and before that hurts his credibility, I just want to try to let folks know ... he really isn't.

(And on a fallacious note, it's not hard to find evidence that Robert and I don't agree on everything, and sometimes disagree with a fair amount of heat. But it's never gotten personal between us, the way it has between Robert and Theorist, and between me and Theorist. IMO, that reflects on one of the three of us.)

I think, for the most part, Theorist's chosen name is good advertising with what you get from him. He theorizes. And there's nothing wrong with that. He's not always wrong, and if one can consistently read him in a detached way, and ignore the self-aggrandizement, he often brings up things that are very worth talking about it.

I think where it breaks down (for both me and Robert) is that Theorist becomes completely enamored with and cemented in his theories. It's proven all but impossible to get him to provide meaningful support for his assertions or to revisit them in the light of other evidence. Any -- and I mean any -- attempt to do so has been historically taken by him to be a personal attack. (It's easy to see why, given the lines quoted above. He honestly believes not only that he isn't wrong now, but that he has never been wrong. How does someone point out otherwise, without him feeling aggrieved by the sheer audacity of it?)

Like Robert, I've given up TC almost completely, and given up arguing with Theorist absolutely completely. The latter because it makes zero difference ... the absolute best you can hope for is that he agrees with a point you make that he didn't directly refute. (The former because there's too much cult of personality. Way too much acceptance of what he says as genius and gospel, and it simply isn't. Anybody who thinks that Theorist has not been significantly wrong at least as often as he's been prescient is simply not paying attention. And there are a lot of folks at TC who don't pay attention.)

All of this said, I don't think Theorist is a bad person. In fact (as I piss Robert off), IMO Robert, Theorist, and I have a lot in common, and I think that plays into why we don't get along so great. I just think that if Theorist were more open to ideas that he should support his arguments with facts, with data, and with chains of logic, and if he'd not take assaults on his arguments as if they were assaults on him personally, he'd be a better person, and his contributions would actually be significantly more valuable.

But, you know, it's not like there are things I couldn't change to make me a better person, too.

This line, in particular, stood out to me as a succinct, cogent summation of one of the developing power-creep issues in the game:

"ATT 3 w/ Focus is now below average firepower."

To the degree that's true, it's because we have (1) an exceptions-based ruleset that (2) is always growing. But since the whole piece is vague and theoretical, it's hard to demonstrate whether it's true or not. Of course, one could take a look at List Juggler and actually provide some empirical backup, but Theorist doesn't bother to do that.

One thing, though -- this is not something you ever want to write in an essay meant to be persuasive to complete strangers:

"I’ve been calling things pretty much perfectly since Wave 1, and I’ve learned over the years to trust my uncanny intuition."

Part of the reason it's unpersuasive is because it's fatuously self-regarding, and the other part is because it's actually really easy to find things he got drastically wrong. (Does anyone else remember when he was promoting Rookie Pilot + Stealth Device?)

Theorist is a well known contributor to the community... many consider him to be one of the top "minds" in the game.

Theorist is a relentlessly longwinded narcissist, and that's it. He has very little understanding of this game, of game design in general, or of how to interact with other humans. He also has a bad habit of convincing himself of an argument and then ignoring any and all contravening evidence, logic, or expertise.

He raises some valid concerns in the article, and some of the proposed cards seem like good additions to the game.

He doesn't, and they aren't.

Best line: "It's going to get worse if it doesn't get better." I think he nailed it.

I have high respect for Theorist as we were both around during wave 1 and I've read a lot of his stuff, but that one line made me chuckle.

I have zero respect for Theorist, as we were both around during Wave 1 and I've read a lot of his stuff.

His continued presence at TC is the reason I stopped blogging.

No disrespect intended to you Vorpal Sword, but Theorist is one of the reasons that I stayed playing the game. When you say that he does not know how to deal with people that is 100 percent wrong. When I played on vassal he was there and we talked a lot. I never seen you playing vassal only blogging. You may have played a lot when I was not on vassal, but to say that he just does not know how to deal with people is false. He was one of the few people that talked to me a lot in wave 1 through pms at TC, and on Vassal. I do not get to play on vassal any longer because of being busy with real life things.

You may know your stuff with how probability works and different things, and I have enjoyed the stuff that you contributed there, but I just wanted to post in his defense. When 2 people do not see eye to eye it is easy to think that the other person is bad at everything or does not know anything. He may have been wrong on some accounts but he nailed it on others.

I think that someone's personality and social skills have nothing to do with their ability to produce a rational argument. I think that getting emotive about it is unhelpful and obstructive to sensible discussion.

While Vorpal Sword disagrees with everything Theorist says (rightly or wrongly, I make no implication) he also fails to provide any evidence to support his own arguments apart from "Theorist is a bad person and I don't like him".

The reason I didn't want to get into it is that there's often not a good way to engage someone who writes a 3,500-word article in a reasonable way. It's not worth wading into the tide to bring back a couple of seashells, especially because the first claim Theorist's defenders will make is that I'm cherry-picking rather than engaging his whole argument.

But sure, let's go.

Others have summarized his argument as "3 Attack + focus isn't good enough anymore", and I'm actually not sure I completely agree with that description. I think a better way to paraphrase his thesis is that the increasing diversity of offensive upgrades has led to a relative devaluing of Agility, and that has caused a balance problem.

The first problem with that thesis is that he misunderstands how durability functions in X-wing. There is literally no good justification for splitting up your consideration of Agility and hit points. This actually goes back a long time: Theorist thinks of Agility as analogous to armor in other systems, which isn't how it works in X-wing. Durability in X-wing is a random variable; it's a stochastic function of Agility and hit points.

So the strongest version of Theorist's case that can be made is that there's a different effect of offensive upgrades on ships with high Agility and low hit points, as opposed to ships with low Agility and high hit points. But that's not the claim he's making, because he says things like this:

Especially the card K-4 Security Droid severely undermined AGI as a defensive stat.

Why is the K4 an especially big problem? He doesn't say. Why does K4 hit high-Agility ships harder than low-Agility ones? He doesn't specify. But since durability is fundamentally the number of shots a ship can take before it's destroyed, simply granting an exception to the action economy (which lots of other upgrades do) doesn't account for the kind of interaction he's claiming exists.

And then he presents a list of qualities possessed by weak ships:

Those ships hit hardest are those who sport no accuracy buffs, defend themselves with AGI instead of health, don’t particularly position at all, and sport lower PS.

But that doesn't match up at all with his thesis. There are actually very few ships with no access to "accuracy buffs", and those that are are older ships with inflexible upgrade bars--and there's no reason that a lack of access to accuracy buffs ought to make a ship more or less effective in the general metagame. (It does make a difference to a ship's overall value in terms of efficiency and flexibility, but again, that's not what he's claiming.)

And then he puts up a list of ships he thinks are hit hardest, and it doesn't match up with either his initial thesis or the set of qualities he has in the previous paragraph:

— T-65 X-wing (Integrated Astromech has helped, but not quite enough)

— Z-95 (not badly; ATT 2 has become weaker now though)

— Kihraxz Fighter

— MA-3 Interceptor (Scyk)

— TIE Fighter (not badly; worse than Z-95 but this ship is a better blocker)

— TIE/FO Fighter

— TIE Bomber

— TIE Advanced (except Vader; his PS and ability provide alternate tools to stay viable)

Agility here runs from 1 to 3, and Attack runs from 2 to 3. [EDIT: No it doesn't--I forgot that the TIE Bomber is 2 Agility, not 1.] Efficiency runs from very good (Headhunter, post-Raider TIE Advanced) to bad (M3-A). Their degree of upgradeability runs the gamut from no upgrade slots at all to the fairly flexible TIE Bomber. These ships have nothing at all in common.

Have I done enough? His thesis is contrary to the way the game's math actually works, and his support doesn't actually mean anything.

Oh, and according to List Juggler's summary of Store Championships held during Wave 7, in the cut we're seeing 9.4% of Imperial points spent on TIE Fighters. In fact, they're the game's second most popular ship in terms of points spent, after the Aggressor--which makes it hard to believe that the TIE fighter is being left behind by the metagame.

For those who are calling Theorist wrong, do you have an alternative explanation as to why Jousting essentially doesn't seem to exist any more except for 4BZ and people running old school TIE swarms?

Yes. Also pulling from List Juggler, limiting to the cut at Wave 7 sanctioned events:

A quarter of all ships used by the most successful tier of players are at PS8 or higher. Those ships disproportionately have access to boost or barrel roll, and usually both. Ships that move very late that are very good at repositioning are very likely not to be shot at, and that's not new--it's been around since Wave 2. Ships like that can reasonably be expected to defeat jousters much more often than they're defeated.

No disrespect intended to you Vorpal Sword, but Theorist is one of the reasons that I stayed playing the game.

That's great. I'm genuinely pleased when people get started in X-wing, but even more so when long-timers stay involved. And I don't mean to say that Theorist is an evil person; I've seen him be gracious. Not to me, you understand, but it's certainly happened. But it also doesn't have anything to do with the article, and I shouldn't have brought my personal issues with him into the thread.

You may know your stuff with how probability works and different things, and I have enjoyed the stuff that you contributed there, but I just wanted to post in his defense. When 2 people do not see eye to eye it is easy to think that the other person is bad at everything or does not know anything. He may have been wrong on some accounts but he nailed it on others.

The problem--and this does bear on the topic--is that I have seen him get a lot of things wrong, but I've never seen him admit he's wrong. His ideas are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but I've never seen any evidence that he can tell the difference: he defends them all equally, regardless of how constructive or reasonable the criticism.

That flaw is very much on display here. He has an idea I'm not unwilling to have a conversation about, but he doesn't express it well or provide any support. And the conclusions he draws simply don't line up with any evidence we have about what the tournament game looks like right now--evidence which is as available to him as to me, but which he didn't consider when he was writing.

*Grabs some popecorn*

Popecorn from the vaticane? Should it be palpcorn in this game ?

*Grabs some popecorn*

Popecorn from the vaticane? Should it be palpcorn in this game ?

"UNLIMITED PO-" PCORN -Palpatine 2016 (probably)

I agree that the article has many issues, but there is some valid cause for concern, IMO. Namely:

-Balance between Health and Agility is off. In very loose terms, a high health/low agility ship should be about on par for survivability with a low health/high agility ship, with the mid-range ships filling into the middle and therefore roughly equivalent. It is not. It is ALWAYS better to be low agility/high health the way the game is structured, except in corner cases like Palpatine Aces, or even just AT/SD Soontir. No other Interceptors perform nearly as well as he does.

-Balance between offense and defense is off. Offense needs to be more valuable than defense to avoid rampant turtling scenarios. But when the dice are inherently rigged AND there are many more easily attainable options to improve offense, the balance skews. Cannons are great and deny defense. Ordnance is getting improved. Bombs are more available. Getting TL/Focus is easier. What exists to boost defense? Where's even the action equivalent of a target lock action for defense? Maybe elite arc dodgers can survive, as corner cases, but there is literally no point in taking a mid-PS interceptor, phantom, or any other low health ship. That is in serious need of correction.

-The one most valid point he makes is that it is getting easier to mis-build and play a non-competitive list, but the reality is that it's not due to too many cards/pilots out there, it's that some are so much better than the rest that it narrows the field. The ones that are better are also the ones that need a very specific countermeasure or you're toast. That turns the game into rock paper scissors far too much for my liking, and the fact that huge clusters of ships can essentially be invalidated is troubling, even if FFG works hard to institute fixes.

Overall, X-Wing is a great game. But if/when they were to do a 2.0, I think that they would really have to not only leverage this hindsight of institutional knowledge on how the game is actually played, but also work their asses off to find a math-based costing formula that creates less obvious advantages. If I take nothing more than somewhat agreeing with these general points, I am ok with the article. The whole side topic of X-Wing punditry and just how much erroneous information spews from articles and podcasts is another matter entirely.

Thinking about it it really doesn't quite add up, especially when the two undenieably most popular ships, Soontir Fel and Poe Dameron, only attack with 3 dice + focus.

I don't think you can really look at it that way. Soontir and Poe have lower attack values to offset the fact that they are so strong defensively. Soontir generally has four dice, a focus token, an evade token, plus Autothrusters. He may even be backed by Emperor Palpatine, which both offsets his "three dice plus focus" attack by giving him a guaranteed crit, or boosts his defenses even higher by guaranteeing an evade result. Actually hitting Soontir with all of those defensive bonuses with a single attack is a very tall order.

Likewise, Poe. At range 3 with a focus token, he gets at least one guarenteed evade result. If he rolls all eyeballs, he can still turn one into an evade. If he rolls all blanks, he can use Autothrusters. If he takes shield damage, he can use R2-D2 to repair it. At a tourney last Sunday, the player next to me lamented that Poe was able to regenerate about ten points of damage through his various regen mechanics (as well as a great job at forcing poor shots).

The need for mechanics that can burst through those high defenses are what has led to the introduction of cards like Twin Laser Turrets (more dice rolls = more chances to catch Soontir without a token), Crack Shot and Juke (negate those evade rolls or force tokens to be spent defensively). We're also getting a lot of upgrades which boil down to "Guarantee a result": Accuracy Correctors, Advanced Targeting Computer, Palpatine, and Guidance Chips all fall into this category. They increase the floor when it comes to what you can expect from your attack dice.

I agree that the article has many issues, but there is some valid cause for concern, IMO. Namely:

-Balance between Health and Agility is off. In very loose terms, a high health/low agility ship should be about on par for survivability with a low health/high agility ship, with the mid-range ships filling into the middle and therefore roughly equivalent. It is not. It is ALWAYS better to be low agility/high health the way the game is structured, except in corner cases like Palpatine Aces, or even just AT/SD Soontir. No other Interceptors perform nearly as well as he does.

I've tried typing a response to this multiple times, but I'm having trouble getting across what I actually mean.

But basically:

Generally ships with high agility and low health have better dials, and ships with high health and low agility have bad dials, because they are trying to capture the theme and flavour of the various ships in the Star Wars universe. We all have general ideas of how ships should perform and behave. Everyone knows the Tie Interceptor is super fast and super maneuverable, but is made of paper.

Ships like the Tie Interceptor are ideally not supposed to be shot at all, so making green dice a reliable way of defending from attacks (mirroring health) wouldn't fit with the flavour of the ship. A Tie Interceptor shouldn't be able to reliably take as many attempted attacks as a B-Wing, for example, but the B-Wing should not be able to avoid having the attacks made in the first place.

I think I've made a totally different point to the one I made when I first tried to write this, but hopefully it still makes sense.