The Paradigm Shift of Red Dice post brought up an issue that's afflicted X-Wing for some time now, which is the gross in-game inefficiency of low-PS generics and jousters. Vulnerable to both turrets and arc-evasion, and caught in a middle ground between escalating extremes of attack and defensive capability, they are now incapable ships.

The discussion in the above thread reminded me of some of the theorycrafting that was done in WoW--particularly about tanks, and a metric called 'expected time to live'. It struck me that what we're talking about with regards to the poor performance of generics and jousters is their ETTL vs the ETTL of the turrets/aces/etc. that they face.

(ETTL can also describe the arms race between AGI-based defence and HP-based defence. I don't agree completely that high-AGI is devalued by high attack; rather, it makes the AGI ships' survival graph spikier, while actually flattening the graph for low-AGI ships. And given that people remember bad beats way more than they remember Soontir dodging 4 hits several times during a game, the time he gets one-shot is given disproportionate psychological weight.)

Anyway, it seems clear that the answer for generics and jousters can't (or maybe shouldn't) lie in increasing their offence, which can only make the general situation worse. Instead, these ships need something to keep them on the board longer against turrets and aces, so that their player can leverage the tactical advantage of numbers. In my experience, these ships just come off the board too fast to be competitive. They need to live a little longer, sometimes even just one turn.

With that in mind, a suggested fix. I've tried to make it as clean as possible, with the title/modification requirement a necessary nod, imo, to the ships that might otherwise gain too much.

Jouster's Wings

Title. Modification. 1 pt.

When defending, if the attacker is outside your firing arc, you may add 1 <evade> result to your roll.

It'd be great to see the forgotten ships of X-Wing back on the board. Any more suggestions?

they are "now" incapable?

barely seen anything but fringe B-wing play since Wave 5

Tie Fighters are still doing well, though

anyway, the solution isn't durability (ie turning everything into aces). The solution is getting more things like crackshot, so when you actually get soontir in arc you're reward for it by something other than bouncing off of his defenses

The Paradigm Shift of Red Dice post brought up an issue that's afflicted X-Wing for some time now, which is the gross in-game inefficiency of low-PS generics and jousters. Vulnerable to both turrets and arc-evasion, and caught in a middle ground between escalating extremes of attack and defensive capability, they are now incapable ships.

The discussion in the above thread reminded me of some of the theorycrafting that was done in WoW--particularly about tanks, and a metric called 'expected time to live'. It struck me that what we're talking about with regards to the poor performance of generics and jousters is their ETTL vs the ETTL of the turrets/aces/etc. that they face.

To the degree that article has anything useful to say at all, it's already more than covered by MajorJuggler's "Mathwing". Briefly, "expected time to live" is an important metric in X-wing, and it has decreased over time--but not to the degree Theorist claims. (For instance, he lists the TIE Fighter as a ship that's been left behind by the metagame. That would be the TIE fighter that's the second most popular ship in Wave 7, making up about 10% of all points spent on Imperial lists in the cut.)

And it's not generally the case that this has hit generic ships harder than it has hit aces. What we have is more efficient aces than we did when the game was first launched, as well as a couple of options for generic ships that are so good they've pushed out other ships. The generic ships we actually see in successful lists are Y-wings, TIE Fighters (especially Black Squadron), Blue Squadron, Omicron Group Pilot, and the occasional Headhunter. All of those ships are either very efficient or capable of carrying upgrades that make them very efficient (i.e., TLT).

The problem is that there aren't many generic ships that can match that efficiency, due to issues in pricing ranging from small to large, as well as the problems FFG has always had with pricing pilot skill. In short, your options are to run aces that can avoid getting shot because they move and take actions very late in the round, or take the most efficient ships you can find.

That's what's pushing mid-PS ships and many generic ships out of the metagame. And it's not a new trend; for instance, the reason we saw lots of generic B-wings in Wave 3 was because they were the most efficient Rebel ship at the time. The reason we saw lots of Howlrunner in Waves 1-3 was because she made the most efficient ship in the game even more efficient. The reason we've never seen lots of Knave Squadron Pilots in the game is their efficiency is terrible.

The solution is to rebuild the game from the ground up, with a consistent mathematical basis for pricing ships and upgrades, better resolution in pricing, and a system for attack and defense that looks more like Armada's and less like the current onein X-wing.

Hmmm... Come to think of it you are right to some extend - have not seen much of the generic pilots lately. It is mostly named things where I play...