1) Naked shuttles aren't cost efficient enough to overcome their dial

If you accept that the Lambda isn't worth taking on its own, don't you sort of have to treat Palpatine's cost as 8 points + (however many points you'd have to knock off the shuttle to make it a viable choice)?

That's the difference between Palp and Threepio. You're taking Goldenrod on a ship you already want in your list. His Royal Badness needs to be kind of awkwardly wedged in somewhere.

The shuttle is a monstrously efficient ship statistically but the dial is so bad that it will almost never be that efficient. Palpatine when combined with imperial aces is obscenely efficient because of how much more valuable each evade result is on those ships given their low HP pool and sometimes front-loaded survivability. It's not that awkward a fit, anyway- the 28 points for a palp shuttle gives plenty of room for two aces and the shuttle can get some work done itself.

Tactically speaking the importance of the shuttle can take heat off your aces and actually cause it to get more shots off than it normally would because opponents will target it more preferentially. Since the goal of ace lists is to force end game situations where Soontir or Whisper can dominate lower PS ships, the Biggs-ish effect that a Palp shuttle has cannot be discounted.

Threepio is a really potent card itself but I don't think it's on the level of Palpatine. It makes Han an end game monster when the potential offense decreases. If you can afford the MF title he will be able to win a lot of battles against the more offensively anemic imperial aces by taking evade actions and having two 100% evades a turn.

One gets the feeling MJ's increasing vocality on the subject is because they contribute to not use the math-based advice (even if not his, someones!), And they keep messing things up that are, eg, instantly spotted once stuff is in the wild. The winner of last year's US nationals stated it'd all about the TLTs even as he won with his variant dash list.

I suspect the most 'FFG' solution would really be to have a second round of math-head QA testers. Picking them would be hard, but having people point out the 'you sir about that one?' bits might pay off.

Alex does great, but that last point or two is pretty brutal these days.

Assuming FFG are that bothered about perfect balance. Bet the Emperor card sold a lot of Raiders.

Assuming FFG are that bothered about perfect balance. Bet the Emperor card sold a lot of Raiders.

Might not be as bad as you think.

In our local gaming group I know of only 2 people who bought the raider.

And both of them (incl. me) did not do this for a specific card.

We are just a greedy lot and want at least one of each and every ship....

Bet the Emperor card sold a lot of Raiders.

I'd bet a lot of people bought it with the hopes of selling the bits and pieces on ebay. But I doubt many people exclusively for the Emperor card.

But no doubt that card did push a lot of people off the fence.

Actually I see the Raider being consistently bid on via ebay without Palpatine and the advanced cards. There's a market for collectors

Well,

It is a beautiful ship.

Why dont you look up the greater east asian coprosperity sphere to to the pacific rim. Japan got exactly what they asked for.

Christ, can we leave the WWII stuff alone?

Well that got out of hand quickly...

You make one little comparison about art imitating life and then we're full blown coproserity...

Assuming FFG are that bothered about perfect balance. Bet the Emperor card sold a lot of Raiders.

I bought the Raider for the Tie Advanced fixes and pilots...!

The Emperor was as much a collateral buy as that ship itself.

I bought the Raider for the Tie Advanced fixes and pilots...!

I'd bet that of the number of people who bought it solely for cards, the ones who bought it for the Tie Advanced stuff is a huge majority over those who bought it for Palp.

The shuttle is a monstrously efficient ship statistically but the dial is so bad that it will almost never be that efficient.

"Sort of" to the former, and "definitely correct" on the latter.

The Shuttle's jousting efficiency is about 106%. That's very good, but it's only marginally better than a TIE Fighter or Z-95. The shuttle is worth about 22 points of raw dice and it cost 21 points. So you're getting 1 extra point of jousting value... ok, whatever. "Monstrously efficient" to me would be if it could take electronic baffles for a point, and repeatedly use it turn after turn losing shields in the process, and it would still come out being >100% cost effective. But it would need to be something around 18 points at 3/1/6/6 for it to really be "monstrously efficient". In such a scenario, if you use baffles twice it's essentially 3/1/6/4 at 19 points, for 22 point of raw jousting value.

The Inquisitor is actually closer to being monstrously efficient. He's already 100% jousting efficient before considering his pilot skill. If you include his PS8 in his jousting value*, then he's easily over 110% cost efficient relative to a PS2 Z-95 as the reference point. And that's still just pure jousting numbers, before considering that he has boost + barrel roll options.

There's a few other pilots that are more efficient:

• regenerating Red Ace + Comm Relay/R2-D2
• Corran + PtL/R2-D2/FCS
• Late game Omega Leader + Comm Relay/Juke vs a single target
• Vessery + TIE/D + Tractor Beam + Ruthlessness, under certain conditions

Fel + PtL/SD/AT gets honorable mention with a PS derated jousting efficiency above 100%.

Both of the regenerators only hit those numbers when they aren't in an alpha strike heavy meta though.

* unpublished math, but basically your jousting value goes up if you can PS kill the other guy

1) Naked shuttles aren't cost efficient enough to overcome their dial

If you accept that the Lambda isn't worth taking on its own, don't you sort of have to treat Palpatine's cost as 8 points + (however many points you'd have to knock off the shuttle to make it a viable choice)?

That's the difference between Palp and Threepio. You're taking Goldenrod on a ship you already want in your list. His Royal Badness needs to be kind of awkwardly wedged in somewhere.

Yes, already addressed:

Palpatine is different because he doesn't directly affect an individual ship's jousting value. So you are spending 8 points, and getting "X" points of value back, where "X" is typically in the 20 point range. For a more holistic approach that is more compatible with the above approach , you can view it as spending 29 points to get a shuttle + palp crew, which is worth ~20 points for Palp, and another 16-19 points for the naked shuttle. So 29 points of cost gets you about 36-39 points of value, on average, making Palp undercosted by at least 6 points. The numbers change depending on the data analytics from match replays, but in general Palp is still easily the most undercosted upgrade in the game in absolute terms. C-3P0 crew has roughly the same ratio (he's worth about twice what he costs), but since Palp costs more and is worth roughly double his value, his net "extra value above his cost" contribution is much higher: around 7-10 points for Palp vs about 2-5 for C-3P0.

Sometimes I think we take the game balance more seriously than the designers do, and perhaps THAT's the reason they don't want to splash lots of cash on human calculators to figure out more precise points costs.

Because more precise points costs don't necessarily translate to significantly more sales, and broken ships always leaves a market opening for 'fixes' later on.

And I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier, that a lot of people have zero interest in tournament format games and that once you break out of that tournament mold, the balance changes a lot for some ships and also, people not playing competitive games are more likely to take a ship because it's their favourite or because it looks cool or 'just because' and so not every ship is trying to exist in a hyper competitive environment where every point must pull its weight. For instance, last month I played a 750-a-side cinematic game where I was rebels, and my opponents a mix of Imperials and Scum. My Imperial opponent took a squadron of Obsidian (or was it Black?) squadron TIE Fighters with shield upgrades. Because he wanted to represent an Imperial force after the battle of Endor, forced to repair and upgrade its TIE fighters, all of whom were now veteran pilots.

lBecause more precise points costs don't necessarily translate to significantly more sales, and broken ships always leaves a market opening for 'fixes' later on.

Also, a perfectly balanced game removes the need to keep buying in order to keep up. No need to buy wave 9 if your wave 2 squad is still as good as anything else.

lBecause more precise points costs don't necessarily translate to significantly more sales, and broken ships always leaves a market opening for 'fixes' later on.

Also, a perfectly balanced game removes the need to keep buying in order to keep up. No need to buy wave 9 if your wave 2 squad is still as good as anything else.

Sure there is, because we want new toys to play with. TIE swarms are still quite good, and they've been around forever.

lBecause more precise points costs don't necessarily translate to significantly more sales, and broken ships always leaves a market opening for 'fixes' later on.

Also, a perfectly balanced game removes the need to keep buying in order to keep up. No need to buy wave 9 if your wave 2 squad is still as good as anything else.

Sure there is, because we want new toys to play with. TIE swarms are still quite good, and they've been around forever.

Ție swarms do benefit greatly from later waves cards (like Crack Shot).

In any case, I might have phrased my point a but wrong. People buy from a variety of reasons. I believe 'my squad is no longer competitive, I need to replace/improve it' is one of them. Perfect balance removes this reason, which means that, if you keep all other things the same, sales will drop.

Ție swarms do benefit greatly from later waves cards (like Crack Shot).

In any case, I might have phrased my point a but wrong. People buy from a variety of reasons. I believe 'my squad is no longer competitive, I need to replace/improve it' is one of them. Perfect balance removes this reason, which means that, if you keep all other things the same, sales will drop.

Rock is perfectly balanced against scissors and paper. But if a wave introduces a whole bunch of paper that people are wanting to fly, you're going to want to shift to a more scissorsy list.

Palpatine is different because he doesn't directly affect an individual ship's jousting value. So you are spending 8 points, and getting "X" points of value back, where "X" is typically in the 20 point range. For a more holistic approach that is more compatible with the above approach , you can view it as spending 29 points to get a shuttle + palp crew, which is worth ~20 points for Palp, and another 16-19 points for the naked shuttle. So 29 points of cost gets you about 36-39 points of value, on average, making Palp undercosted by at least 6 points. The numbers change depending on the data analytics from match replays, but in general Palp is still easily the most undercosted upgrade in the game in absolute terms. C-3P0 crew has roughly the same ratio (he's worth about twice what he costs), but since Palp costs more and is worth roughly double his value, his net "extra value above his cost" contribution is much higher: around 7-10 points for Palp vs about 2-5 for C-3P0.

D'oh, can't believe I missed that. Thanks, MJ.

True, power creep is good for sales.

And when the state of the game gets too bad, you reboot with a new edition, bump the points cost to 150, drop the costs of ships so everyone needs to buy more, and start the process again.

Rock is perfectly balanced against scissors and paper. But if a wave introduces a whole bunch of paper that people are wanting to fly, you're going to want to shift to a more scissorsy list.

But if that new paper is no better than the old paper, the incentive for everyone to fly it is reduced. Generally, and especially competitively, people only want to fly new stuff if it's better than the old stuff. If the new release is perfectly balanced such that it is different to the new stuff but not better, then there's no increase in the number of people playing paper, and the rock players are in the same position they were before the latest paper release.

lBecause more precise points costs don't necessarily translate to significantly more sales, and broken ships always leaves a market opening for 'fixes' later on.

Also, a perfectly balanced game removes the need to keep buying in order to keep up. No need to buy wave 9 if your wave 2 squad is still as good as anything else.

Sure there is, because we want new toys to play with. TIE swarms are still quite good, and they've been around forever.

Ție swarms do benefit greatly from later waves cards (like Crack Shot).

In any case, I might have phrased my point a but wrong. People buy from a variety of reasons. I believe 'my squad is no longer competitive, I need to replace/improve it' is one of them. Perfect balance removes this reason, which means that, if you keep all other things the same, sales will drop.

or maybe more people would buy more ships to try out other builds, since they would all be competitive, instead of being forced to buy ships you don't want to fly just to get that card.

and maybe the game would be even more fun with so much variety, and more people would play x-wing

Right, ideally, make all ships and expansion packs equally valuable is the best strategy. Then everyone should want to buy all ships. But that assumes all ships are equally attractive to the buyers and for example, epic ships are by their nature far more of a niche market. So it would make sense to make them somewhat more attractive based on attractive cards, either iconic characters or really good cards or both (3PO, Palp, etc).

For the most part I think that FFG does genuinely try to make the game balanced and that tweaks to ships later (e.g. chaardan refit) are efforts to make it more balanced and typically offer a good quantity of fixes for all your ships. Still, I suspect if, through random sorting, certain sets tend to sell well purely because of a much-desired card (e.g. autothrusters) there's no incentive for them to provide that card in other sets.

True, power creep is good for sales.

And when the state of the game gets too bad, you reboot with a new edition, bump the points cost to 150, drop the costs of ships so everyone needs to buy more, and start the process again.

No, not quite. You get a short boost of the latest and greatest, and then sales flatlines as the next shiny comes along. Especially If your player base is growing, you want new players to buy the entire product line, not just the latest 1-2 releases. Having as many as possible of your 30+ products that continue to sell well for years after their design costs are recouped are far better then 3-4 that sells really well for a few months, and then disappears.

Eventually a growing number of SKUs will cause problems and/or the game will collapse under general bloat so I`m sure we will see a reboot of some sort of X Wing eventually, but I think that is years down the line. I`m just hoping it will be a sensible one with upgrade packs at a reasonable price for old players, and not your scenario.