Nah, man the situation you described your self shows that you would rather blame the dice then the player. The Leader pilot should of been focused fired. Yes those natural rolled probably did help, but I'm also guessing that it was against only a few or one ship at a time. Any ship in this game can be focused down with a small amount of skill.

I think you underestimate MY skill at that point - I'm very good at controlling enemy priority and understanding the means of defeating my own list. The list in question was Redline w/Clusters, OmegaL, ZetaL, Backstabber, and my goal was to 1) kill something with Redline early while 2) luring shots AT Redline early, as he's a soft target with a lot of damage potential and allowing two Cluster Missile shots is an unacceptable outcome. Meantime, OmegaL goes after his target while ZetaL/Backstabber flank and support Redline.

By the time Redline dies, at least one and possibly two ships are dead, so the opponent has little chance to focus fire.

The one game where the plan didn't come to pass is when he zoomed in Super Dengar on Redline and killed him turn two with Dengar's focus fire and Manaroo support. However, ZetaL survived both a R1 Super Dengar shot AND the return fire in-arc shot with only one shield damage - statistically near-impossible odds.

My game against PalpAces was surprisingly simple - Redline/ZL dive straight at Palpatine, while I keep Backstabber/OL off to the far side so that if they try to flank ME, I in fact flank them.

I prefer 4-ship builds because they have resilience against a moment of bad luck - and thankfully Imperials have an abundance of Aces in the 15-25 point range making it easy to make a 4-ship list.

Vader creww shuts down palp aces, my 3 point crew card on a decimator will shut down palp aces almost every time since most imperial aces have only 0-2 shields.

The real power of palp is people thinking he's better than he is.

You know what I don't mind in a game, palp shuttle dying first. It probably means I've gotten free shots on some of your ships.

You know what I hate in a game, having the palp shuttle as my last remaining ship.

I never understood why hes so insanely good. Not for his price that is. One die result changed to any result per round for 8pts and really prevents the ship hes on from doing anything other than toting him around so hes even more expensive.

Aside from making Wampa get his ability off every round he attacks, i just dont see how he can be such a gamechanger every game.

Now how many times do you think you get to fire at him per turn? Because you need two or more high-red-dice attacks, with modifications, to push anything through.

Which ain't easy given his arc dodging ways.

Doable, but not easy.

Same goes for the inquisitor, omega leader... Basically anything with 3 or more green dice and an evade action(with bonus points for boost actions and the autothrusters they allow)

3) Look at some real game tape, write down exactly what Palp does, and then try to assign a value to that.

Do you model those extra hit points that weren't taken away due to Palpatine as an increase or decrease in hull?

Is this a trick question?

How do you model the difference between pushing through a Loose Stabilizer and doing the same with a Damaged Sensor Array?

As a first-order approximation, treat each crit as a simple hit and then compute the resulting value. You now have a minimum floor which you know the real value must be higher than. If you want more accuracy, then start working on higher order approximations.

"It's better to be approximately correct than precisely wrong." -- wise words from my doctoral advisor

If you understand the underlying fundamentals, you can do a simple sniff-test in under 60 seconds with the calculator on your phone to determine that Palpatine is undercosted.

How do you account, when reviewing game tape, for the fact that some people believe devoutly that you should go for Palpatine first--and more particularly, for the outsized effect that has on the game in the hands of a smart player?

This is a fundamental issue with using data analytics in nearly any competitive game system, and is not unique to evaluating Palpatine specifically, or even X-wing in general.

And once you've done that, suppose the quantitative work provides one effect estimate, and qualitative methods provide a substantially different one (which we can infer here from the fact that Palpatine was published at his current cost). How do you resolve the conflict?

Any qualitative method can ultimately be described in quantitative terms. X-wing is moneyball, and mathematics is the language that describes it.

There are dozens or hundreds of methods that you could use to try and make an argument one way or the other about game balance, both quantitative and qualitative. But mathematical reality is not a democracy, and most of those arguments won't hold water. It's not an issue of resolving differing data points, it's an issue of understanding the underlying fundamental theory and finding a method that reflects reality.

Likewise, playtesting prior to finalizing the design will yield dozens or hundreds of different data points and opinions. A good designer does not adjust his design to converge to the mob's "average consensus". A good designer is the smartest guy in the room and understands the game better than all of the playtesters combined. He understands the mechanisms and gears that make the game engine work, and he uses the playtesters to generate useful data passing through that machine that can be analyzed. He has more information than any of the playtesters due to both depth of knowledge and breadth of data.

FFG decided to cost Palpatine at 8 points. If that is intended as a qualitative argument that Palpatine is balanced at 8 points, then it is a very poor one. It is however evidence that they don't understand their game's underlying fundamentals well enough to precisely balance costs. This is already well-established from looking across the history of their releases. It's a difficult technical problem that very few designers in the industry, if any, are capable of solving, so I don't blame this on any specific FFG designer. I don't believe that they knew he was undercosted and shipped him anyway in order to sell physical product, but I suppose in general I shouldn't make that assumption.

3) Look at some real game tape, write down exactly what Palp does, and then try to assign a value to that.

Do you model those extra hit points that weren't taken away due to Palpatine as an increase or decrease in hull?

Is this a trick question?

No, just a particularly egregious copy-and-paste error.

If you understand the underlying fundamentals, you can do a simple sniff-test in under 60 seconds with the calculator on your phone to determine that Palpatine is undercosted.

I can and have. But selling that sniff-test to other people is a different issue, because the simplifications required to answer the question quickly and simply tend to be hard to justify.

That is, it's one thing to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and say to someone involved in building a complex system "this bit of your system might be be messed up". But even assuming they believe you and privilege your feedback, my experience has been that the inevitable follow-up is "okay, how do we fix it?" And if you don't have a precise answer immediately to hand, they go back to ignoring you.

Or at least that's what happens to me all too frequently. One of the advantages of working with circuits and code was that they were often stubborn, but they rarely argued with me; people and organizations come with prior commitments and ideologies that may or may not line up with your recommendations.

And once you've done that, suppose the quantitative work provides one effect estimate, and qualitative methods provide a substantially different one (which we can infer here from the fact that Palpatine was published at his current cost). How do you resolve the conflict?

Any qualitative method can ultimately be described in quantitative terms. X-wing is moneyball, and mathematics is the language that describes it.

I don't disagree with you that mathematics is the language of events in general and of X-wing in particular. What I mean--and perhaps in talking about quant and qual I've confused the matter rather than illuminating it--is that the question is what to do when you're sure the model reflects reality, and you're sure the people handing you information (whether it's a playtest or a survey) are telling you the truth as they see it, but the two sources don't agree.

I mean, you brought up moneyball and I think it's a really valuable example. It's been around demonstrating its value for literally decades, and yet you still see things like the Eagles drafting Wentz with the #2 overall pick. Every statistical tool says that's a dumb decision, but they did it anyway. And if Wentz plays approximately at replacement value in his first 2-3 years as a starter (whenever that is), the people who already don't trust quantitative modeling will take it as a victory for their team that he didn't turn into a complete stinker.

Or look at data-driven political analysis against traditional punditry. The polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination are essentially unchanged since December: the only major shifts have been in the number of candidates in the race, and those candidates' voters have redistributed themselves roughly as you'd expect from an a priori look at favorable/unfavorable numbers. But we've had to sit through five months of talk about "momentum" this and "Establishment" that in order to reach the conclusion that a farsighted person could have guessed in December and any reasonably numerate person should have predicted on March 2.

I'm not suggesting that you have, or should have, the answer to how to convince people to prioritize reasonably objective quantitative evidence over intuition and storytelling. All I'm saying is riffing off the idea that all you have to do is look at game tape of Palpatine and assign values to his effect: doing that is actually moderately difficult, and explaining what the result means and why it's important in a way that gets people to use your answer is really hard.

One thing I want to mention is that upgrades act as force multipliers for each other, and for 4 waves now the most effective strategy has been to stack as many of those upgrades together. Look at Dash. Is Dash with an HLC slapped on him really a wise use of 43 points? Not really. What if we add the Outrider title? Better use of 48 points than with just HLC at 43. And every upgrade you stack on him makes him more and more efficient.

The same thing is true of Acewings, especially Soontir Fel. So adding a Palp shuttle to two already efficient aces multiples their force immensely. They're already hyper-efficient for their cost.

So assuming that the shuttle never attacks and you're paying 29 points purely for Palpatine's effect, it's still efficient.

But in reality you're only paying 8 points for Palpatine, not 29. Because you're still getting an entire Shuttle. Shuttles are pretty good for their points.

I don't want to hear that obnoxious argument that, "it costs 60 points dude". Yeah, and Super Dash is efficient than 5 Academy Pilots, and a Palp Shuttle is a better use of 29 points in a Palp Aces squad than 2 Crack Squadrons. Your broken ship costing points is not an argument for why its not broken.

I'm also still astounded that everyone hates U-Boats when Palp Aces is a thing. Ugh, another top 4 that's all U-Boats. The upgrades that U-Boats use are too good when combined together? Nerf Deadeye, amirite? Isn't it obnoxious how they can always make their dice be 4/4 successes? Isn't it ridiculous that you have to take them into account when squad building, and how limiting it is to have to do so? U-Boats eliminated everything that countered Palp Aces from the meta!

I just want all you anti-U-Boat players to know that you're being inconsistent and that you're biased (probably because you play Palp Aces yourself). If all I had to deal with were U-Boats, triple Black Eight Squadron of all lists would be playable. Can't do that though, it would autolose to Palp Aces.

If you understand the underlying fundamentals, you can do a simple sniff-test in under 60 seconds with the calculator on your phone to determine that Palpatine is undercosted.

I can and have. But selling that sniff-test to other people is a different issue, because the simplifications required to answer the question quickly and simply tend to be hard to justify.

It doesn't have to be. If you can relate the specifics back to a known model then sometimes you can make it fit quite easily. For example, apply Lanchester's Square Law: in any combat system a unit's combat power is proportional to the square root of its expected damage output times its expected durability. A more accurate model will differ slightly (and it does for X-wing), but you have to accept that well-established premise as a first-order baseline. If they don't accept that first order approximation, then save yourself some time and give up now because any further discussion will be pointless.

Example:

3) Look at some real game tape, write down exactly what Palp does, and then try to assign a value to that. For example, lets say that over the course of a game Palpatine saves Fel from 1 damage, saves Inquisitor from 2 damage, and pushes a crit through on an enemy ship, killing it before it can fire. That's a fairly average use of Palp in any given game, and is easily worth about 20 points.

Blocking 1 damage on Fel:

Soontir Fel at 3 HP = 35 points of value

Soontir Fel at 4 HP = 35*(4/3)^0.5 = 40.4 points of value

value added: 5.4 points*

*It's actually worth more because Fel is relatively more durable before his stealth device goes away

Blocking 2 damage on The Inquisitor:

The Inquisitor at 4 HP = 31 points of value

The Inquisitor at 6 HP = 31*(6/4)^0.5 = 38.0 points of value

value added: 7 points

Doing 1 damage to a BroBot killing it:

BroBot at 8 HP = 50 points of value

BroBot at 7 HP = 50*(7/8)^0.5 = 46.7 points of value

value added: 3.3 points, PLUS not getting shot at

Total value:

>5.4 + 7.0 + 3.3 + [not getting shot at] =

>15.7 + [not getting shot at]

So the first-order approximation is already at a minimum of 15.7 points of value out of Palpatine, and hasn't even included:

• Fel's value is worth more because his stealth device is still intact
• Not getting shot at is worth something

So it's pretty simple to explain and justify that Palp is undercosted. You can really dig into it and get more accurate analytics and models, but that's only going to further reinforce the conclusion from this initial estimate.

That is, it's one thing to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and say to someone involved in building a complex system "this bit of your system might be be messed up". But even assuming they believe you and privilege your feedback, my experience has been that the inevitable follow-up is "okay, how do we fix it?" And if you don't have a precise answer immediately to hand, they go back to ignoring you.

Do you not have an answer, or is it merely difficult to communicate?

The problem with balancing Palp is there is literally no downside to using him, so determining his viability is a straight-up numbers comparison. Because the Imperial Aces all have low health, high AGI, Palp will always come out on top with a positive net value unless he is priced ridiculously high like 16 points. If you want an effective ban-hammer just for Palpatine, errata the card to add the following at the end of his text:

"Then receive one stress token."

This way, the Palp carrier gets gets stuck with a stress every turn he gets used. This dramatically adversely affects the carrier's tactical options and potentially jousting efficiency as well. Also, in epic this results in no change if he's on a huge ship, since huge ships can't be assigned stress.

If you're philosophically opposed to directly nerfing Palpatine, then the only other option is to buff every other single ship in the game. Given that the entire game needs to be rebalanced right now, this might not be such a bad approach... assuming that the designers know what they're doing this time around.

I'm not suggesting that you have, or should have, the answer to how to convince people to prioritize reasonably objective quantitative evidence over intuition and storytelling. All I'm saying is riffing off the idea that all you have to do is look at game tape of Palpatine and assign values to his effect: doing that is actually moderately difficult, and explaining what the result means and why it's important in a way that gets people to use your answer is really hard.

To me the real question is not "how" to convince someone, but rather "why"?

Convincing a friend in casual conversation?

You have enough time and rapport to have a reasonable conversation. No problems here.

Convincing a random person or group of people on the internet?

No constructive output in sight. Good luck.

Convincing the game designer to learn the error of their ways?

The game designer is supposed to be the smartest guy in the room (see earlier post), so if the game designers need educating, then there are bigger problems to deal with. This is just a symptom.

Im 6-0 when the shuttle is not the first target. I havent even run palp with Fel yet.

@ MJ:

How does Palps value change in Epic and Cinematic play? At say, 500 points?

Look, I fundamentally disagree with you that the game designer is the 'smartest guy in the room.'

He's the guy with the creative spark, the one who goes, "Well, wouldn't this be neat if we could do this?" and the drive (or ego, or self-confidence) to push forward until his vision becomes reality.

Think back to Gary Gygax. What he made with Chainmail and then adapting Chainmail to a tabletop RPG has had TREMENDOUS impact, but he was in no way the smartest guy in the room - his games had holes, terrible holes, and he had enough ego to push through his design but also to CLING to it until he was pushed out. What other people took and added to his game has MADE it... acceptable, but my problem with D&D is that at its core it has meaningless numbers and useless mechanics - for example, why even bother writing down whether a character's strength is 16 or 17, when the important bit is the +3? But without that bit of legacy code, is it still D&D?

What other people add is editing potential - filtering bad ideas and reinforcing good ideas. Having THOSE guys be the smartest, most analytical in the room, capable of pointing to Creative Guy why that is good and this is bad, is what you need - creatives often don't analyze themselves well, and occasionally get hung up on bad ideas they insist are good despite every bit of evidence to the contrary.

Edit: added the bit about drive, ego, and/or self-confidence - often they seem interchangable to me.

The problem with balancing Palp is there is literally no downside to using him, so determining his viability is a straight-up numbers comparison. Because the Imperial Aces all have low health, high AGI, Palp will always come out on top with a positive net value unless he is priced ridiculously high like 16 points. If you want an effective ban-hammer just for Palpatine, errata the card to add the following at the end of his text:

Well, therefore there is a points value between 8 and 16 where you might say "yeah, I might buy palp, but I might just buy another fighter". At that point, I would say it is balanced.

Overall, I'm not too concerned about palp. Without palp, you never really saw shuttles and imperial aces, while a common build, rarely won tournaments in my experience. Often place highly, very rarely won because sooner or later the dice go cold and they die. Palp papers over that issue and makes the shuttle viable. Not only that but he's brought Imperials to a top tier build and when I started it was "play rebels or go home" so it seems better than that now.

This question of the difference between "overpowered" and "good enough to make the list viable". I would argue palp and the shuttle are good enough but I'm not convinced they're really underpointed by more than a few points at most. Palp aces really rely on the points-efficiency of omega leader, soontir, wampa or inquisitor. Without these combos palp is not that amazing (not bad, a dice change will be useful in any list) but not that soul-destroying "and now you didn't hit soontir after all".

The thing is, Palp aces is pretty dead in the water versus a good stress build. However, all competent stress builds that really layered on the stress have gone the way of the Dodo with Uboats on the table. I imagine someone will come up with a new way to deal stress that will scare Aces away.

palp as he stands now would have been perfect at 10 points, I think. With some of the 2 ace builds, you'd lose the initiative bid, which is HUGE. If Soontir gets caught in multiple arcs, his tokens and Palp can only help for so long. You'd also lose most of the popular 3 ace builds.

His value is relative to the ships he supports, and limiting those ships or their initiative bids would have been sufficient. The boat has sailed on that, though.

The stress errata might be a simple fix, but I don't really like it. If they could make it so you have to declare before rolling your dice that you're going to use him, that would be better. It's a similar issue to pre-nerf phantoms: the players with those cards had all the info and did not need to commit to something until after they knew the board state. Experienced Palp users wait until they "need" to use him--he essentially can't be wasted for no gain.

Something like:

"Once per round, [instead of rolling a die,] you may [set that] friendly ship's die result to any other die result. That die result cannot be modified again."

This way you use Palp before having the benefit of seeing how the dice come up first.

Look, I fundamentally disagree with you that the game designer is the 'smartest guy in the room.'

He's the guy with the creative spark, the one who goes, "Well, wouldn't this be neat if we could do this?" and the drive (or ego, or self-confidence) to push forward until his vision becomes reality.

The two are not mutually exclusive, and the design team can be big enough that one person can be the creative lead, while another is a technical lead. But the point remains that if you want to have a balanced game, then someone in the design team has to be The Guy that "gets it". If you don't, then playtesting will be the blind leading the blind.

Well, therefore there is a points value between 8 and 16 where you might say "yeah, I might buy palp, but I might just buy another fighter". At that point, I would say it is balanced.

Yeah. That's the brute-force solution to the problem.

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

2) Prior to Palpatine the only viable aces were Soontir and Whisper. Now there is also:

• Vader
• Omega Leader
• The Inquisitor
• Vessery

Palp + 2 aces is generally still better than any 3-ace list, but look for more pure ace squads to start popping up on top tables as the number of viable options and permutations increases.

Palpatine was definitely a mistake, and started a trend of ever increasing card power. He doesn't need a nerf though, just some really good Rebel cards to balance him out.

I think Rebels got some pretty **** awesome cards with the Ghost expansion. And I don't think Palp is more powerful, point for point, than say Dengar, who is amazing. And I think more troubling is the proliferation of 0 point cards. Empty crew slot? Chopper. Empty EPT? Adaptability. Etc. While I get there's an "opportunity cost" of not taking a better card for that slot, it remains a 0 point upgrade that provides a distinct and quite often reasonably significant advantage. Old Poe with Adaptability is, what, three points cheaper than New Poe? So essentially, you're paying a 3-point premium to take New Poe with an EPT. That's a lot, really, and there's not really much evidence that you really pay a lot for the opportunity to take an EPT, for example. Especially with new ships with a bucket-load of slots, the jumpmasters being a prime example, where for some undisclosed reason they all have EPT slots and a large collection of other slots leading to a large number of possible combos. All of which is more problematic, I would say, than just the Emperor card.

tournament results would vastly disagree with you there

Palpatine was definitely a mistake, and started a trend of ever increasing card power. He doesn't need a nerf though, just some really good Rebel cards to balance him out.

Last thing we need is a Rebel version of Palpatine. Let's stop this ridiculous power creep chain Jesus Christ, we do not need, "just some really good Rebel cards to balance him out."

You should not be able to "guess" zero with C-3PO. Palpatine should only work on attack dice. I look at cards like Fleet Officer or Weapons Engineer and they're well balanced, interesting cards that don't ruin the game and have costs associated with them, like having to spend an action/gain a stress. Fleet Officer is range 1-2 only, and Weapons Engineer is limited to the range of your TL.

But C-3PO or Palpatine? Nope, no thought required. They just always work, and Palpatine works no matter what range. That's not very well designed or interesting.

Also I'm sick of Rebel players complaining about how they don't have anything good because U-Boats took it all. There is more to playing Rebels than Fat Turrets and regen ships. Firstly, fat turrets are still good, especially Dash. Secondly, you guys now have a ship that has 16 health and costs 35 points base. Biggs with R4-D6 can tank 3 Torpedoes. Kanan's pilot ability is obnoxious. Rebels have options, you just need to put thought into building a list now instead of smearing ice cream on your face and waking up hours later in top 8.

tournament results would vastly disagree with you there

What tournament results would vastly disagree with who where? Vague post is vague

tournament results would vastly disagree with you there

Newsflash: lists start winning more when you let another one make all of their counters unplayable.

Indeed. The comparative strength of cards is very meta dependent for a lot of cards. I never saw Deadeye, ever. Ever. Now suddenly it's everywhere and not just on U-boats.

Or look at data-driven political analysis against traditional punditry. The polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination are essentially unchanged since December:

I would not use political polls as examples

because they aren't always reliable. A few times Sanders has won a state against the poll's predictions.

more on the discussion's topic, and following along the lines of what MajorJuggler says, I think it's fair to say that game designers like FFG hire specific talents with a certain set of creative abilities. they probably don't think it's necessary to hire a quantitative analyst with a PhD in physics, math or similar expertise in statistical and quantitative analysis to help in the design process.

more on the discussion's topic, and following along the lines of what MajorJuggler says, I think it's fair to say that game designers like FFG hire specific talents with a certain set of creative abilities. they probably don't think it's necessary to hire a quantitative analyst with a PhD in physics, math or similar expertise in statistical and quantitative analysis to help in the design process.

More they don't have the money to hire someone like that. Those skillsets do not come cheap, and FFG would not have the profit margin to afford to actually employ them.

more on the discussion's topic, and following along the lines of what MajorJuggler says, I think it's fair to say that game designers like FFG hire specific talents with a certain set of creative abilities. they probably don't think it's necessary to hire a quantitative analyst with a PhD in physics, math or similar expertise in statistical and quantitative analysis to help in the design process.

More they don't have the money to hire someone like that. Those skillsets do not come cheap, and FFG would not have the profit margin to afford to actually employ them.

It's probably also a cost vs.benefit issue. It's not a given that hiring a math guy and spending the resources to do in -depth balancing will result in a proportional financial gain to FFG.