I would argue the balance issue is based on the the fact that the only objective of competitive play is Deathmatch, while it may seem like only having one game mode, would make it easier to balance it really is the opposite.(...)

Granted it is easy for me to say that adding more scenarios and the like to competitive play would make things easier but there is the issue of having to balance who chooses the objectives, what the objectives are, and how things would work in a thematic sense (IE a typical territory/objective take and hold scenario that is a staple of ground based games doesn't really work in a dogfight setting since the ships are constantly moving and can't camp an objective) which if FFG could pull off would be amazing but would take a lot of work and play testing

Design me a mission where a list of very mobile, invincible ships that are strong offensively wouldn't just dominate anyways.

I hear this idea often on these forums as some sort of magic fix for the meta, but I haven't seen any ideas for actual missions.

The meta likely wouldn't change much unless certain objectives forced you to play certain ships.

Escort of a feeble convoy (autoloss with loss of convoy) is a challenge even for this kind of ships. Offensively good stuff is often bad at protecting.

That said, it would help only slightly. If the desigm has already moved itself into this corner, its difficult to get out if there.

Wave X really too early to say something yet (remember we even have HotR there lurking, which might shift things). Quadjumper is gimmicky, but probably a lot of fun, and nice or scenarios. But I am a bit wary of the Upsilon, 4dice and coordinate - could be like "thought you finally blocked my highly mobile superace, nope it gets help from the shuttle".

There's really not a lot of ways to actually protect another ship in this game in a direct sense and basically the only ship that would be good for it would be Biggs.. a ship that already sees play with the alpha strike. Otherwise it just becomes "kill the enemy really fast" and well the triple jumps are good at that.

The ships that are good in this game are multifaceted and have a lot of game in a lot of situations and missions wouldn't really change that unless you legislated against it. If you wanted to make missions a thing in this game you'd have to design a lot of upgrades around them and then I think they'd work.

Yep, if you do protect mission, I think you have to follow the path of HotAC and give ships a "protect" action to assign tokens to specific ship to protect. Maybe focus tokens, and not evade, since it would be too easy for a swarm to protect a ship.

When a ship is new, voluntarily make it a little (at least) better that its counterparts already present ? Not "balancing" either.

When a ship is new, voluntarily make it a little (at least) better that its counterparts already present ? Not "balancing" either.

Wrong. If none of the ship's counterparts already in game are seeing any play because they're not good enough, then NOT making the new ship better than them will only result in that ship not seeing play either.

So better make a new one with better stats than fix the old ones ? Good for sales, but not really for overall balance of the ships...

When a ship is new, voluntarily make it a little (at least) better that its counterparts already present ? Not "balancing" either.

Wrong. If none of the ship's counterparts already in game are seeing any play because they're not good enough, then NOT making the new ship better than them will only result in that ship not seeing play either.

So better make a new one with better stats than fix the old ones ? Good for sales, but not really for overall balance of the ships...

If you know old ship A is underpowered and needs a fix, all you get by NOT making new ship B better than A is that B will be DOA, underpowered and in need of a fix from day 1.

Look at Kihraxz for example. They didn't make it better as the x-wing so no power creep there. The result? The ship is in need of a fix every bit as much as the x-wing, possibly even more if you think about Integrated Astromech, Wes and Biggs. Is this what you think FFG should do ?

When a ship is new, voluntarily make it a little (at least) better that its counterparts already present ? Not "balancing" either.

This is again operating from a false assumption: this time that the game is balanced already. New ships are balanced to the TIE fighter: ships that are underpowered remain underpowered regardless. Making the new ships underpowered too just results in two weak ships.

I don't think K-fighter is sh*tty because FFG didn't want to stamp on the T65's glory; I think they just f..ed up, like they did for the statline of the HWK, if you want a good example.
People here seem to think FFG's guys working on X-wing are super witty and everything in that game is the result of a long reflexion process (I did too at the beginning on that game). But you know what? I don't think it's the case. Especially for the latest waves, with new game mechanics thrown at your faces every two month, without taking the time to make proper use of the previous one. No wonder it coincides with the arrival of ships from a TV show for 7yo.
Lately, the way I see X-wing is a game crawling under its own weight, with FFG trying to make the most possible of it before it collapses and they have to give us a V2.

When a ship is new, voluntarily make it a little (at least) better that its counterparts already present ? Not "balancing" either.

This is again operating from a false assumption: this time that the game is balanced already. New ships are balanced to the TIE fighter: ships that are underpowered remain underpowered regardless. Making the new ships underpowered too just results in two weak ships.

What you say is true, however, I won't say scouts or Dengaroo are balanced to the TIE fighter. Neither are Palp Aces.

Edit : maybe you're right, and they should have taken the TIE fighter up to 14pts a long time ago. Again, buffs and no nerfs...

What you say is true, however, I won't say scouts or Dengaroo are balanced to the TIE fighter. Neither are Palp Aces.

PalpAces has been around since the Raider came out in (irrc) late Wave 6. It was at Wave 7 Worlds and didn't even make the final: it's not in of itself overpowered.

Contracted Scout is a perfect storm: apparently they didn't see Deadeye coming. Scoutspam has already been nerfed once.

The problem with Scoutspam is very Phantom vs Fat Falcon-esque: PalpAces has only become the monster it is because the lists that suppressed it (anything that's not raw maximised jousting or arc-dodging power) can't handle TorpScout's obscene firepower combined with its limited arcdodging immunity. Neither would be the problem they are in the absence of the other.

Dengaroo I don't think would thrive outside of the current inbred meta.

Crackswarm, one of the few lists that survives in the current meta, is the TIE fighter.

True on Palp Aces counters. However I personally think that this much defensive abilities on high-PS repositionning beasts is OP.

Crackswarm is not a "vanilla" TIE fighter, it's been buffed by both Crack Shot and Black Squadrons. Even the TIEs needed a buff, apparently.

Crack shot isn't really a tie buff, it's just a good ept vs high agility aces, and helps against everything else. Tie swarms have never really been made up of vanilla ties ever, unless your going for 8 in a squad.

The only elements of power creep I see that's hurting the game, WE actually were asking for, and that's munitions to be worth it and well.....they are now lol, but in combo with Deadeye it just makes a killer jouster, one that's hard to beat unless you have good defense in one way or another. Palp is really strong but really didn't make his grip on the game till scouts pushed out the rebels and regen and tlt

Just out of curiosity, what annoys people more...insane offense (mass crackshots, multiple ordnance/HLC, TLT's, gunner, predator, etc), or insane defense (high agility, multiple tokens, auto thrusters, palp, regen, etc)

Obviously both can possibly lead to a negative play experience, but for me insane defense is worse. With offense at least the game goes quick, and if it's going bad you don't have to endure it for long. With defense you might go the whole game doing hardly any damage only to get plinked away to death, or worse go to time and lose because you lost as little as a single cheap ship. Even worse is regen where you might actually have killed a ship twice over in terms of hits getting through, but they regenned a ton of shields back so they were never that close to dying.

Just out of curiosity, what annoys people more...insane offense (mass crackshots, multiple ordnance/HLC, TLT's, gunner, predator, etc), or insane defense (high agility, multiple tokens, auto thrusters, palp, regen, etc)

Obviously both can possibly lead to a negative play experience, but for me insane defense is worse. With offense at least the game goes quick, and if it's going bad you don't have to endure it for long. With defense you might go the whole game doing hardly any damage only to get plinked away to death, or worse go to time and lose because you lost as little as a single cheap ship. Even worse is regen where you might actually have killed a ship twice over in terms of hits getting through, but they regenned a ton of shields back so they were never that close to dying.

Unless it's a power RAC or something, insane offense can be more easily played around by getting into certain range bands or asteroid placement or PS bids or whatever.

But if someone's ship is just invincible there is nothing you can do.

You're very correct btw. This is why there is such backlash against U-Boats, but not as much against Palp Aces. U-Boats can wipe half an opponent's list in one volley and decisively end the game turn 2. A player facing Palp Aces is just as screwed if not more so, but they go through the motions of playing the game for longer against it, and they have the illusion that they're still playing the game when in reality their attack rolls and maneuver dials don't matter.

Games against U-Boats that go awry are quick deaths. A game against Palp Aces is like being stranded in the desert, and unbeknownst to you the water in your canteen leaked out a while ago. You get thirsty so you go for a drink and it's all gone.

I say the place to start when trying to balance the game is Evade dice. They are armor disguised as speed. And that doesn't work well.

It works excellent as metaphor for the game. Interceptors are the thing which is supposed to evade incoming fire from a single attacker even when that attacker gets you in arc. They are that agile and star wars laser cannon projectiles are that slow and visible to allow for that with ease. The alternative would be to decrease arc size or give agile ships post maneuver movement like the phantom used to have. Do you remember who well this went because it feels so freaking unfair?

We have agility as metaphor for that and smaller post maneuver movement to represent getting better attack angles thanks to your superior agility, It works just fine. Get multiple angles on the same ship and you get past their agility, past their defensive tokens and dice. Or bring autoblasters, and the other ace counters. It is really working beautifully within the game metaphors and represents the X-Wing dogfights from the old Lucas Arts games and Legends X-Wing books very well. Maybe Wedges ability is a little too weak, maybe he should decrease enemy ships agility by two and be even a little more expensive. But the general idea and mechanics work great.

I disagree. A ship that is effective at evading fire through maneuvers should survive by staying out of the line of fire. Not by sitting in an enemy's line of fire and tanking the damage due to magical "I'm fast" armor. They can't simply fly right into enemy guns and magically not get hit. Especially if they are as large a target as Imperial fighters are with their large solar panels.

Look at a head-on or profile view of a Y-Wing (1 Evade) compared to any Tie (3 evade). Which do you think would be easier to hit? Y-Wing is an ultra narrow dart. I tell you I'd much rather be shooting at a Tie Fighter than a Y-Wing.

Target profile from the front is super small, just a few m², against flanking the target profile would be indeed disadvantages. And we are talking about a 90° "line" of fire, not a real line. If you decrease the fire arcs to something much smaller, sure those barrel rolls gonna be enough to represent the high agility of the TIE-Interceptor.

Besides, agility is not representing the target profile, but the combination of small movement and target profile. Those evades rolled are exactly that, evading incoming fire. That focus spend on defense is exactly that, a special focus on evading.

Hitting a Y-Wing is target practise, because you are shooting at a basically stationary target. Shooting an interceptor with a single ship is an exercise in patience as you only chance to hit the thing is when the pilots fumbles to evade that slow incoming shots. Why? Because the interceptor pilot has lateral thrust which rivals his forward thrust, while the Y-Wing has a lot less thrust avaible in general and thus can not change his flight vector fast in any significant way.

Star Wars Dogfighting in interceptors is more like dodgeball than lasertag, incoming fire is slow, visible and avoidable for the most part, auto-blasters with their ability to spray are here the exception and even that is represented in the game. Now you could argue that Y-Wings should have not only one, but two agility instead, but the basic idea of the ships in X-Wing is mostly based on X-Wing, which makes the Y-Wing a lot less agile than it used to be in TCW.

I think people make too much of the Y-Wing's sluggish handling. It's slow by fighter standards. That means it's still a pretty agile ship. It's no wallowing tub begging to get shot down. And it is certainly no "Stationary target"

There is no reason a Y-Wing should have 1 Evade whilst a ship such as a YT2400 should have 2.

Anyways, back to actual game mechanics. Ships are balanced with the assumption that some ships move well and some ships take hits well. Agile ships like a Tie Intercepter have great movement dials because we are under the assumption that if they take hits they will die. Ships such as a Y-Wing have crappier movement dials because it's assumed they will be tanking most of the damage rather than avoiding it.

And yet with the state of the game, ships that should be tanking damage are getting torn to shreds whilst ships that should be avoiding damage are both avoiding it and tanking it.

For the sake of balance a ship should be very defensive or very aggressive or occasionally jack of all trades master of none. That way it's a conscious choice between a glass cannon or a turtle. You should not be able to have your cake and eat it too in the way you can with ships such as Tie Interceptors or Tie Phantoms.

I say the place to start when trying to balance the game is Evade dice. They are armor disguised as speed. And that doesn't work well.

It works excellent as metaphor for the game. Interceptors are the thing which is supposed to evade incoming fire from a single attacker even when that attacker gets you in arc. They are that agile and star wars laser cannon projectiles are that slow and visible to allow for that with ease. The alternative would be to decrease arc size or give agile ships post maneuver movement like the phantom used to have. Do you remember who well this went because it feels so freaking unfair?

We have agility as metaphor for that and smaller post maneuver movement to represent getting better attack angles thanks to your superior agility, It works just fine. Get multiple angles on the same ship and you get past their agility, past their defensive tokens and dice. Or bring autoblasters, and the other ace counters. It is really working beautifully within the game metaphors and represents the X-Wing dogfights from the old Lucas Arts games and Legends X-Wing books very well. Maybe Wedges ability is a little too weak, maybe he should decrease enemy ships agility by two and be even a little more expensive. But the general idea and mechanics work great.

I disagree. A ship that is effective at evading fire through maneuvers should survive by staying out of the line of fire. Not by sitting in an enemy's line of fire and tanking the damage due to magical "I'm fast" armor. They can't simply fly right into enemy guns and magically not get hit. Especially if they are as large a target as Imperial fighters are with their large solar panels.

Look at a head-on or profile view of a Y-Wing (1 Evade) compared to any Tie (3 evade). Which do you think would be easier to hit? Y-Wing is an ultra narrow dart. I tell you I'd much rather be shooting at a Tie Fighter than a Y-Wing.

Target profile from the front is super small, just a few m², against flanking the target profile would be indeed disadvantages. And we are talking about a 90° "line" of fire, not a real line. If you decrease the fire arcs to something much smaller, sure those barrel rolls gonna be enough to represent the high agility of the TIE-Interceptor.

Besides, agility is not representing the target profile, but the combination of small movement and target profile. Those evades rolled are exactly that, evading incoming fire. That focus spend on defense is exactly that, a special focus on evading.

Hitting a Y-Wing is target practise, because you are shooting at a basically stationary target. Shooting an interceptor with a single ship is an exercise in patience as you only chance to hit the thing is when the pilots fumbles to evade that slow incoming shots. Why? Because the interceptor pilot has lateral thrust which rivals his forward thrust, while the Y-Wing has a lot less thrust avaible in general and thus can not change his flight vector fast in any significant way.

Star Wars Dogfighting in interceptors is more like dodgeball than lasertag, incoming fire is slow, visible and avoidable for the most part, auto-blasters with their ability to spray are here the exception and even that is represented in the game. Now you could argue that Y-Wings should have not only one, but two agility instead, but the basic idea of the ships in X-Wing is mostly based on X-Wing, which makes the Y-Wing a lot less agile than it used to be in TCW.

I think people make too much of the Y-Wing's sluggish handling. It's slow by fighter standards. That means it's still a pretty agile ship. It's no wallowing tub begging to get shot down. And it is certainly no "Stationary target"

There is no reason a Y-Wing should have 1 Evade whilst a ship such as a YT2400 should have 2.

Anyways, back to actual game mechanics. Ships are balanced with the assumption that some ships move well and some ships take hits well. Agile ships like a Tie Intercepter have great movement dials because we are under the assumption that if they take hits they will die. Ships such as a Y-Wing have crappier movement dials because it's assumed they will be tanking most of the damage rather than avoiding it.

And yet with the state of the game, ships that should be tanking damage are getting torn to shreds whilst ships that should be avoiding damage are both avoiding it and tanking it.

For the sake of balance a ship should be very defensive or very aggressive or occasionally jack of all trades master of none. That way it's a conscious choice between a glass cannon or a turtle. You should not be able to have your cake and eat it too in the way you can with ships such as Tie Interceptors or Tie Phantoms.

Imho the YT-2400 has a better thrust to weight ratio than the Y-Wing, especially on its lateral thrusters. And thus two agility is appropriate. You might agree with his or disagree, but the game mechanics at least agree with that.

Your argument that ships like the Y-Wing should be able to take some fire, while Interceptors should not holds true, the issue here is that you ignore that ships like the interceptor are supposed to be mostly unimpressed by a single shot and go indeed down quickly if you can focus fire them and strip their defensive tokens. Palpatine changes this dynamic for 100pts games, which you again may like or dislike, but is at least thematically fitting. And the reason why he can do this in 100pts games, but not in epic is simply because small skirmishes are not large enough to bring enough guns on a target.

Let me back this up with some math: If 3 X-Wings shoot an interceptor which is tokened up with focus and evade, and you have focus/tl on them, you indeed have a decent chance to bring it down. Meanwhile three interceptors with focus will only do 3.5 damage against a X-Wing which has one focus and its two green dice. Even against Y-Wings they do just 6 damage, while TLT Ys do about 2.7 damage out of arc and BTL Ys can do about 5 damage to turtled interceptors.

And that is with Y-Wings which suffer imho greatly from being totally underpowered in the fire-power department. They are supposed to be the big guns which get escorted by X-Wings or ARCs, but FFG decided to give them just two attack dice and lose their turret ability completely when they want to shoot with their turret and primary guns in one turn. Still the metaphor for the damage mitigation and avoidance works even with them imho. The balance might be not right, especially when you bring autoblasters into the game, but the basic mechanic seems fine.

True on Palp Aces counters. However I personally think that this much defensive abilities on high-PS repositionning beasts is OP.

Crackswarm is not a "vanilla" TIE fighter, it's been buffed by both Crack Shot and Black Squadrons. Even the TIEs needed a buff, apparently.

You know Black Squadron Pilot is core set, right?

Crackswarm has less raw firepower than an Academy Pilot swarm but has higher pilot skill and is a little better at penetrating agility defence thanks to Crackshot: it's a TIE swarm tailored to counter the current metagame. It would probably be less effective than an old-style swarm against low agility squadrons.

True on Palp Aces counters. However I personally think that this much defensive abilities on high-PS repositionning beasts is OP.

Crackswarm is not a "vanilla" TIE fighter, it's been buffed by both Crack Shot and Black Squadrons. Even the TIEs needed a buff, apparently.

You know Black Squadron Pilot is core set, right?

Crackswarm has less raw firepower than an Academy Pilot swarm but has higher pilot skill and is a little better at penetrating agility defence thanks to Crackshot: it's a TIE swarm tailored to counter the current metagame. It would probably be less effective than an old-style swarm against low agility squadrons.

Erf, my bad for the Blacks, I thought they came with the gozanti (I play rebls only and didn't use to see them before).

Yes, Crack Shot is better against highly defensive targets. Without it (and maybe Juke), 2 attack-dice ships would be even more outdated.

I say the place to start when trying to balance the game is Evade dice. They are armor disguised as speed. And that doesn't work well.

It works excellent as metaphor for the game. Interceptors are the thing which is supposed to evade incoming fire from a single attacker even when that attacker gets you in arc. They are that agile and star wars laser cannon projectiles are that slow and visible to allow for that with ease. The alternative would be to decrease arc size or give agile ships post maneuver movement like the phantom used to have. Do you remember who well this went because it feels so freaking unfair?

We have agility as metaphor for that and smaller post maneuver movement to represent getting better attack angles thanks to your superior agility, It works just fine. Get multiple angles on the same ship and you get past their agility, past their defensive tokens and dice. Or bring autoblasters, and the other ace counters. It is really working beautifully within the game metaphors and represents the X-Wing dogfights from the old Lucas Arts games and Legends X-Wing books very well. Maybe Wedges ability is a little too weak, maybe he should decrease enemy ships agility by two and be even a little more expensive. But the general idea and mechanics work great.

I disagree. A ship that is effective at evading fire through maneuvers should survive by staying out of the line of fire. Not by sitting in an enemy's line of fire and tanking the damage due to magical "I'm fast" armor. They can't simply fly right into enemy guns and magically not get hit. Especially if they are as large a target as Imperial fighters are with their large solar panels.

Look at a head-on or profile view of a Y-Wing (1 Evade) compared to any Tie (3 evade). Which do you think would be easier to hit? Y-Wing is an ultra narrow dart. I tell you I'd much rather be shooting at a Tie Fighter than a Y-Wing.

Target profile from the front is super small, just a few m², against flanking the target profile would be indeed disadvantages. And we are talking about a 90° "line" of fire, not a real line. If you decrease the fire arcs to something much smaller, sure those barrel rolls gonna be enough to represent the high agility of the TIE-Interceptor.

Besides, agility is not representing the target profile, but the combination of small movement and target profile. Those evades rolled are exactly that, evading incoming fire. That focus spend on defense is exactly that, a special focus on evading.

Hitting a Y-Wing is target practise, because you are shooting at a basically stationary target. Shooting an interceptor with a single ship is an exercise in patience as you only chance to hit the thing is when the pilots fumbles to evade that slow incoming shots. Why? Because the interceptor pilot has lateral thrust which rivals his forward thrust, while the Y-Wing has a lot less thrust avaible in general and thus can not change his flight vector fast in any significant way.

Star Wars Dogfighting in interceptors is more like dodgeball than lasertag, incoming fire is slow, visible and avoidable for the most part, auto-blasters with their ability to spray are here the exception and even that is represented in the game. Now you could argue that Y-Wings should have not only one, but two agility instead, but the basic idea of the ships in X-Wing is mostly based on X-Wing, which makes the Y-Wing a lot less agile than it used to be in TCW.

I think people make too much of the Y-Wing's sluggish handling. It's slow by fighter standards. That means it's still a pretty agile ship. It's no wallowing tub begging to get shot down. And it is certainly no "Stationary target"

There is no reason a Y-Wing should have 1 Evade whilst a ship such as a YT2400 should have 2.

Anyways, back to actual game mechanics. Ships are balanced with the assumption that some ships move well and some ships take hits well. Agile ships like a Tie Intercepter have great movement dials because we are under the assumption that if they take hits they will die. Ships such as a Y-Wing have crappier movement dials because it's assumed they will be tanking most of the damage rather than avoiding it.

And yet with the state of the game, ships that should be tanking damage are getting torn to shreds whilst ships that should be avoiding damage are both avoiding it and tanking it.

For the sake of balance a ship should be very defensive or very aggressive or occasionally jack of all trades master of none. That way it's a conscious choice between a glass cannon or a turtle. You should not be able to have your cake and eat it too in the way you can with ships such as Tie Interceptors or Tie Phantoms.

Imho the YT-2400 has a better thrust to weight ratio than the Y-Wing, especially on its lateral thrusters. And thus two agility is appropriate. You might agree with his or disagree, but the game mechanics at least agree with that.

Better thrust to weight or not, that thing is a huge target and I do not see it being difficult to hit no matter how quickly it can change heading. And considering Y-Wings are like 2/3 engines I find it difficult to believe they have low thrust to weight ratio.

Your argument that ships like the Y-Wing should be able to take some fire, while Interceptors should not holds true, the issue here is that you ignore that ships like the interceptor are supposed to be mostly unimpressed by a single shot and go indeed down quickly if you can focus fire them and strip their defensive tokens.

And you think Y-Wings are supposed to impressed single shots?

Heck, with their shields, agility and swiveling lasers, A-Wings are supposed to be able to destroy Ties. In X-Wing they have trouble damaging anything with 3 evade.

Let me back this up with some math: If 3 X-Wings shoot an interceptor which is tokened up with focus and evade, and you have focus/tl on them, you indeed have a decent chance to bring it down. Meanwhile three interceptors with focus will only do 3.5 damage against a X-Wing which has one focus and its two green dice. Even against Y-Wings they do just 6 damage, while TLT Ys do about 2.7 damage out of arc and BTL Ys can do about 5 damage to turtled interceptors.

And how does all that damage figure when you consider point costs?

I say the place to start when trying to balance the game is Evade dice. They are armor disguised as speed. And that doesn't work well.

It works excellent as metaphor for the game. Interceptors are the thing which is supposed to evade incoming fire from a single attacker even when that attacker gets you in arc. They are that agile and star wars laser cannon projectiles are that slow and visible to allow for that with ease. The alternative would be to decrease arc size or give agile ships post maneuver movement like the phantom used to have. Do you remember who well this went because it feels so freaking unfair?

We have agility as metaphor for that and smaller post maneuver movement to represent getting better attack angles thanks to your superior agility, It works just fine. Get multiple angles on the same ship and you get past their agility, past their defensive tokens and dice. Or bring autoblasters, and the other ace counters. It is really working beautifully within the game metaphors and represents the X-Wing dogfights from the old Lucas Arts games and Legends X-Wing books very well. Maybe Wedges ability is a little too weak, maybe he should decrease enemy ships agility by two and be even a little more expensive. But the general idea and mechanics work great.

I disagree. A ship that is effective at evading fire through maneuvers should survive by staying out of the line of fire. Not by sitting in an enemy's line of fire and tanking the damage due to magical "I'm fast" armor. They can't simply fly right into enemy guns and magically not get hit. Especially if they are as large a target as Imperial fighters are with their large solar panels.

Look at a head-on or profile view of a Y-Wing (1 Evade) compared to any Tie (3 evade). Which do you think would be easier to hit? Y-Wing is an ultra narrow dart. I tell you I'd much rather be shooting at a Tie Fighter than a Y-Wing.

Target profile from the front is super small, just a few m², against flanking the target profile would be indeed disadvantages. And we are talking about a 90° "line" of fire, not a real line. If you decrease the fire arcs to something much smaller, sure those barrel rolls gonna be enough to represent the high agility of the TIE-Interceptor.

Besides, agility is not representing the target profile, but the combination of small movement and target profile. Those evades rolled are exactly that, evading incoming fire. That focus spend on defense is exactly that, a special focus on evading.

Hitting a Y-Wing is target practise, because you are shooting at a basically stationary target. Shooting an interceptor with a single ship is an exercise in patience as you only chance to hit the thing is when the pilots fumbles to evade that slow incoming shots. Why? Because the interceptor pilot has lateral thrust which rivals his forward thrust, while the Y-Wing has a lot less thrust avaible in general and thus can not change his flight vector fast in any significant way.

Star Wars Dogfighting in interceptors is more like dodgeball than lasertag, incoming fire is slow, visible and avoidable for the most part, auto-blasters with their ability to spray are here the exception and even that is represented in the game. Now you could argue that Y-Wings should have not only one, but two agility instead, but the basic idea of the ships in X-Wing is mostly based on X-Wing, which makes the Y-Wing a lot less agile than it used to be in TCW.

I think people make too much of the Y-Wing's sluggish handling. It's slow by fighter standards. That means it's still a pretty agile ship. It's no wallowing tub begging to get shot down. And it is certainly no "Stationary target"

There is no reason a Y-Wing should have 1 Evade whilst a ship such as a YT2400 should have 2.

Anyways, back to actual game mechanics. Ships are balanced with the assumption that some ships move well and some ships take hits well. Agile ships like a Tie Intercepter have great movement dials because we are under the assumption that if they take hits they will die. Ships such as a Y-Wing have crappier movement dials because it's assumed they will be tanking most of the damage rather than avoiding it.

And yet with the state of the game, ships that should be tanking damage are getting torn to shreds whilst ships that should be avoiding damage are both avoiding it and tanking it.

For the sake of balance a ship should be very defensive or very aggressive or occasionally jack of all trades master of none. That way it's a conscious choice between a glass cannon or a turtle. You should not be able to have your cake and eat it too in the way you can with ships such as Tie Interceptors or Tie Phantoms.

Imho the YT-2400 has a better thrust to weight ratio than the Y-Wing, especially on its lateral thrusters. And thus two agility is appropriate. You might agree with his or disagree, but the game mechanics at least agree with that.

Better thrust to weight or not, that thing is a huge target and I do not see it being difficult to hit no matter how quickly it can change heading. And considering Y-Wings are like 2/3 engines I find it difficult to believe they have low thrust to weight ratio.

Your argument that ships like the Y-Wing should be able to take some fire, while Interceptors should not holds true, the issue here is that you ignore that ships like the interceptor are supposed to be mostly unimpressed by a single shot and go indeed down quickly if you can focus fire them and strip their defensive tokens.

And you think Y-Wings are supposed to impressed single shots?

Heck, with their shields, agility and swiveling lasers, A-Wings are supposed to be able to destroy Ties. In X-Wing they have trouble damaging anything with 3 evade.

Let me back this up with some math: If 3 X-Wings shoot an interceptor which is tokened up with focus and evade, and you have focus/tl on them, you indeed have a decent chance to bring it down. Meanwhile three interceptors with focus will only do 3.5 damage against a X-Wing which has one focus and its two green dice. Even against Y-Wings they do just 6 damage, while TLT Ys do about 2.7 damage out of arc and BTL Ys can do about 5 damage to turtled interceptors.

And how does all that damage figure when you consider point costs?

Have you seen A-Wings in Rebels?

What has balance to do with core mechanics?

The metapher works if points are on point or not is for that matter irrelevant and we know that x-wing generics are to expensive since about wave 1

Have you seen A-Wings in Rebels?

What has balance to do with core mechanics?

The metapher works if points are on point or not is for that matter irrelevant and we know that x-wing generics are to expensive since about wave 1

No, I've actually not seen much Rebels. I'm waiting for to be on Netflix. Don't have the channels to watch it normally.

Have you seen A-Wings in Rebels? :PWhat has balance to do with core mechanics? The metapher works if points are on point or not is for that matter irrelevant and we know that x-wing generics are to expensive since about wave 1

No, I've actually not seen much Rebels. I'm waiting for to be on Netflix. Don't have the channels to watch it normally.

(Shakes fist angrily): DISNEEEEEEEYYYYYY!!!!!!

In Rebels at least. A-Wings die even when piloted by top tier pilots.