There are so many ways to bypass the white die in skirmish, just be glad it's not Descent where EVERY attack has a 1/6 chance to x-men itself and miss.

They likely decided that after so many ways to get Pierce 2 or better, they should add in some white dice hate also. I love that we're getting rerolls and Deadlies and such. Reduces but doesn't remove the inherent swinginess of the dice system.

I think it's also important to remember the inherint benefit to the game in terms of its enjoyment by having the X-Man as a possibility;

The potential swing at a critical moment can also allow a player that is falling behind to come back. Now I know we all like to think our smart play and hard work should be rewarded with a decisive victory, but let's not forget that these matches, from a tournament perspective, take time. If you're going to be at it for an hour, it would seem hopeless and defeating to come back from an early setback if you have to play the match out.

The means to just cancel an attack outright, regardless of damage allows the underdog a small opportunity to try and come back and make the match win still within their grasp.

When you play games with a runaway leader that take over an hour to resolve, you just sit there wondering what the point of continuing to play is.

With the swing of an X-Man as a possibility, it keeps the leader honest.

Of course, the cost of X-Man is that you need to run squishy units with only white defence, and while there will certainly be games where you get to the end of the curve and dodge way more than you should, that also means most games you will only dodge 1 in 6 times, and sometimes less than that.

There are numerous ways to offset X-Man lucky swings, so I don't think it's a problem with the game, as I've stated above. It adds some wrinkles and uncertainties, as dice will always do anyways, just like you could put up double blanks while blocking with Vader or Weiss, or put up 6 blocks.

If you honestly feel like your local meta uses nothing but white dice, then your job is even easier, because you can tech against that and focus on things that do re-rolls or remove those results, and ignore taking cards with Pierce abilities.

As Cleardave says, I just don't see it as a problem either. I've been burned by the blank for more often than I've benefited from the X. And as has been said, numerous times, White dice units are often more squishy. I was actually pretty incensed that deadly got added, because the chorus of people who think Jedi should never be able to be stopped by anything but another Jedi are going to clamor that every glowbat jockey should have it.

They likely decided that after so many ways to get Pierce 2 or better, they should add in some white dice hate also. I love that we're getting rerolls and Deadlies and such. Reduces but doesn't remove the inherent swinginess of the dice system.

I wish the designers would put out the cards they use instead of dice rolling. I think I would use that system instead of rolling. Then you know there are only 2/12 chance of rolling a dodge and then when it's gone, it's gone until the reshuffle. It actually would improve tactics, because it would be the same for the 3-block pip, and the 3 damage pip, and your tactical derision making would be different if you know certain cards are gone.

I wish the designers would put out the cards they use instead of dice rolling. I think I would use that system instead of rolling. Then you know there are only 2/12 chance of rolling a dodge and then when it's gone, it's gone until the reshuffle. It actually would improve tactics, because it would be the same for the 3-block pip, and the 3 damage pip, and your tactical derision making would be different if you know certain cards are gone.

Of course that would fundamentally change the flow of the game and provide another fiddly component to manage, audit, etc.

The other big thing is that card counting becomes a skill to master with regards to tactical planning, whereas the white die is just a basic probability chart to keep in mind. The white die lets you take risks and have wild stuff happen in the game, like having Vader roll up in your face for a Brutality strike and X'ing both out while the other player's face melts.

Wouldn't you be annoyed if some lame 1 damage shot used up your X-Man until the deck reshuffles?!

Starcraft used an all card combat system, and the game was built around that. This does not, and I doubt it would enhance the experience, especially if you had to port over this deck to campaign.

Also, would that be one deck for all your potential white rolls, or one per "die" that each model would have? Too many problems with that .

Oh admittedly it is too much auditing for this game. I admit that. It would be 1 deck of 12 per dice. So a white deck of 12. You pull the top card until all cards are gone, then you reshuffle the deck. It is sort of like playing Spades more than card counting. If you haven't seen that X come up, you know it is going to sooner or later.

Any time you play with dice (or cards, or any random elements), improbable events are going to make you lose sometimes. And other times they will make you win. The better player will still win more of the time in a well-designed game, and Imperial Assault is a well-designed game.

In my opinion, the dice are fun because they add an element of unpredictability, force you to adapt, and make the game more exciting.

There are plenty of excellent strategy games with less chance involved if you don't like having random events mess with your plans. It just depends on your preferences.

Any time you play with dice (or cards, or any random elements), improbable events are going to make you lose sometimes. And other times they will make you win. The better player will still win more of the time in a well-designed game, and Imperial Assault is a well-designed game.

In my opinion, the dice are fun because they add an element of unpredictability, force you to adapt, and make the game more exciting.

There are plenty of excellent strategy games with less chance involved if you don't like having random events mess with your plans. It just depends on your preferences.

I don't hate dice.

What I'm saying is that one out of sixing your opponent's crucial final push is quite the NPE for your opponent. That's too swingy and annoying.

Of course that would fundamentally change the flow of the game and provide another fiddly component to manage, audit, etc.

The other big thing is that card counting becomes a skill to master with regards to tactical planning, whereas the white die is just a basic probability chart to keep in mind. The white die lets you take risks and have wild stuff happen in the game, like having Vader roll up in your face for a Brutality strike and X'ing both out while the other player's face melts.

It would actually change how the game is played at a fairly fundamental level. That's because there is no predictive quality with dice... past results are absolutely not in any way an indicator of future results.

But there is a tremendous predictive quality with a "dice deck." Basically, if you were attacking against a lot of white-dice figures, you would wait with your big (Focused) attacks until you had seen both of the Dodge cards come up. And after that, you would be 100% accurate in your prediction that no more Dodge results would come up for the next number of attacks, and so you would let 'em fly accordingly. And don't forget that you'd be able to count cards for your own attack dice too, so you could actually predict very closely your odds of success in any of those "Do I or don't I?" sorts of situations, where the game could hinge on the success or fail of a big gambling maneuver. ...all of that leads to a game almost completely different than what we have now, and I think it would be a major step down.

I vastly prefer using actual dice, with the unpredictable quality that they bring! Keep in mind that this perspective is coming from a guy who suffered from the dreaded "Dodge...forced reroll...Dodge again" scenario, which was a significant turning point for my opponent in my Top 8 loss at Gencon. I'd rather see amazing and random luck happen in my games--even when the luck is against me like that--than have the game devolve into a matter of card-counting. I'll leave that sort of thing to the Magic and Poker players.

Sometimes the dice like me and sometimes they don't, but precisely because we use dice, I know that I've always at least got a shot of turning things around.

Chance is part of everything.

I love it when I roll the X-man and curse when rolled against me.

Nothing is a sure thing. That is why it's fun, because it adds a part of the experience you can't control (the fickleness of fate)

The greatest Tacticians try to minimize the impact of luck, but they never deny its gift.

I would be very disappointed if the game had a deck of cards instead of dice. Dice are quite simply more fun. It's a basic psychology thing.

Consider this: how often do you have a tense, exciting stand-up dice-roll in a game? And how often do you have a tense, exciting stand-up card-flip?

I'm also disappointed by the news that IA developers apparently use a dice result card deck to test new content. Playing with a card deck is a VASTLY different game with completely different strategies and considerations when compared to playing with dice. It's quite literally playing a different game, and so will skew stuff during testing.

Specifically regarding the dodge discussion, I have gone on record multiple times on these boards with arguments that it's simply not as bad as you think. In fact, I consider the widespread 'white-die-hating' to be generated mostly by cognitive biases. I'm hopeful that the guys in charge of the game's development realize that and don't succumb to making knee-jerk reaction decisions regarding the defence roll mechanics.

And how often do you have a tense, exciting stand-up card-flip?

Play Malefaux. You get tense, exciting card flips there all the time.

I consider the widespread 'white-die-hating' to be generated mostly by cognitive biases. I'm hopeful that the guys in charge of the game's development realize that and don't succumb to making knee-jerk reaction decisions regarding the defence roll mechanics.

You do understand that thus is WHY they use a dice deck, to eliminate the cognitive bias in the "dice rolling" and be assured that they are getting a statistical spread.

All that said, I have a friend whose white dice are unquestionably skewed toward the "X", many, many games half of his white dice rolls come up dodges.

You don't get "statistical spread" with a deck of cards. You would, maybe, if you wound up with a very specific occurence of only going through the entire deck during a single game, pulling every single card once. If you only go through a part of the deck, or have to flip after a reshuffle but don't go through all of it again, your spread of results goes all over the place and we're back to square one.

After you pull the first card out of the deck, the outcome probabilities of every subsequent flip go all over the place and have very little to do with the outcome probabilities of a d6 roll, which fundamentally alters all the math in the game and many of the strategies of the game. It simply does more harm than good.

If you think your friend rolls way more dodge results than he "should" (and that's serious air quoting), either ask him to swap out his white die or use a dice tower. Preferably both. Then again, he might just be lucky and continue to roll dodge results. But in that case, getting a card deck won't help with anything. Instead of being annoyed at him rolling a lot of dodges, you'll be annoyed at him flipping dodges on the most opportune time.

If a game has a RNG system, it also has a luck factor, I'm sorry but you can't have it any other way.

In a card drawing environment, there are positives and negatives. Playtesting capt possibly generate the amount of data that comes when a product is released into the wild. They simply cannot simulate anything close to the same sample size. If you were to look at the statistics over a thousand games, five thousand, ten thousand, the dice roll statistics would be very close to the average, and the prevalence of each die face in the sample would be very close to 1/6. Seeing the statistics at their most average state is the best way to decide if changes need to be made. With swing reduced or eliminated, it becomes more obvious if a product needs an adjustment. Your sample size during a playtest for a product is likely a few hundred at most. The decks allow the developers to see average results in every session and across several, and therefore can more easily identify imbalances.

The ability to predict the dice results in a card deck can definitely be perceived as a negative, but the benefits are more important than the negatives. They simply cannot generate the sample size required to correctly balance and price figures with only their time, employees, or testers. This allows them to get much closer. It will not replicate your experiences playing a single match or even several. But if you played the same match under the same circumstances several hundred times, then your dice results would reflect those on the card decks.

I think black was supposed to be armor and white being dodgy, but that seems to have gone out the window with expansions.

If you're really having problems, and I have seen campaign with officers + nexu + cloaking device troopers giving everything on the board whites making it a real headache, then house rule it so that dodge gives a block + reroll.

In a card drawing environment, there are positives and negatives. Playtesting capt possibly generate the amount of data that comes when a product is released into the wild. They simply cannot simulate anything close to the same sample size. If you were to look at the statistics over a thousand games, five thousand, ten thousand, the dice roll statistics would be very close to the average, and the prevalence of each die face in the sample would be very close to 1/6. Seeing the statistics at their most average state is the best way to decide if changes need to be made. With swing reduced or eliminated, it becomes more obvious if a product needs an adjustment. Your sample size during a playtest for a product is likely a few hundred at most. The decks allow the developers to see average results in every session and across several, and therefore can more easily identify imbalances.

The ability to predict the dice results in a card deck can definitely be perceived as a negative, but the benefits are more important than the negatives. They simply cannot generate the sample size required to correctly balance and price figures with only their time, employees, or testers. This allows them to get much closer. It will not replicate your experiences playing a single match or even several. But if you played the same match under the same circumstances several hundred times, then your dice results would reflect those on the card decks.

Yep. I can totally understand why they use dice decks for playtesting; it keeps the results of playtests from being skewed by 5 X-Men being rolled in one mission, for example. If nothing else, if it's going to be helpful, playtesting requires accuracy and consistency with what players will experience over 1000s of plays. I'm just glad we don't use dice decks for the actual game itself.

I've heard that you can get a dice deck for Settlers of Catan, though. That is attractive to me, because it keeps a solid strategy (building primarily on 6s, 8s, 5s, and 9s) from being overthrown by oddly out-of-probability dice results. I've seriously had a game where 10s and 11s came up at least as often as 6s and 8s. But that's a resource management and expansion game, which plays very differently than a tactical skirmish game; they are 2 very different types of games. IMHO that's why the dice deck would be a good idea for Settlers and a bad idea for IA.

In a card drawing environment, there are positives and negatives. Playtesting capt possibly generate the amount of data that comes when a product is released into the wild. They simply cannot simulate anything close to the same sample size. If you were to look at the statistics over a thousand games, five thousand, ten thousand, the dice roll statistics would be very close to the average, and the prevalence of each die face in the sample would be very close to 1/6. Seeing the statistics at their most average state is the best way to decide if changes need to be made. With swing reduced or eliminated, it becomes more obvious if a product needs an adjustment. Your sample size during a playtest for a product is likely a few hundred at most. The decks allow the developers to see average results in every session and across several, and therefore can more easily identify imbalances.

The ability to predict the dice results in a card deck can definitely be perceived as a negative, but the benefits are more important than the negatives. They simply cannot generate the sample size required to correctly balance and price figures with only their time, employees, or testers. This allows them to get much closer. It will not replicate your experiences playing a single match or even several. But if you played the same match under the same circumstances several hundred times, then your dice results would reflect those on the card decks.

Again: a deck of cards does not give you a "perfect spread" or "average results", unless you very specifically pull every card in the deck once in a game. If you don't, you can pull two dodges in a row, reshuffle, and then pull two dodges in a row again. Sure, there's a fat chance of that. But there's also a fat chance of that happening on dice, so what's the difference? Other than the fact that you're shoehorning in a mechanic that wasn't meant to be in the game, that is.

If your absolute playtesting goal is getting mathematically average results, just calculate it mathematically instead of doing the hassle of setting up a card deck. In fact, you can forego testing in the first place and just make everything "average" by math. But we don't do that, because game testing is all about checking how all of your math stacks up with all the random input. If you don't have luck swings, you don't need as much testing because lots of stuff will just appear to work with no issue.

Testing a dice game with a card deck is bad because you are quite literally testing the new content with a completely different game and not the game the end user will play. Quick and dirty example: if I have Luke, I can either hang back with him or push him forward, hoping to dodge out of the way of beefy attacks. If I know that half of the white deck was flipped already and there are only blanks and 1 block results in the discard pile, I will have more incentive to play aggresively. Likewise, if I'm near the bottom of the deck but the blanks haven't come out yet, I know it's best to pull Luke in and hide him behind some other pieces. Or I might go out of my way to attack my opponent's Officers first to force a reshuffle of the white deck. The card deck creates new conditions and considerations that are not in the actual game, skewing the strategies and by extension, the results of the testing.

I've heard that you can get a dice deck for Settlers of Catan, though. That is attractive to me, because it keeps a solid strategy (building primarily on 6s, 8s, 5s, and 9s) from being overthrown by oddly out-of-probability dice results. I've seriously had a game where 10s and 11s came up at least as often as 6s and 8s. But that's a resource management and expansion game, which plays very differently than a tactical skirmish game; they are 2 very different types of games. IMHO that's why the dice deck would be a good idea for Settlers and a bad idea for IA.

Like I keep pointing out, the card deck result mechanic does not give you an "average" or "perfect" spread of results. The Catan deck is even worse, since the idea is that you have a 36-card deck, but you actually go through 31 of them and then reshuffle the deck. So five cards are not used every shuffle. So you can conceiveably go through the entire deck and only get a '7' once. Or never get a '6'. What's the point of using that over dice rolls? Other than, again, screwing with the established conditions and strategies of the game?

I've heard that you can get a dice deck for Settlers of Catan, though. That is attractive to me, because it keeps a solid strategy (building primarily on 6s, 8s, 5s, and 9s) from being overthrown by oddly out-of-probability dice results. I've seriously had a game where 10s and 11s came up at least as often as 6s and 8s. But that's a resource management and expansion game, which plays very differently than a tactical skirmish game; they are 2 very different types of games. IMHO that's why the dice deck would be a good idea for Settlers and a bad idea for IA.

Like I keep pointing out, the card deck result mechanic does not give you an "average" or "perfect" spread of results. The Catan deck is even worse, since the idea is that you have a 36-card deck, but you actually go through 31 of them and then reshuffle the deck. So five cards are not used every shuffle. So you can conceiveably go through the entire deck and only get a '7' once. Or never get a '6'. What's the point of using that over dice rolls? Other than, again, screwing with the established conditions and strategies of the game?

What? You only use 31 of the 36 cards? That's odd. I've never used it so maybe that really is the rule. But if that's the case then yeah, I definitely wouldn't want to use the card deck for that game either.

I don't see the benefit of a deck of cards, unless you're the type of person who enjoys counting cards and doesn't like a random result.

The dice are what the game was designed with, and wanting a different style of game by removing the dice means you're in the wrong game to begin with...

In the end it reduces the frequency of statistical anomalies or outliers so that other more dynamic aspects of the game can be examined more closely. For example, a playtest could conceivably yield results making you think that a certain figure is highly over or underpowered, but the opposite could be true in most situations. The deck approach can help determine what caused it. Hot dice can yield great results at times, but there are other elements to the game as well, with too many variables to track. Think of it like algebra or the scientific method. Standardizing one variable makes it easier to determine issues with other variables.

It seems weird, but to be fair, they're in general doing a pretty good job.

Actually, I think they're doing a fantastic job! Just compare last year's meta to this year's.

The point of dice decks is to let you play an "average" game. If you can only playtest a scenario 3 times and you use dice and you get very unfavorable results each time then you haven't really tested the scenario the way it will usually be played.

The reason Catan uses 31 of the 36 cards is to make card counting "impossible."

However as everyone has tablets and cell phones, dice decks are obsolete and you should be using a weighted die app instead. It does a better job of preventing card counting and a better job of simulating an "average" set of rolls.

Again: a deck of cards does not give you a "perfect spread" or "average results", unless you very specifically pull every card in the deck once in a game. If you don't, you can pull two dodges in a row, reshuffle, and then pull two dodges in a row again. Sure, there's a fat chance of that. But there's also a fat chance of that happening on dice, so what's the difference? Other than the fact that you're shoehorning in a mechanic that wasn't meant to be in the game, that is.

My understanding is that this is pretty much exactly what they would do. This isn't like in Catan where they're using the deck in a competitive game (although I realize that that is what some people in this thread were suggesting) and so there would be no reshuffling until they've gone through the whole thing. A dice deck without reshuffling would absolutely be more consistent than rolling dice. If you playtest a campaign scenario where you roll ten dodges or ten blank results the only thing you've learned at the end is that it's really easy/hard to win when the dice are with/against you. It's more valuable to see how the mission plays with an even spread. And yes, a deck would in fact result in a much more even spread - it wouldn't be perfect unless you rolled each die a multiple of twelve times, but it's an improvement over the randomness of actual dice.

With all that said, the key to making it work would also be to completely avoid counting the cards and to play as though it was actually random. If you know that the only card left is a dodge and so you intentionally go for a little attack instead of using one of your heavy hitters then you're playtesting wrong. This is why I think that the dice deck is a great thing for playtesting but would be a terrible addition to the actual game. It would just add one more variable to keep track of during the game (the card counting) but in my opinion it would just be added complexity without actually adding any fun. There's already enough weighing of statistics in this game, and often times it's the outliers (UGH! Three dodges in a row!) that make things surprising and fun.

I guess I should ask if you have played Descent in the past? The X-Man has been a bane since then, its just that they moved where the X is located. In Descent the X was located on the Blue Attack Die, which made every single attack that you could make just be an automatic miss. In Imperial Assault, they switched it up so now only one sect of defense dice had a threat of being an automatic miss. I actually prefer the way that the shifted the X-Man over to defense dice as it puts the miss on the defender and not the attacker. There is nothing more devastating than to have dealt massive amounts of damage on your attack just to have the blue attack die fail to even connect, on both sides of the table, 16.67% of the time. Now, we only have to worry about 16.67% of attacks missing a certain group of targets, and on top of that, there are plenty of effects that exist to either force a re-roll or just flat out ignore the result.