All well and good, my personal opinion about it is that i don't really need generics in my lists. I like the idea of having a unique named guy in the cockpit, with a unique pilot ability.

However the "Squad" idea is a very good one that i remember having discussed multiple times over the years.

Imho this should not be a dumb discount on a certain generic spam however.

What it should be is that you pay a certain amount of points and then you have a limited choice of ships for your list that makes somewhat sense fluffwise.

For example you take only Gold squadron Y-Wings and have as a possible option to include Dutch Vander. For the spent squad points and limitations you took, you could for example get a powerful squad ability, or unlock new tech choices or even a one-time powerful attack, discounts on a certain equipment etc.

There is really no limit to the stuff you could give as a restriction or bonus. But if well done this would make these "Formations" a good excuse to take a consistent squad of one ship type with one named character that fits te squad well instead of just mixed aces.

The attractivity of taking this depends on the power of the gained boons, so you could very well make a squad of all Tie-Bombers or X-Wings with a lot of points into generic pilots competitively viable. It's just a question of good balancing and playtesting really.

For my part i would rather have seen this introduced than the Condition mechanic...

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The way to "fix the game" in the sense of restoring viability to more pilots is to nerf Pilot Skill itself and that's pretty hard to do at this stage. It needs to be reasonably possible to outmaneuver a higher PS ship.

There are a number of ways we could do that but all are fairly extreme and none particularly elegant.

In the game,TANKS!, destroyed tanks are not removed from the battlefield until the end of the round. A destroyed tank is still able to complete its attack. It is basically the same as the simultaneous attack rule, but for the entire round of combat so that higher skilled pilots don't have an unfair advantage over low PS generics. I think doing something similar to this in X-Wing could accomplish what you're proposing without too much effort.

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The way to "fix the game" in the sense of restoring viability to more pilots is to nerf Pilot Skill itself and that's pretty hard to do at this stage. It needs to be reasonably possible to outmaneuver a higher PS ship.

There are a number of ways we could do that but all are fairly extreme and none particularly elegant.

In the game,TANKS!, destroyed tanks are not removed from the battlefield until the end of the round. A destroyed tank is still able to complete its attack. It is basically the same as the simultaneous attack rule, but for the entire round of combat so that higher skilled pilots don't have an unfair advantage over low PS generics. I think doing something similar to this in X-Wing could accomplish what you're proposing without too much effort.

That is "Fel's Wrath" ability for everyone.

Well if i see that 2015 we had some 46% generics at worlds, i am totally fine with this for my part. Yes i know they were mostly TLT Wagons but still. Will see what happems this year. With the U-Boat nerf i guess there will be less generics, but even then...

What i would say to that is that the game is not broken. If there are no generics but a diverse meta, i have absolutely no problem with that. It's not as if this would hurt anyone but a few forum guys here, and to me after U-Boats the game and listbuilding is more fun than ever.

All of this is just purely subjective of course... but i would say don't fix what is not broken!

I have always wanted each faction to have their own "generic" title for any ship reducing the squad points, and each faction has certain (and different) restrictions of which generics they can put it on. and which they cannot

Militia Volunteer (Rebels)
Imperial Conscript (Imperials)
Indentured Pilot (Scum)

Just my 2 cents.

You guys have a fundamental odd perspective on aces, named pilots and generics.

The fundamental concept of an Ace is the ability to operate without synergies. The Inquisitor is called for a reason the best spend 31-points in the game, regardless of the list you put him in. Same for Soontir, OL, Corran, etc
Aces can work independently. For that very reason I would usually not call Vesery an Ace, while I have no issue to call Ryad one.

Generics are cheap and that's basically it. They bring nothing else than their own body to the table, but they are supposed to be the most point efficient way to bring a specific ship with its upgrade slots to the table. OGP is a good example for that. It's the cheapest way to bring Palpatine on the table and that's basically the only reason people bring it. 29 Points for 10 HP is a decent enough damage sponge and if left alone 3 attack dice for 21 points are solid too.
TLT-Y-Wings are another example of this, efficient, cheap points without anything remarkable special about them. Torp scouts are another thing, they used to be cheapest platform for this kind of efficient alpha strike. But in all cases it's the upgrades and how those generics allow you to use those upgrades which makes them viable.

Lastly named pilots which are not aces: Palob, Biggs, Captain Yorr, Howlrunner, Etahn A'baht (awesome in epic, to expensive for standard play), Dutch, Bey, Manaroo, IG-88, etc ... Wes too imho, all those names can't do anything on their own and they bring abilities that offers huge synergies with other ships. And they have one big problem in their design space: They need to consider aces and generics as their wingmen which limits their usefulness heavily for generis. And if they are squishy targets they usually cost way too many points for standard 100pts play, because their defense is not point efficient. Howlrunner can compensate this by being cheap and having lots of cheap generics as wingmen. If you recreate her as X-Wing she would still not see tabletime. Most other of those squad synergie reliant ships see only tabletime when the current meta allows to build a list around multiple synergies to compensate for one synergie going early of the table or boost the durability of the support ship significantly. Mindlink M3A with Palob comes with a cloaking device Palob, in Guri+Palob+Manroo each element has double synergies with the other two elements. Biggs, Wes, Corran makes sure that the expensive support of Wes stays longer on the board, while Biggs is point efficient at taking damage.

The solution to see more generics on the table without automatically killing anything else on the table would be more named or support ships with synergise for generics which you can either keep alive better or at least come with the ability to take blows in a point efficient way. Squadron titles do sound like a crutch to compensate that we lack enough decent squadron leaders in the game. Howlrunner is awesome, we need more of those.

So, it's far too late, I hope this post is understandable, if not I will edit it after 8 hours of sleep. ;-)

I know they haven't been out very long, but I have yet to see anyone fly an ARC-170 with a generic pilot. FFG needs to fix this right away.

;-)

I just got into dropfleet commander, and maybe a system like theirs would work to even things out? Here's how it works:

Each player has cards depicting their battle groups. You place them in a stack based on the order you want to activate in and place them face down, so the card on top is the first group you want to activate (think command dials for Armada). Then you each flip over the top card and compare strategy ratings (based on number and size of ships in the group). Lower strategy rating picks if they activate first or second, in the event of a tie it's a roll off (adding admiral ratings). So converting that (with some modifications to fit dogfighting a little better) to X-Wing:

Make cards with your ships written on them, then keep them in a "hand of cards".

Set dials

Select one card, place it face down, opponent does the same.

Flip cards over, highest PS selects the order that the ships activate in

In a tie, player with initiative chooses.

Repeat

In the combat phase you could do the same thing or you could keep the rules the same. It's a huge change, and probably something better suited to a version 2, and would need some tweaking to keep swarms from just stomping everything (since 8 activations vs 2 or 3 means you could have as many as 5 academy pilots arc dodging Soontir Fel...not exactly thematic)

Alternatively, have a PS cap. Adding all your PS together can't exceed the cap. Not sure about this one...