2 hours ago, Astech said:

7-8 does seem a bit more reasonable as a starting point for this ship in tournament play. But as Marinealver has made clear this is a concept point, an origin for calculations, and not an actual ship.

You're absolutely right - the ship itself would be pretty hopeless. It's definitely an unfinished frame.

I'm just skeptical that a mathematical model for ship pricing depends on certain components of that ship having no associated points cost. As previous releases have shown, generally the price on red dice goes up exponentially. So the inverse is also true - I imagine the cost of going from 1 to 2 red dice is probably only a point or so, and from 0-1 red dice even less. But I believe that the cost is still there - I don't think that there is a "free" ship frame that gets improved on every time a ship is being designed.

I feel like Marinealver is onto something here, I just think that all his work will lead to more accurate extrapolations if the "entry point" model is is a little more expensive than 1 point.

I think the Assault Missile Z-95s would probably lose against the hundred ship horde. They'd probably stand the best chance but 100 one die attacks is a list melting level of firepower.

I'd need to agree with those who say this isn't a "one point ship" even if you think you are using the minimum stats currently seen in X-Wing. Cut it to zero agility and you still don't have a 1 point ship.

If you want to look at what could possibly be considered the lowest level you might look at I'd say that's 6-7 points for a ship that is essentially just a 1 point hull with maybe 4 forward maneuvers.

Maybe FFG made a "mistake" by giving the HWK a 1 point primary attack but that was also before they did away with the weapon failure crit that would do away with the secondary weapon the ship is somewhat obviously supposed to have. We could also point to a several EPIC ships that have no primary attack although two of them can equip secondary weapons in the form of a hardpoint and maybe other upgrades.

I'm not sure even a 0/0/1/0 is a 1 point ship.

2 hours ago, StevenO said:

I'd need to agree with those who say this isn't a "one point ship" even if you think you are using the minimum stats currently seen in X-Wing. Cut it to zero agility and you still don't have a 1 point ship.

If you want to look at what could possibly be considered the lowest level you might look at I'd say that's 6-7 points for a ship that is essentially just a 1 point hull with maybe 4 forward maneuvers.

Maybe FFG made a "mistake" by giving the HWK a 1 point primary attack but that was also before they did away with the weapon failure crit that would do away with the secondary weapon the ship is somewhat obviously supposed to have. We could also point to a several EPIC ships that have no primary attack although two of them can equip secondary weapons in the form of a hardpoint and maybe other upgrades.

For huge ships I simply left them out. I'm not the only one that ignores them for mathematical calculations.

2 hours ago, Blue Five said:

I'm not sure even a 0/0/1/0 is a 1 point ship.

Well it would be a small base Pilot skill 0 0/0/1/0 with no firing arc 2 straight green and 2 banks red no actions and no upgrade slots for the bare minimum functional ship. Or what I like to call the 0.5 point ship.

Absolute 0 would be no base 0/0/0/0 with no firing arc no maneuvers no actions and no upgrades slots for 0 points (I think that might be a little OP).

Yeah, it's a 0 point ship because you remove it the moment you place it on the board. Thus you can have an infinite number of them.

I think it's a very interesting framework that you presented here. Seems you are a bit misunderstood though.

The details of implementation into the current game are nonsensical because this will always be adjusted to 12+ points. There is no need to harp on the implications of a one point ship. The interesting thought is that this could be a starting point - never an endpoint.

9 hours ago, Marinealver said:

there are no neutral ships

That is a **** shame.

Isn't the idea of making a 1 point ship a bit like judging a building on the merits of a rivet?

7 hours ago, Blue Five said:

I'm not sure even a 0/0/1/0 is a 1 point ship.

It's not, unless it's got a DREADFUL dial. I'd happily take 6 floating asteroids for 6pts.

Actually the idea of buying more obstacles (beyond spewing them out of the rear) is pretty cool. It would also sell more stuff for FFG...

To all the "OMG... 200 attack dice!" People:

You do realise that due to the very real bottleneck of actually physically placing these ships that you're never going to get anywhere close to having 200 guns on target? Right?

The "shootable area" (in a 360 degree arc) around a ship has inside it enough space to fit approximately 154 small ship bases.

If we assume that both squads are going head to head with each other and restrict that area to a 90 degree arc then that shrinks to just under 40. However let's give it a little boost to account for ship bases that may be inside the area but not fully inside the area, and call it 50.

However, from range 1 out to the end of range 3 is seven ship bases, and the enemy ships are not going to be stacked 7 deep. So I'm going to make an estimation on how much of this area is actually going to get filled, and cut the incoming shots to 40% of this value. Which leaves us at the final value of 20.

I.e. I would be amazed if more than 20 of those ships were able to line up shots at any given time. Receiving 200 attacks is just absurd.

Admittedly, 20 1-dice attacks with focus (minus casualties of course) is still nothing to sneeze at, but it's not going to annihilate all as some people might fear.

Quote

Admittedly, 20 1-dice attacks with focus (minus casualties of course) is still nothing to sneeze at, but it's not going to annihilate all as some people might fear.

Sure it will. You've forgotten the durability of 200 1 hull ships. It takes 200 attacks to kill them all.

I think this thought exercise is bizarre to me and doesn't really lead anywhere. It reminds me of Attack Wing's fixed point cost scheme (2 points for every stat, +2 for the unique version of a ship, period).

10 minutes ago, Blue Five said:

Sure it will. You've forgotten the durability of 200 1 hull ships. It takes 200 attacks to kill them all.

These things are pilot skill zero with a worse dial than the lambda class shuttle, anything that survives the first pass and makes it past the wall of ships is probably never going to have to worry about receiving focused fire again for the duration of the game.

3 hours ago, namdoolb said:

These things are pilot skill zero with a worse dial than the lambda class shuttle, anything that survives the first pass and makes it past the wall of ships is probably never going to have to worry about receiving focused fire again for the duration of the game.

You wouldn't GET past the wall of ships, thats the point.

4 minutes ago, VanderLegion said:

You wouldn't GET past the wall of ships, thats the point.

We've already covered the math & the reasoning behind how you're exceptionally unlikely to get more than 20 of these ships with a firing solution at any given time.

You'll want to assume that some quantity of these 1-point ships get ps-killed before firing, which means that you're probably going to receive between 15-18 one dice attacks. Or (to put it another way) 12-13 successful hits to evade.

Assuming you're smart, and flying things with 3 agility, you can expect to blank out on about 3 of those rolls. (24% of the time) Any token will cover you for one of those blank-out's and for the other two let's hope you have a little action economy or some spare hit points.

After the second exchange of fire, your surivors (and there will be more than a few most likely) will be close enough (and will have removed a few ships from the relevant section) that they should be able to clear it with their faster maneuvers.

Let's be clear about one thing hough; the 1-point ship is ridiculous. Not because it's overpowered but because there's no possible way to actually deploy them on a standard table. The *minimum* ship cost based on what you could physically put on the table is probably 2, and really should be 3.

I do have to say though that if you were building to beat this, then a swarm of assault missile carriers is definitely the way to go; that'll ps-kill so many of the enemies with actual shots on you on the first pass, and open up a huge breach in the "wall" for you to fly through... after that though, it would still take several hours to conclude the battle (maybe even days, who knows how long it would take to maneuver that many ships.).

Oddly, with a "wall" of these all you may need to do is survive the first pass and believe or not get through them with the least amount of disruption. Why no disruption? It's because if these were so thick they went from edge to edge then they will all be extremely hard pressed to find space to turn around and would end up flying off the board on the other side because of it.

Now I'm not sure you could get through the wall cleanly because my thought is that you may want to thicken the wall up to avoid an easy fly over while putting breaks in your owns lines would give you that room to maneuver that you'd desperately need.

If it could be used I think you wave of 1/1/2/0 ships would be a lot like riding out a storm to an opponent. They could come in and apply some steady pressure but if if you can weather that and make it through then it should all blow over.

5 hours ago, Panzeh said:

I think this thought exercise is bizarre to me and doesn't really lead anywhere. It reminds me of Attack Wing's fixed point cost scheme (2 points for every stat, +2 for the unique version of a ship, period).

Well obviously it won't be a simple point per stat/maneuver formula. Every improvements is scaling depending on what you add. It is obvious that going from 0 shields to 1 shields is a much bigger jump than going from 1 shield to 2 shields. Just like changing a 3 straight white to a 3 straight green isn't as much as adding a 4 red straight when the ship didn't have straights. This is merely a starting point and each change addition will have its own value. It won't necessarily be a solid integer but it will be a reasonable value that can be calculated and later rounded to the next whole number.

A far, far more useful way of finding a baseline ship would be to start with the Z-95, the TIE/ln, and maybe the light Scyk and finding their points of similarity, then trimming points and abilities until you reach a shared minimum. You're going to end up somewhere in the 6-10 pt range I imagine.

58 minutes ago, Funkula said:

A far, far more useful way of finding a baseline ship would be to start with the Z-95, the TIE/ln, and maybe the light Scyk and finding their points of similarity, then trimming points and abilities until you reach a shared minimum. You're going to end up somewhere in the 6-10 pt range I imagine.

As I mentioned earlier since both ships have different approaches to their starting chassis trying to combine the two would not get you the base line. Especially when there are ships that have a worse dial. So many people only take the stats on the pilot card into account when calculating the value. If that were the case then why does prototype pilot(A-wing) cost 17 (not including refit obviously) and Sinar Test pilot cost 16. The difference in stats is Sinar test pilot has pilot skill two but as far as every else stat goes they are identical. So the TAP is cheaper than the A-wing yet being 1 pilot skill higher. Sure A-wing can take a refit which drops it down to 15 but TAP has a missile slot too so the same argument could be made there. The details are in the dial however it is hard to put a value on the dial other than the speed and that red<white<green and then there is the bearings which constitutes about 3 different vectors that may ore may not be independent from each other.

Trying to integrate all of them into a point value is difficult unless you are really good at vector math. So I took the approach of taking all the ships and stripping them down to the lowest common denominator. Thus with the ship unable to go lower I set it at 1 as the starting point.

Alternatively, like a lot of early game ships, A-Wings pay a hefty premium for their fun toys (like missile and their actions) which you can choose to rebalance with Chardaan.

How many people have considered that FFG doesn't actually have a formula? Maybe the designers just put together the ship, throw out a rough guess on its points relative to how they think it will perform against other ships, then they playtest and start adjusting their estimated value up or down depending on the playtest data?

The biggest question this raises is "why the numbers they chose at the beginning for the X-wing and the TIE Fighter?" Was it maybe so simple as thinking "Two TIEs should be about equal to one X-wing. If we want to do 100 point games, how about we aim for a max of 4 X-wings, so around 25 points each, varying for pilot skill and upgrades, and maybe 8 TIEs, so 12 points?" Then they started messing with prototypes and refined. And arguably, they didn't refine well enough, as the TIE swarm was early on one of the most effective list archetypes in the game.

Maybe this is how they designed the rest, too? Throw out a number, play, and revise. Revise more for pilot skill, and for pilot abilities. On and on, keep refining over the months of development we're not privy to, and in the end, we get the ships that move around our tables and blow each other up in our imaginations.

2 hours ago, MarekMandalore said:

How many people have considered that FFG doesn't actually have a formula? ...

^THIS^ is probably the most likely situation. However one thing is noted that FFG tends to have a little bit better balancing power per points than some other companies who seem to intentionally deviate from what would be the meta power curve. So even if they don't have a formula or a starting point or any statutes, they are still doing a good job with their point pricing.

Best 1 point ship that comes to my mind is the venerable space tug. 1 0/0/1/0 with a green 1 forward, white 1 banks and red 1 turns and no actions. Give it a mod that allows it to turn an ordnance card over once a turn on a fighter that is within range 1 of it or maybe even remove a damage card and you might have a ship that's actually viable to the game (the latter mod would probably be in the neighborhood of Palpatine or APT expensive).

As for the 100 dice quandry, I'd like to see what an alpha strike of Assault Missiles would do to a cluster of sitting ducks like that. You'd actually have to plan your shots rather well in order to not only get the maximum number of ships in the range 1 burst, but also planning down the line of how further missile attacks would go to knock off as many second hull points as possible.

Z-95's would indeed give you the biggest alpha strike, but TIE Bombers with EM would give you 3 more shots into the swarm.

This looks like a job for VASSAL!