When someone was teaching me Armada, he remarked how one of the most common thing is they don't do nearly enough navigate commands which makes maneuvering much harder. Is there something similar for xwing that you've noticed?

Yeah #1: Their first turn of combat doesn't have all of their ships participating. <- Critical loss of firepower

That and #2: Unfamiliarity with angles, not knowing when to K-turn (u-turn) vs 90-degree turn.

1. Aim where the ship is, not where it will be.

2. Mass ships, not arcs.

Also, don't maximize their fire (lock + focus), expecting those red dice will make all the job themselves.

Definitely setting up ships across the board instead of clustered together.

I think most beginners don't have enough of a plan for what they need to do to get the engagement they want. It's not alway a great idea to rush forward and joust.

1) Self bumps

2) Asteroid bumps

3) opponent with higher PS who will move away bumps

4) other bumps

That unmodified dice suck. Strenth in numbers. Movement mechanics.

1. Coming to a tournament that isn't well suited to the meta. My FLGS has some young teenage players with a good deal of piloting skill, but are often squashed by lists that simply have better synergy or less janky combo-chains.

2. Flying for the joust rather than playing to a list's strengths. I recently beat a triple defender list with A-wings by stressing them and then constantly wearing them down. A lot of rookie players think a joust with focused fire is the only way to win.

3. Expecting the dice to go there way. A lot of experienced players get sour grapes at a single cold dice roll, and new players can get really discouraged by it. I can laugh at blanking out my 5 Fenn Rau dice with focus + target lock because I knew it could happen and accept it, but a lot of people really get discouraged.

More than everything I think what I see most beginners do wrong is maneuvering. There are several times when I am teaching the game that as soon as a player reveals their dial I say "that puts you streight on the asteroid", "that will have you collide with a ship (that hasent moved yet)" etc etc. This originates from the fact they cannot visualize yet were about the chosen maneuver will put them forehand. So the first thing I teach them is a few siple tricks to get an idea how the ship turns. For example, any given bank maneuver will reposition your ship with the side of its base parallel to were the forward ark lines point. After that I go into more details on how much towards the inside the ship will be placed depending on speed. Etc etc

Rushing in too fast to engage early. (Lack of patience)

Forgetting who moves first. Bumping your own ships and missing bumps on the opponent.

Not maintaining a tight formation in the early phases of the game. (Spread out/too thin)

Being too focused on where you want to be and getting blindsided by the opponent. No situational awareness.

NOT KNOWING YOUR BUILD!

never go in against a sicilian when death is on the line

As many have pointed out, there's no one big mistake that cause newer players to lose, but rather a bunch of smaller inefficiencies that compound to hurt them.

Poor initial engagements, incorrect action choice, misjudging angles and manoeuvres, spreading fire when they should concentrate it, concentrating fire when they should spread it, Flying too spread out, flying too clustered, arc-dodge fails. Honestly I could go on and on, but really the important thing is that they learn from these mistakes.

1 hour ago, Blail Blerg said:

Yeah #1: Their first turn of combat doesn't have all of their ships participating. <- Critical loss of firepower

Pretty much this from my experience. Due to splitting up their forces, still learning to maneuvering, etc. Worst case is they piecemeal their forces and allow the opponent to divide and conquer them.

46 minutes ago, Kdubb said:

Definitely setting up ships across the board instead of clustered together.

I agree, but I do want to stress that I have been having loads of success spreading my low-PS swarm accross my starting edge. This allows me to see where high-PS ships deploy before I commit to a lane, which means they have no idea where I'm going either. I guess the second advantage is that my opponent assumes I'm a noob, and underestimated my ability to converge at the point on the map where I foresee combat will take place.

Spreading out is a mistake I've seen new players make all the time (myself included), but with the right ships, an experienced player can make it work miracles.

Biggest thing my friends and I ran into when learning the ropes was creating a traffic jam in our squadron. A slight miscalculation in turning resulted in fighter 2 bumping fighter 1 which caused fighter 3 to bump 2 and so on down the line. You then had a huge cluster of fighters unable to take actions in what could be a very vulnerable position depending on how your enemy moved.

The use of VASSAL helped a great deal as it was a bit of a pain to practice formation flying with the actual models and templates.

Maneuvering toward where ships are, instead of where they should be expected to be. I play with a friend who has played for years, but very infrequently. And he still does this.

Splitting fire. Lot of newcomers go for easiest target instead of focusing on one target until its dead. Very easy to plant a fresh ship in front of them at range 2 and have them fire at it instead of the ship at range 3 with 1 HP left. They lose without killing one ship, but have done a combined 10 damage.

For me it was focus firing. For some reason I thought all the ships would just shoot each other one on one like a real dogfight. It would make the game a lot fluffier though, if not super long.

16 minutes ago, markcsoul said:

For me it was focus firing. For some reason I thought all the ships would just shoot each other one on one like a real dogfight. It would make the game a lot fluffier though, if not super long.

Look up the Flying Cirus. Focus firing is very accurate. In almost every pre missile era of dogfights, and in the Star Wars movies, 1v1 isn't how dogfights work... "wingmen" are a thing for a reason. Just ask Werner Voss.

I would also add

• Not thinking at least 1 turn ahead - e.g. this turn I will get a great shot, but that will put me in front of an asteroid.
• not knowing when to disengage (if you have more than 1 ship available).

I started the game flying high PS arc dodging aces. I did alright but it wasn't until I started flying TIE Fighter swarms I learned how important set up before the game was. That and being unpredictable with a brick of ships thought to be predictable, coming in at the right angles and when to break up to cause havoc with my opponents.

Due to just flying aces at first I had never learned blocking and predicting where things end up since more often than not I could just boost and barrel roll away.

I think it's too easy for a newer player to run things like Soontir Fel and get trapped into bad habits without learning a whole lot. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Soontir, but against other newer players you can fall behind in skill when they learn other skills to combat your aces.

Quite often Green players simply forgot that you need TL to fire that Protons. I explain this 3 times or more. Mark the card with red pencils. But 50% that he will forgot this

Never ordnance during first 2-3 plays. Introduced after learning 101. But...

Aiming at where they are, not where they're going.

Landing on rocks. Almost every newbie does this regularly and it's usually very punishing. Even when you give them something easy to fly, such as a PWT, they can't shoot if they keep pinballing from one rock to another.