1 minute ago, TBot said:

True, I shouldn't discount VASSAL as a good practice tool, every bit helps.

I don't think that practice in VASSAL can totally replace practicing with actual models for a lot of things like range, arc, and maneuver judgement. For just working out what your first 3 rounds of maneuvers from a particular setup is though, I don't think it can be beat.

2 minutes ago, ayedubbleyoo said:

I'm not sure if anything has been written about this, but I'm struggling with Action upgrades too due to the need to sacrifice your existing actions.

That's why most upgrades or pilot abilities that require actions end up not being as good as they seem at first glance. Expose and Saboteur are both great examples of this.

4 minutes ago, WWHSD said:

That's why most upgrades or pilot abilities that require actions end up not being as good as they seem at first glance. Expose and Saboteur are both great examples of this.

Yeah, I've only played around 10 games but I'm feeling this already.

The U-Wing has been a bit tricky since I imagined it doing all sorts of supporting actions but mostly I need to just focus as normal. Assume this must apply to support ships in general, the inbuilt abilities that aren't actions seen by far the most useful.

Saying that, I don't know enough to plan complicated relationships between different cards yet.

19 hours ago, joyrock said:

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?

#1 mistake: choosing the Imperial faction. It's the hardest to fly properly and it's unforgiving. You also limit yourself to a very small number of decent options to build your squad.

#2 mistake: not really a mistake but more an advice. IMO at the beginning you need to try a couple of ships but only until you figure out how you like to fly and you find something you like. After that it's better to try to use the same ship for sometime to get a better feeling of how it plays. I think you learn faster that way than if you keep changing ships everytime you play.

#3 again no a mistake but a good way to learn is to ask your opponent what mistake you did at the end of a game. If you are playing casual you can also ask him to comment your moves as you play.

Great thread, as someone that just recently played their first ever game in their first ever tournament I would say:

-Forgetting to take actions, its amazing how often I did this
-Struggling to visualize where the ship will land, I practice so much on my table but always had the templates to check where I would be, need to spend more time practicing without them so you can visualize where it will end up
-Jousting right off the bat, I was always trying to rush in and fight instead of setting anything up or make my opponent tip his hand
-Lack of focus fire, to many times I found myself in a situation where my ships couldn't hit the same target, this was a product of not thinking far enough ahead
-Bumps, getting bumped, bumping asteroids, my own ship, it happened way to many times. Practice flying, practice getting out of bumps once you hit something.
-Trusting my opponent, if you ever have a question, ask a TO. My opponent told me I was doing something wrong in my first move and I believed him despite my gut telling me otherwise, this affected how I flew for the rest of the day and denied me actions that could have helped me win matches (I lost 2 matches to points because the opponent got away with 1 health remaining on a ship where that extra action for a boost on Poe would have put me in range both times).

4 minutes ago, ayedubbleyoo said:

Saying that, I don't know enough to plan complicated relationships between different cards yet.

I think that's another trap that new players fall into. If your squad depends on a lot of interactions between cards one of two things is going to happen:

1. You've got too much BS to remember that you end up forgetting to use effects.
2. If your opponent messes up your interaction somehow you've got a bunch of worthless upgrades.

Not for brand new players, but for those that know how to play but are still rookies, a common mistake I've seen is actually netlisting without knowing why they're flying the list they're flying. I've seen plenty of players through Manny right into the fight when flying Dengaroo, or back in the day, players flying 7 tie swarms not in formation. It's one thing to playing Whisper RAC, and just fail at which way to decloak (so you're playing it poorly because you're still learning), but it's another thing to just absolutely ignore how the list is supposed to work. The worst example I saw of this was a Moldy Crow piloted by Kyle, who wasn't taking the focus action... Just wrong!

Yup, at the moment I'm just running the same three ships with one major upgrade on each. Then changing up the upgrades to ones I feel like trying.

Main thing must be learning how to fly the ships where you want them, then I can learn more about list building. To be honest I think I'll always want to keep the upgrades pretty simple.

10 minutes ago, Thormind said:

IMO at the beginning you need to try a couple of ships but only until you figure out how you like to fly and you find something you like.

I think this is solid advice. High PS Interceptors and Phantoms appealed to me a lot when I first started playing. Those are the ships that I thought I'd end up playing. The play style just didn't work for me. I started fooling around with ships that were low to mid-PS and a bit less delicate and realized that they fit the way that I play much better.

38 minutes ago, TBot said:

True, I shouldn't discount VASSAL as a good practice tool, every bit helps.

VASSAL is a weird duck. It's a great simulation of the real game, awesome for testing lists against live opponents.

But.

It's a bizarrely parallel learning curve on maneuvering. My experience, and the experience of most of the people I've talked with about it has been this: whatever you struggle with on the actual table, you'll likewise struggle with in VASSAL ... and you'll have to learn to overcome it separately.

When I first started playing, it took me forever to learn how to judge long maneuvers. I'd bump, I'd rock myself, I'd end up losing shots. But I practiced and I learned. Then I got on VASSAL -- way back in the early days -- and ... it again took me forever to learn how to judge long maneuvers. I had exactly the same issues, and even though I'd learned the spatial solutions on the real table, I had to re-learn the exact same stuff in VASSAL.

So it's good practice, but it's not perfect practice.

Beginners fail in having good dice results. Good results require lots of practice, experience and loaden dice.

I think it's usually missing one of 3 things:

1) dice modifications are king

2) focus fire is important

3) the game is almost never won in the squad builder but it certainly can be lost there

@ayedubbleyoo Do you do any online list building? Just google "x-wing list builder". Create a login so you can access your lists & your collection. Then build a list, test it (https://ynot6517.github.io/bench/#) and tweak it.

The Ynot Squad Builder is a work in progress and not all ships/pilots & upgrades are available quite yet, but it's a fair tool to help learn how ships move, how cards behave/interact, etc.
I found it easier to use than the other simulators. The manual is in the drop down menu (top right).

Hope this helps some of the other Rookies out there.

Yeah I do use xwing-builder.co.uk at the moment, it has been useful. I haven't tried testing them though.

I'm not sure how deeply I want to get into list building yet, still quite a lot of flying practice needed!

Good tips though, I've found this forum really useful in general.

1 hour ago, Thormind said:

#1 mistake: choosing the Imperial faction. It's the hardest to fly properly and it's unforgiving. You also limit yourself to a very small number of decent options to build your squad.

#2 mistake: not really a mistake but more an advice. IMO at the beginning you need to try a couple of ships but only until you figure out how you like to fly and you find something you like. After that it's better to try to use the same ship for sometime to get a better feeling of how it plays. I think you learn faster that way than if you keep changing ships everytime you play.

#3 again no a mistake but a good way to learn is to ask your opponent what mistake you did at the end of a game. If you are playing casual you can also ask him to comment your moves as you play.

#1: The truth. When we started, I had a very hard time getting thru the 2 years of constant losing with my chosen faction. More importantly, we tried to get my nephew to play, and since he liked Boba Fett, we started getting him Imperial stuff (S&V did not exist yet, nor did the Defender). He quit the game because it was not fun to get blown away month after month.

#3: We always do the After Action Report and talk about what worked and didn't work with each other's lists. In fact, my next session will be to replay a revised U- and X-wing list I used last week.

We learned very early on that a wounded fighter was a shooting fighter. Focus fire, make them dead, then change targets.

2 hours ago, ayedubbleyoo said:

I'm not sure if anything has been written about this, but I'm struggling with Action upgrades too due to the need to sacrifice your existing actions.

I guess this is one of the reasons getting focus from somewhere else can be useful. Maybe.

I just don't use them unless I'm running Tycho with PtL, test pilot and Daredevil (and even then that's just for lols).

When you look at an upgrade that requires an action there are two questions you need to ask:

1) is it a bomb?

2) is it more efficient or versatile than focus?

If the answer to both of those is "no," then skip the upgrade, save your points and just focus. Not even expose on a decimator is worth it, despite the seeming synergy. 4 naked dice is inferior to 3 dice with focus.

By the way, if the upgrade in question is a bomb, you have to ask yourself another question:

Am I flying a K-Wing with advanced slam?

I'm mostly kidding about that one (but seriously, K-Wings are the best bombers), but it brings up another new player no no. Action bombs are best on low PS, dial reveal bombs are best on high PS.

This isn't set in stone, but the idea is to have your low PS bombers move before the aces and drop their action bombs on or right in front of higher ps ships for a guaranteed hit. If a low PS ship drops a dial reveal bomb, the higher ps ships moving later can use repositioning moves to get away from it. This is also why dial reveal bombs are better on high PS pilots (though action bombs are still great and IMHO flatly better than dial reveal bombs). Ideally most of the field is in their final position, so you know how many ships you will hit.

A big one I don't think I've seen: overrating marginal increases in utility - Calculation, Marksmanship, Expose, Opportunist, etc.

Marksmanship is a big one, it sounds AMAZING. But then you realise that in a LOT of situations focus is similar enough with much better utility that it's nowhere near worth the points cost.

Ditto, or perhaps even moreso, Expose.

Marksmanship is great when you have multiple attacks to modify...except for one more point expertise does the same without the crit and doesn't take your action.

Not really a tactical mistake, but by far the biggest one in my opinion is netlisting. Not only does it kill the joy of learning the game, it can also put players off when their supposedly broken squad gets spanked over and over. Failure is unpleasant, but it's also a powerful learning tool.

Not sure it qualifies as tactical mistake either, but since we're talking about mistakes, here's one:

Not talking.

Or rather, not asking enough questions. For me at least, I always had that saying in the back of my mind that goes something like "It's better to keep your mouth closed and look like a fool, than to open it and reveal all doubt." So I'd miss simple things because I didn't ask, like which ship is down to 1 hull that I can knock out, or let other things go by that I didn't understand because I didn't have the upgrade or ship yet that allowed something to happen, but was old news to regular players (like Omega Leader with Juke & Target Lock).

They didn't let the wookie win. "Always let the wookie win".

Misinterpreting the value of an action. This especially goes for tokens. All too often I see someone barrel roll rather then focusing. I also all too often see folks act way to scared of asteroids, gun the engines and rush through it with your whole squad! You don't need tokens when your whole squad is staring a choice target down out of arc from the rest of the enemy list.

Also learning the correct asteroid placements is an artform unto itself. I did not realize when I started this game how you could negatively influence a Fat Han or positively influence a swarm depending on your asteroid placement, and those are just 2 examples.

11 hours ago, hilux said:

Not really a tactical mistake, but by far the biggest one in my opinion is netlisting. Not only does it kill the joy of learning the game, it can also put players off when their supposedly broken squad gets spanked over and over. Failure is unpleasant, but it's also a powerful learning tool.

At least they're learning, as opposed to building a crap list and getting spanked over and over again and never figuring out why their list is bad to begin with.

4 hours ago, spacelion said:

At least they're learning, as opposed to building a crap list and getting spanked over and over again and never figuring out why their list is bad to begin with.

I'd kind of concur tbh. It's a lot easier to learn to play the game when you're not getting thrashed because you're running Soontir with Predator.

47 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

I'd kind of concur tbh. It's a lot easier to learn to play the game when you're not getting thrashed because you're running Soontir with Predator.

"Man I wish there were some way to look up more effective lists for ideas. Oh well, maybe next time I'll try Expose instead."