I don't know whether or not there needs to be a 2.0 edition.

I do know that the ideas in here about agility and armor for ships and accuracy and damage for weapons are pretty interesting.

I also know that while tournaments seem to be a necessary evil, all of these games are much more fun and varied and interesting and relaxing and less of my stuff languishes when tournaments aren't a priority.

1 hour ago, Verlaine said:

But the game has changed to something else. If you play checkers and start adding pieces that behave like chess pieces then you end up playing a different game. That has happened to X-Wing. We might go on about what constitutes a 'radical' change and what are the 'fundamentals', but I suspect that these definitions are very fluid and have also changed in the past.

No, the game hasn't changed to "something else". It's simply become bigger.

We still use the same movement and range templates, roll the same dice, use dials to pre-select maneuvers and select 100 point lists with a choice of six obstacles. This exception to the rule would be Epic/Cinematic play, which is a niche version of the core game.

Do not confuse adding more variety (such as new ships, new actions, new obstacles and even new damage decks - all of which sit perfectly well within the existing framework of the game) with changing fundamentals of the game which have remained constant since Wave 1.

2 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

No, the game hasn't changed to "something else". It's simply become bigger.

We still use the same movement and range templates, roll the same dice, use dials to pre-select maneuvers and select 100 point lists with a choice of six obstacles. This exception to the rule would be Epic/Cinematic play, which is a niche version of the core game.

Do not confuse adding more variety (such as new ships, new actions, new obstacles and even new damage decks - all of which sit perfectly well within the existing framework of the game) with changing fundamentals of the game which have remained constant since Wave 1.

If adding and changing rules doesn't make a game different, then nothing does. As you admit yourself: new pieces have been added, just like adding chess pieces to a checkers game.

Aaaah, the beauty of semantics...

Just now, Stay On The Leader said:

Aaaah, the beauty of semantics...

Indeed. I don't see the big deal here.

2 hours ago, Odanan said:

Or they could simply make an errata of it... (like increasing the cost in 2-3 points)

Still just a joke...

Let's just play the Star Wars Dance Off instead.

1 hour ago, Verlaine said:

If adding and changing rules doesn't make a game different, then nothing does. As you admit yourself: new pieces have been added, just like adding chess pieces to a checkers game.

That's a really poor analogy, and using it makes for a really poor (and yes, semantic) argument Checkers was never designed with the intention of adding new pieces to the game - it is completely self contained, and doing so essentially breaks it.

The X-Wing Miniatures Game however, was ABSOLUTELY designed FROM THE OUTSET for new ships to be added and new rules to be introduced over time. By using those new ships and new rules you are not suddenly playing a different game.

All of which is totally beside the point however, as for the second post in a row you've ignored the fact that I have been talking about the suggestion of fundamental changes to the core game mechanics, not additional content introduced via expansions. Such changes would be suggestions seen downtopic, like splitting the effects of accuracy and damage, or using dials to pre-select actions like Armada's commands. These are the kind of changes which would lead to your checkers-with-chess-pieces analogy.

Before a 2.0 launch I would love to see them just embrace hard eratta. Allow printable files that you can insert into a sleeve over the original card to update the text. That would allow fixes to everything but the cardboard bases.

All the sudden you can stop worrying about making the FAQ overly complicated and let it focus on rules issues rather than refining card text intent.

To put it another way, how does the existence of, say, the IG-2000 expansion (with it's extra rules for Bombs, Boost, Segnor's Loops, Large Base ships and the Scum faction) affect someone who is ONLY playing with the ships and upgrades from the original X-Wing Miniatures Core Set and Wave 1 Expansions?

Answer: It doesn't, in any way shape or form. At all. They could take their existing rules and Wave 1 expansions and use at any official tournament they liked. They'd be at a disadvantage, sure, but there's no barrier to entry.

Now, how would the introduction of action dials or accuracy and damage dice in a proposed "X-Wing 2.0" affect the same player?

Answer: They would be unable to participate in an official tournament with their existing collection. They would need to make additional purchases and/or learn new rules in order to play. They would be playing a different game, and there would be a barrier to entry.

And that is not a semantic difference.

Yes please.

EDIT: For some reason this post didn't let me actually type anything....

17 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

To put it another way, how does the existence of, say, the IG-2000 expansion (with it's extra rules for Bombs, Boost, Segnor's Loops, Large Base ships and the Scum faction) affect someone who is ONLY playing with the ships and upgrades from the original X-Wing Miniatures Core Set and Wave 1 Expansions?

Answer: It doesn't, in any way shape or form. At all. They could take their existing rules and Wave 1 expansions and use at any official tournament they liked. They'd be at a disadvantage, sure, but there's no barrier to entry.

Now, how would the introduction of action dials or accuracy and damage dice in a proposed "X-Wing 2.0" affect the same player?

Answer: They would be unable to participate in an official tournament with their existing collection. They would need to make additional purchases and/or learn new rules in order to play. They would be playing a different game, and there would be a barrier to entry.

And that is not a semantic difference.

New damage dice wouldn't have to. As long as the rules were clear about how they interacted with defence dice, there's no reason why introducing a high accuracy low damage die (with a bunch of double hit results that need 2 evades to cancel but onyl deal one damage on a hit) wouldn't be just as playable alongside older sets as bombs were.

6 hours ago, haslo said:

Either what you're talking about is incremental enough that it can be done without a reboot (and thus naming it 2.0 is silly), or it's fundamental enough that they won't do it for all the ships that are currently out and start anew and we have to buy everything from scratch.

...

They don't have the time to look at all the ships simultaneously though, and playtest them all at the same time. If they did, I'm sure balance would be much worse than it is now. I think that would be man-decades, not must man-years, and I'm sure that I'm still underestimating the effort it would take. The only alternative that doesn't take that long is the "start from scratch" approach.

FFG currently has the highest selling miniatures game on the market. They are the first company to ever beat 40k, pretty much period. They are not a particularly large company, but neither is Privateer Press or Wyrd or SteamForge or any of the other companies that have managed to do an edition overhaul that touches every single model in their lineup. There's no reason they couldn't create a new edition that launches with new rules for every currently available ship if they chose to. It's been a well worn road for years now.

Agreed. But as it's been asked before, is FFG willing to lose even a percentage of its X-Wing player base that will not buy into the new game? Especially with Runewars coming out?

I think 2.0 is already upon us. Fenn is the new Fell, the shadowcaster is the new firespray and the jumpmaster the new falcon.

I think there is a problem with having an X-wing 2.0.

if you introduce new mechanics to the game will you focus everyone to buy new stuff to play with. Let's just assume a new box comes out and it includes a new piece of cardbox for each ship, will persons that play epic need to buy 12. Let's say you completely change the bases for ships to do something like Armafa where shields are on the plastic as a dail, would you need to buy again 12 new sets.

There are main 2 points that get brought up

1- FFG has to be close to running out of ship

2- some ships can't be played so we need a new version of x-wing

The first point is a crazy idea because FFG and Disney have so many movies and shows now to pull ships from not even to say that FFG will make up new ships like the Raider when they run low on ideas. How many new ships are going to be in Ep 8 / 9 / Solo movie / season 4 rebels / freemaker wars / let alone any else we missing anything from 1-7 and Rogue one? There can be new version of ships which could show up (like the over powers B-wing) and tons of things like Imp/Reb Aces not even to think about new Scum Ace packs and big ships.

The second point can be viewed with the eyes of the Defender, very few people played it and so many thought it was worthless then the fix happened, Mindlink was called a dead card and the list goes on and on. So many people net list or roll easy mode they would never bat an eye at running B-wings again or T-65s unless one wins worlds, people have dismissed the M3-A before they even have a clue about the new cards with the scum epic.

No x-Wing does not need a version 2, not right now

I'm not opposed to a 2.0, if it is done right, as in not in the rebuy all the ships kind of way, which is frankly a ridiculous idea.

What I do want is an upgrade for the game, though, that adds objectives into standard play and squadbuilding, similar to Armada. The design space is just too crowded when you try to make every ship viable and meaningfully distinct in deathmatch. Because with the deathmatch focus we have right now a 'fix' for something will always either fail (hello Scyck, hope you are fine over there in your box) or become dominant/problematic (hello x7s, nice nerf you got there). Adding objectives allows the designers to push ships successfully into non-killy/unkillable nieches making them relevant at the same time. Of course for this to be successful some ships need looking at, like the Shadowcaster with its combination of Deathmatch abilities and speed, though these issues could be adressed within the system like with objectives that punish your opponent for not having many ships.

Now of course FFG would need to sell that somehow and personaly I'd love to see an resistance A-Wing/TIE Advanced/fo combopack that contains lots of cardboard and pilot sized objective cards.

9 hours ago, Sithborg said:

Would WOTC seriously stop printing Magic cards for a year to "fix the game"?

No, but OTOH WotC is willing to remove elements from the game that are damaging it. Which is a corrective measure that FFG seems unwilling/unable to use.

20 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

No, but OTOH WotC is willing to remove elements from the game that are damaging it. Which is a corrective measure that FFG seems unwilling/unable to use.

Not sure about that. The 86 point Whisper/Echo list was removed pretty effectively.

17 minutes ago, Verlaine said:

Not sure about that. The 86 point Whisper/Echo list was removed pretty effectively.

Unplayed by the meta is not the same as banned.

And since you used that as an example, what if FFG had actually banned Whisper and Echo, and reissued 2 Phantom aces with lower PS? It's possible they could have left the cloaking RULES untouched and still eliminated the "unbeatable high PS cloaker." Maybe the Phantom could have been a reasonably balanced ship rather than go from OP to dead.

Having started playing Armada recently, I would not be very happy about a second edition of Xwing.

That said I can see how very different the two games are even from my limited exposure, and I think the design difference between the two really highlights the flaws in the older xwing system.

The main difference is, imo, the way they handle 'actions'. In xwing actions are unique to the pilot card they are on. Sure, all actions in the game are shared by more than one pilot, but at the same time each ship will have different actions than another ship. In Armada each ship has access to the same four commands(which I consider analogous to actions in xwing). These commands can give you access to certain universal abilities and different cards allow access to more specific abilities.

So already armada ships start on a more equal footing than xwing ships. They can ALL take a command that modifies their maneuver. Obviously they all have different maneuver schemes and thus fly differently, but they can all modify that equally. In xwing the difference between movement dials is exacerbated by access to different repositioning actions, or to none at all. An X-Wing and T-70 X-Wing have more or less the same dial, but one has a built in boost action, making its movement footprint better. The same can be said for rerolls. Armada, all ships have access to a basic reroll through command dials. Xwing, not all ships have the target lock action natively. A TIE/FO is superior to a normal TIE in offensive capabilities because it has a native target lock.

This is ALL exacerbated by upgrade cards. Until recently there only so many kinds of slots, and those slots were generally universal. If you had red dice, you got a turbolasor slot. Blue dice? Generally you got an ion slot. None of these slots give you access to new commands. They can modify what you can DO with those commands; but that universal nature of the commands, with different ships getting different ways to use them through stats and upgrade cards is a tighter system imo. In xwing any card can do basically whatever. There are very loose themes involved with different upgrade types. But there are always cards that break that mold. Some cards just add entirely new actions! So not only does a regular x-wing not have native access to movement adjustment, but the t-70 could have access to BOTH kinds of movement adjustment where the x-wing has to choose one or the other. This doesn't even mention the Action Header upgrade cards.

While the armada system of handling actions is obviously not transferable 1 to 1 to xwing, due to them modeling different types of combat and equipment, I think the universal starting point for all ships, with how you use the commands differing, is a superior system.

The other main difference that bugs me now is evade dice. What are they representing? The infringe on TWO other separate designs spaces, movement and accuracy. They make the game much more arbitrary than feels good. You often dont have very many pieces on the board. When those pieces can be destroyed in one turn because the 8 different basic things that affect shot accuracy and evasion chance all went in your opponents favor, and then your own attack failing because one or two of them went in your opponents favor, why even have all those things? Attacker's position, initial attack roll, target lock(which allows you to reroll WHATEVER) focus, defender's position, initial evade roll, focus, evade token. All these things determine both if an attack hits, and how much damage it does. Its too much redundancy for not enough variation.

But again, unless they literally flooded the market with new starter sets that included enough cardboard and cardstock to convert entire collections and they were dirt cheap; the division a second edition would create would kill 90% of any fun local game store players would have. You could play with the older, less balanced version with everyone you used to play with or you could play the newer, better version with the >100% of people that bought it. What a gross, alienating decision that is to make every week!

17 hours ago, iamfanboy said:

I want you to do a little exercise:

Try to figure out how much of that $600 you actually use. Imagine that, if you had to play in a tournament and all of your minis and cards spontaneously combusted, how much would you have to spend right now in order to run a competitive list?

If you're a tournament player, it's almost certainly less than half that, and the only way to use all of it is to be a casual player doing lots of Aturi Cluster, Epic games, and never setting foot at a table with 100/6 rules.

2.0 would, done right, make all of that $600 usable again at a tournament.

You want to run Biggs, Wedge, and Luke?

You want to run an Academy swarm?

You want to run Starvipers?

2.0 would let you. In theory. In practice... eh, it is tricky to design games, and no one's perfect.

I don't always fly competitive so i use pretty much everything.

17 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

What is it about this fallacy that makes it so easy to believe?

I'm running Windows 10. I can open all of my documents from Windows 7. Why would XWM be different??

I probably should have said that IF that was the case i would not play. The big problem I have is that imo we do not need a 2.0 version. The game is pretty well balanced as is. Sure it isn't perfect but look at any game you like and ypu will see that there always tends to be things in that game that is more effective than others. Xwing is no exception. Creating a 2.0 version will create its own balance issues down the road (hindsight is 20/20 after all). For a good example of this look at ordnance and bombs. Since the dawn of the game people have been wanting a fix to make them good. Now they are good and pwople want nerfs. Will a 2.0 version really cause all these 'problems' to end? For a time maybe but sooner or later the work to 'fix' the game will be ruined by a good combo or exploitation of the mechanics.

As long as it fixes the two biggest mechanical problems with the game:

Undersized dials literally cannot physically contain enough maneuvers for some ships)

Bad card organization: font sizes limit ships to 4 maximum action choices, but for some reason the upgrade bar can fit more upgrade icons than any ship will ever have, lol.

And then rebalances the early wave ships with the maneuvers and upgrade types that came out after they were released.