Just now, Astech said:

That's actually super weak on defense - pretty much an auto-loss, in fact. On offense, once Tomax goes down all you need is to give the shuttle one protect action and Oicunn can't kill it before he dies.

One downside to that list is the fact that it's two ships. You won't be making good use of the reinforcements rule.

So.. Uh... Anybody up for actually putting some rules together? I'm willing to play test a bit but I'm tapped out with work as is. We're actually looking at alternatives to shake up the meta a bit more.

22 minutes ago, LagJanson said:

So.. Uh... Anybody up for actually putting some rules together? I'm willing to play test a bit but I'm tapped out with work as is. We're actually looking at alternatives to shake up the meta a bit more.

Well I wan't to put up a series of missions and rules and not just senators shuttle. Would like a Trench Run, a bomb surface base mission and other stuff. But Also have to make it simple enough so you don't need dozens of tokens, flexible enough so you can randomly select a mission without having the change your list. But as you said, time is a luxury I don't have as well.

On 5/5/2017 at 8:10 AM, MaxPower said:

I dont know how any list could stop 3 torp scouts from destroying the shuttle after at most 2 rounds of firing.

They are guaranteed to get a lock on the ps0 shuttle. They ignore biggs. Their damage output vs the shuttle is crazy.

7 x Z-95's can defeat that list pretty easy. Only Homing Missiles let you ignore Evade tokens. The Z's can dish out 7 Evade tokens a turn. I don't think the U-boats have enough Torpedoes to make a difference.

10 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

7 x Z-95's can defeat that list pretty easy. Only Homing Missiles let you ignore Evade tokens. The Z's can dish out 7 Evade tokens a turn. I don't think the U-boats have enough Torpedoes to make a difference.

Yet 7 Z-95s can't really dish out the damage, meaning the Shuttle will take 2 full turns of over 6 damage a turn, probably killing it with average dice. I think 6 Z-95s with cluster missiles are a better bet in the long run.

Just now, Astech said:

Yet 7 Z-95s can't really dish out the damage, meaning the Shuttle will take 2 full turns of over 6 damage a turn, probably killing it with average dice. I think 6 Z-95s with cluster missiles are a better bet in the long run.

The Shuttle protectors don't need to kill anything. They just need to let the Shuttle live for the 6 rounds to get off the board.

Also, the Shuttle won't take 6 turns of damage as it will have 7 Evade tokens a turn and 2 green dice. That's plenty to get it off the board.

37 minutes ago, Marinealver said:

Well I wan't to put up a series of missions and rules and not just senators shuttle. Would like a Trench Run, a bomb surface base mission and other stuff. But Also have to make it simple enough so you don't need dozens of tokens, flexible enough so you can randomly select a mission without having the change your list. But as you said, time is a luxury I don't have as well.

Hey, I got the trench.

Seriously though, I have looked at multi mission tournaments. Babaganoosh made a good point in that thread regarding mission rule awareness and player confusion. Keeping the number of mission types to just a few is big. Straight up dogfight, attack and defend is three missions in three rounds. You can achieve this with only two rule sets, standard and shuttle escort. This... is doable. At most one more mission but it needs to be simple and balanced. I'd avoid the trench run scenario, but perhaps something similar. A strike mission of some sort? Does FFG have one that's not broken?

First though, cleaning up the shuttle mission.

2 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

The Shuttle protectors don't need to kill anything. They just need to let the Shuttle live for the 6 rounds to get off the board.

Also, the Shuttle won't take 6 turns of damage as it will have 7 Evade tokens a turn and 2 green dice. That's plenty to get it off the board.

The shuttle will take 2 turns of damage and die. A proton torpedo with guidance chips averages 4 hits. It's very reliable. And with a focus token it becomes even better. The shuttle doesn't have access to focus tokens, so it will roll an average of 6/8 evades, plus 8/8 evades from an evade token spent, giving it a total of 14/16 evades. That means that from every torpedo shot the shuttle takes 2.25 damage. you could round that down to two if you wanted to be a little on the safe side. The shuttle has 12 total health, so it takes exactly 6 missile shots to kill the thing.

Of course, the shuttle may close to range 1 before the second volley goes off, in which case Feedback array would kill it regardless.

8 minutes ago, LagJanson said:

Hey, I got the trench.

Seriously though, I have looked at multi mission tournaments. Babaganoosh made a good point in that thread regarding mission rule awareness and player confusion. Keeping the number of mission types to just a few is big. Straight up dogfight, attack and defend is three missions in three rounds. You can achieve this with only two rule sets, standard and shuttle escort. This... is doable. At most one more mission but it needs to be simple and balanced. I'd avoid the trench run scenario, but perhaps something similar. A strike mission of some sort? Does FFG have one that's not broken?

First though, cleaning up the shuttle mission.

yeah I'm also working on my own trench. My idea was a series of turns (say 12) before the death Star is in range then 3 attack dice is rolled to fire the super laser. Super laser takes 7 "charges" to fire. I made a card set where on the back if the set is put together it forms the tactical display of the death star, and each card that is flipped up (as for a charge) is a scene from the Death Star firing the super laser.

Tweaks I'd start with, I think:

1. Randomly select attacker and defender, later in tournament try to balance it so all players have played both roles.

2. Shuttle gets 8 hull, 8 shields (so same total as a VCX or Deci), but can receive crits.

3. "Protect" tokens are not evade tokens, but do assign an evade result (homing missiles do not bypass). You can spend more than one per attack.

4. The shuttle has Anti-Pursuit Lasers and Countermeasures equipped (and otherwise counts as a large-based ship, if it matters).

5. No reinforcement rule.

Probably too generous to the shuttle at this point, but can adjust down from here.

5 minutes ago, Marinealver said:

yeah I'm also working on my own trench. My idea was a series of turns (say 12) before the death Star is in range then 3 attack dice is rolled to fire the super laser. Super laser takes 7 "charges" to fire. I made a card set where on the back if the set is put together it forms the tactical display of the death star, and each card that is flipped up (as for a charge) is a scene from the Death Star firing the super laser.

Sounds familiar. 12 turns is where my own thematic rules balanced nicely. Feel free to use anything from my own rules (post 3) that you'd like. The turbolaser towers are near perfect. A big enough threat to make the players swear without sandpaper effects. In four runs they've hit the target twice... But boy is it devastating when they hit!

2 minutes ago, Hawkstrike said:

Tweaks I'd start with, I think:

1. Randomly select attacker and defender, later in tournament try to balance it so all players have played both roles.

2. Shuttle gets 8 hull, 8 shields (so same total as a VCX or Deci), but can receive crits.

3. "Protect" tokens are not evade tokens, but do assign an evade result (homing missiles do not bypass). You can spend more than one per attack.

4. The shuttle has Anti-Pursuit Lasers and Countermeasures equipped (and otherwise counts as a large-based ship, if it matters).

5. No reinforcement rule.

Probably too generous to the shuttle at this point, but can adjust down from here.

2. Crits being 2 damage? Most crit cards are not actually that big a deal on the shuttle.

1 minute ago, LagJanson said:

Sounds familiar. 12 turns is where my own thematic rules balanced nicely. Feel free to use anything from my own rules (post 3) that you'd like. The turbolaser towers are near perfect. A big enough threat to make the players swear without sandpaper effects. In four runs they've hit the target twice... But boy is it devastating when they hit!

Yeah, well 12 is the number on the dial from the Star Wars LCG. So I went with that. I think Dagobah Dave's scenario is the most popular one for trench runs, but just like the senators shuttle I want to make it where two players can bring any faction (not just rebels vs imperials) and play a game. The idea is to use stratagems to fill out any important list builds just in case you end up on the one side of the mission you didn't build your list into. Such as Scum finding out they are the defenders or Imperials having a mirror match and imperials are now the attackers. One such idea is to give out free <missile> and <torpedo> secondary weapons to single slot ships. Also I have to modify the attackers goal for trench run to 2 critical hits with a <torpedo> weapon or 4 hits with a <missile> weapon (for the times when scum or even Imperials become the attacker).

7 minutes ago, LagJanson said:

2. Crits being 2 damage? Most crit cards are not actually that big a deal on the shuttle.

No, just regular crit cards -- so it's random if you get a useful effect. Shaken Pilot, for example, is useful. Stress from a thrust control fire could be used for slicer tools, etc.

Kind of keeping in line with many online competitive games where you have to switch sides after a game, why not run the tournament where you have to play both sides? Each player has to bring two lists, in a similar fashion to Hanger Bay, but you rotate and play both offense and defense, depending on how many rounds you go, maybe 4 games, alternating offense and defense, 6 games for a larger/longer tourney. My FLGS usually does 3 games for store tourneys, so getting a 4th game in seems doable.

Just now, kris40k said:

Kind of keeping in line with many online competitive games where you have to switch sides after a game, why not run the tournament where you have to play both sides? Each player has to bring two lists, in a similar fashion to Hanger Bay, but you rotate and play both offense and defense, depending on how many rounds you go, maybe 4 games, alternating offense and defense, 6 games for a larger/longer tourney. My FLGS usually does 3 games for store tourneys, so getting a 4th game in seems doable.

Locally, I know this won't fly. Many of the players here don't have much for ships. Several just a single faction. A single list where players change sides from defender to attacker works. Another reason for this is it keeps list optimization down since instead of always playing one role, the player must achieve multiple style objectives with that one list.

I think it is more challenging to try and build one list that will work on both offense and defense than to allow players to optimize for one or the other.

if you do a cut, maybe the cut returns to standard dogfight mode just to shake it up further.

57 minutes ago, Astech said:

The shuttle will take 2 turns of damage and die. A proton torpedo with guidance chips averages 4 hits. It's very reliable. And with a focus token it becomes even better. The shuttle doesn't have access to focus tokens, so it will roll an average of 6/8 evades, plus 8/8 evades from an evade token spent, giving it a total of 14/16 evades. That means that from every torpedo shot the shuttle takes 2.25 damage. you could round that down to two if you wanted to be a little on the safe side. The shuttle has 12 total health, so it takes exactly 6 missile shots to kill the thing.

Of course, the shuttle may close to range 1 before the second volley goes off, in which case Feedback array would kill it regardless.

Actually, the odds for the Proton Torps with GC is a lot less than you think.

I'm not sure where you got those probabilities, but they're wrong. Just off the top of your head you can see you'll roll 2 hits on average with 4 dice, then the GCs will add one more hit for a bare minimum of a 3 average. but you're right in that my original approximation isn't quite right. Here's the full version.

This is the full trinomial distribution tree of a 4-die attack, summarised through each branch in the table above. By accounting for the fact that you can turn one focus to a crit and GCs give you a hit when you don't already have 4 of them, you get an average damage of 895/256, which is about 3.5 damage. The shuttle again evades 14/8 damage, leading to a total damage of 1.75. This is admittedly lower, but not by much. And again, Feedback array after the initial volleys will easily finish it off.

7 hours ago, Astech said:

That's actually super weak on defense - pretty much an auto-loss, in fact. On offense, once Tomax goes down all you need is to give the shuttle one protect action and Oicunn can't kill it before he dies.

Oicunn can do 2 damage, then Tomax can do 3-4 more, and it's over. Even if the shuttle evades, the evade will get crack shotted and Tomax at PS8 will likely fire his missiles. Bonus points for homing missiles - no evades!

23 minutes ago, ThalanirIII said:

Oicunn can do 2 damage, then Tomax can do 3-4 more, and it's over. Even if the shuttle evades, the evade will get crack shotted and Tomax at PS8 will likely fire his missiles. Bonus points for homing missiles - no evades!

Check the rulebook - in 100 point battles the shuttle has 6 shelds in addition to its hull value. tomax dies on Combat Round 2, and Oicunn can't survive 4 turns of attacks from a 100 pt list.

6 hours ago, heychadwick said:

The Shuttle protectors don't need to kill anything. They just need to let the Shuttle live for the 6 rounds to get off the board.

Also, the Shuttle won't take 6 turns of damage as it will have 7 Evade tokens a turn and 2 green dice. That's plenty to get it off the board.

If I recall correctly only one token can be spend for the same effect on one opportunity, so 7 evades would be 4 too many. However with that in mind you can still beat the scouts with a higher PS alpha strike force handily I think. This is a very ordnance-focussed mission, isn't it?

Furthermore I believe Michael should be compensated by FFG.

You might want to check this out:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0zje8x9z69yeyay/X-Wing-Missions-for-organised-play.pdf?dl=0&fb=1&fb_action_ids=10153439753674235&fb_action_types=groups.post

One more definite rules tweak, and a potential variation from my post above:

Rule tweak: The shuttle is placed at PS 12 anywhere at range 1 of the defender's edge. It always moves at PS 0.

Variant: Instead of 8/8 health, APL, and Countermeasures, the shuttle has 6/6 health, two crew slots, and may equip one modification worth 3 points or fewer. The cost of any equipped modification or crew are subtracted from the 100 points of the player's list. (This way, thematically, you can defend the a Emperor, Jabba, Leia, etc and get the benefit of their abilities -- but pay for Palp and your list will be down points on offense).

Any thoughts on the impact of adding crew slots to the senator's shuttle (crew paid for out of the base list)?

Edit: And Ion / Tractor Beam rules -- how best to apply ion/tractor beam rules against the shuttle? My instinct would be to treat it as a large base ship in both cases.