2 New Dice (A Dumb Idea I Cannot Stop Thinking About)

By gamblertuba, in X-Wing

2-dice attacks are kind of crap. Rebels and their 1-agility barges are addicted to Biggs. Could these problems be at least helped by the following:

  • When defending, replace one of your green dice with a white die. White die is a green die but one of its evade faces is replaced with a double evade face.
  • When attacking a target (with your primary weapon?) in your primary firing arc, replace one of your red dice with a black die. Black die is a red die with a double hit side in place of a regular hit.

Why?

  1. The black die will provide a larger benefit to multiple attacks with fewer red dice.
  2. The white die will provide the largest benefit to 1 agility ships and might help Rebels get over a Biggs addiction. (i.e. Biggs could be nerfed "safely")
  3. Makes all ships care about arc against all targets.

I'm not positive on the best way to enhance the two "super" dice but this is the simplest example I could use. The idea is to maintain the overall balance so that the odds of a standard joust would be unchanged. I know this would undermine the costing of current ships. (e.g. turrets and aux arcs are weakened) But, the idea of making the first die rolled a stronger one keeps the power curve from bottoming out so much on low attack or low agility ships.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I feel like the idea has potential.

Edited by gamblertuba

Sounds a bit like the dice in Armada.

Nice idea! Never gonna happen but lets theorize:

What if it was "you may replace" and the black die had no crits in it?

To be honest, this just makes me want to see some black and white prize support dice . . .

The idea is interesting, but I wonder if it will be enough. I guess your TIE swarm now does about two more damage per round . . . except the opponent is also rolling one more evade against those attacks. Is one extra damage enough to bring balance to the Force? Likewise, your B-Wing might get one extra evade in a round, but I feel like that extra evade is going to go a lot further on Fenn than on Ibtisam; it's a quarter of his health vs. an eighth of hers. One-agility ships really suffer from dice creep: as the game has gone on, dice have gotten stronger, with more ways to modify them and maximize their impact; but hull and shields haven't scaled appropriately. Giving them a one-in-eight chance to roll an extra evade is cool, but I don't know if it's enough, especially considering that other ships also benefit from the change . . . .

(Plus, the B-Wing's problems kinda go beyond statline issues . . . their dials are just way too slow at this point, their aces are largely overcosted, and so on . . . grumble grumble I want my jousters back).

As pretty much a rebel only player at this point, I resent the Biggs Addiction you speak of.

I get your point, but I only occasionally dabble with Biggs.

I can quit him any time I want.

7 hours ago, Arthur_McGuire said:

Sounds a bit like the dice in Armada.

Nice idea! Never gonna happen but lets theorize:

What if it was "you may replace" and the black die had no crits in it?

Why would this idea not happen? They added conditions to this game. I'd bet they will add new dice, eventually, once they start to run out of ideas for expansions again. Plus, a title for 2dice attack small ships or 1 dice defense small ships which lets them trade dice sounds feasible.

5 hours ago, Sekac said:

As pretty much a rebel only player at this point, I resent the Biggs Addiction you speak of.

I get your point, but I only occasionally dabble with Biggs.

I can quit him any time I want.

It's not a Biggs addiction, more like Biggs necessity. If your big hitters, or reliable ships or supports are 1 agility and 9 hp and there are lists where two or three ships can murder that 9 hp ace before it shoots... you better have Biggs handy.

@gamblertuba IMO if we got a die that has a two hit face, you're gonna see more Biggs, not less.
There are still more things to help you mod your red and black dice than things that would help you mod your green and white dice.

Edited by Polda

Palpatine

I see a lot of fixes on this here forum and lot of the ideas seem to come from Attack Wing.

I've been saying for about 2 years that this would be a way to fix the T-65. Give them a rogue squadron title that allows them to make their attacks with (I've always said blue, but let's go with your color) black dice. A Black die would have 2 crits, 4 hits, 1 focus, 1 blank. Therefore, an unmodified attack would give them the same results as a single modifier. And a single mod the same as a dual. Basically, it makes the X Wing hyper accurate over other 3 dice ships (sadly, the combination of K4 and Expertise means that the Dengars of today's meta are still more efficient attackers, and they still don't need an action). You could also then make it a mod for other ships to use it... something like "Enhanced Lasers: (Limited) When attacking, replace one of your red dice with a black die. Cost 1. Mod." And it would obviously come what would be today referred to as the Battle of Scarrif "aces" package, so there would be no problem putting dice in the box.

But I don't think this idea works anymore. Perhaps the dual hit icon is indeed needed to bring the X wings back into the fold. Perhaps the mod could say something like "This die may not be modified" to circumvent Palp. And if it either increased the cost of the X wing, or there was an alternate title that decreased the cost, there is no worry about equipping it on Biggs.

Die with double face is an interesting idea and would definitely enhance 1-2 dice ships but my problem is this. 2 dice weren't always broken, awings were a thing once, tie fighters were absolutely a thing, this idea would just end up making ffg dice creep the two face options out and we'll need 3 face die. The problem is ffg can't stop from breaking a game that had balance and then breaking it further to fix the previous break. If they could leave power creep alone I think your idea could work but they can't so it won't.

4 hours ago, Polda said:

It's not a Biggs addiction, more like Biggs necessity. If your big hitters, or reliable ships or supports are 1 agility and 9 hp and there are lists where two or three ships can murder that 9 hp ace before it shoots... you better have Biggs handy.

I still respectfully disagree. I never run Biggs in tournaments and I do fine. He's a crutch, no doubt. I can walk without crutches, thank you.

Different attack dice are a great idea.

Green dice creep not so much.

THis has been a suggestion I've developed for a while:

Accuracy die (blue): has no crits, and several double hit symbols (not sure how many). Double hit symbols on this die require two evades to cancel, but deal one damage if uncancelled. Used for missiles (canonically small, fast, nimble things designed to track and kill light ships, but didn't do much damage against big things with lots of shielding and armour) but also for any similar high-accuracy-low-damage scenarios like flak cannon equivalents, TLTs, etc.

Normal die: the current red die.

Damage die (black): has a lot of crits, and several double hit symbols. Double hits on this die require only 1 evade to cancel, but deal two damage if uncancelled. Used for torpedoes (canonically slow, powerful things that are almost impossible to tag fighters with but can cripple large ships and capital ships) and other high-damage-low-accuracy weapons such as HLC.

This way you could have missiles and torps using relatively lower numbers of dice and still doing what they're supposed to do against the ship types they're supposed to do it against, rather than the current situation where to be good they have to do big piles of dice and be basically equally effective against both ship types.

I'd also like to see special effects attached to specific die results like the surges in Descent/ImpAss, but that's a WHOLE nother thing and would definitely require a ground-up rules rewrite.

I'd love to see this concept, but the trouble is that you'd either have to live with a whole bunch of stuff not using them appropriately (i.e. the whole current crop of secondary weapons, not to mention probably several primary weapons) or errata them. It could even be possible to combine different dice, or to add or upgrade to specific coloured results (e.g. add a black doublehit to an otherwise red roll, but there would have to be a cancellation priority order for this. Probably blue doublehit > hit > black doublehit > crit).

I think this could actually be worked in by errata, but the opportunity has long since been missed.

2 hours ago, Khyros said:

Give them a rogue squadron title that allows them to make their attacks with (I've always said blue , but let's go with your color) black dice.

My only input here is this:

All attack dice need to be the warm colors (add orange and yellow)

All defense dice need to be the cool colors (add blue and purple).

Although I do like the idea of a "double damage" non-crit result.

Edited by Darth Meanie