Been playing this game a while though only posting to this forum newly. Just wanted to say I like epic ships but what's unfortunate is most of my friends who play don't.
Hard to argue with them in the sense they say x-wing does small craft best. What looks like a fun series of campaigns can't carry through the big ships just lumber along as dice chucking fests and seem to be less interesting strategically.
Am I missing something? Or is that how it is for most?
Epic is epic fun. Everyone should play epic. Casual Epic is the most fun I had in this game. Ever.
15 minutes ago, KelRiever said:Am I missing something? Or is that how it is for most?
Yep! Full on Star Wars is WWII in the Pacific Theater...legions of fighters supported by capital ships. That's epic play!
13 minutes ago, RufusDaMan said:Epic is epic fun. Everyone should play epic. Casual Epic is the most fun I had in this game. Ever.
100%.
Recently we've been using two Epics and two 100 pt squads on a 3 x 3 map. It makes for a great furball!
The Epic builds require a lot of thought. Too much point defence (1-2) and you get taken apart by the other Epic's fire. And fighters at R3. Too much long range fire power and the fighters close to range 1 and eat you alive.
Same amount of thought goes into the squad builds. CAP or anti-ship load outs. Aces or lower skill pilots for quantity. Live or die with the choices.
Epic is great for adding a couple of additional layers of tactical complexity to the game. OP, you should really try and get your friends to give it a go. Almost guarantee that once they try it they'll love it!
Just yesterday me and my X wing buddy dipped our toes into some casual epic. We did 200 points, he used his Gozanti and I used my C-ROC. It was Awesome! Tell your friends if they aren't playing epic, they're only getting half of the awesomeness and half the fun X wing has to offer!
We've already decided that our next game day we're going to do another 200point epic match before we move on to 300 points, then we're going to bust out his Raider and my Corvette for a truly epic showdown!
17 minutes ago, Stoneface said:Recently we've been using two Epics and two 100 pt squads on a 3 x 3 map. It makes for a great furball!
The Epic builds require a lot of thought. Too much point defence (1-2) and you get taken apart by the other Epic's fire. And fighters at R3. Too much long range fire power and the fighters close to range 1 and eat you alive.
Same amount of thought goes into the squad builds. CAP or anti-ship load outs. Aces or lower skill pilots for quantity. Live or die with the choices.
Epic is great for adding a couple of additional layers of tactical complexity to the game. OP, you should really try and get your friends to give it a go. Almost guarantee that once they try it they'll love it!
All true Stoneface!
10 minutes ago, rubberduck said:Just yesterday me and my X wing buddy dipped our toes into some casual epic. We did 200 points, he used his Gozanti and I used my C-ROC. It was Awesome! Tell your friends if they aren't playing epic, they're only getting half of the awesomeness and half the fun X wing has to offer!
We've already decided that our next game day we're going to do another 200point epic match before we move on to 300 points, then we're going to bust out his Raider and my Corvette for a truly epic showdown!
Through some trial and error, we found that if you limit the Raider and Tantive to 40 points of upgrades it makes for a fair match, points wise. The Raider's base cost is 10 pts more than the corvette. You can use less of course.
DON'T forget damage control as part of your build. If you do, it may be a short but VERY interesting game!
Edited by StonefaceI guess it's who I play with. I actually understand their criticisms completely. Me, I just like the epic ships every once in a while whereas they never do.
*shrug* So many games to play too. I need more time and more friends.
56 minutes ago, KelRiever said:I need more time and more friends.
Don't we all!
2 hours ago, KelRiever said:the big ships just lumber along as dice chucking fests
Make sure you use tournament rules for energy. You power up all your weapons from the start and have full power reserves. This gets them moving faster. Also Optimised Generators on the big huge ships is a help in keeping power up. Finally Ordnance Tubes greatly reduces energy requirements. These were in the Gozanti. Epic got a real boost when the Gozanti was released. Speaking of which the Gozanti and docked ships - I can't think of anything more strategic in X-Wing than wondering when to launch and your opponent worrying about these undamaged Interceptors being released.
10 minutes ago, Sasajak said:Speaking of which the Gozanti and docked ships - I can't think of anything more strategic in X-Wing than wondering when to launch and your opponent worrying about these undamaged Interceptors being released.
Yeah, my friend made very good use of these, launching a loaded TIE bomber firing at PS 8 right in my face! It hurt....a lot.
Edited by rubberduckI have all the epic ships and had never put them on the table until I played Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. I really enjoyed the big guys and can't wait to try more stuff with them.
Lots of X-Wing miniatures fans like me got into this game at least partly because of nostalgia for the X-Wing and TIE Fighter video games. One of my favorites parts of those games was energy management. Epic ships let me do that!
1 hour ago, Incard said:try more stuff with them
The Gozanti missions. They are so good. You only need a 3x3 play area and very easy to play.
7 hours ago, KelRiever said:Hard to argue with them in the sense they say x-wing does small craft best. What looks like a fun series of campaigns can't carry through the big ships just lumber along as dice chucking fests and seem to be less interesting strategically.
Am I missing something? Or is that how it is for most?
I really like the campaigns with the big ships. I think when you play it, you need to agree not to take really powerful stuff when you play it. For example, as many Tie Phantoms or ships with HLC can ruin the campaigns. You just need to agree to do a lot more generics and regular ships instead of the crazy powerful ones. If you can agree to that, it's not usually too bad.
10 hours ago, RufusDaMan said:Epic is epic fun. Everyone should play epic. Casual Epic is the most fun I had in this game. Ever.
It is how you get the films on the table.
Someone make stats for an Imperial Star Destroyer. I know, I know it's supposedly too big to fit on the table.
But you can use the one from Armada. Just pretend it's really, really far away...
1 hour ago, KelRiever said:Someone make stats for an Imperial Star Destroyer. I know, I know it's supposedly too big to fit on the table.
But you can use the one from Armada. Just pretend it's really, really far away...
Have you searched these forums for ideas??
I started several threads that talked about the best builds for the Huge ships based on mandating one of the Titles.
And for ISDs, look for the Omen build by Refugeanoth:
Edited by Darth Meanie
6 hours ago, KelRiever said:Someone make stats for an Imperial Star Destroyer. I know, I know it's supposedly too big to fit on the table.
But you can use the one from Armada. Just pretend it's really, really far away...
Actually, there's a better plan than that.
Get a top-down picture of a star destroyer
Print on A2
Draw boxes around Bridge tower (obstacle, shielded), spinal quad lasers, and port/starboard turbolaser emplacements (guns under control of imperial player that fire powerfully but inaccurately within a given arc, either giving a few attack dice or some stress to anyone ending their move in said arc)
Use as board.
You are now dogfighting above a more or less to-scale star destroyer.
Find a similar image for an MC-80 and set the two up adjacent and have a Starlancer-esque dogfight between two capital ships!
QuoteHard to argue with them in the sense they say x-wing does small craft best. What looks like a fun series of campaigns can't carry through the big ships just lumber along as dice chucking fests and seem to be less interesting strategically.
Start with small epic games, but also the smaller epic ships. Corvettes are largely just dice monsters, but the transports are most assuredly not.
The epic ships do work - and do make for a dramatically different game. Epic - with 300-400 point squads, epic ships and a double sized board, do really present different tactical challenges. They're not just dice-fests - the single-point epic ships arguably add more tactics than the big boys; a Rebel Transport is part moving bunker, part battering ram, part ionizing minefield. A Gozanti Carrier can drop an entire 4-ship bomber wing 2/3 of the way across the board in a single turn, or cripple an ace by stripping all his tokens before the activation phase even begins.
Plus, epic games make different things good to standard 100 point "knife fight in a phone box" dogfights:
Okay, I was joking about using the Armada ship!
But I do really like the idea of using that thing as a board. Mind you, to print that costs. Still, pretty sweet!
9 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:Actually, there's a better plan than that.
Get a top-down picture of a star destroyer
Print on A2
Draw boxes around Bridge tower (obstacle, shielded), spinal quad lasers, and port/starboard turbolaser emplacements (guns under control of imperial player that fire powerfully but inaccurately within a given arc, either giving a few attack dice or some stress to anyone ending their move in said arc)
Use as board.
You are now dogfighting above a more or less to-scale star destroyer.
Find a similar image for an MC-80 and set the two up adjacent and have a Starlancer-esque dogfight between two capital ships!
This rocks!!
Why didn't FFG release a pair of mats like this instead of a lame Hoth and Styarkiller base mat?
Oh, that's right. They are running out of design space. . .
Edited by Darth MeanieOn 6/25/2017 at 10:09 AM, RufusDaMan said:Epic is epic fun. Everyone should play epic. Casual Epic is the most fun I had in this game. Ever.
I'm a competitive player who's been playing in tournaments since Wave 1's release at Gencon. And I agree with this statement fully. Epic X-Wing, whether casual or competitive, is the most fun way to play this game.
A lot of people prefer the pick up and play nature of the small game, over the longer pew pew pew of the epic game. So you're not alone in that most folks find it harder to get an epic game going than to find a small match.
However! Epic matches have entirely different tactical and strategic considerations than small games. It is simply not the case that the epic game is about chucking dice (at least, not more so than the small game). Other folks have talked about some specifics, so I'll stick to a general rule of thumb:
Epic matches have more points to use, and more options. That means that there is a larger variety of potential opponent compositions to consider when building a fleet. That, in turn, means that whatever epic fleet you end up with needs to be flexible, with different plans to deal with different opponent archetypes. In my mind, that makes epic at least as interesting as small.
But obviously you and your friends might have a different take.
18 minutes ago, Punning Pundit said:A lot of people prefer the pick up and play nature of the small game, over the longer pew pew pew of the epic game.
Hey, you want quantity or quality?