5 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

The exceptions that test the rule, certainly. I would say that the time of accidental wins with those lists is probably over, as power creep and minor nerfs have eroded some of the raw list power, but I may be wrong.

I'm at the point now where I think some ships "play x wing" so much better than the others that the academic best way to handle them is to not play x wing. I haven't fully digested how I want to act or play based off that belief, but i feel pretty certain its true.

50 minutes ago, Brunas said:

I don't know why people do it. I know there are people that enjoy the current most competitive metagame, or at least claim to. It does exactly mean that they were the best of the people that decided to bring broken lists. In VA the last "fair" list we had was Kylo and two mangler boats and thweek + 3 starvipers, and they were annihilated the second they hit "real" lists. Probably just means how you define compete, which I would put at what maximizes your chances of winning an event, and there's only 2-3 lists that will do that

For me 3 Ace or 2 Ace + (holding Palp Yorr aside) lists in Scum & Imperial are still just barely good enough with practice to target 4-2. Assumes a healthy combination of very few mistakes + 50% favorable matchups. That typically allows a path to Top 8-16 before crashing against a boss battle.

1 hour ago, Biophysical said:

I strive to make effective squads, but one common theme in basically everything I run is arced ships, because I want my decisions to matter. I find it both interesting from a gameplay perspective, and I feel like it gives any wins I might get more significance. You don't accidentally win with arced ships that can't regenerate.

44 minutes ago, Brunas said:

to get through FSR2, unsure if I could manage 9 rounds of it unironically.

I admit I was flying it wrong by your design standards, but it was a lot of fun dogfighting with it - no fortress, breaking formation for offensive advantages, trying to annihilate the opponent's list before the countdown ticked over. And yes, it was nine rounds with it... The worst was the first - that poor Imp aces player who decided to joust me was so upset he filled me with sadness.

Admittedly, I also set the list aside after that and never touched it again.

4 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

For me 3 Ace or 2 Ace + lists in Scum & Imperial are still just barely good enough with practice to get to 4-2 regularly. Assumes a healthy combination of very few mistakes + 50% favorable matchups. That typically allows a path to Top 8-16 before crashing against a boss battle.

This is basically how I build all my lists. right now, I have:

2x Defender

Kylo+QD

3x T-70 (Generics even!)

And BB-Arcgressive

Its so much more fun, even if I lose all my games, I know at least I was playing one.

Gonna have to paint a Crab logo on the back of my Ghost...

correction: Gonna have to pay someone to paint a Crab logo on the back of my Ghost...

Something in between: new version of a plot with some modification

How to read it:
y-axis shows how often a pilot was used in 49 regionals
x-axis shows how many games that pilot won
the size of the ring shows how often the pilot ended up in the cut E: relatively! (# of cut / # of swiss)

A reading example:
Rebel Fenn is used very often (249), has a high win percentage (63%), and frequently makes the cut (100 times, or 40.2%).
Captain Yorr is played relatively frequently (60), has a pretty high win percentage (64%) -and made the cut even more often, relatively speaking (28 times, or 46.6%).
Braylen Stramm is played rarely (6), has a high win percentage (57%) - but almost always made the cut (5 times, or 83%). This is so rare that I'm hardly interested though.

Note: this is not limited to completely filled out tournaments, so it's biased towards cuts. Which means the circles are probably too large (more people played pilot X than I know, and they did not make the cut)
I did remove ships that made the cut less than two times, and I did remove ships that were overall used less than 5 times. I'm not interested in rare events, and 5 usages of a ship out of 5073 ships is what I consider to be rare.
This is NOT adjusted for generics, meaning their values have to be taken with a large grain of salt. But most ships are unique anyway.

5 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

A reading example:
Rebel Fenn is used very often (249), has a high win percentage (63%), and frequently makes the cut (100 times, or 40.2%).
Captain Yorr is played relatively frequently (60), has a pretty high win percentage (64%) - but made the cut relatively rarely, for whatever reason (28 times, or 40.6%).
Braylen Stramm is played rarely (6), has a high win percentage (57%) - but almost always made the cut (5 times, or 83%). This is so rare that I'm hardly interested though.

Emphasis added. I don't have your dataset, but based on the numbers above, 28/60 is 46.67%. Either way, it's better than Rebel Fenn.

I like actual data, it's generally lacking from many corners. Then again, it starts to look like my day job at some points, so I sometimes enjoy going with the "feels like" just to be contrarian.

On the cancer issue, infection would be a less contentious, though less evocative, way to look at it. I mean, you have to switch chemo to penicillin or antibiotics, and it's not generally self inflicted by the system, but caused by outside forces. Can FFG staff be considered outside forces acting upon the X-wing organism that sometimes heals it and sometimes infect it? Or are we the cause?

In some ways, it may actually be better, since the organism can fight off infections on its own at time, while cancer...

8 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

Thanks Dragoon! This stuff is awesome. We need a way to get more swiss data! Though I guess we could draw conclusions from the middle pack above.

This really does match perception to. Dash/Poe and Gunboats/Quickdraw have always seemed good but not great. Seems like there is enough data on those two at least to draw that conclusion I think.

One thing this drives home for me is that Jess Pava is now more than ever just Miranda's version of the attack shuttle phantom title.

2 minutes ago, drjkel said:

Emphasis added. I don't have your dataset, but based on the numbers above, 28/60 is 46.67%. Either way, it's better than Rebel Fenn.

thanks for catching that. You can also see from the text that I apparently did not hit edit, or it jumped back when I exchanged the picture or something alike. Why is one 40% frequent and one rare? I'll correct it right away!

Just now, GreenDragoon said:

Why is one 40% frequent and one rare?

You're just trying to sell one particular list type a bit harder than the other. On that note, I'll give you this delicious doorstop in exchange for that crumby old pastry you have...

also, for full transparency: circle size is sqrt(Cut/Swiss) because we suck at comparing areas. Same with Turret range 3 band being as large as range 1+2. The square root helps us to compare it better.

Well despite my best efforts, the 3 ships I flew in a regional are on the right side of that graph!

2 hours ago, Biophysical said:

You don't accidentally win with arced ships that can't regenerate.

Jesus

15 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

This really does match perception to. Dash/Poe and Gunboats/Quickdraw have always seemed good but not great. Seems like there is enough data on those two at least to draw that conclusion I think.

Poe and Nu are the only ships that are really underperforming compared to their numbers. QD is almost perfectly on the fit, meaning a certain amount of QD will statistically advance (around 1/3) to the cut. Nu is a bit more complicated because it‘s a generic and often has more than 1 per squad. Poe clearly underperforms though, which might be explained with him being a popular ship that everyone has.

On the other side of the fit are Fenn, Lothal, Miranda, Lowhhrick and Zeb. They all overperform, meaning your chances of making the cut is statistically higher if you use one of them. Or several.

1 hour ago, catachanninja said:

I'm at the point now where I think some ships "play x wing" so much better than the others that the academic best way to handle them is to not play x wing. I haven't fully digested how I want to act or play based off that belief, but i feel pretty certain its true.

This is definitely a problem, and it's sad that FFG's historic answer to super strong "regular" ships is to almost always to attack them with hard counters that are also good against everything else.

Edit: I'll probably take some flack for saying this, but I think R3A2 is a great card. It requres you to play the game to get the benefit, it hard counters a small set of things and it is modestly useful against a large set of things.

4 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

This is definitely a problem, and it's sad that FFG's historic answer to super strong "regular" ships is to almost always to attack them with hard counters that are also good against everything else.

Edit: I'll probably take some flack for saying this, but I think R3A2 is a great card. It requres you to play the game to get the benefit, it hard counters a small set of things and it is modestly useful against a large set of things.

I always liked stress because in the old days it brought everyone down to the base level of setting dials correctly, even the passive mods on a falcon got real sad when it was taking 3+ shots a turn. But hey people like thier action stacking and thier turrets and bombs so whatever.

2 minutes ago, catachanninja said:

I always liked stress because in the old days it brought everyone down to the base level of setting dials correctly, even the passive mods on a falcon got real sad when it was taking 3+ shots a turn. But hey people like thier action stacking and thier turrets and bombs so whatever.

There might be something more to this comment....

Would X-Wing be a better game if Actions didnt exist at all?

1 minute ago, Boom Owl said:

There might be something more to this comment....

Would X-Wing be a better game if Actions didnt exist at all?

I've played the early models of this game system - Wings of War, where the templates are a deck of cards and the damage is completely random! The actions actually do make this more interesting but I think the token staking and free actions have gone a might bit far. Why try to make the right decision when you can do ALL the actions? Happiness likely sits somewhere in the middle.

2 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

There might be something more to this comment....

Would X-Wing be a better game if Actions didnt exist at all?

I have a side hobby of designing games only I would want to play, and the one that's basically an X-wing variant has the player set a face down "action" token when they set the dial. There are actions, but they aren't responsive.

15 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

I have a side hobby of designing games only I would want to play, and the one that's basically an X-wing variant has the player set a face down "action" token when they set the dial. There are actions, but they aren't responsive.

I actually like the sound of that quite a bit

17 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

I have a side hobby of designing games only I would want to play, and the one that's basically an X-wing variant has the player set a face down "action" token when they set the dial. There are actions, but they aren't responsive.

That actually sound super interesting.

I also heard that Wings of Glory required you to set two dials (when you reveal one, the next is locked, and then you set that dial). That sounds SUPER cool (and hard)

19 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

I have a side hobby of designing games only I would want to play, and the one that's basically an X-wing variant has the player set a face down "action" token when they set the dial. There are actions, but they aren't responsive.

But muh advanced sensors whisper!

22 minutes ago, LagJanson said:

Wings of War, where the templates are a deck of cards and the damage is completely random!

Well, it's not completely random. (At least not in Wings of Glory, the current incarnation.) A given damage deck is associated with the power of the gun the firing aircraft carries.

And I think the lack of actions is at least partially compensated for by using altitude rules. (Or by using large planes, where crew-members may have to move to operate stations.)

1 minute ago, Tlfj200 said:

That actually sound super interesting.

I also heard that Wings of Glory required you to set two dials (when you reveal one, the next is locked, and then you set that dial). That sounds SUPER cool (and hard)

That does sound awesome. Very high entry barrier, but it must feel good when you pull it off. That's my main problem with my dream game of an X-wingish game using vaguely realistic space flight. The momentum build-up probably sends people flying off the board all the time because it takes just as long to stop as it does to get going. Feels bad and takes some time to get good at managing a system where you don't automatically slow down.

22 minutes ago, Tlfj200 said:

I also heard that Wings of Glory required you to set two dials (when you reveal one, the next is locked, and then you set that dial). That sounds SUPER cool (and hard)

There are two versions of WoG: First World War and Second World War. The basic game engine is pretty similar, but there are a number of minor differences, as you might expect given the aircraft advancements.

In WWI, you "set a dial" by laying out (face down) three chosen maneuvers in order. There are some restrictions: for example, you can't do two "stall" maneuvers in a row, and an Immelmann requires a "straight" maneuver both before and after.

It is interesting and challenging, but you don't lay out maneuvers every turn ... instead, you lay them out every third turn. So you lay out three, execute those three over three turns, then lay out three more. So the turn with a fresh three maneuvers is significantly more reactive than others. Depending on how well you can rationalize that in your head -- e.g., "this is just a rules way of simulating my pilot only being able to take stock and plan for a limited time during a furball; he can't constantly be operating with perfect information" -- that may or may not bug you.

I think WWII does a similar thing, but with only two maneuvers, but I've only read the rules once, and haven't played it.

Anyway, if you really want a game of dogfighting, you could do a lot worse than WoG WWI.

(Bizarrely, there is not a VASSAL module for it!)