I mean, I'm buying cameras and photography gear (just picked up a super-clean vintage rebadged Sigma 28mm f/2.8 for Pentax A). I *might* at some point get a Xi and a LAAT, but I've got no clue *when* it'll happen.

1 hour ago, jagsba said:

The Y-Wing is used mainly as a bomber because it can carry a heavy payload of missiles, torpedoes and bombs. The other important weapon is the topside ION canon, which rather than destroying a target, can disable it for later capture. Our canons have a computer assisted auto-fire feature, so don’t forget that when your in the heat of battle.

Factor 5 manufactured Rebel Alliance propaganda and bloody lies

20 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

I mean, I'm buying cameras and photography gear (just picked up a super-clean vintage rebadged Sigma 28mm f/2.8 for Pentax A). I *might* at some point get a Xi and a LAAT, but I've got no clue *when* it'll happen.

I preorderd a xi and a laat.

2 hours ago, EBerling said:

Objective play would have also solved one of the biggest problems in X-Wing -- the lack of incentive for either player to engage. So much of competitive X-Wing is about jockeying for a favorable engagement. Sure, it's a strategically and tactically interesting exercise playing chicken to see who will eventually cave first and engage the opponent on their terms, but it's also booooring and exhausting, and I suspect most players, especially new players, don't really like it. I got a point near the end of 1.0 where I just started really hating tournaments because the thought of spending 15-30 minutes every game as my opponent and I jockeyed for the best engagement terms was really tedious, repetitive, and uninteresting.

same team, yeah I'm sure it's no surprise, but the game of "who gets bored slower or does something stupid out of boredom" at the start of every game is... boring. Shocking!

17 minutes ago, catachanninja said:

I preorderd a xi and a laat.

I am not your own private Boba tea and coffee barista, you'll get your drink when I'm **** good and ready sir

5 minutes ago, Brunas said:

same team, yeah I'm sure it's no surprise, but the game of "who gets bored slower or does something stupid out of boredom" at the start of every game is... boring. Shocking!

my secret has always been to be really belligerent and take a better jousting list so that my opponent just flies into me to end their suffering early

1 minute ago, catachanninja said:

my secret has always been to be really belligerent and take a better jousting list so that my opponent just flies into me to end their suffering early

very altruistic - also you're kind to give your opponent such nice triangle tokens, and so many of them!

not like those of us who put the squiggly tokens and eye tokens on our own ships, rolled dice, and then ignored what they said though. That was truly the most interesting gameplay out there.

10 hours ago, Chumbalaya said:

GW and MtG are going strong and will continue to despite selling the same stuff over and over. And they didn't do it by catering to established players to the detriment of prospective new players.

Specifically, MtG doesn't pit new and old players against each other, like X-wing low key sorta does by pushing the new hotness factions.

MtG is deliberately really easy to get into collecting, is easy to branch your collection (because while you likely have an identity as a 'type' of player, your type can change if another set really attracts you, like how I almost always play Mono-White but Dimir's initial launch was exciting to my Johnny brain despite my favorite 'theme' being buffs and teamwork, and I always COULD go white-X and still retain value from all my card investments into non-white cards), and they work hard to make sure the rotations don't de-value your identity too hard. A huge goal of MTG is to balance the need for new players to 'jump in' without devaluing collections, and they did a good job.

MTG also focuses way more on 'tricks' than raw stats. Raw stats are important to faction identity (White tends to have small stuff or really big stuff and no in between, green is efficiently statted because its 'tricks' depend on having stats on the board and don't work great 'out of nowhere'. Red slants offensive, blue tends to have poor stats but unusually good utility on creatures, ect), but part of why MTG colors feel so vibrant, and why different decks of the same color can have so many different archetypes, is a focus on tricks (ideally, some metas are better than others, looking at you 3/3 elk meta) which allow different pieces to feel different. Its good for the game that vs a White control deck you don't want to attack with all your creatures just because you can, while vs a Blue one you want to avoid playing on curve, despite those two things normally being a 'good thing' because it means that agro decks vs white and blue need to 'slow down' and let their opponent influence them, just as how in turn you are forcing those decks to speed up, above and beyond the differences in wincon or other tools (White Control is probably planning to kill you with a big creature or lots of little ones. Blue control probably wants to combo you out, and both of those need to be beaten differently on top of the dangerous things your 'playing around'). The fact these decks have totally different tricks let the matchups against them be different despite being the same archetype, which also encourages experimentation in decks and casual players expressing themselves through their decks.

As for GW: GW structured their entire game around making it easy to buy repeats of models. In X-wing, there is a very low 'practical cap' on how many ships you need of a given type in most situations. Epic and Scenario pay is very much not the norm, and the 'cap' is pretty low. In 40k, you can legitimately always use another of a given piece for normal play until you get to truly riduculous numbers, because the model count in 40k is higher AND your initial army is very unlikely to contain the max count of what you COULD run. And they do a great job of making you want to mix different types of units so that getting a 'one of' to try splashing into your strategy of a bunch of stuff is attractive, and yet also make it possible to get more later: Gotta have 1 land raider, but you could run 4. Gotta have 1 dreadnaught, but you could run 6. Tactical Marines? You could in theory run 33 tactical squads in a 2,000 point game, and more realistically if you fully upgraded them around 20. That is 200 models, and potentially 40 boxes, depending on how you get your tac marines. But that still feels less exploitative than being 'forced' to buy a box from a faction you don't care about, or being told your purchase options within your own faction are done and if you want to expand your collection (especially if you want to try different strategies) your going to have to faction jump.

On top of this, 40k is infinitely more flexible about how you use your minis, because it has rules for faction mixing, ways to bypass the normal limits on how many of each type of unit you can use, and very flexible points limits for games. You start collecting Republic as a Rebel player? Your can't 'care' about them at the same time. You start collecting Eldar as a Space marine player? You can run your Eldar as a detachment in tournament and casual games alike, so every new eldar piece could also be a space marine piece, if your willing to pay a minor cost in the form of a resource used to enact special army specific strategies. Wanna play an extra big game? 3,000 points are a thing without having to go full epic. Wanna play a small one with your bud who is learning? Lucky you got extra troops that you don't 'need' because you can both just play a smaller battle at 1,000 or 1,500 points without losing much. X-wing loses a lot by being rather inflexible on points count and having its 'apocalypse' variant start at even 1 point above the 'standard' play more.

The fact that the game is scenario based, and that 'deathmatch' is one of the NON-competitive scenarios, helps a lot too. It is kinda bonkers to me X-wing decided to make deathmatch the 'main mode' when its kinda... well understood that deathmatch modes aren't actually that great and are being low key phased out across gaming in general unless they also include strategic objectives that force you to engage due to offering a huge reward, or are free for all deatchmatch modes (Hi Aces High, thanks for being fantastic!). Having scenarios in 40k encourages diverse types of units to work together rather than focusing on the most efficient way to kill lots of units without spending lots of points, and when this broke down due to killing becoming too efficient we had the worst meta of 40k ever, the 'killhammer' meta.

A unit able to easily pop an expensive HQ is nice and a useful tool without being OP in a scenario mode if the unit isn't good at holding objectives. It becomes a tool in a toolbox, rather than the clear best choice. Likewise, units like the Land Raider, which are very tough but don't get a lot of guns for their points and over-invest in being a bit hard to kill, and thus are unlikely to 'earn back' their points, still make sense due to the utility they have in breaking lines and opening things up for stuff like your troops, or 'assassinating' an artillery piece constantly bombarding an objective. Objective play naturally makes the battle more complex because you need to evaluate different needs, while deathmatch mode makes the game about a single thing which can often so easily be 'mathed out.'

1 hour ago, Brunas said:

very altruistic - also you're kind to give your opponent such nice triangle tokens, and so many of them!

not like those of us who put the squiggly tokens and eye tokens on our own ships, rolled dice, and then ignored what they said though. That was truly the most interesting gameplay out there.

I was making lots of triangles before it was cool

When tomorrow's points drops don't include an energy nerf despite CIS' PDF getting updated by Wave 7 anyway:

30 minutes ago, Hoarder of Garlic Bread said:

When tomorrow's points drops don't include an energy nerf despite CIS' PDF getting updated by Wave 7 anyway:

Tomorrow seems awfully optimistic?

A new article every Wednesday for 4 weeks tho. And Wednesday of the drop week was the last Wave's points.

3 hours ago, Hoarder of Garlic Bread said:

A new article every Wednesday for 4 weeks tho. And Wednesday of the drop week was the last Wave's points.

*please cheap LAAT, expensive purple*

5 hours ago, FlyingAnchors said:

*please cheap LAAT, expensive purple*

how cheap is "cheap" before you're unhappy it's "expensive?"

25 minutes ago, Tlfj200 said:

how cheap is "cheap" before you're unhappy it's "expensive?"

If the generic comes in at like 43-45 there some pretty decent looking options that open up for Hyper. The LAAT really helps Athersprite Jedi out by essentially removing the need to lock and giving offensive rerolls while bumped or stressed + native force. Encourages more focus or evade turtle actions instead of Lock + Oops Spent all muh Purple on offense. Although locking will still be super common for Obi/Plo when they are looking to guarantee init kill dunks on things. In that range it also might fit something like 4 CLT Jedi Knights + LAAAT which seems good.

Also makes Torrents really cool game fun time. For me my hyperspace decision tree will look something like "could this LAAT just be Luminara?". How far away from 46 the i2 LAAT will be is my personal line. This kinda stuff usually pays a hefty "swarms must always be 'bad' so the people don't get mad tax" so it could for sure come in 46-49.

Stuff I have "tested" with made up pOiNtS (Still need to try out hype level 9,000 list Warthog + Besh V-Wing Gang):

Man, that last one. I could pretend to be good with double repositions AND fly a swarm at the same time....

Well, maybe points tomorrow. A's and X's for today.

6 minutes ago, Hoarder of Garlic Bread said:

Well, maybe points tomorrow. A's and X's for today.

Maybe they will put the points for the new ships of the Resistance and the Tie Brute with the 3 others ? ThatMs why they have released the articles so soon ?

Seems annoying with gas clouds

I will be shocked if I ever see someone actually pull off a successful Backwards Tailslide.

The circumstances--didn't land on an obstacle, then your template passes through it, but the final ship position doesn't overlap it--are so geometrically hard.

Just a starting point.

What does "sad" mean this week?

Any definition of "sad" that includes both Kylo and Zeb kinda confuses me.

1 hour ago, theBitterFig said:

I will be shocked if I ever see someone actually pull off a successful Backwards Tailslide.

The circumstances--didn't land on an obstacle, then your template passes through it, but the final ship position doesn't overlap it--are so geometrically hard.

I mean, you could add in the new thingy that let's you use the two speed templates. Worth it? Probably not.

3 minutes ago, gamblertuba said:

I mean, you could add in the new thingy that let's you use the two speed templates. Worth it? Probably not.

Yeah, my thought was they intend folks to use those two together. That's a lot of spend for one trick unless the cards are really cheap to load.

21 minutes ago, Spinland said:

Yeah, my thought was they intend folks to use those two together. That's a lot of spend for one trick unless the cards are really cheap to load.

Which they shouldn't be as a result of BB astromech, Poe's ability, Black 1, Closed S-Foils, old Snap's ability, etc.

I just thought that old Snap wouldn't mind the new talent until I remembered that if he wants to hold on to having an action during his action step proper, he needs to take R5-X3. Which is a base 58 points + whatever the talent costs. For 2 rounds of boost + evade + action. Not worth it. New Snap is addressing the problem of old Snap being hit so hard by the Composure nerf. I mean, old Snap with the free SLAM boosts will certainly be fun and funny, but new Snap is straight up better.

Edit: Nevermind, Overdrive Thruster is specifically for red repositions. Boo. But at least thematic with Poe.