First off, I know the devs are on record some time back saying the HWK-290's 1-ATK was a mistake, as it left it no place in the game without its turret. I disagree - and further, I think the Quadjumper should ALSO have had only 1-ATK (well...0-ATK, actually. After all, the thing was canonically unarmed, although it obviously deserves a mod slot allowing the weapons sometimes modified into it to be equipped).

ANYWAY...1-ATK should still have a spot in the game, even if hard to use. And 2-ATK is in nearly as bad a boat.

So let's create a mod to fix that. The goal, here, is to boost the utility of 1- and 2- attack primary without overpowering them, nor necessarily overpowering other ships or resulting in so much effectiveness that certain ships become more ineffective than they already are.

Proposal:

Target Motion Compensator
Modification, Small ship only
When attacking, during the 'Roll Defense Dice' step, if your ship does not have any evade, focus, ion, or stress tokens, the defender may not roll more defense dice than the number of attack dice rolled.

Cost: 2 pts

(And yes, I realize this means that Lightweight Frame still technically gets to bump the number of defense dice up, as it triggers in a later step. Let's call that a feature rather than a bug. Referencing the roll of defense dice is also intentional - things that specifically add defense results directly, such as spending evade tokens, obviously still work to bump up the defense as well.)

Doesn't really address the central problem that the simplistic dice system used in the game lends itself to rather unbelievable leaps in effectiveness just by adding or subtracting a single die

Core of the issue would have to be looked at

Bring in the 'mada dice (and tokens!)

Otherwise, I believe outmanuever should be a base rule

Actually, that's somewhat elegant, but really the powerhouse ships in the game are just too strong

48 minutes ago, xanderf said:

First off, I know the devs are on record some time back saying the HWK-290's 1-ATK was a mistake, as it left it no place in the game without its turret. I disagree - and further, I think the Quadjumper should ALSO have had only 1-ATK (well...0-ATK, actually. After all, the thing was canonically unarmed, although it obviously deserves a mod slot allowing the weapons sometimes modified into it to be equipped).

ANYWAY...1-ATK should still have a spot in the game, even if hard to use. And 2-ATK is in nearly as bad a boat.

So let's create a mod to fix that. The goal, here, is to boost the utility of 1- and 2- attack primary without overpowering them, nor necessarily overpowering other ships or resulting in so much effectiveness that certain ships become more ineffective than they already are.

Proposal:

Target Motion Compensator
Modification, Small ship only
When attacking, during the 'Roll Defense Dice' step, if your ship does not have any evade, focus, ion, or stress tokens, the defender may not roll more defense dice than the number of attack dice rolled.

Cost: 2 pts

(And yes, I realize this means that Lightweight Frame still technically gets to bump the number of defense dice up, as it triggers in a later step. Let's call that a feature rather than a bug. Referencing the roll of defense dice is also intentional - things that specifically add defense results directly, such as spending evade tokens, obviously still work to bump up the defense as well.)

i like

yeah the number of dice is the issue. if the number of dice rolled in general was doubled and ships had double shields and hp, it would leave more room for abilities, etc.

one thing ive considered was that likelyhood to hit and damage shouldnt be related at all. a turbolaser battery might have troublehitting a tie, but if it does its over. the system ought to have hit chance, dodge chance, hit damage, hull, and shield. allow shots to be affected by pilot skill or ability, so maybe a t-70 and a tie both roll 3 chance to hit, but the t-70 does twice the damage.

the original ships left too little room to maneuver(pun intended)

1 hour ago, Vontoothskie said:

one thing ive considered was that likelyhood to hit and damage shouldnt be related at all.

Heck yeah bra!

Also add an angle the deflector shields mechanic!!

2 hours ago, Vontoothskie said:

one thing ive considered was that likelyhood to hit and damage shouldnt be related at all. a turbolaser battery might have troublehitting a tie, but if it does its over. the system ought to have hit chance, dodge chance, hit damage, hull, and shield. allow shots to be affected by pilot skill or ability, so maybe a t-70 and a tie both roll 3 chance to hit, but the t-70 does twice the damage.

My knee-jerk response to that has always been HECK YEAH! It smacks a bit of the D&D system, but who cares - if it works it works. It does make sense that some weapons are brutally powerful, one-hit-kill affairs...that just have a VERY hard time hitting. And others are far more reliable, almost guaranteed, but do small amounts of damage.

That's logical, and familiar to gamers, and ALWAYS ends up getting my initial up-vote.

Couple problems with it, though:

• From a game design perspective, it's undesirable. Take it to a logical extreme of a nuke on the map that you roll 8 dice to detonate and it only goes off if you roll 8 crits - but automatically destroys all enemy ships - for 70 pts. (Yes, ridiculous - again, thought exercise...logical extreme) That'd be pretty annoying, as you have no defense against it. You just start a battle, your enemy rolls his 8 dice, and almost certainly whiffs and then you spend 15-20 minutes to paste the ship or two he brought to deliver it. Most the time. But, then, every now and then...he rolls his 8 dice, and you just automatically lose. It may "make sense" to have that sort of thing happen, but it's really a terrible play experience. We have dice in the game to 'salt' (as in cryptography) the results - provide variety and opportunities for players to see how they deal with the randomness of battle. Not to DECIDE outcomes, which tends to be what happens when you have 'high damage, low accuracy' weapons unchecked.
• Here's the really amusing thing, though - while a staple of many games since the first editions of D&D - it's really not realistic. I mean, it SEEMS like it should be...but it's just not. Would any military really put up with a weapon that could ANNIHILATE it's target *if* it hit...but it probably wouldn't hit? Or a weapon that is *guaranteed* to hit...and do little to no effective damage? Not at all! For military application, the question of a weapon is whether it can reliably achieve a 'mission kill' on its target in a period of time. Either it can, or it can't. There is certainly variety in types of weapons and types of targets, where some are good against some things and bad against others...but it's not really a case of 'accuracy' vs 'damage'. The current 'attack dice' vs 'agility dice'...actually does an okay job reflecting that in 'starfighter vs starfighter' combat...more or less, all the weapons used (that we have in the game) are designed to be effectively employed against the thing they are shooting at, so the vagaries of the dice results reflect the vagaries of the combat results.

Well the more LWF that are in the game the better those 2 attack ships become.

In my experience the dices are not the problem

Weak attack 2 dices. Medium 3. Strong 4.

Fat ships 1 green. Medium 2. Nimble 3.

Ultra easy. If there are a variety of ships on the table the game feels better. XYABEZ. How to deploy. How to deploy your bait. When to engage not caring about returning fire.

One Scout Tie with 1 Red can win your day. Not only because that Bomber behind him can use the Scout's TL. Because the Scout with 3 Greens and Stealth Device closes to that misterious Rebel Force masked with ECM devices and represented by a "Blip" marker and forces that ship to deploy on the map. Two Y Wings with custom anti Huge Ship torpedoes.

Man, I love this game

58 minutes ago, xanderf said:

Would any military really put up with a weapon that could ANNIHILATE it's target *if* it hit...but it probably wouldn't hit?

"By the beginning of June, we all hated the new AIM-4 Falcon missiles. I loathed the damned useless things. I wanted my Sidewinders back. In two missions I had fired seven or eight of the bloody things and not one guided. They were worse than I had anticipated. Sometimes they refused to launch; sometimes they just cruised off into the blue without guiding. In the thick of an engagement with my head twisting and turning, trying to keep track of friend and foe, I'd forget which of the four I had (already) selected and couldn't tell which of the remaining was perking and which head was already expiring on its launch rail. Twice upon returning to base I had the tech rep go over the switchology and firing sequences. We never discovered I was doing anything wrong."

-Colonel Robin Olds, USAF

To be fair they started phasing them out pretty quick.

8 hours ago, xanderf said:

Target Motion Compensator
Modification, Small ship only
When attacking, during the 'Roll Defense Dice' step, if your ship does not have any evade, focus, ion, or stress tokens, the defender may not roll more defense dice than the number of attack dice rolled.

Cost: 2 pts

Thus making 2 agility, 2 attack ships king of the meta forever, since more than 3 agility is pointless, range 3 is pointless, Att 3 will never get to use this ability, and Att 1 is still garbage because of the 1 damage a turn cap. I could see 5 bombers with this, TIE shuttle and Tactician being kings of the meta - massive health, control and damage. That said, it isn't more overpowered than Dengar currently is, so I'm all for it.

5 hours ago, Astech said:

Thus making 2 agility, 2 attack ships king of the meta forever, since more than 3 agility is pointless, range 3 is pointless, Att 3 will never get to use this ability, and Att 1 is still garbage because of the 1 damage a turn cap. I could see 5 bombers with this, TIE shuttle and Tactician being kings of the meta - massive health, control and damage. That said, it isn't more overpowered than Dengar currently is, so I'm all for it.

The thing is that their damage is still capped. Yes, it means that 2 atk now has a better chance of landing some kind of hit on its target - but rolling 2 attack dice you aren't ever doing more than 2 damage at a time (barring lucky crits).

It does not make 5 attack 'useless', as that's the only way you are going to land 5 damage in one go - 2 attack can't. While this makes it more likely to get SOME result, it's only going to ever be a very small result. You're still only rolling 2 dice!

i hear the valid criticism, but a lot of weapons are valid but dont work against quick targets. artillery, for example. this whole universe is based on ww2 combat, so compare turbolasers to canons batteries on a ship, which are notoriously bad at shooting down planes. i dont think a destroyer captain would even suggest firing anything but flack or AA swivel guns against fighters because its almost impossible to hit them. ... but against a battleship or shore batteries, holy **** are those deck guns brutal. special weapons for special purposes get things done

I saw a suggestion somewhere on these forums to change things so that crit results require two evade results to cancel. This would allow 2-dice ships to occasionally cut through solid defense. I liked the idea.

On 8/4/2017 at 7:50 PM, xanderf said:

First off, I know the devs are on record some time back saying the HWK-290's 1-ATK was a mistake, as it left it no place in the game without its turret. I disagree - and further, I think the Quadjumper should ALSO have had only 1-ATK (well...0-ATK, actually. After all, the thing was canonically unarmed, although it obviously deserves a mod slot allowing the weapons sometimes modified into it to be equipped).

ANYWAY...1-ATK should still have a spot in the game, even if hard to use. And 2-ATK is in nearly as bad a boat.

So let's create a mod to fix that. The goal, here, is to boost the utility of 1- and 2- attack primary without overpowering them, nor necessarily overpowering other ships or resulting in so much effectiveness that certain ships become more ineffective than they already are.

Proposal:

Target Motion Compensator
Modification, Small ship only
When attacking, during the 'Roll Defense Dice' step, if your ship does not have any evade, focus, ion, or stress tokens, the defender may not roll more defense dice than the number of attack dice rolled.

Cost: 2 pts

(And yes, I realize this means that Lightweight Frame still technically gets to bump the number of defense dice up, as it triggers in a later step. Let's call that a feature rather than a bug. Referencing the roll of defense dice is also intentional - things that specifically add defense results directly, such as spending evade tokens, obviously still work to bump up the defense as well.)

I'd say this is a better fix for TIE Bomber attacks than Unguided Rockets.

1 and 2 attack sips simply need to be properly costed. For the current edition, point cost errata's would be sufficient.

In a future Xwing 2.0, what should probably happen is to increase granularity with an expanded dice system.

IE: Much like Armada, have multiple types of offensive dice(and defensive). Have 2, maybe 3, types of each.

So you'd have the current Red and Green dice, but you'd add Black offensive dice and Blue defensive dice. Black attack dice might have 8 sides. 2 facings with 2 hits each. 1 facings with Hit and a Crit. 2 facings with a singe hit. 1 facing with a single focus. And 2 blank facings. Blue defense dice might have 1 facing with 2 evades, 2 facings with a single evade, 1 facing with double focus, and 3 blank facings.

This would add more granularity to the system without needing to totally redesign it.

So a Jump Master might have an Agility value of 2 green. Which would mean it rolls 2 green dice. But an X-wing might have an agility value of 1 green 1 blue. Same number of dice, but the Xwing is significantly more dodgy with the better defense dice. A TIE fighter might have an agility value of 2 green and 1 blue. While a TIE Interceptor would have 2 blue and 1 green.

Okay, a combination of the 1 crit = 2 evades needed AND the extra dice system would be **** cool... though, like you said, the dice would need a brand new version of the game (because let's face it, that is an INSANE amount of stats to errata). The crit/evade ratio... I MIGHT have to roll into my casual games... I weep for whomever in my group is on the receiving end of a perfect roll of 5 crits XD (which HAS happened from the Outrider with trick shot and HLC and they blanked out on their evade roll).

3 hours ago, Kehl_Aecea said:

Okay, a combination of the 1 crit = 2 evades needed AND the extra dice system would be **** cool... though, like you said, the dice would need a brand new version of the game (because let's face it, that is an INSANE amount of stats to errata). The crit/evade ratio... I MIGHT have to roll into my casual games... I weep for whomever in my group is on the receiving end of a perfect roll of 5 crits XD (which HAS happened from the Outrider with trick shot and HLC and they blanked out on their evade roll).

You know you're meant to turn crits into hits with HLC right?

16 hours ago, xanderf said:

The thing is that their damage is still capped. Yes, it means that 2 atk now has a better chance of landing some kind of hit on its target - but rolling 2 attack dice you aren't ever doing more than 2 damage at a time (barring lucky crits).

It does not make 5 attack 'useless', as that's the only way you are going to land 5 damage in one go - 2 attack can't. While this makes it more likely to get SOME result, it's only going to ever be a very small result. You're still only rolling 2 dice!

That's the thing though - 2 damage to any Agi3 ship per turn is unacceptable, since they don't have the HP for it, with possible exceptions for Defenders and IG-2000s. With a decent swarm you could easily do 4-5 damage each turn (especially with crackshot/juke). Because of the way the mod is written, you can still fully modify the attack, so long as the tokens are gone by the time the defender rolls.

One 5-die attack (pretty much only from Rey, Ghosts or Upsilons these days) is typically more than half a list, and will probably do less damage than 4 swarm fighters with the title. Add in a Crack shot swarm with Howlrunner backing and you've got a way to easily nuke any ace.

Strangely enough, the only meta list that isn't affected by this is Fair Ship Rebels, which is already at the forefront of the meta.

8 hours ago, Astech said:

That's the thing though - 2 damage to any Agi3 ship per turn is unacceptable, since they don't have the HP for it, with possible exceptions for Defenders and IG-2000s. With a decent swarm you could easily do 4-5 damage each turn (especially with crackshot/juke). Because of the way the mod is written, you can still fully modify the attack, so long as the tokens are gone by the time the defender rolls.

Juke wouldn't work, as it requires an evade token when the defender is rolling defense dice - if you are evading, your target motion compensator isn't working.

Your math is also concerning. "Fully modded" from a TIE Fighter amounts to spending the focus token during the attack (to possibly no effect, just to get it spent). A pair of fighters shooting 2 dice, each with a focus token that somehow survived to their chance to fire, are still only going to usually get 3 hits between them. A Soontir Fel who kept the range up (because he's PS9 and they are PS1) may only be rolling evade 2 dice against each attack - but at range 3, one blank converts to an evade via autothrusters (which still work), he still has his focus token to modify results, and still has his evade token. He'll be blocking on average 2 damage an attack until he runs out of tokens, so the motion-compensating-TIE-Fighters still manage to land no hits. ON AVERAGE the tokened-up ace is going to be doing just fine against this mod. What this does do is give the TIE Fighters more of a chance to get damage through. At range 3, our typical SD+AT Soontir is rolling 5 evade dice against 2 attack dice. He can do that all day, without spending any tokens, and never get hit at present. That's the problem we're trying to address, here. He's still not LIKELY to get hit, until his tokens run out, but at least now he's probably going to be spending them.

5 hours ago, xanderf said:

Juke wouldn't work, as it requires an evade token when the defender is rolling defense dice - if you are evading, your target motion compensator isn't working.

Your math is also concerning. "Fully modded" from a TIE Fighter amounts to spending the focus token during the attack (to possibly no effect, just to get it spent). A pair of fighters shooting 2 dice, each with a focus token that somehow survived to their chance to fire, are still only going to usually get 3 hits between them. A Soontir Fel who kept the range up (because he's PS9 and they are PS1) may only be rolling evade 2 dice against each attack - but at range 3, one blank converts to an evade via autothrusters (which still work), he still has his focus token to modify results, and still has his evade token. He'll be blocking on average 2 damage an attack until he runs out of tokens, so the motion-compensating-TIE-Fighters still manage to land no hits. ON AVERAGE the tokened-up ace is going to be doing just fine against this mod. What this does do is give the TIE Fighters more of a chance to get damage through. At range 3, our typical SD+AT Soontir is rolling 5 evade dice against 2 attack dice. He can do that all day, without spending any tokens, and never get hit at present. That's the problem we're trying to address, here. He's still not LIKELY to get hit, until his tokens run out, but at least now he's probably going to be spending them.

Good point for Juke, but Crack shot still works fine. It's a great deal better against low hull, high token aces in this situation, too.

"Fully Modded" can mean Horlrunner rerolls, in which case the output per TIE is around 1.75 hits each. With crack shot, Soontir Fel is going to be taking damage - at any range - as soon as the evade token's gone against a crack shot swarm. Add in Tomax with Crack, Unguided rockets and this card and you've got a dangerous swarm+'ace' build. Of course, anybody who isn't Soontir Fel (most notably Whisper, Carnor, Ryad, Vessery, Vader, etc) is going to die much quicker than they already do in this meta. Soontir himself is nonexistent for other reasons.

It is a good title, but one that makes the game Fair Ship Rebels Vs Swarms, which is no fun for a lot of people.

On 8/6/2017 at 3:59 PM, BadMotivator said:

So you'd have the current Red and Green dice, but you'd add Black offensive dice and Blue defensive dice. Black attack dice might have 8 sides. 2 facings with 2 hits each. 1 facings with Hit and a Crit. 2 facings with a singe hit. 1 facing with a single focus. And 2 blank facings. Blue defense dice might have 1 facing with 2 evades, 2 facings with a single evade, 1 facing with double focus, and 3 blank facings.

This would add more granularity to the system without needing to totally redesign it.

So a Jump Master might have an Agility value of 2 green. Which would mean it rolls 2 green dice. But an X-wing might have an agility value of 1 green 1 blue. Same number of dice, but the Xwing is significantly more dodgy with the better defense dice. A TIE fighter might have an agility value of 2 green and 1 blue. While a TIE Interceptor would have 2 blue and 1 green

Good idea. ( Your blue dice only have 7 sides, though)

maybe defenders get 1 blue 2 green, or 3 green (they were meant to be easy to hit), and cloak gives 2 blue. It would take up heaps of space on the cards, though.