In many situations with this game, there is a question of whether something is 1 point overcosted or if a ship is DOA for the same reason.

Would it have been better to have released the game with a 1000 point limit thereby allowing cards to be costed at 17, 23, or other relative increments?

Would the added flexibility for balance be offset by added complexity to the game?

I only ask this having played a few tabletop games recently with a similar design and it was a lot easier to weigh the cost vs. benefit of upgrading a squad's weaponry at the cost of a few models compared to whether a certain upgrade card will be able to pull in its points in a 100:6 game.

In theory, yes. In practice, they seem to be struggling with getting things even 2-3pts in range, nevermind 0.2-0.3pts thereof.\

Really what should be considered is whether a ship or a card is a worthwhile buy at the stated cost, and consideration given to whether the thing should exist in that particular state at all. Would Expose be better balanced if it was able to be 3.5 points? No, no it would not.

And Scyks? You might want to argue for 12.5, but they weren't priced at 12 or 13, but fourteen points. That's a point less than the A-wing, which boasted a better dial and, er, an entire 33% more hitpoints.
Before we panic about partial points, it would be better to worry about getting things to within a point at all.

More granularity in costing would help -- though rather than 10x, 2x is probably enough.

More granularity would help elsewhere in the game, too -- whether that's doubling all ship stats (Atk, Def, Hull, Shield), or switching up dice (d12 over d8). On the other hand, simply doubling stats makes the game fall victim to more randomness, so maybe that's *not* the way to go ...

Still comes down to playtesting

Their reluctance to readjust cost after release would mean they'd still get as much of the pricing wrong as they currently do, imo.

More granularity is always better. Though I think a more elegant solution is just to dilute the balance issues by increasing point levels. Play 150-200 point games.

6 hours ago, Reiver said:

In theory, yes. In practice, they seem to be struggling with getting things even 2-3pts in range, nevermind 0.2-0.3pts thereof.\

Really what should be considered is whether a ship or a card is a worthwhile buy at the stated cost, and consideration given to whether the thing should exist in that particular state at all. Would Expose be better balanced if it was able to be 3.5 points? No, no it would not.

And Scyks? You might want to argue for 12.5, but they weren't priced at 12 or 13, but fourteen points. That's a point less than the A-wing, which boasted a better dial and, er, an entire 33% more hitpoints.
Before we panic about partial points, it would be better to worry about getting things to within a point at all.

exactly! scycks are fantastic ships if the title was free to begin with. Laeten ashara is magnificent at 18 points if the title was included, and x-wings are great at 2 points less across the board(minus biggs). you can't fix pricing without adjusting the price.

at this point the game wont survive a codex or update to core stats because unlike most miniature games the numbers are written directly on a component of the miniatures, and theres no way ffg is reprinting those for free. a lot of the core game problems come from rushing release without play testing enough, but other issues stem from intentional irregularities built in by designers. why is are the havoc, punisher and k wing small ships while the U-wing and Ig-2000 are large? for that matter how is the tie silencer which appears to be bigger than all of them a small ship? these bizzare design choices have all added up to make fixing the game really difficult without printing new cards and cardboard, which ffg refuse to do

If they wanted to go to the Codex route and change how things are valued for point cost...

They're missing one of the best opportunities to do so with the changing of Distributors and letting the inventories deplete to zero.

I for one would not care that my early purchased stuff had Point values printed on them if the later stuff did not and we could have a better balanced game.

I thought you were looking for the Six-Fingered Man.

Nevermind.

5 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

I thought you were looking for the Six-Fingered Man.

Nevermind.

He’s probably hanging out with the One-Armed Man.

12 hours ago, Hawkstrike said:

More granularity in costing would help -- though rather than 10x, 2x is probably enough.

More granularity would help elsewhere in the game, too -- whether that's doubling all ship stats (Atk, Def, Hull, Shield), or switching up dice (d12 over d8). On the other hand, simply doubling stats makes the game fall victim to more randomness, so maybe that's *not* the way to go ...

Granularity is certainly the way the game should have gone. If they wanted, they could just start doing cards with point costs like 0.5, 0.25 (pi/2, e^phi, etc). But they missed the boat, and now we'll have to wait for a reboot, if ever.

If you doubled all the stats, you'd have less variance, not more. Consider the flowing:
If you roll a single D6, you're equally likely to get the best result (6) as you are to get the worst (1).
Whereas if you roll 2 dice, you're still equally likely to get a 12 (1/36) as you are to get a 2 (1/36), but you're far more likely to roll a 7 (1/6). More dice = less variance.

In X-wing, if you roll sufficiently many dice, you will pretty much always be near the average roll.

That's why games like 40k can be much more strategic - there's a lot less riding on a single die / die roll.

The only problem is that the game space gets unweildy with, say 12 attack dice from a Finn powered Ghost at R1.

Quote

Would an extra digit help with balancing?

Alex Davies has said directly that X-Wing is why Armada is at 300 points.

But everyone else is also correct that they're not always getting to within 1% of correct, and thus changing the point scale wouldn't necessarily help.

On 14/10/2017 at 2:10 PM, Hawkstrike said:

simply doubling stats makes the game fall victim to more randomness, so maybe that's *not* the way to go ...

Its technically the other way around.

More dice means less variance (spread around the average value), so less "randomness".

Edit : ninja'd, didn't readthe whole page before posting (**** phone).

On 14/10/2017 at 8:05 PM, BadMotivator said:

More granularity is always better. Though I think a more elegant solution is just to dilute the balance issues by increasing point levels. Play 150-200 point games.

Quite true for most of ships/cards.

But on the other hand we'll jave to errata some cards with multiple use per turn that are really overpowered when using a massive number of ships.

Just see how Op Spec is horribly efficient in Epic...

On Saturday, October 14, 2017 at 9:05 PM, Punning Pundit said:

Alex Davies has said directly that X-Wiwhy Armada is at 300 points.

But everyone else is also correcpayingt that they're not always getting to within 1% of correct, and thus changing the point scale wouldn't necessarily help.

Thats actually why increasing granularity helps.

If a card costs 3 points, but it is widely considered to be overpriced. However, at 2 points it would be too cheap. It's technically worth 2.5 points. This means you either are forced to make it 20% too cheap or 16% too expensive. Rinse and repeat for every card in a list and you could easily have a list that is paying/nit paying a substantial portion of what it should.

On 14/10/2017 at 8:10 AM, Hawkstrike said:

More granularity in costing would help -- though rather than 10x, 2x is probably enough.

More granularity would help elsewhere in the game, too -- whether that's doubling all ship stats (Atk, Def, Hull, Shield), or switching up dice (d12 over d8). On the other hand, simply doubling stats makes the game fall victim to more randomness, so maybe that's *not* the way to go ...

Quite the opposite, regarding more randomness. Doubling the stats, and I presume therefore the dice, actually reduces the relative standard deviation of the results. You will find it nigh impossible to one shot a TIE fighter (unless you are at R1 with full mods and they have none), but also, it´ s nigh impossible for that TIE to completely dodge the damage. You will get results closer to the mean average of damage and less of the extremes, relatively. It would be a bad move to double the stats and dice, but for exactly the opposite reason of what you say.

EDIT: As others have said.. (I didn´ t read the whole thread).

Increasing price granularity won't help.

The cause of mis-priced cards is that assigning a numeric value to the potency of an effect is hard to get right, not that there is an easy method for determining what an effects should cost but rounding error fracks it up.

I totally came in here thinking that you were suggesting playing a 1000-point epic game. Never mind. Carry on... I’ll be busy dusting off my Rebel Transports (yes, darn it, that’s plural!!!)