Seriously.

There are 3 devs working on it, and none of them (TTBOMK) exclusively.

That's just dumb.

It's hardly surprising they don't have time to do anything when they're working on this and armada and runewars and legion and and and and etc

30 minutes ago, Babaganoosh said:

One element that's surprising in all of this is a realization of just how shoestring-y the budget for x-wing development seems, at least in terms of the game mechanics. X-wing must have been an immensely profitable product so far, given how successful it's been in the stores. My impression is that X-wing doesn't get a heavier touch in terms of game development compared to much less popular games - that's just a feeling, though. In any case, it doesn't seem like X-wing gets an appropriate amount of investment from a company level. I'm not saying that the designers don't try hard and do their best; just that this task merits more investment.

I often wonder about FFGs margin on all this. I mean, some of the models are as low as $15. FFG gets, what, 1/2 that? The product spends a year in R&D. Then, in the end, many players buy ONE model--and maybe just to get a card they want at that.

It doesn't seem like that would be too profitable for all the effort involved.

6 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

I often wonder about FFGs margin on all this. I mean, some of the models are as low as $15. FFG gets, what, 1/2 that? The product spends a year in R&D. Then, in the end, many players buy ONE model--and maybe just to get a card they want at that.

It doesn't seem like that would be too profitable for all the effort involved.

well obviously every player is different, but most seem to buy 2-3 of the ship they love to fly. Your competitive players will buy one of what they need and resell the rest... pre-nerf palp it was wasn't hard to find a raider missing palp and the x/1 titles and ATC for about $50.

20 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

I often wonder about FFGs margin on all this. I mean, some of the models are as low as $15. FFG gets, what, 1/2 that? The product spends a year in R&D. Then, in the end, many players buy ONE model--and maybe just to get a card they want at that.

It doesn't seem like that would be too profitable for all the effort involved.

My feeling is that profits from games like X-wing keep development alive on less profitable projects. It's not necessarily a bad thing; more seed money for interesting projects means more successful games in the long run. But they should take care that their golden goose has enough food to eat

12 minutes ago, FlyingAnchors said:

well obviously every player is different, but most seem to buy 2-3 of the ship they love to fly. Your competitive players will buy one of what they need and resell the rest... pre-nerf palp it was wasn't hard to find a raider missing palp and the x/1 titles and ATC for about $50.

I vaguely remember playing survey monkey on these boards and being surprise how little people bought per wave. Sure, some booght multiples, but many bought just one.

4 minutes ago, Babaganoosh said:

But they should take care that their golden goose has enough food to eat

Yep. But IMHO they should really be making this game more about generics instead of aces; it would sell more copies of each ship.

7 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

I vaguely remember playing survey monkey on these boards and being surprise how little people bought per wave. Sure, some booght multiples, but many bought just one.

This upcoming wave (Wave tw-thir-elve-teen) is the my smallest purchase yet: six total ships. (My average through Wave 11 is about 11 ships per wave.)

1 minute ago, Jeff Wilder said:

This upcoming wave (Wave tw-thir-elve-teen) is the my smallest purchase yet: six total ships. (My average through Wave 11 is about 11 ships per wave.)

My pattern of purchasing has been declining. I bought four in the last wave when it was closer to 8-10 in previous waves. I don't buy epic ships anymore (the last one I got with store credit but sold half), so it sort of counts. I don't think I'll be getting the Scum pack and I won't buy every ship in the next release.

Wave 8: 9 ships
Wave 9: 9 ships
Wave 10: 4 ships
Wave 11: 1 ship
Wave 12teen: ?

13 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

This upcoming wave (Wave tw-thir-elve-teen) is the my smallest purchase yet: six total ships. (My average through Wave 11 is about 11 ships per wave.)

Wave Twirteen. I like it.

8 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

Wave 8: 9 ships
Wave 9: 9 ships
Wave 10: 4 ships
Wave 11: 1 ship
Wave 12teen: ?

Yeah, I'm not quite that drastic, but (as an Imp player), I probably will only buy 1 Phantom II, for example.

9 minutes ago, AlexW said:

My pattern of purchasing has been declining. I bought four in the last wave when it was closer to 8-10 in previous waves. I don't buy epic ships anymore (the last one I got with store credit but sold half), so it sort of counts. I don't think I'll be getting the Scum pack and I won't buy every ship in the next release.

Me too. I have been a lot more judicious after buying multiples of TIE Adv, Squints, and Punishers* (yeah, I got 9 of those bad boys) and finding out they just don't play well.

FFG needs to make sure the mid PS generic is rock solid (like BotE and Rho), and come up with squad mechanics to make fielding multiples of the same chassis a thing.

*And maybe never will. If only Minefield Mapper worked the "broken" way, I would use my Punishers to make a minefield then never care if they did anything more but soak up blaster bolts.

21 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

*And maybe never will. If only Minefield Mapper worked the "broken" way, I would use my Punishers to make a minefield then never care if they did anything more but soak up blaster bolts.

Come to the UK, it works that way here.

1 hour ago, Darth Meanie said:

I vaguely remember playing survey monkey on these boards and being surprise how little people bought per wave. Sure, some booght multiples, but many bought just one.

And then you go look at people's collections on Reddit and they have 3 E-wings.

I think FFG makes more money over time than on release anyway (well this upcoming wave might be different because of the hype train). How many people do you think are going to pick up a kirahxz single once GFH comes out if they don't own one already? Or the recent Y-wing reprint so newer players who didn't have one didn't have to pay $40 for one on eBay?

And that's not to say FFG doesn't make a profit off of new releases, thats an important component. But I think solely looking at release day purchase data isn't nessacarily a good indicator of purchase habits/profits.

FFG could do a lot it improve this game. It keeps selling to new players but the feeling i’m Starting to get is your old base is really starting to check out. That makes growth hard- especially when the new player buy ships from old players who are just done; FFG loses even more there.

I still have major concerns about my my favorite minis game, and they now look like not only are those concerns not going to be addressed, some are willfully ignored.

A lot is wrong in design right now. A lot sounds like it’s out of there hands (or a company structure that makes it mostly so)... at the end of the day it’s still wrong and less people are going to pay for that myself included.

Wave 6: 12

Wave 7: 8

Wave 8: 9

Wave 9: 5

Wave 10: 5

Wave 11: 2

Wave 1: 14 ships

Wave 2: 10 ships

Wave 3: 14 ships

Wave 4: 18 ships

Wave 5: 4 ships (twin decis and twin Yts)

Wave 6: 12 ships

Wave 7: 7 ships (K-wings didn't get me excited, neither did punishers, I wasn't very interested in what felt like peripheral ships.)

Wave 8: 8 ships, (but man at this point the jumpmasters really got me down. My playtime for the game took a nosedive after I played my first vassal game with triple jumps. I felt the game broke a little in a way that it had never done before)

Wave 9: 4 ships (3 fang fighters and an ARC. Progressively less interested in buying new ships, was waiting for fixes to the old ones, except for the Fangs. REALLY liked the mandalorian fighters and the prospect of playing three of them in a list got me excited the same way as triple interceptors.)

Wave 10: 3 ships (2 strikers and a U-wing). Strikers, man. Just hands down the best thing this game has ever introduced since Wedge Antilles. I would have bought more strikers and flown 5-striker lists almost exclusively but they just kept getting pummeled by jumpmasters and TLTs.

Wave 11: 0 ships. Sad to say the first wave where I just have no intention of buying ships. I'm playing against turrets every single game and it's just not what I signed up for. Currently waiting it out until I can play interceptor/striker lists.

If Wave 9 10 and 11 had been what I really felt was overdue, which was re-releases of the first wave with new pilots, ship-specific 'bump' cards, and cards that gave EPTs to undercosted pilots, I'd be in there like a dirty shirt. Especially if TLTs and jumpmasters had been tamed FIVE WAVES ago.

I get the development cycle is slow, but man. I miss X-wings.

@MajorJuggler I bet you know of the X-wing Squadron Benchmark and Fly Casual projects. These project let you play against an AI that is just basic at this moment.
I know AI is not your area of expertise but, do you think developing a competent AI that can play a whole match against itself in matter of a second or two (simulating human times for movements, dial planning, action taking, bump resolving, in order to limit virtual playtime to 75 minutes) would help analyzing how efficient ships are?
I mean, if we could define every ship and upgrade card they way Benchmark or Fly Casual do, but so that the computer can run a game without visual interface, all silent number crunching, and play the entire match in seconds, then retry many times gathering some statistics of how every ship perform, over and over again for many thousands of matches, would it be any useful even if we don't get an AI that is as brilliant as a human? Would that help figuring out what ships/cards are just better regardless of player skill?
Or would that be greatly undermined by the limitations of the AI skill level?

Developing a competent AI for x-wing would be SUUUUUUUPER difficult. I mean, developing a competent AI for Go was hard enough, but x wing is wildly more complex. Even doing it via machine learning would be super hard.

In the next 5 or 10 years I could maybe see AI developments for tabletop gaming being viable, but even then, probably not as a design tool.

so I don't have time to listen to this, not really been into X-Wing for years (on strike until they fix the T-65)

any word on that front? Last news we had was from 2015 when Alex said "IA is not the last we'll see for the Old X-Wing".

Or are we stuck with revolting turdlike spaceships forever until the game dies?

4 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Developing a competent AI for x-wing would be SUUUUUUUPER difficult. I mean, developing a competent AI for Go was hard enough, but x wing is wildly more complex. Even doing it via machine learning would be super hard.

In the next 5 or 10 years I could maybe see AI developments for tabletop gaming being viable, but even then, probably not as a design tool.

It’s like 50-100 lines of python code to build a neural network that can predict, when fed two lists, which list will win. I think you are assuming a simulator type AI that actually plays that game? That is not what this is. And yes that is a much harder problem.

1 minute ago, sozin said:

It’s like 50-100 lines of python code to build a neural network that can predict, when fed two lists, which list will win. I think you are assuming a simulator type AI that actually plays that game? That is not what this is.

How do you teach the network, though? It's trivial to write a network that can give you an answer, it's nontrivial (TTBOMK) to write it and then teach it what the RIGHT answer is.

Or would you be able to integrate it with listjuggler somehow?

E: but yes, I was actually referring to a game-playing AI rather than just a list-comparing one. As I thought that poster was. COuld be mistaken though.

6 minutes ago, jimmius said:

so I don't have time to listen to this, not really been into X-Wing for years (on strike until they fix the T-65)

any word on that front? Last news we had was from 2015 when Alex said "IA is not the last we'll see for the Old X-Wing".

Or are we stuck with revolting turdlike spaceships forever until the game dies?

They are looking forwards not backwards.

You teach it with humans providing labelled “hot or not” data (given two lists, choose either A wins, B wins, or push). Starting in wave 4 we start getting some (noisy) tournament result data in listjuggler, but there is a lot of it, so that will help too.

4 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Developing a competent AI for x-wing would be SUUUUUUUPER difficult. I mean, developing a competent AI for Go was hard enough, but x wing is wildly more complex. Even doing it via machine learning would be super hard.

In the next 5 or 10 years I could maybe see AI developments for tabletop gaming being viable, but even then, probably not as a design tool.

I completely disagree. While the number of possible board states is quite large the number of available moves on any given turn is relatively small, especially with some lists. Making something that plays fairly well while looking forward 2-3 turns would not be overly difficult.

There's also the question of who it's supposed to beat. I once, in 48 hours, wrote a chess program that can reliably beat me (1 minute turn timer on a single core 212Mhz Pentium 1). It basically just did its best not to make bad moves and apparently, as a chess player, I personally don't meet that standard. Taking a similar approach with X-wing I have little doubt you could write something that plays around as competently as the average FLGS player just by maximizing its shots and minimizing the opponents shots. Even if it would likely get spanked by higher tier tournament players.

4 minutes ago, sozin said:

You teach it with humans providing labelled “hot or not” data (given two lists, choose either A wins, B wins, or push). Starting in wave 4 we start getting some (noisy) tournament result data in listjuggler, but there is a lot of it, so that will help too.

OK.

But, does that give it the ability to extrapolate to lists it hasn't seen?

Presumably you'd have to program it with all the listbuilding rules.

It also assumes that the humans feeding it the answers are correct about them...

9 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

They are looking forwards not backwards.

**** them then. they can pump out these hideous new ships all they like, but theres no excuse for the travesty that is the X-Wing in it's current state

Both true points. It should be able to learn features like R3-A2 being a good counter to PTL, for example. Re: data quality, the theory is that you should get a normal distribution with enough samples. Meta-wing is the logical place for it to go (when you first visit the page it asks you to contribute data). One of the cool outputs of a system like this is that, even without an AI, it would still give us a data driven view of the meta pyramid over time.