So, I have been playing now with some new players, and while we play teams (so 200 points per side), we each bring 100 point lists.

As an EpicWinger, I'm not used to being so constrained, point-wise

I'm pretty sure XWM is down to a 2-3 ship-per-list meta. So, my question (finally) is what is the average point-build for a single ship these days?

I'm guessing it's gotta be in the 40-50 point range.

And, thus, I begin to ruminate if 100 points is getting a little too restrictive. . .

Anywhere from 63 (the average rac) down to 14 (rex) and everything In between. Highest ship count is 4 right now tho, proper swarms are still dead as doornails

Meta:

2 ship: 40-60, 45-55 (Nym, Miranda, Turrets galore, Ghost + wingman)
3 ship: 40-38-22 (Sheathipede builds), 35-35-30 (Aces, Paratanni) (Defenders, OL, Palps, Upsilons)
4 ship: 38-24-24-12 (Missile aces + TLT or Gunboats, generics) , 34-22-22-22 (Ace + 3 gunboats)
5 ship: Not meta competitive usually above 4, QD+swarm, Vader+swarm
6 ship: Zs
7 ship: Blair bunke Zs.
8 ship: Non-competitive 8 ties.

6 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

Meta:

2 ship: 40-60, 45-55 (Nym, Miranda, Turrets galore, Ghost + wingman)
3 ship: 40-38-22 (Sheathipede builds), 35-35-30 (Aces, Paratanni) (Defenders, OL, Palps, Upsilons)
4 ship: 38-24-24-12 (Missile aces + TLT or Gunboats, generics) , 34-22-22-22 (Ace + 3 gunboats)
5 ship: Not meta competitive usually above 4, QD+swarm, Vader+swarm
6 ship: Zs
7 ship: Blair bunke Zs.
8 ship: Non-competitive 8 ties.

Yeah, OK, so say 40 points.

It's either your 1-2 and a 3rd or 4th filler, or it IS the filler since the other ship is even bigger.

So, assuming a well-tricked out ship is 40 points these days, is 100 points a silly cap??

I realize it is all based around time to play, but if you are only pushing around 2 ships. . .

19 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

Yeah, OK, so say 40 points.

It's either your 1-2 and a 3rd or 4th filler, or it IS the filler since the other ship is even bigger.

So, assuming a well-tricked out ship is 40 points these days, is 100 points a silly cap??

I realize it is all based around time to play, but if you are only pushing around 2 ships. . .

possibly, but many cards and ship costs are based around the 100 point limit and how many fit. lifting the cap may still require a sizable addition to the faq to remove issues.

Even escalation tournament's acknowledge this which is why previous cards must be reused.

44 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

Yeah, OK, so say 40 points.

It's either your 1-2 and a 3rd or 4th filler, or it IS the filler since the other ship is even bigger.

So, assuming a well-tricked out ship is 40 points these days, is 100 points a silly cap??

I realize it is all based around time to play, but if you are only pushing around 2 ships. . .

Look if I have to play against 2 arc dodging, highest firepower and efficiency in the game. TWO large turrets, in one game most of my games. I will quit this game forever.

Yup.

The game is fine at 100 points.

If you want more ships, you have to have worse ships. That's how it's always been.

If you're concerned that the balance is towards lower ship counts, blame harpoons and other autodamage for killing swarms.

1 hour ago, thespaceinvader said:

Yup.

The game is fine at 100 points.

If you want more ships, you have to have worse ships. That's how it's always been.

If you're concerned that the balance is towards lower ship counts, blame harpoons and other autodamage for killing swarms.

It might be a little early to blame Harpoons for killing swarms but I agree on autodamage from other sources. Wren, Bane and bombs et al certainly provided nails for the coffin. A portion of the blame falls at our feet. The cry of "Make ordnance useable" has lead to the game as it is now. We pretty much got what we wanted and now we don't like it.

43 minutes ago, Stoneface said:

It might be a little early to blame Harpoons for killing swarms but I agree on autodamage from other sources. Wren, Bane and bombs et al certainly provided nails for the coffin. A portion of the blame falls at our feet. The cry of "Make ordnance useable" has lead to the game as it is now. We pretty much got what we wanted and now we don't like it.

My favorite ship (Squint) has been dead for pretty much the entire game, so my only real gripe about ordnance is that Proton Torpedoes are junk and of course, lore wise, I want them to not be junk.

2 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Yup.

The game is fine at 100 points.

If you want more ships, you have to have worse ships. That's how it's always been.

If you're concerned that the balance is towards lower ship counts, blame harpoons and other autodamage for killing swarms.

I'm not concerned about the meta at all, I was just curious what some opinions might be.

Mostly, I got the answer I wanted: when I kit out a single ship to be "effective," these days 40 points is the going rate. About double what it used to be, I 'spect.

3 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Anywhere from 63 (the average rac) down to 14 (rex) and everything In between. Highest ship count is 4 right now tho, proper swarms are still dead as doornails

I have a 6-ship build that's not horrible.

4 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

Look if I have to play against 2 arc dodging, highest firepower and efficiency in the game. TWO large turrets, in one game most of my games. I will quit this game forever.

16 minutes ago, Herowannabe said:

OP wants to increase point cap (say to 120 or 125). If you do by a little bit, you can easily begin to fit two fully upgraded large ships with turrets. A la double Falcon. Except unlike currently, these two large turrets can have all of their most powerful synergistic upgrades on both.

Large ship turrets have no existing hard counter, have not since their inception, are generally extremely cost efficient and are always in every Tier1 of every wave since Wave3. They're also the best arc dodgers in the game, along with the most synergistic.

You can argue a lot of things, but the most important thing to note is I really don't want to argue with you on this point. I've been here since Wave3, trust me, I've heard it before. If you want to have a discussion, I'd ask you to first start by truly understanding the perspective I'm showing you.

Well thanks for the 8 to 12 ships you can't just swarm 25 TIE-Fighters/Z-95/Headhunters. So the value has to be in the sum of all parts rather than individual ship builds. Thanks the more points there is less demand for point efficiency and MOV and more on damage and absorption. In epic you start seeing more of the named TIE pilots other than Howlrunner (although she still shows up in those matches). Single Aces that rocked the Meta such as Soontir has to be held back in reserves because there are so many firing arcs and dice a critical ship can be focused down faster than green dice and tokens can block. However the Gozanti proves to be perfect for such reserves. But really it depends on what ship you try on flying.

Generic ships will be taken in blocks of 2-4 because taking a single Green Squadron pilot would be not taking advantage of clone builds. Meanwhile ships that have numerous pilots such as TIE Fighters and X-wings will likely have a few more unique named pilots but still flying in supportive formation.

Some ships will be taken on individual such as Rear Admiral Chirenu and Corran Horn, but they will be decked out to the teeth, maybe even with a shield upgrade or other stuff.

I wish they would errata TLT to be ineffective against reinforced sections. I know now with the "Aztec" wookie gunship it is there but such rules will put emphasis on getting on the non reinforced side.

2 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Mostly, I got the answer I wanted: when I kit out a single ship to be "effective," these days 40 points is the going rate. About double what it used to be, I 'spect.

There will be exceptions ofc , but unless i'm mistaken that statement hasn't been true since bwings were viable.

I've always advocated a boost to 125 point totals, you end up with WAY more options and suddenly costs are much more forgiving. I mean, cripes, most cards that come out are between 0-2 in cost these days- doesn't that just kinda reek of, "We didn't exactly think the format through hard enough" to you guys?

That said.

Call me cynical but I find it oddly fitting that heavier, more versatile fighters have become the mainstays over cheap swarmers, in a very oddly lore friendly way proving Imperial Doctrine so, so terribly wrong as always.

1 hour ago, Blail Blerg said:

You can argue a lot of things, but the most important thing to note is I really don't want to argue with you on this point. I've been here since Wave3, trust me, I've heard it before. If you want to have a discussion, I'd ask you to first start by truly understanding the perspective I'm showing you.

Oh no, I’m not disagreeing with you. Far from it. Your post was just so poorly constructed and punctuated that I legitimately couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say.

I’ve been around since wave 2, and I agree with you. Two fat turrets in a list would SUCK. And not just because it would be a tough nut to crack, it would just be dull to play and dull to play against. I’ve never really liked how they handled turrets in X-Wing.

52 minutes ago, Herowannabe said:

Oh no, I’m not disagreeing with you. Far from it. Your post was just so poorly constructed and punctuated that I legitimately couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say.

I’ve been around since wave 2, and I agree with you. Two fat turrets in a list would SUCK. And not just because it would be a tough nut to crack, it would just be dull to play and dull to play against. I’ve never really liked how they handled turrets in X-Wing.

Yeah, I agree. =P That was a bunch of screaming and QQ in prosaic form.

Yeah. Here we are in wave 12, 10 waves later, and I think I've found the best list, its an ace + turret....

My friends and I played a 3 player variant for some time with the single player having 150pts and the other 2 having 160pts between them (noting that the 2 person side weren't allowed to secretly show their dials/move, they had to either openly discuss it or not show - hence the extra points).

It took us a while to realise that the point change seemed to favour the Imperial side for some reason (I should have mentioned that each player only plays one faction, so all 3 factions are in play with the teams changing each game). As soon as we dropped the points back to 100 the game balance seemed to improve. Of course this made playing with 3 people rubbish as the 2 player team had so few points. We tried going the other way playing 200vs200 and allowing the 2 players to show dials in secret, but it seemed to favour Imperial again. This was before bombs kicked off...

10 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

So, I have been playing now with some new players, and while we play teams (so 200 points per side), we each bring 100 point lists.

As an EpicWinger, I'm not used to being so constrained, point-wise

I'm pretty sure XWM is down to a 2-3 ship-per-list meta. So, my question (finally) is what is the average point-build for a single ship these days?

I'm guessing it's gotta be in the 40-50 point range.

And, thus, I begin to ruminate if 100 points is getting a little too restrictive. . .

I would prefer to drop the points limit rather than increase it.

Drop to 90pts, deploy using R2 ruler not R1, bring the time limit for rounds down to 50 minutes, play an extra round of Swiss. I'd rather play more quicker games than fewer long games with more points.

6 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Mostly, I got the answer I wanted: when I kit out a single ship to be "effective," these days 40 points is the going rate. About double what it used to be, I 'spect.

You got the answer you wanted because you read the answer you wanted; this isn't remotely true.

Effective ships today vary from 14 to 50+ points (60+ if you include RAC/X, but I've not seen much of that recently), there's no particular point value that's more or less effective than others, and I think you'd be exaggerating at best to say that this has changed over the years. Even in the time I've been playing there have been strong builds from 2 to 7 ships, using broadly balanced values (e.g. Pattiswarm, Palp/aces, Nym/Miranda, Dash/Miranda, trip Scouts, trip Defenders) or using very skewed values (RAC/X, Ace/Miniswarm, Han/Jake).

It's not even close to accurate to sat that kitting out a single 'effective' ship is 40+ points. Rex costs 14 points. Jess can go as low as 26. A Nu Gunboat with a Harpoon Missile and LRS is plenty effective at 22. Miranda is very effective at anywhere from 35 (just TLT and LRS) to 50+.

And if you're playing epic, the cost of an effective ship skews WAY down, because quantity is way more important than quality at Epic. More guns = more better when you can put them all on one dude and overwhelm his defences.

7 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Mostly, I got the answer I wanted: when I kit out a single ship to be "effective," these days 40 points is the going rate. About double what it used to be, I 'spect.

This is literally the most idiotic comment I've read all year. WTF is this even supposed to mean?

13 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

This is literally the most idiotic comment I've read all year...

...well, to be fair the year is only around 36 hours old where we are, so give it time

1 hour ago, Stay On The Leader said:

Drop to 90pts, deploy using R2 ruler not R1, bring the time limit for rounds down to 50 minutes, play an extra round of Swiss. I'd rather play more quicker games than fewer long games with more points.

Wouldn't that tilt the balance towards alpha-strike lists too much?

3 minutes ago, PT106 said:

Wouldn't that tilt the balance towards alpha-strike lists too much?

Yes. You see this in epic (which has the R2 deploy) - stuff which gives you an edge in the first round of engagement - be it missiles, or stuff like glitterstim - is incredibly advantageous.

I think 5-ship heavy swarms can work, but that's more personal preference resulting in trying to make things work + opponent's unfamiliarity rather than actual innate effectiveness. That said both 5 strikers and 5 alpha autothrusters have won low-level events or at least made an early-cut showing at bigger ones.

I also agree wholeheartedly that the 100 point limit is very deliberate. A lot of ships are specifically designed to not allow you to field 'that one extra ship', from the 21 point rookie X-wing to, more recently, the fact that you can't quite fit a generic silencer in 33 points without skimping on its many upgrade options.

59 minutes ago, PT106 said:

Wouldn't that tilt the balance towards alpha-strike lists too much?

Probably the opposite, because you won't have as many points to invest in your alpha.

Alpha strikes work well at high points costs as you can hurl 100pts of ship at one ships defences and overwhelm them. As points limits drop that ratio of focusing offense onto a single point becomes manageable for the defender. As Darth Meanie says they're a bigger problem in Epic just because of the number of guns you can buy to point at one target at once.