After the third round of balance adjustments and design changes, proud to introduce Supremacy version 1.4!

What is Supremacy?

This is an unofficial complete game expansion developed for Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing Miniatures Game. Supremacy uses a complete replacement set of Pilot and Upgrade cards from X-Wing. Supremacy therefore differs from X-wing play in 5 key ways:

Split Factions/"Faction Ethos" Cards
Different Pilot Cards
Mandatory "Chassis Variants"
Adjusted Rules: Turrets/Bombs
Different Upgrade Cards

Each version of this manual incorporates "live recosting", where the feedback from the previous round of testing is incorporated into rebalancing the game. Consider it just one very long playtest, with the idea that even when new waves and cards are introduced, balance is retroactively considered to keep everything on a level playing field.

What's new in this version from 1.3?

- New Upgrades and Upgrade Type (Augmented Armaments)
- Systems, Bombs, Crew
- Balance Changes

Advanced weaponry
Rebels, Imperials and Scum (to be introduced in the next wave) have faction-biased specific upgrades. Astromechs for Rebels, Illicit for Scum, and a new upgrade, "Advanced/Augmented Armament" for Imperials. To reflect optimized weapon development you can retool some imperial ships with the AA logo on the appropriate chassis, for example a build of Maarek Stele might look like this, using the advantages conferred by the new EPT "Strafe" to keep hitting a target hard. Further compounding Stele's ability to keep a ship crippled is the new advanced armament, "Chin cannon refit", which upgrades the underslung guns on the cockpit to a higher rate of fire, to confer stress to enemy ships:

"This is Gold Leader, we're starting our attack run on the shield gate"
One of the hardiest tools in the arsenal of the Rebel Alliance are its trusty Y-wing fighters. They carry a munitions payload unparalleled to many other fighters of their size. Bombs are now available for your Y-wing ships, and have the potential to cause massive damage to enemy formations.

Bombs in supremacy are aimed at being useful as area denial tools. Too slow and predictable to reliably hit enemy fighter formations, careful, coordinated and overlapping bombing runs can instead cause havoc for enemy formations trying to avoid their effects. In Supremacy, bombs take a turn to prime. This means they will not detonate until the end of the next Activation phase. They also deploy closer to your ship. You have a full turn to plan a maneuver to get out of the way, so nimble ships may simply be impossible to catch. Bombs are much more potent for their cost however, seismic charges are a nightmare for any ships caught flying through asteroid fields, whereas proton bombs have a devastating impact for any ships caught inside their enormous blast radius.

For this Y-wing pilot in Gold Squadron, a viable tactic may be to drop a bomb, charge the opponent head on and try to take advantage of use of his or her Ion Cannon Turret upgrade to disable an enemy ship, and have them drift into the deadly r1 radius of the bomb. Each S3 Y-wing, for example, comes with an enlarged payload of munitions so this can be attempted multiple times.

Experimental Weaponry
Deep in the heart of the Maw Nebula lies secret imperial research facilities producing unusual weapons of strange capability. Weapons like the s42 miniaturized turbolaser, or superpowered TIE fighters that perform on par with T-65 X-Wings. Some of these strange ships might be seen undergoing test runs amongst enemy squadrons.



Endless Swarms
The Empire has access to seemingly endless swarms of foolhardy, expendable and persistent pilots to fill its swarms of TIE fighter battalions. The largest swarm of ships achievable in Supremacy is ten TIE fighters. Cheap, reckless, trainee pilots with nothing to lose, you may find that death by a thousand cuts ends up being your end, so plan carefully in how you might dissect these swarms of ships. Granted, hit them once and systems will start failing, these pilots do not have the precision or understanding of piloting TIEs within their parameters.

Courage and conviction
Faced with endless swarms and secret weapons, the Rebels must rely on their all-purpose and powerful X-Wing and Y-wing fighters in combat. New upgrades complement those found in v1.3, so the rebellion can field ever-deadlier and more specialised wings of ships. You might try pairing one of your rebel aces with a complement of support Y-wings, a "one-two punch" of munitions and arc-dodging. Especially if you use a hard-to-kill Luke Skywalker in his trusty T-65B, along with Horton Salm with a build designed to hand out target locks to adjacent ships like candy.



All of these builds and more are possible in v1.4.

As always, in these early releases balance is a tricky thing and some ships may continue to underperform, or become overpowered. I'd be much obliged if you might pass on your experiences of playing this version so we may tweak the rules for the next!

All cards needed to play this game are provided in the PDF on print-ready sheets. When the balance of the game is stable I'll also start attaching the requisite full-bleed files such that they may all be printed professionally.

PDF Version 1.4.1 :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cBEiJg2hjE_u1KPc91is7ZW3619xhrBk/view

I like where you're going, but I have to say that I'm not a fan of overly complex or fiddly upgrades. Chin Cannon Refit has three separate conditions you have to check for before you can use it. I would urge you to look into reducing the complexity as much as possible to reduce game time and brain burn.

20 minutes ago, HolySorcerer said:

I like where you're going, but I have to say that I'm not a fan of overly complex or fiddly upgrades. Chin Cannon Refit has three separate conditions you have to check for before you can use it. I would urge you to look into reducing the complexity as much as possible to reduce game time and brain burn.

agreed. All it is trying to do is cut the middle line between flechette cannon and flechette torpedo. Probably having a 'tactician' type restriction in there is too much, but I was worried about it being too powerful or situationally better than other armaments.

The other big offender for text is the seismic charge, on either of these I'd be thrilled for ideas on how to pare them down to simpler effects, with the original design intention.

I think for chin cannons the hull value of 4 is something that could be dropped without significant loss.

I like this a lot. Seems really fun and cool, and I actually really like the added complexity for squadbuilding. The chassis cards are a great addition as well. I like the new upgrade types too, they seem fun. I've been kind of quietly lurking and watching the Supremacy project grow, but I just wanted to say that I totally approve of it.

Glad to see your obvious artistic abilities being applied here as well. How much of that art is your own? I recognize some of it from the RPG, but I haven't seen a lot of that art.

well I've downloaded the latest PDF version will give it read over...

13 minutes ago, Kieransi said:

I like this a lot. Seems really fun and cool, and I actually really like the added complexity for squadbuilding. The chassis cards are a great addition as well. I like the new upgrade types too, they seem fun. I've been kind of quietly lurking and watching the Supremacy project grow, but I just wanted to say that I totally approve of it.

Glad to see your obvious artistic abilities being applied here as well. How much of that art is your own? I recognize some of it from the RPG, but I haven't seen a lot of that art.

Most of the art is repurposed art from Edge of Empire, Armada, or other FFG licensed properties. About half of it I could drop straight in, but lots of it had to be modified or adjusted before I could fill a card with it. I expect you'd recognize a lot of the pieces before I got my mitts on them.

The remainder is my own. Not a whole lot of art I've had to do, as I spent 90% of the design time on things like formatting the document and keeping everything tidy.

The next wave (Interceptors and A-wings) will have a lot of my own art in it. In general though for X-wings and TIE fighters I had a pretty good pool of art I could draw from, but I had to spend a lot of time making sure I wasn't ripping off some poor person's fanart, and that all of these were as far as I can tell licensed previously.

12 minutes ago, Ghostrider58 said:

well I've downloaded the latest PDF version will give it read over...

great! Hope you like it.

40 minutes ago, citruscannon said:

agreed. All it is trying to do is cut the middle line between flechette cannon and flechette torpedo. Probably having a 'tactician' type restriction in there is too much, but I was worried about it being too powerful or situationally better than other armaments.

The other big offender for text is the seismic charge, on either of these I'd be thrilled for ideas on how to pare them down to simpler effects, with the original design intention.

I think for chin cannons the hull value of 4 is something that could be dropped without significant loss.

For the bombs you have them detonating a turn later than they currently do. I don't think this is necessary or desired. This adds another board state to track and gets complicated fast if there are multiple drops per turn. Bombs aren't OP, Sabine is OP. I could go on a rant about how FFG got faction bombing exactly backwards, but I won't. I think you can safely leave them as they are in the official game as long as you don't stack more unavoidable damage on top of them with poorly thought out upgrades given to the most bomb resistant factions.

For the chin cannons you can easily drop the hull value requirement. The ships that are granted immunity by this effect are not ships that need any help at all. If you want to keep it on the lower power side you could just have it hand out a single stress token when a crit is rolled. Or perhaps have it change all uncancelled crits into hits and deal a stress for each crit changed? The Empire should have been the stress dealing faction anyways. They are the faction everyone else fears. It's not like you see Imperial pilots screaming right before they explode like all the rebel terrorists do.

14 minutes ago, HolySorcerer said:

For the bombs you have them detonating a turn later than they currently do. I don't think this is necessary or desired. This adds another board state to track and gets complicated fast if there are multiple drops per turn. Bombs aren't OP, Sabine is OP. I could go on a rant about how FFG got faction bombing exactly backwards, but I won't. I think you can safely leave them as they are in the official game as long as you don't stack more unavoidable damage on top of them with poorly thought out upgrades given to the most bomb resistant factions.

For the chin cannons you can easily drop the hull value requirement. The ships that are granted immunity by this effect are not ships that need any help at all. If you want to keep it on the lower power side you could just have it hand out a single stress token when a crit is rolled. Or perhaps have it change all uncancelled crits into hits and deal a stress for each crit changed? The Empire should have been the stress dealing faction anyways. They are the faction everyone else fears. It's not like you see Imperial pilots screaming right before they explode like all the rebel terrorists do.

So the plan was for imperial bombers to have much better options for minor adjustments to bomb placement (after maneuvering, being able to use bank tokens to drop them instead of its own maneuver template). No faction was planned for anything that increases the damage of bombs or affects the way they behave on the map.

I really like being able to stretch the effect of the bomb out to 2 and having ships forced to dodge out of the way, as it does open up some good tactics for planning bomb runs around stressing ships or using ion tokens. With range 1 that's a little tricky to do reliably at this point. I also liked how the delay meant you could use a feint to drop a bomb, force a swarm to break formation instead of coming forward, then try to pick off individual ships.

As long as you can get around the 1-turn delay thing it made for some interesting new tactics. If it feels unwieldy to too many people however we should change it, but hopefully you see where it was coming from.

Chin cannon hull adjustment drop seems like the best plan, I'm in full agreement and won't be too much of a boost but will crucially make it simpler text. I'll adjust it for 1.4.1 later today. (incremental patches should help keep major design changes down to the next version.)

ok, 1.4.1 is up, with the Chin cannons fix. I'll leave bombs for the minute but see how they pan out with opinions.

Reposting my last post in 1.3 seeing as the old thread is buried:

15 hours ago, citruscannon said:

Cleaner, yes. But we run into an enormous balance problem by dissociating pilots from their ships. I am able to rein in pilot abilities (whilst still maintaining some interesting diversity) by giving options for each ship type, with each pilot. But I don't have to worry about vader piloting an interceptor, for example.

I'm not suggesting dissociating pilots from their ships. I got ahead of myself and explained things badly.

What I'm suggesting is moving all the ship information from the pilot card to the chassis card.

You've got the same end result: a ship expressed by a ship card and what's effectively a title card.

If you do it this way around action bars and statlines are edited by variant, not by pilot.

• Variant-added actions can be added directly to the action bar.
• You can make variants with no ability.
• You can directly edit the statline by variant.
• All properties of the ship are on one card and all properties of the pilot on the other, which is a little more intuitive.
• You get a ship picture and a pilot picture instead of two ship pictures!

The secondary advantage is that where you have a pilot that flies two ships like Maarek Steele you only need one card for both versions. Doing things this way also lets you be very efficient with generics: one PS1 pilot with the TIE fighter, TIE interceptor and TIE defender symbols could elegantly replace Academy Pilot, Delta Squadron Pilot and Alpha Squadron Pilot. Conversely, how often are you going to make a variant that goes on multiple ships?

Doing it this way around has the same mechanical effect but it's much more efficient in terms of cards (no duplicate pilots) and rules text (no rules text needed for action bar and statline edits). The cards are simpler, there's far fewer of them to print and you don't lose any depth at all. The main setback (and the likely dealbreaker) is that you'd have to redesign the alt-art card layouts.

13 minutes ago, Firespray-32 said:

Reposting my last post in 1.3 seeing as this threat replaces that one:

...

It has the same mechanic effect but it's much more efficient in terms of cards and rules text. The cards are simpler, there's far fewer of them to print and you don't lose any depth at all. The main setback (and the likely dealbreaker) is that you'd have to redesign the alt-art card layouts.

Interesting ideas!

Oh I see what you mean, I guess stacking the icons on the bottom works for restrictions, but you're still using two cards when trying to figure out what you want to fly, before adding upgrade cards. Just seemed more logical to me that when you are flipping through your pilot cards, you find the pilot you want, then the appropriate base that has almost the same stats on it, then make your decision on the variant you want to fly. But not to say i'm right, since this way you'd be deciding the pilot you want, deciding the variant you want to fly, and then finding your base, which is almost the same.

From a practical design standpoint, I don't have art for every physical pilot in the game, or even anything close to it, but I do have a large library to pick from for spaceships. It's much easier to adapt existing artwork into art that is useable using the current setup. Unless I started using pictures of ships on the pilot cards, but then if they're flying a different ship there's something about that that graphic-design-wise sits funny with me. So although Howlrunner and in this case a picture you've used of maarek stele work, from a graphic point of view the document would have to suffer to make this work.

Although having actions added by the variant might seem problematic, it does serve as a nice reminder when flipping between different variants what the key differences are.

kinda of splitting halfway down the idea might work, if the major rationale is to move the actions over to the variant. I could see doing that for simplicity? Didn't think the current layout was too confusing as it's only a small adjustment from X-Wing game, whereas moving pilots on to their own thing seems like a bigger departure.

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Although having actions added by the variant might seem problematic, it does serve as a nice reminder when flipping between different variants what the key differences are.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's that different in practice.



Comparing those two is no harder than comparing the two Maarek Steele versions. Variants are essentially just ships that share a dial and pilot pool.

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From a practical design standpoint, I don't have art for every physical pilot in the game, or even anything close to it, but I do have a large library to pick from for spaceships. It's much easier to adapt existing artwork into art that is useable using the current setup. Unless I started using pictures of ships on the pilot cards, but then if they're flying a different ship there's something about that that graphic-design-wise sits funny with me. So although Howlrunner and in this case a picture you've used of maarek stele work, from a graphic point of view the document would have to suffer to make this work.

You already have that with the current setup. Howlrunner flying a TIE Havoc has a picture of the TIE Havoc and a picture of a basic TIE fighter that isn't actually in the list.

As for getting enough pilot art, Armada's done a lot of the legwork - named pilots in Armada have pilot pictures. When it comes to generics and pilots with no established appearance you could draw heavily from the EPTs - pretty much every EPT would work with a ship picture. Fearlessness gives you Fenn Rau, Bodyguard gives you Guri, Calculation gives you Xizor, Crack Shot gives you a random Weequay. Intensity, Adrenaline Rush and Veteran Instincts give you four TIE pilots between them. It's surprising just how many ships have pictures of their pilots on their upgrades.

2 hours ago, Firespray-32 said:

I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's that different in practice.


Comparing those two is no harder than comparing the two Maarek Steele versions. Variants are essentially just ships that share a dial and pilot pool.

You already have that with the current setup. Howlrunner flying a TIE Havoc has a picture of the TIE Havoc and a picture of a basic TIE fighter that isn't actually in the list.

As for getting enough pilot art, Armada's done a lot of the legwork - named pilots in Armada have pilot pictures. When it comes to generics and pilots with no established appearance you could draw heavily from the EPTs - pretty much every EPT would work with a ship picture. Fearlessness gives you Fenn Rau, Bodyguard gives you Guri, Calculation gives you Xizor, Crack Shot gives you a random Weequay. Intensity, Adrenaline Rush and Veteran Instincts give you four TIE pilots between them. It's surprising just how many ships have pictures of their pilots on their upgrades.

hm. I see what you mean.
I'll have a play around with a few concepts, but I'm not convinced it makes a major change to the utility of organisation, only a minor one. The reason this is significant is because it would take a very much non-insignificant amount of time to redesign the cards, it'd be a LOT of work, and something I've have to be planning for a long time. in the amount of time it would take me to redo the design work and make sure all the art fit to the new designs that'd be wave 3 at the earliest. I'll have to have a good long think about it, as it would take some time to implement.

The redesign work's the catch, yeah. I personally think it's worth it but that's easy for me to say as I don't have to do any of the artwork.

I'll make three more arguments in favour of the change and then I'll leave it be:

• You'd have fewer cards to print: one PS1 pilot card can replace an entire faction's worth of PS1 generics and the occasional multi-ship pilot like Maarek and Hera only need one card.
• Statline and action bar changes are much cleaner. Consider the implementation of Heavy and Light Scyk in both approaches.
• Variants without abilities work better. Consider a basic TIE fighter with no special abilities. In the current system its variant card would cost one point, have an empty action bar and flavour text in the rule box. It'd have pretty much nothing on it and be essentially pointless. That adds some pressure to put rules text on every variant. If you do things the other way around variants without abilities work fine: see the TIE/ln Starfighter example above. Ships like the BTL-S3 and BTL-S3 TS also wouldn't need any rules text: their extra shield can be added straight to the statline.

Changing the subject slightly, I'd also consider is leaning on the variant system to implement some of your new mechanical ideas. If you made something like Chin Cannon Refit a Variant instead of an upgrade you restrict to a single class of ship (making it much easier to balance) and you don't add any extra rules or cards to the table because if you take it you're not taking a different variant. Having a fairly moderate number of upgrade cards and a large array of ship variants to choose from could be an interesting direction to go in.

Not quite sure what I'm seeing here (just skimmed it), but I probably like it.

Fan stuff like this makes me happy and glowy.

okay, so with some improvements to the way bombs are deployed (they deploy in the combat phase and explode the next round) as well as some formatting fixes, the document has been updated to 1.4.2

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okay, so with some improvements tot he way bombs are deployed (they deploy in the combat phase and explode the next round) as well as some formatting fixes

That's a pretty elegant solution.

1 hour ago, Firespray-32 said:

That's a pretty elegant solution.

I think it works better than the last version, you end up with the intended effect, which is bombs are "dodge-able" and become potent area denial tools, but the cost is that any ship with the ability to boost probably has to use it to get out of the way. So fragile aces are probably still okay if they can avoid a bump but slower ships and swarms might have some trouble.

I had a good think about the variant cards and pilot cards. I'll have a try with shuffling some of the 'data' over to the variant card, and still keeping the variant card and pilot card but just swapping the info over. It's basically what you suggest but keeping the pilot card the larger of the two, which is just a formatting formality. I'm going to play around with some ideas and post them on the discord development channel eventually.

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I had a good think about the variant cards and pilot cards. I'll have a try with shuffling some of the 'data' over to the variant card, and still keeping the variant card and pilot card but just swapping the info over. It's basically what you suggest but keeping the pilot card the larger of the two, which is just a formatting formality. I'm going to play around with some ideas and post them on the discord development channel eventually.

I think it would be faster to edit the variant card into a pilot card. There are only three things to do that way. Add the pilot skill to the variant card (you've got loads of space for it), replace the modification bar with a ship bar, then add the modification bar to the bottom of the big card.

ok, so for version 1.4.3 coming up, we're going to patch in a refined approach to turrets. We're making a pretty big game design change here, but I think it's for the best as it strongly pushes the idea of meaningful and consequential player choices, and pretty elegantly too.

A 'midway' if you will between mobile arcs and PWTs without having to reprint any bases.

have a look:

On 2/20/2018 at 5:04 PM, Firespray-32 said:

I think it would be faster to edit the variant card into a pilot card. There are only three things to do that way. Add the pilot skill to the variant card (you've got loads of space for it), replace the modification bar with a ship bar, then add the modification bar to the bottom of the big card.

yep, that'd work too!

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A 'midway' if you will between mobile arcs and PWTs without having to reprint any bases.

If mobile arcs are what you want you can make them all mobile arcs without reprinting the bases.

Use a tracking token is used to mark which section is selected.

I've tested this a few times and the asymmetry in arc sizes is quite interesting in practice.

12 minutes ago, Firespray-32 said:

If mobile arcs are what you want you can make them all mobile arcs without reprinting the bases.

Use a tracking token is used to mark which section is selected.

I've tested this a few times and the asymmetry in arc sizes is quite interesting in practice.

true, having it set to a target lock works nicely because it boosts things like expert handling as a useful EPT, makes for interesting possibilities for 'spotter' ships that can assist in the granting of target locks, and because it means turret ships have to go into the combat phase with a clear plan already laid out for the ship they will fire at, which represents thematically the same concept.

I'm wary of extra tokens being required on board, but I see exactly where you're coming from!

The tracking token sits on the ship base itself and works well on large ships. Friction keeps it in place. Small ships might be a little more fiddly.

I like both solutions - they have the same action-economy draining effect for firing out of arc but they require different tactics to counter. The target lock solution requires you to spend an action to switch targets but you'll be able to fire at it wherever it goes. The asymmetric mobile arc requires you to spend actions to switch firing arcs but you can target anything in that firing arc.

Tactically, you'd fight a large turret by having whichever ship gets locked stack tokens and drop back to long or out-of-range, forcing the turret to switch targets and spend actions. For mobile arcs you deplete its actions by dodging its arc and forcing it to switch. This is easiest to do at the border between rear arc and side arc.

In terms of pricing, the mobile arc is something of a side-grade: the mobile firing arc counts as a firing arc so it doesn't trigger Autothrusters and can use cards like Tactician.

The target lock requirement is a nerf: the turret still counts as out of arc with all the penalties that inflicts. Black One, Captain Kagi and Expert Handling become highly potent against turrets at lower PS and a hard counter to turrets at higher PS.

10 hours ago, citruscannon said:

ok, so for version 1.4.3 coming up, we're going to patch in a refined approach to turrets. We're making a pretty big game design change here, but I think it's for the best as it strongly pushes the idea of meaningful and consequential player choices, and pretty elegantly too.

A 'midway' if you will between mobile arcs and PWTs without having to reprint any bases.

I've been a big fan of everything you've done with Supremacy up til now, but...I don't like this change to turrets at all. It feels overly punishing and needlessly clunky, and creates a lot of limitations on turrets that don't make a lot of sense - tying them to Target Locks limits the ships that can have turrets at all, for starters (since the chassis would have to have the action), as well as making them vulnerable to Target Lock removal and, unlike a mobile arc, range-limits and overly telegraphs their firing intentions. That's not to mention that it doesnt really follow with what we see in ANH, where Luke and Han are clearly not using fancy targeting systems to shoot down TIE's, just their own ability to aim.

From what I've been able to ascertain, the only turrets that get complained about are 3-dice primary turrets (of which there are only actually three in the current game: the Falcon, the Decimator, and a Punishing One Jumpmaster) and the Twin Laser Turret (which you have not yet implemented into Supremacy), and since you are designing from the ground up you can account for the capability of such weapons in other ways (points cost, availability, altered or new rules text etc) as and when necessary.

Allowing the defensive bonus from being at range 3 is perhaps enough 'punishment' for these weapons, but to keep things consistent and elegant you could always impose a further +1 defence dice bonus for a target being shot out of arc, or disallow the range 1 attack dice bonus for firing out of arc (or both?) if you felt these weapons needed to be reined it - as it stand, though, it feels that you are punishing them in an odd fashion.