What if ion tokens could exhaust an opponent's upgrade card for a turn? It would have to be a part of the ship itself, not an EPT. And you can't really ionize a hull upgrade, so I think it couldn't really affect modifications.

But what about system, tech, and secondary weapons? No, you can't fire that TLT this turn because I ionized it. No, your Fire Control System does not trigger to give you a Target Lock.

Too strong? Then make it require two or three ion tokens.

It should be an either/or - you can't make your opponent space drift AND exhaust one of their cards as well.

I've proposed this in the past actually. That when you hit with an ion weapon you either assign it to the ship or an upgrade. It would make ion weapons more versatile.

I like the concept, but it seems like it would be very, very complicated to institute, because so many upgrades provide purely passive benefits, and can't easily be 'turned off' as it were.

Maybe for secondary weapons though.

9 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

I like the concept, but it seems like it would be very, very complicated to institute, because so many upgrades provide purely passive benefits, and can't easily be 'turned off' as it were.

Maybe for secondary weapons though.

Not trying to be contentious, but I fail to see how that's complicated. The effect simply doesn't work that turn. What's an example of passive that would be too complicated?

Imagine ionizing Advanced Optics. That focus token disappears at the end of the round, because it's that upgrade card that allows it to stay there. Sorry, your Heavy Laser Cannon doesn't work until next turn. No, Mr. Ghost, you can use Sensor Jammer because I broke it. No Advanced Sensors shenanigans for you this turn, Kylo.

One drawback is that in many cases this only works if you are high PS shooting at low PS. I don't know how to fix that.

How do you actually write it? It's easy to say the concept, but how do you put it into x-wing rules language simply and unambiguously?

And when does the effect go away? How costly is it? Does it cost the same number of ions to block an HLC shot as to block BOba crew? Why?

Etc etc.

It's a neat concept but actually instituting it seems likely to be very complex.

This could be really cool. Maybe no ionizing titles.

37 minutes ago, Boba Rick said:

One drawback is that in many cases this only works if you are high PS shooting at low PS. I don't know how to fix that.

Ions, even their current implementation, don't discard at the end of the turn rather they discard when a ship is activated for movement.

For this you could have equipment ion tokens discard at the end of a ships combat activation.

3 minutes ago, Makaze said:

Ions, even their current implementation, don't discard at the end of the turn rather they discard when a ship is activated for movement.

For this you could have equipment ion tokens discard at the end of a ships combat activation.

There we go!

Crew, some modifications, and some titles don't make much sense. So you could either word it so it only effected specific slots (Cannon, Missile, Torpedo, Turret, Tech, and System). At the same time ions shutting down life support could force the crew to scramble to reboot it and not be able to do their thing, many modifications like hull upgrade don't makes sense but others like autothrusters completely do, and a lot of titles actually represent equipment on the ship (TIE s/f and ARC come to mind). So I'm actually kind of partial to just saying screw it and letting it work on anything.

This would be a cool zero point mod!

You'd really only need to add a second paragraph to the ion rules.

Ion Tokens: add the following paragraph to the ion reference card.

When a ship is assigned an ion token, you may instead assign that ion token to an equipped Cannon, Missile, Torpedo, System, Tech, Astromech, or Salvaged Astromech upgrade card. While a card has one or more ion tokens, that card's effect and text is ignored. At the beginning of the turn before you are assigned a maneuver dial, a ship may remove up to one Ion token from each equipped upgrade card that has ion tokens to a maximum of 2 ion tokens. For each token removed in this way, assign the ship one ion token.

14 minutes ago, Makaze said:

Crew, some modifications, and some titles don't make much sense. So you could either word it so it only effected specific slots (Cannon, Missile, Torpedo, Turret, Tech, and System). At the same time ions shutting down life support could force the crew to scramble to reboot it and not be able to do their thing, many modifications like hull upgrade don't makes sense but others like autothrusters completely do, and a lot of titles actually represent equipment on the ship (TIE s/f and ARC come to mind). So I'm actually kind of partial to just saying screw it and letting it work on anything.

In the OP I suggested the only slots that could be ionized are System, Tech, and Secondary Weapons. :-)

1 minute ago, Boba Rick said:

In the OP I suggested the only slots that could be ionized are System, Tech, and Secondary Weapons. :-)

And both flavors of astromechs!

Right, you could simply flip the upgrade card that is ionized face down until the token is removed next round

Just now, BadMotivator said:

You'd really only need to add a second paragraph to the ion rules.

Ion Tokens: add the following paragraph to the ion reference card.

When a ship is assigned an ion token, you may instead assign that ion token to an equipped Cannon, Missile, Torpedo, System, Tech, Astromech, or Salvaged Astromech upgrade card. While a card has one or more ion tokens, that card's effect and text is ignored. At the beginning of the turn before you are assigned a maneuver dial, a ship may remove up to one Ion token from each equipped upgrade card that has ion tokens to a maximum of 2 ion tokens. For each token removed in this way, assign the ship one ion token.

EXACTLY.

This ability is NOT an upgrade. It's a changing of the current existing ion rules.

That being said, I don't know if I like the change you've suggested here. It looks like the ion tokens go from the upgrade card, then to the ship, then removes. That seems too powerful for me.

3 minutes ago, Makaze said:

Crew, some modifications, and some titles don't make much sense. So you could either word it so it only effected specific slots (Cannon, Missile, Torpedo, Turret, Tech, and System). At the same time ions shutting down life support could force the crew to scramble to reboot it and not be able to do their thing, many modifications like hull upgrade don't makes sense but others like autothrusters completely do, and a lot of titles actually represent equipment on the ship (TIE s/f and ARC come to mind). So I'm actually kind of partial to just saying screw it and letting it work on anything.

This seems very strong. Disabling a secondary weapon mod would cripple some ships, see HLC or TLT. At high PS it would be quite frustrating to play against. Also Ion is meant to be balanced as is.

I propose the idea is changed to a modification.

Ion Targeter

When assigning an ion token to an enemy ship, you may instead assign an 'Overload' token to an upgrade card worth 2 or fewer points.

If the ship already has at least one 'Overload' token you may move all assigned token to an upgrade card with a points cost no higher than twice the number of Overload tokens.

Hopefully that makes sense

Overload Token

Any upgrade with an overload token is treated as discarded. Overload tokens are discarded after a ship has activated in combat and performed a maneuver.

1 minute ago, Scum4Life said:

This seems very strong. Disabling a secondary weapon mod would cripple some ships, see HLC or TLT. At high PS it would be quite frustrating to play against. Also Ion is meant to be balanced as is.

I propose the idea is changed to a modification.

Ion Targeter

When assigning an ion token to an enemy ship, you may instead assign an 'Overload' token to an upgrade card worth 2 or fewer points.

If the ship already has at least one 'Overload' token you may move all assigned token to an upgrade card with a points cost no higher than twice the number of Overload tokens.

Hopefully that makes sense

Overload Token

Any upgrade with an overload token is treated as discarded. Overload tokens are discarded after a ship has activated in combat and performed a maneuver.

Now we are not changing gab the rules for ion tokens, something that we definitely should avoid.

Also a single 19 point ion Cannon Scyk should not be able to deactivate palatine or a TLT. However if you have four Scyks or y wings then it can be justified as a significant effort.

This might however lead to only High value upgrades being equipped, and warping the meta.

7 minutes ago, Boba Rick said:

EXACTLY.

This ability is NOT an upgrade. It's a changing of the current existing ion rules.

That being said, I don't know if I like the change you've suggested here. It looks like the ion tokens go from the upgrade card, then to the ship, then removes. That seems too powerful for me.

Yeah. The idea isthat you can remove the ions from the cards by ionizing your ship. But it's optional. So you have a choice of when that ionization occurs. It is powerful, but ions could use some oomph.

3 minutes ago, Scum4Life said:

Now we are not changing gab the rules for ion tokens, something that we definitely should avoid.

Also a single 19 point ion Cannon Scyk should not be able to deactivate palatine or a TLT. However if you have four Scyks or y wings then it can be justified as a significant effort.

This might however lead to only High value upgrades being equipped, and warping the meta.

Also by removing 'Overload' tokens once a ship has activated in movement and combat, regardless of what type of upgrade you hit it will have had an effect.

Furthermore regarding which upgrades can be affected, Boba fett CARD doesn't care, and given suitable fluffing, I dont see why this should either.

Lifesupport being affected covers crew, weapons could easily be disabled, mods like guidance ships could be deactivated.

Hull upgrade is tricker but surely someone could think up an excuse.

Without adding a fair bit of rules, there's not really a good time window for ion tokens to disable upgrades. Ideally you'd want it to work for one round after ionizing the upgrade (that way it would work against a wide variety of upgrades, whether they were offensive, defensive, or action focused), but tracking that would be a pain*. This sounds like a fun idea for a scenario, or a missed opportunity to give huge ships variable ion effects, but it strays too far from KISS principles for it to be implemented at a system level in my opinion.

*The best system I can think of would be numbered or lettered ion tokens that you would remove every time the ship corresponding to that symbol got to attack.

6 minutes ago, Squark said:

Without adding a fair bit of rules, there's not really a good time window for ion tokens to disable upgrades. Ideally you'd want it to work for one round after ionizing the upgrade (that way it would work against a wide variety of upgrades, whether they were offensive, defensive, or action focused), but tracking that would be a pain*. This sounds like a fun idea for a scenario, or a missed opportunity to give huge ships variable ion effects, but it strays too far from KISS principles for it to be implemented at a system level in my opinion.

*The best system I can think of would be numbered or lettered ion tokens that you would remove every time the ship corresponding to that symbol got to attack.

Seems like this would be a condition card. "If this attack hits, cancel all results and assign the "TARGETED IONIZATION" condition card to an upgrade of your choice on your opponent.

TARGETED IONIZATION: If this condition is assigned to an upgrade, the next time this upgrade could be used, skip that use and discard this card.

I actually *REALLY* like the concept. It's sort of a super powerful jamming condition at the expense of offense. Except this affects more than tokens, you can also disable engine upgrades, accuracy correctors, secondary weapons, advanced optics and crew like Kylo. Very interesting game mechanics.

11 minutes ago, viedit said:

Seems like this would be a condition card. "If this attack hits, cancel all results and assign the "TARGETED IONIZATION" condition card to an upgrade of your choice on your opponent.

TARGETED IONIZATION: If this condition is assigned to an upgrade, the next time this upgrade could be used, skip that use and discard this card.

I actually *REALLY* like the concept. It's sort of a super powerful jamming condition at the expense of offense. Except this affects more than tokens, you can also disable engine upgrades, accuracy correctors, secondary weapons, advanced optics and crew like Kylo. Very interesting game mechanics.

I was thinking condition card as well; I'm not crazy about the extra "layer" of condition cards, but let's face it as the game continues we'll likely see them increasing.

A CC could retroactively change the entire Ion effect; personally I would limit the ion effect to Modifications, Tech, Ordnance, Cannons/Turrets, and System.

29 minutes ago, viedit said:

Seems like this would be a condition card. "If this attack hits, cancel all results and assign the "TARGETED IONIZATION" condition card to an upgrade of your choice on your opponent.

TARGETED IONIZATION: If this condition is assigned to an upgrade, the next time this upgrade could be used, skip that use and discard this card.

I actually *REALLY* like the concept. It's sort of a super powerful jamming condition at the expense of offense. Except this affects more than tokens, you can also disable engine upgrades, accuracy correctors, secondary weapons, advanced optics and crew like Kylo. Very interesting game mechanics.

Yeah, after a bit of thought, condition cards would be the way to go if you wanted to bring this to any sort of competitive format. As for your implementation (This is intended as constructive criticism), not any sort of , the concept of "use" is really nebulous since it isn't defined in the rules reference guide. I think something like this would work.

"... Assign the "Targeted Ionization" card and place one of the defender's upgrade cards face down on this card."

Targeted Ionization: Ignore the effects the of the upgrade card placed on this card.... [Trigger for removing condition. An action probably makes the most sense to me] ... When this card is discarded, flip the chosen upgrade card faceup.

Still a bit of a mouthful, but piggy-backing on the mechanics from I'll Show You the Dark Side would hopefully make things easier.

I love ion effects and think they're underrated as-is. Sounds like a fun house rule. Not sure I'd want it officially in the game, but probably wouldn't complain, either. Does make generic TIEs and stuff more appealing!

There are a lot of effects in Armada that can 'exhaust' an upgrade card or force you to discard token, and most of them are attached to Ion weapons (the ones that use a blue dice). They often need a crit result to trigger, and you use the crit for a special effect rather than assigning a face-up damage card. There is even one called 'Overload Pulse' that exhausts all of the defenders defence tokens (which are used instead of defence dice in Armada).

So I definitely think something like this is implementable in X-Wing, but it may need to be part of a larger expansion that includes a rules booklet to define some new terms. At the very least, I think it may require a rules reference card to summarise things.