Hi Folks!

Version 2 is now done, and into playtesting!
With three factions, 27 ship chasses, spread across 8 ship types, and recosted pilots and new upgrades, this is big step over wave 1. We've got a squad builder in early alpha, and everything is all organized for Vassal play, simply addable as an extension to your regular X-wing vassal module. I've had a lot of fun putting this together, and would be thrilled if you had a crack at it to see what you think.

All files for Vassal and the Game manual are available from the website here:
https://xwsupremacy.wixsite.com/supremacy

Nice work, although there are still things I am not a huge fan of.

I assume you want opinions, so there you go. None of this is meant to offend you, or break down your spirits. These are just my thoughts.

I feel like the project is in the limbo by simultaneously being "Too ambitious" and "Not ambitious enough". I love the turret change, for example, it is an idea I had as well. But then you have the "Armament Refit" cards, which just seem odd to me. TIE-s with extra cannons slapped on really stand out for me as a negative. I know the old EU had some of those, but I think it ruins the design of these beautiful ships, as well as it goes against the supposed military doctrine of the Empire. Cheap, and plentiful.
I understand your justifications for it. I just dislike it. I'd much rather have something like a TIE only slot, not limited to armament upgrades. (For several reasons: 1: armament rules seem like fun, and everyone should have them, if anyone, 2: TIE-s share many many traits with the other variants, weapons are not one of them. The engines, the wings, ordnance pods... There are many many possibilities)

I also feel that the faction ethos cards don't go far enough. Once per game, for 1 ship? Sometimes there are some pretty hefty conditions (VI).

I think it would be great to have a selection of faction exclusive passive abilities (like an EPT) that applies to all ships, all game. It would really deliver on the front that Factions are, different. Like a passive racial ability in an RPG.

I respect your decision to rework bombs, and I can sympathize with that idea. I'm not sure that's the way I'd go on about it, tho.

51 minutes ago, Commander Kaine said:

Nice work, although there are still things I am not a huge fan of.

I assume you want opinions, so there you go. None of this is meant to offend you, or break down your spirits. These are just my thoughts.

I feel like the project is in the limbo by simultaneously being "Too ambitious" and "Not ambitious enough". I love the turret change, for example, it is an idea I had as well. But then you have the "Armament Refit" cards, which just seem odd to me. TIE-s with extra cannons slapped on really stand out for me as a negative. I know the old EU had some of those, but I think it ruins the design of these beautiful ships, as well as it goes against the supposed military doctrine of the Empire. Cheap, and plentiful.
I understand your justifications for it. I just dislike it. I'd much rather have something like a TIE only slot, not limited to armament upgrades. (For several reasons: 1: armament rules seem like fun, and everyone should have them, if anyone, 2: TIE-s share many many traits with the other variants, weapons are not one of them. The engines, the wings, ordnance pods... There are many many possibilities)

I also feel that the faction ethos cards don't go far enough. Once per game, for 1 ship? Sometimes there are some pretty hefty conditions (VI).

I think it would be great to have a selection of faction exclusive passive abilities (like an EPT) that applies to all ships, all game. It would really deliver on the front that Factions are, different. Like a passive racial ability in an RPG.

I respect your decision to rework bombs, and I can sympathize with that idea. I'm not sure that's the way I'd go on about it, tho.

Hey no worries, thanks for the comments.

Sometimes some things just need to be tried out for a wave or two, and if the mechanic is wordy, or just not fun, it gets amended or axed. We've already done that to a few things, and I expect there will be more. Always room for improvement!

Addressing in order:
-Turrets I'm also pretty happy with. It picked up some early flak for being too complicated, but I think we've pared it down to something straightforward.
-Armament refits are pretty much just the game balance answer to Astromechs and Illicits. They aren't really extra guns per se, but instead just the upgraded cannons that historically only the more advanced imperial ships can take. A regular TIE LN, or a regular interceptor just doesn't have access to these. I considered a TIE only slot, but it actually falls into the problem of going against doctrine of the empire. The historicity of it was strongly weighed, and technically a lot of the TIE models did undergo armament refit over the course of the films. I wanted a way to diversify the upper level ships for the empire a bit more beyond EPTs, as a soft cannon slot, and this seemed to do it. Now, as you say, they are very fun, something that's been considered is to let Rebels and Scum tinker with and improve the guns on their ships a bit as well, it's something that maybe we can retroactively introduce a little down the line.
-Faction Ethos cards have been extremely conservatively designed. I am very carefully watching that they don't become freebie 'swing' cards for certain squads. I *do* really want to graduate them to having passive effects for an entire squad, but honestly I felt we needed to make sure we had the balance of the chasses cards sussed out cleanly first. I didn't want a situation where certain chasses were overcosted, but observations of that weren't borne out in the playtesting because of the effectiveness of a passive effect from an Ethos card. The plan for ethos cards was to take the data for the cards that really just never saw use and improve them to something like a passive effect, and then see if it brought it up to the same usage elvel as whatever the highest use ethos card for that faction was.
-Bombs are still very mutable at this stage. We're still tinkering with this mechanic, and for this wave at least, trying out this method. So far it's been pretty fun using bombs as a genuine area denial tool that force bad maneuvers and action loss from high PS aces, but we'll take in the feedback of the playtesters on it before making any decisions about keeping it. It has to make bombing fun for both sides, useful in and of itself. We'll keep fiddling with it until we get that result, and any suggestions or alterations are very welcome.

Thanks!

as an addendum, and something that will be worked into the next manual, I wanted to address the aim of the manual being a complete explanation of the gametype. Frankly, although this is helpful for sorting out rules questions, it makes learning how to play the game exceedingly daunting (and makes the game look a lot more complex than it really is)

I thought perhaps we might break things down much more simply with a one-page "quick-start". Having this at the beginning of the next manual will let me shift the manual over entirely to a "game glossary", so that to play supremacy you don't feel like you need to have read the entire thing.

alright, so first round of playtesting is in!
Upcoming changes planned to be implemented for 2.1.0 are as follows. This is subject to minor amendments

Ethos

• Syndicate changed to read "equipped on a friendly Black sun ship..."

X-Wing

• Red Squadron pilot buff: PS4 -> 5
• T-65BR buff: "If correct, you may rotate your dial to another maneuver." will read "If correct, a friendly ship at range 1 may rotate its dial to another maneuver."

Y-Wing

• BTL-S3 TS "Twin" buff: "Increase your shield value by 1." changed to " "Increase your shield value by 1. The squad point cost of each of your equipped (crew) upgrades is reduced by 1 to a minimum of 0."

A-Wing

• Arvel Crynyd Buff: 22pt -> 21pts

EPTs

• Reverse Throttle Hop buff: 2pts -> 1pt, PS5+ only
• Opportunist buff: PS5+ only

Crew

• Flight Instructor Buff: 4pt -> 3pt

Armament Refit

• Heavy Blaster Cannon Refit Buff: 3pt -> 2pt

Modifications

• Countermeasures nerf: Now reads: "At the start of the Combat phase, you may discard this card. Then, roll 2 attack dice. For each d or c result, you may remove 1 enemy target lock from your ship."

For interest,

here are the current forecasted end redistributions for cards. You'll notice the heavy emphasis on ship-specific cards (chasses) in supremacy, with a drastic reduction in generally available cards. We're aiming for about 100 cards fewer than current X-wing, which has about 292 of last count, and Supremacy is aiming for about 160 in total.

Each wave will result in cards being recycled out of use if they don't fit the criteria of being appropriately well-costed, useful, and not disproportionately better than taking nothing.

This reduced library of cards is aimed squarely at ensuring the game stays one primarily centered around maneuvering and decision making and not card combos.

for playtesters, if you ever get the feeling that card combos are more important for a ship than just the base chassis on its own, please let us know on the battle reports or error reports, I'd like to flag it for rebalancing.

Great work !

I was sceptic about this project at first because I feared the chassis system would imply too much complexity, but it keeps getting better and better, congrats.


PS : the squad builde doesn't seem to work (no way to add ships to the squad).

5 hours ago, Giledhil said:

Great work !

I was sceptic about this project at first because I feared the chassis system would imply too much complexity, but it keeps getting better and better, congrats.


PS : the squad builde doesn't seem to work (no way to add ships to the squad).

Yea, it's a bit of a give and take, by adding in some new card categories, the hope was that we could redistribute in what form certain mechanics saw play, and use the same opportunity to make the game much leaner in terms of overall choice. A common complaint we had with new players to our playgroup before we started making Supremacy was list-building paralysis, where the feeling was that they just didn't know what cards to take to make a really effective squad. My ideal aim is to have relative importance to gameplay being roughly 25% listbuilding, 75% gameplay tactics and choices.

If you take Meta-wing for example, right after about the 120-140 card mark, usage drops below 10%, and the effectiveness of the card turns from something generically useful into something almost consistently with niche use. Niche upgrades that aren't directly linked to a particular ship frame are inherently difficult for beginners to identify, especially if they are part of 2 or 3 card combos.

A lot of those niche mechanics I'd like to see rebuilt into chasses cards directly, especially power cards, as it helps prevent a case of "some cards better than others", even with the ability to rebalance cost. For new players it also makes it much easier to get on board with at least one of the ways "how a ship probably should fly", because for what was previously a niche 2-card combo, now one of them is baked in already as a 1-of-3 options available to the player for that ship, so they only have to connect the dots with one other card.

Now conversely, whenever you take away options like we're doing (like how expertise was recycled into an expensive astromech), there has to be a corresponding assessment of what kind of gap you leave, so you don't adversely diminish diversity in listbuilding possiblities. But there are a few guiding rules I'm following: The decision on that droid for example fell under the general aim to reduce the number of efficiency-improving mechanics in the game that are available to all ships.

Basically, in a nutshell, I want to drive down the number of action economy-improving cards, and efficiency improving cards, and drive those mechanics into more easy-to-balance niche chassis cards. (examples being PTL becoming an interceptor chassis ability, expertise as a droid, juke being sifted into only being available to a more expensive set of ships, and making having both focus and evade relatively hard to get without preconditions, eg. speed of maneuver, type of maneuver, etc.)

Thanks for the headsup on the squad builder, a few bugs have cropped up recently so we'll look into this for the next patch!

5 hours ago, Giledhil said:

PS : the squad builde doesn't seem to work (no way to add ships to the squad).

@citruscannon : got the thing working now. Just so you know, if you are in a different area with another language supported by the original builder (french in my case), it will automatically turn to that language, and then the builder won't be able to add ships. So you have to manually set it to english to get it working.

Just now, Giledhil said:

@citruscannon : got the thing working now. Just so you know, if you are in a different area with another language supported by the original builder (french in my case), it will automatically turn to that language, and then the builder won't be able to add ships. So you have to manually set it to english to get it working.

aha ok, good to know! it's still a work in progress at the minute, lots of new skills being learned in the process of making this

On 4/2/2018 at 7:01 PM, Commander Kaine said:

I also feel that the faction ethos cards don't go far enough. Once per game, for 1 ship? Sometimes there are some pretty hefty conditions (VI).

I think it would be great to have a selection of faction exclusive passive abilities (like an EPT) that applies to all ships, all game. It would really deliver on the front that Factions are, different. Like a passive racial ability in an RPG.

re: this idea,

So along with patching version 2.1, this is something I'm taking a second look at now that we've got the amendments in for the patch sorted away. We'll have a go with exploring this a little further for version 2.1, and look at some passive effects that impart a strong sense of 'theme'. Might take a few goes to get the balance right, but that's why community-input is so fun!

2.1 is pretty close to release so hopefully I can sneak this in there

Just now, citruscannon said:

re: this idea,

So along with patching version 2.1, this is something I'm taking a second look at now that we've got the amendments in for the patch sorted away. We'll have a go with exploring this a little further for version 2.1, and look at some passive effects that impart a strong sense of 'theme'. Might take a few goes to get the balance right, but that's why community-input is so fun!

2.1 is pretty close to release so hopefully I can sneak this in there

Great! I'm looking forward to it

Some questions about some card interactions :

How does ATC interact with Vader's x1 ? Does it allow to change 1 result per attack ? Or just once since "perform this attack twice" doesn't count as 2 distinct attacks?
In the case it allows a mod for both attacks, it seems to me that the combination with "Sniper" is really too powerful.

I guess you'll have to be really careful with passive dice mods now that you have a ship with 2 actions and 2 attacks a round (but I think you're perfectly aware of that since you didn't put an armament refit slot on the x1).
Imho, passive dice mods are just bad for the game, and getting rid of it would be a great idea ^^

5 hours ago, Giledhil said:

Some questions about some card interactions :

How does ATC interact with Vader's x1 ? Does it allow to change 1 result per attack ? Or just once since "perform this attack twice" doesn't count as 2 distinct attacks?
In the case it allows a mod for both attacks, it seems to me that the combination with "Sniper" is really too powerful.

I guess you'll have to be really careful with passive dice mods now that you have a ship with 2 actions and 2 attacks a round (but I think you're perfectly aware of that since you didn't put an armament refit slot on the x1).
Imho, passive dice mods are just bad for the game, and getting rid of it would be a great idea ^^

Yep, agreed on passive die mods being something to be very careful with. This one is a tricky question to answer, because a fully kitted out vader is intended to be the most powerful (and most expensive) pilot in the game, the whole "how can one fighter best our entire fleet?" that Sato runs into to. So whatever we do to him sets the upper power limit for the mod.

As currently written, it'd be modded twice. A vader with that particular build comes in at a minimum of 53 points, and probably 56 points for an extra hull because he's already a big investment of cost at that point. In practice, on a really expensive vader we haven't seen the chassis ability used every round when someone has the chassis because of the stress requirement. In general however, there are a lot of things the ship is very susceptible to if you were to take that build. The first is missiles and ion control. If you're double modding defensively every turn you're not moving too fast, and you can't shake target locks so A-wings with concussion missiles or Y-wings with turrets will disproportionately cause you problems. I'm not certain I'd want a 55 point vader over 5 TIE fighters either for that matter.

Based on playtesting, so far we haven't found a stacked vader to be disproportionately a problem, because if built for offense the opponent just has to focus fire vader down first before anything else, and 3 hull 2 shields crumbles fairly fast in this scenario, whereas in reverse, if firing on Imperial ships they tend to have evades to help negate at least one of the crits, or rebels have shields to just soak them up (and then catching vader the next turn because of stress is fairly straightforward).

Nevertheless, I'll flag the interaction for more playtesting and see what the stats look like on a few more reversal games (where the two opponents play two fast back to back games, trading their lists), and if it looks like squads "require" specific tools to deal with a specific build of vader, then we'll rebalance. The most salient adjustment is a 'Once per turn' on ATC, which would be the first go-to

On 4/18/2018 at 6:39 PM, Commander Kaine said:

Great! I'm looking forward to it

okay!

so we had a really good rehash of these this week, we're going to feed the following Ethos cards into the playtesting machine and see what comes out. The general aim was to build in a pro and a con to each card, to help with fine-tuning and try to keep everything even in power level. Suggestions or amendments welcome!

Rebel Alliance

Partisan Courage - When attacking at range 1, turn 1 blank result to a focus result. When defending at range 1, turn one focus result to a blank result.
Built on Hope - When defending, after rolling defense dice, if there is at least 1 other friendly ship at Range 1-2 of the attacker, you may change a blank to a focus. When attacking an enemy ship, after rolling attack dice, if there is at least 1 other enemy ship at Range 1 of your ship, you must change one focus to a blank.
Battle-Hardened - Once per turn, you may perform an action while stressed, if you do, receive 1 damage card. If your agility is 1 or less, turn that card faceup

Imperial Navy

Type Aces - When you reveal a red maneuver, if you are not stressed, you may treat that maneuver as a white maneuver. If you do, you may receive 1 facedown damage card or two stress tokens after the "Perform Action" step.
No Shields, All Guts - When defending, if you have no shield tokens, you may receive 1 facedown damage card or two stress tokens to reroll all of your defense dice.
Target Discipline - When attacking, you may spend a focus token and receive one stress token to reroll all blank results.

Scum and Villainy

Contract Hunters - When attacking or defending, if there are no other friendly ships at Range 1-2, you may reroll 1 of your blank results. If an enemy ship at range 1 is destroyed by another friendly ship, receive 2 stress tokens.
Indomitable - After another friendly Mandalorian ship at Range 1-2 is destroyed, you may assign 1 focus token to your ship, or remove 1 stress token from your ship.
Syndicate - The squad point cost of each of your equipped Illicit upgrades is reduced by 1, to a minimum of 0. When a friendly ship discards an Illicit card, if it is not a Black Sun ship, roll 1 attack die, on a (hit) result, receive 1 stress token.
Cartel - After a friendly ship discards a Illicit upgrade card, you may roll 1 attack die. On a (focus) result, receive a stress token, on a (hit) result, flip that card faceup, on a (crit) result, recieve 1 facedown damage card.

with some brilliant work by @featherlight, the Squad builder is now up and running for this patch. The builder is built off the backbone of the great work from @geordanr, we've started to migrate the interface to Supremacy. A few of the adjustments from the v2.1 patch are up there already, so we'll follow this up with a full release of the new patch, as soon as the vassal module is ready to go! Vassal auto-importing is not quite ready, but it's almost there!

https://tinydantser.github.io/xwing

9 hours ago, citruscannon said:

with some brilliant work by @featherlight, the Squad builder is now up and running for this patch. The builder is built off the backbone of the great work from @geordanr, we've started to migrate the interface to Supremacy. A few of the adjustments from the v2.1 patch are up there already, so we'll follow this up with a full release of the new patch, as soon as the vassal module is ready to go! Vassal auto-importing is not quite ready, but it's almost there!

https://tinydantser.github.io/xwing

Language problem again for me :

language option is gone, so there's no way to go back to english (from the automatic detection of the website giving me my area language). As a result, no ships are available to add...

2 hours ago, Giledhil said:

Language problem again for me :

language option is gone, so there's no way to go back to english (from the automatic detection of the website giving me my area language). As a result, no ships are available to add...

uhoh, oh no! Sorry about that. We took the language option tab out specifically to assist situations like yours of getting sorted to the wrong side of the site (because multi-language support is not something we have set up yet). Looks like there's some more the architecture that needs to be removed. I'll look into this ASAP.