42 minutes ago, The Inquisitor said:

More factions probably doesn't make inter-faction balance easier. It does probably make intra-faction balance easier to manage with less moving parts.

I'd prefer more factions because it gives more room to flesh out an archetype. With 2 or 3 huge catch-all factions the differences start to get cosmetic particularly if very similar ships or, increasingly, the actual same ship get shared between factions. Rebels have TIE fighters, Nym is dual faction, etc. Compartmentalising will keep more flavour per faction, even if ships are shared.

It seems possible for FFG to move towards a 5 faction system but they still need to flesh out Resistance and First Order and that might be hard to do with more ships in the original trilogy era coming out for Solo or whatever.

Yeah, I don't think the FO and Resistance will ever be viable as true factions unless the final movie generates a lot of new ships.

FFG would need to tap into the Clone Wars to have enough material to create new stand-alone factions. Also, the thing with using the Clone Wars as a source is it would be an easier task to create "faction flavor:" droids for the CiS, and Jedi for the Republic, with affiliated faction-only mechanics.

I thought there was currently only one faction, Rebel.

....couldn't help it in our pre-FAQ reality, haha.

I play STAW and they have a bunch of factions, I think it would help IF and only IF the factions are balanced.. In STAW unfortunately the smaller factions are not all that balanced, how ever since faction mixing is permitted it makes for some odd combos. They also lumped many of the smaller factions together in order to help balance, and that did help a bit.. However what X-wing needs in not more factions but monthly scenarios from FFG. Its what makes STAW such a fun game, as you have to play a different scenario each month. well it used to be monthly but they messed that up as well now and went to every other month.. the scenarios could be based on movies, books etc..If they really wanted to do it right they could make the top op prizes alt paint ships that would be sold retail a year later that way folks wont have to suffer though EBAY scalpers like the STAW people had too..lol