Hi guys,
I extensively reworked my old Team Deathmatch mod, which you can find here on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/146860/team-deathmatch
The general idea is that every player gets one naked ship with a generic pilot and can unlock new abilities and upgrades by fulfilling certain achievements, like damaging an opponent for the first time. The standard mode in which this can be played is a simple team deathmatch (whichever team kills more enemies wins), but I really liked the "X-Wing Objectives" mode that was published here in the forums and converted its rules for the team game, so you have six scenarios in which certain objectives need to breached.
Design principles:
The "better" the ship is, the worse the pilots are. That's why the T70 has lower PS pilots than the T65, why the Defender has really low PS pilots, and why the A-Wing practically has VI stapled to it. Since some ships do not have enough named pilots, let alone in the segment I'm searching for, I ripped off some custom pilots that people in the community made (especially Odanan) or created my own, usually by either making custom versions of existing pilots with lower PS (like with Rey) or by transferring pilots from other ships. That's why you don't find Poe or Han in the game, and I didn't want to make low PS versions of them if it could be helped because I felt that beginners might feel off-put when the heroes they know from the movies play second fiddle to some fairly unknown guys (Poe being worse than Snap Wexley, stuff like that). Rey was an exception because there simply are only four people total we ever see piloting the Falcon, and Han is clearly the best of them, so I had little choice.
I also tried not to include pilots and upgrades whose abilities require good squad synergies or who generally rely on helping others out, such as passing tokens around, taking damage for teammates, etc. Those pilots are extremely important in normal games, but they're not really that interesting if they're the only ones you can fly over a several-hour game. There are two or three of those in the classic support ship roles, like the Lambda und U-Wing, so if you want to go for that feeling you can, but the mod is intended to being able to play 1v1 with practically every ship.
I also tried to not include discard upgrades (with the exception of ordnance), since the cards are printed on the sheets. That precluded use of many EPTs.
One last thing is that I tried to include "bad" upgrades that usually don't find a place in the competetive meta, since they allowed me to mitigate some more powerful ships (like the Defender) and since point costs weren't a concern - I wanted all ships to be worth roughly the same amount - I could include stuff like Expose, which is normally utterly overcosted. That's also the reason why the TIE/fo and the Striker have hull and shield upgrades - they would just be too cheap compared to the other ships and distort the metagame of the mod.
Since I'm not exactly an X-Wing pro, I'd appreciate any feedback on the specific balancing. I feel that some combos are stronger than others, because some ships really only work with strong synergies (U-Wing, Lambda, etc.) while others you could practically fly naked and still get a decent result (T70, Defender, etc.). For simple layout reasons, I can't include more than four upgrade cards, which required me to throw some stuff into the pilot cards (for example, I included VI in two or three pilots by simply raising their PS and point cost). The limits of the layout also made dual cards problematic; Intensity doesn't feature for this reason, and the S-Foils on X-Wing and U-Wing gave me a major headache.
So, to reiterate, specific feedback on the combos and balancing is very welcome!