1.0 Upgrades and Pilot Cards

By LinkDirector, in X-Wing Rules Questions

Not to mention that 1e was never playable out of the box, not fully. It didn't ship with enough dice or models to do even a 60 point game or to do a full attack with the biggest dice count in the box, not defend with the biggest defence count.

X wing has always been a game you need to find additional content to fully play.

This time round a good chunk of that content will be free online officially.

Just to throw this out there: I understand the frustrations of people who aren't interested in including a technological step in their game prep, but keep in mind that printing costs on the card makes those costs inflexible and makes balancing difficult. That's why, you had a bunch of ships with only one viable pilot, because they had to balance the entire chassis around one pilot who was undercosted compared to the others. Changing the printed values on the cards is really hard. Balancing via software is much easier and should make for a better-designed game with more meaningful options to make. Now we might actually get to see K-wings besides Miranda, a TIE Advanced that isn't Vader, and so on.

My problem is not with the variable costs of ships/pilots/add-ons being calculated exclusively in the app, but more with having physical cards that eventually don't represent what is printed on the card. I understand that errata FAQ documents have been a mainstay for X-Wing for years and IMHO it totally got out of hand with all the errata changes that followed with the meta game. In many cases, having a physical card ended up representing that you spent real money on collecting the cards for deck-building purposes when in actuality you were working off just the errata document for the actual effects.

I'm looking forward to the potential flexibility of the app and I'm confident that any serious newbie or veteran player will not have a problem adapting to the new methods. My hope is that with the app, keeping abreast of errata will not be as laborsome as it has been in the past.

On a side note for 2nd Ed, I would like to see that non-faction add-on cards be exclusively digital in the app since I don't want to have to buy multiples of a ship that has specific generic cards I want if I don't regularly play that faction, even after getting the appropriate Conversion Kit. This drove me crazy in 1st Ed!!! (I'm pretty sure that won't happen, yet people will probably still flame me despite just being my personal preference/opinion)

@warwalk, if you'll excuse me putting words into the devs' mouths for a moment: I think the hope is that the ability to change the cost of things more easily will result in them not needing to change the text. In a world where you don't have to nerf something because you can just make it more expensive, you might wind up with no cards that require additional documents to use at the table.

While the cards might not change their workings the likelihood that we can do completely without a actual faq (as opposed to a balancing document) that clarifies certain interaction is close to none.

19 hours ago, warwalk said:

On a side note for 2nd Ed, I would like to see that non-faction add-on cards be exclusively digital in the app since I don't want to have to buy multiples of a ship that has specific generic cards I want if I don't regularly play that faction, even after getting the appropriate Conversion Kit. This drove me crazy in 1st Ed!!! (I'm pretty sure that won't happen, yet people will probably still flame me despite just being my personal preference/opinion)

The devs have said that they will be fixing this to better support single faction collectors. I believe I read something about a card-only release, or that every ship in a wave will come with all the upgrades from that wave, or something similar. Sorry I can't remember details right now, still working on my coffee, but basically you won't be forced to buy out of faction anymore.

1 hour ago, nexttwelveexits said:

The devs have said that they will be fixing this to better support single faction collectors. I believe I read something about a card-only release, or that every ship in a wave will come with all the upgrades from that wave, or something similar. Sorry I can't remember details right now, still working on my coffee, but basically you won't be forced to buy out of faction anymore.

They're moving to a model like that of Legion or Runewars, where there will not be any faction-independent cards which don't appear in a given faction's sets. Most likely this means that faction independent upgrades will appear once per faction per wave.

3 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

They're moving to a model like that of Legion or Runewars, where there will not be any faction-independent cards which don't appear in a given faction's sets. Most likely this means that faction independent upgrades will appear once per faction per wave.

Nice. It doesn't mean you won't have to buy three or four of a certain ship to get enough of that upgrade for the rest of your squad (get a free Sheathipede with the purchase of every Flight-Assist Astromech!)... but it DOES mean you won't have to buy ships from your least-favorite faction just for that one upgrade you REALLY need (no more $20 Autothrusters that also come with a free Starviper).