For me the big things are ditching Push The Limit and Veteran Instincts. I think this creates a great deal more control over what a ship can combo together and how powerful that is. Something that is fair moving early becoming unfair when moving later can be prevented because you can't change when it happens via pushing up the Pilot Skill.

The Push The Limit change does that as well. Ships won't have a blanket extra action allowing dialing in the perfect order for ships to do things. Ships won't be able to put two things together that shouldn't be allowed together.

Those should be terrific balancing mechanisms all on their own. And more to the points about "fun" they should serve quite well in preventing things that just flat out "feel" unfair and thus become unbalanced.

Creating a perfectly balanced game is actually trivially easy. Making a perfectly balanced game that is also fun and interesting, THAT is nigh impossible.

What would an easily perfectly balanced game look like? Well the game has one ship: the X-Wing. The X-Wing has one pilot: the Red Squadron veteran with initiative 4. Each side gets 3 of them. Go.

The thing is though the game doesn't need to be PERFECTLY balanced. It just needs to not have a "this ship required to win" level of imbalance: ie the Phantom at time of release. When the meta was "Play a Phantom, play a hard counter to the Phantom, or lose" that was a legit balance problem.

32 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

For me the big things are ditching Push The Limit and Veteran Instincts. I think this creates a great deal more control over what a ship can combo together and how powerful that is. Something that is fair moving early becoming unfair when moving later can be prevented because you can't change when it happens via pushing up the Pilot Skill.

The Push The Limit change does that as well. Ships won't have a blanket extra action allowing dialing in the perfect order for ships to do things. Ships won't be able to put two things together that shouldn't be allowed together.

Those should be terrific balancing mechanisms all on their own. And more to the points about "fun" they should serve quite well in preventing things that just flat out "feel" unfair and thus become unbalanced.

Don't forget the end of engine upgrade and presumable vectored thrusters, especially EU was such a limiting factor when every single large ship could in theory have it.

VT is definitely still in.

But then, VT has never been a problem.

1 minute ago, thespaceinvader said:

VT is definitely still in.

But then, VT has never been a problem.

How do we know that? I haven't seen it, yet, though the art is on the new expert handling I believe, which has the same effect as new EU in turning your red reposition white.

1 minute ago, Admiral Deathrain said:

How do we know that? I haven't seen it, yet, though the art is on the new expert handling I believe, which has the same effect as new EU in turning your red reposition white.

Ah that's my error. I think you're right, in that case.

But I wouldn't be surprised if there's a BR equivalent of Afterburners, with limited charges of the action, but some extra bonus for doing them.

Look, we can legitimately put a Proton Torpedo on an X-Wing and have two shots with it while keeping the Target Lock.

Does anything else matter?

Whilst I never expect the game to be 100% balanced; I'm hoping for the gap between good and bad to be significantly reduced.

I expect this game to be designed in such a way that even if things are not balanced, skill will be the great equalizer! Which means I will be much worse at it than I am now!!

Richard Garfield said in a recent interview, "if you don't have broken cards [in a competitive game], you're not pushing the boundaries, not trying hard enough"

This works fine for his games, which are not meant to be balanced (leading to card bans on the one hand, and super expensive cards, on the other) but is a poor strategy for a minis game like X-wing, in which players expect their expensive plastic toys to be useful and fun to play with.

The dynamic card pricing scheme for 2.0 seems like the perfect way to solve this quandary. The devs can go crazy with pilot and upgrade powers, and shift the pricing accordingly if something is too good/too poor.

They have kind of suggested they will be intervening often, but don't plan on being trigger-happy, so broken strategies will probably still appear, but will be squashed after a month or so, if not organically countered.

This means we should have a dynamic and diverse game, which is not only more balanced than old 1.0, but also more approachable and more fun - considering the old balancing strategy consisted of aces packs released at least a year after a ship proved useless, stapled-on upgrades, and long-*** FAQs changing cards' effects and timing.

I'm totally on board with the new approach (which I had been calling for, for maybe two years, in fact).

19 minutes ago, takfar said:

Richard Garfield said in a recent interview, "if you don't have broken cards [in a competitive game], you're not pushing the boundaries, not trying hard enough"

He's excusing himself with that. He wasn't worried about broken stuff like Ancestral Recall when MtG came out because it wasn't meant to be in every deck or in multiples in every deck. It was okay if it was a little broken. But when everybody just needs to make an order for the broken piece and can field how ever many there wallet can bear...

Coloring with disregard for the lines is a piece of cake. Even very small children are capable of that.

34 minutes ago, takfar said:

They have kind of suggested they will be intervening often, but don't plan on being trigger-happy, so broken strategies will probably still appear, but will be squashed after a month or so, if not organically countered.

Oh, good, so we can look forward to even more daily "FFG, Please XXX Now" posts.

I actually think this will be a good control mechanism, but the process will get painful, at times.

Richard Garfield is right.

You mean to tell me the game will not be perfect

You don't say

Yes 2.0 will have a meta, yes it will give certain lists an advantage over others. I can one of 2 lists dominating.

• Int 1 swarms
• Int 6 with link actions.

Those I can tell you will be competitive but which one depends on the pricing. But I will tell you not both of them will be top tier, it will be one or the other.

If the ships/squads that weight the scales have fixed <90 firing arcs, regardless the faction; there may be some salt, but it will sprinkled on some very well crisped chips, with a pint in hand, and there will be much rejoicing.

1 hour ago, NotBatman said:

Oh, good, so we can look forward to even more daily "FFG, Please XXX Now" posts.

I actually think this will be a good control mechanism, but the process will get painful, at times.

Yeah, what good did THAT ever get us....

Oh, wait.

1 hour ago, NotBatman said:

Oh, good, so we can look forward to even more daily "FFG, Please XXX Now" posts.

I actually think this will be a good control mechanism, but the process will get painful, at times.

Uh... Welcome to every competitive game community, ever? It will always be a bit painful if you're following stuff on a daily basis. Look on the bright side, if you're tired of it all, you can just check the app/website and get direct access to any updates to cards in your lists.

Anyway, the whole point is, they can now actually improve game balance without having to resort to incredibly inelegant erratas, FAQs and reprints. We, on the other hand, no longer have to wait months, re-buy ships on aces packs, or go crazy buying lots of unnecessary ships to get access to that essential upgrade we "need" to make a favored ship competitive. What's not to like?

1 hour ago, Frimmel said:

He's excusing himself with that. He wasn't worried about broken stuff like Ancestral Recall when MtG came out because it wasn't meant to be in every deck or in multiples in every deck. It was okay if it was a little broken. But when everybody just needs to make an order for the broken piece and can field how ever many there wallet can bear...

Coloring with disregard for the lines is a piece of cake. Even very small children are capable of that.

Now, I'm not saying I approve of the MtG model. I was only into that game for a year or so back in '96, in a very casual level, and left it because I wasn't keen on keeping up with new cards or needing to buy a lot of packs in order to maybe get the more powerful stuff (also, I was a young kid with no money).

What I'm saying is, the beauty of the 2.0 XW balance model is that the designers can go wild, and in case they make a terrible mistake that gets through playtesting and wrecks tables everywhere, they can still rein it in by simply increasing point costs - which is the reason point costs exist, after all: to make the opposing sides balanced, even while different and asymmetric!

I have no rational reason for it, everything looks pretty peachy bar a few well documented specifics, but there is a tiny corner of my mind where the phrase ' a can of worms ' resides, when considering the new balancing system.

I know why. Perhaps it's something to do with live things being pretty wriggly and unpleasant to pin down.

The adjacent corner is something about cats and herding.