I have a few questions that are about the rules.

#1: Advantages.
In my play we have found that spending 1 or 2 advantages becomes a bother. It's such a small advantage that takes so much time for each player to figure out what they want to do with them. I share the same problem as a GM with all of my NPCs.
An idea was to simply put a default. So if a player gets 1 advantage it's always a Boost die to grant someone. If a player gets 2 advantages, they always grant themselves a boost. If a player really want to use it for something else they should say so and have it ready once its their turn to speed things up.

Alternatively just ignore them.

#2: Defenses
In all honesty I find the Boost and Setback dice next to pointless. Most of the time they roll a blank so people don't bother aiming or taking cover. Have you found another way to use Defenses? Maybe grant a single Soak or a single Pierce depending if you are attacking or defending? I don't like the sound of granting free Pierce but I am not sure what to do. Cover just seem lackluster compared to Saga edition which raised the characters defenses while aiming negated cover.

This question also applies to starships. Maybe even more so. The shields feel so insignificant when they should have a bigger role.
(I am looking around for a house rule to starship combat in general but I am curios what people do).

1. Advantages can always be spent to recover strain at a 1:1 ratio. I would suggest that be the default of the character has strain. Beyond that, the mechanical bonuses are really there to be used in case the players can't think of narrative things. Even so, a mechanical benefit should always have a narrative explanation. It shouldn't simply be "give him a blue die". It should be "I provide cover fire, granting grulbarr to aim his bowcaster more steadily at the gang boss. He gets 1 blue die to his next combat check."

2. Setback dice have a 1/3 chance of coming up blank, same as Boost dice. Chances are you're going to get something negative or positive 2/3 of the time per die. I allow cover to stack with armor for Defense purposes, to the normal cap of 4 Defense. This makes cover more useful for characters that already have decent armor. It's surprising how much setback dice help.

2 setback dice increase the difficulty as much as upgrading the dice. They stack up rather quickly and can turn a sure thing into a near thing or a fail.

#1. If you guys haven't been playing long this may be a longer decision process but players get better at knowing their options. Also 1 Advantage (or 1 Threat for that matter) can also have a small Narrative effect and for my group that is actually the default use of it if not in combat.

#2. Setback has a 66% chance per die of introducing something negative, and compounding by tossing in 2 or more Setback has a big effect as this is a small integer game. Are your players rolling really big positive dice pools?

1 hour ago, SSB_Shadow said:

#1: Advantages.

I have to ask why you're adding a layer of formality. Yes, if you can't think of anything to use 1 or 2 Advantage for, default to Strain or passing boost dice around. But sometimes somebody will get an idea how to use them more narratively, and you want to stay open for that. Don't ignore them, when they roll the face you want, you'll be glad. If you haven't seen their value, you haven't been playing long enough...I recall one of our games, nobody could hit anything but they kept generating advantage, so they kept passing boost dice to the main shootist. The result from that mitt-full of dice was epic, a Triumph and 9 advantages, so I allowed the multiple crits to wipe out a minion group. The narrative was that each shot before was suppressing fire, causing the minions to flinch towards the middle, where the shootist finally nailed them all.

1 hour ago, SSB_Shadow said:

#2: Defenses  

I'm not a fan of shields at all in this game, but for cover and the rest it seems to work pretty well. Comparing to Saga is a non-starter for the simple reason that the pip-intervals in this game are much more broad. Saga has 20 faces, +1 = 5%. In this game, adding a die of any kind moves the needle much further. Believe me, when you start stacking up setback, it will have an effect (and it will make those setback-removal Talents much more meaningful).

For starships there are a lot of threads on it already, some pretty recent. The simplest solution I've seen is shield-rating * 3 or so, as extra hit points.

Also on the ship shields thing there are quite a few point-based system house rules for this, so I think you are in good company there.

On 6/20/2018 at 9:09 AM, SSB_Shadow said:

In all honesty I find the Boost and Setback dice next to pointless.

I forgot to address this earlier. Statistically Boost and Setback add more to chances of success than upgrades. If a player has only two green dice to shoot with, Aiming once is going to lead to more success than flipping a Destiny Point. Granted, the DP adds the chance of Triumph, but the odds of that are lower.

22 hours ago, whafrog said:

I forgot to address this earlier. Statistically Boost and Setback add more to chances of success than upgrades. If a player has only two green dice to shoot with, Aiming once is going to lead to more success than flipping a Destiny Point. Granted, the DP adds the chance of Triumph, but the odds of that are lower.

This. I am often reminding my players of this and encouraging them to improvise and narrate things that I could grant them boosts for

Spending 1 Advantage at my table is generally Strain or pass a Boost. Never takes that long.

Boosts and Setbacks are not useless. Boosts in particular are Advantage generating machines, very important for weapon effects and crits.