12 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

It remains to be seen how useful any or all of these tactics will be in 2e, but my guess is that none of them will be that useful - there are even fewer ways to retain tokens through bumps, fewer ways to modify dice without tokens,, and in general the offensive game has increased and the defensive game has increased. Blocking is going to be a lot more useful in 2e than it has been of late in 1e.

i think this is a reasonable conclusion but after considering it, i disagree. i think we will see more castling, not less. the reason is the earlier waves of 1.0 did not have final salvos.

so we can look at 2.0 and see two archetypes that are very familiar, tie swarms and 3 ship rebels (eg. Norra, biggs and luke). if i am the swarm player i am against a list that contains an extremely manoeuvrable ace with infinite defence mods. the more space he has, the worse for me. so i can either try to outfly him or castle.

in wave 1, if i castle either:
A - nothing would die, i would receive a draw.
B - he comes near me, i break formation and kill for the win.
C - he picks off one of my ships and i lose.

in 2.0 if i castle either:
A - nothing would die, i take a final salvo that is easily 85% in my favour to win.
B - he comes near me, i break formation and kill him for the win.
C- he picks off one ship and i lose.

to me this ties back to Krayts listener 3 about how changing the rules of a tournament will shape the meta. the introduction of final salvos and the removal of tied games means castling is more favourable to the swarm players than it was in the original swarm days because castling to final salvo can now be a win condition rather than a loss prevention.

12 minutes ago, RynoZero said:

to me this ties back to Krayts listener 3 about how changing the rules of a tournament will shape the meta. the introduction of final salvos and the removal of tied games means castling is more favourable to the swarm players than it was in the original swarm days because castling to final salvo can now be a win condition rather than a loss prevention.

Agreed here. It's the scoring that invited castling, not the bumping rules.

17 minutes ago, RynoZero said:

i think this is a reasonable conclusion but after considering it, i disagree. i think we will see more castling, not less. the reason is the earlier waves of 1.0 did not have final salvos.

so we can look at 2.0 and see two archetypes that are very familiar, tie swarms and 3 ship rebels (eg. Norra, biggs and luke). if i am the swarm player i am against a list that contains an extremely manoeuvrable ace with infinite defence mods. the more space he has, the worse for me. so i can either try to outfly him or castle.

in wave 1, if i castle either:
A - nothing would die, i would receive a draw.
B - he comes near me, i break formation and kill for the win.
C - he picks off one of my ships and i lose.

in 2.0 if i castle either:
A - nothing would die, i take a final salvo that is easily 85% in my favour to win.
B - he comes near me, i break formation and kill him for the win.
C- he picks off one ship and i lose.

to me this ties back to Krayts listener 3 about how changing the rules of a tournament will shape the meta. the introduction of final salvos and the removal of tied games means castling is more favourable to the swarm players than it was in the original swarm days because castling to final salvo can now be a win condition rather than a loss prevention.

If you castle he picks you apart because you have no tokens and you lose.

43 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

If you castle he picks you apart because you have no tokens and you lose.

Read Step B. If the opponent approaches, break the castle formation. Your take is accurate if you don't do step B.

5 minutes ago, LagJanson said:

Read Step B. If the opponent approaches, break the castle formation. Your take is accurate if you don't do step B.

OK, so you break formation, he dodges most of your guns and kills/token strips one that has arc, and doesn't die.

5 hours ago, SOTL said:

I've a feeling this a new trolling account from Shadow.

I thought Paragoombaslayer was back...

35 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

OK, so you break formation, he dodges most of your guns and kills/token strips one that has arc, and doesn't die.

We've got very different scenarios intended here. The intent of a castle is NOT to remain put like a fortress. It's to determine which way you're coming and move to intercept on my terms.

Now, if I was castled, and you were approaching - YES, you might move to intercept at a higher speed than I expect and you could catch me before I'm able to form up in some kind of attack formation. So, what you said is true, but it is not necessarily the only outcome.

I may see you're coming from a certain direction and break the castle in time to form up.

Realistically, if it were me castled, you'd likely get your predicted scenario, since A) I don't castle and B) I don't practice the escape. Now, you go against some of the players that use this as polished tactic (yes, some exist) they break formation as soon as you are committed to a direction, and they know which maneuvers they need to make to break their castle and form up in an efficient manner.

EDIT: ANYWAY - intent of the tactic is off topic anyway - suggest we not worry about it @thespaceinvader . I'm in agreement though, if somebody gets caught in a fortress by an opponent, it ends badly for the guy castled up.

2 hours ago, Lace Jetstreamer said:

Castling can mean any time in the game, a player can intentionally choose to block their own ships for positional advantage. This is seen at high level play at the start of matches especially used by Low Initiative swarms. You might be referring to players who 'Point Fortress' and force their opponent to come and get them 'waiting' in the corner of the board the whole game. That is only the extreme case. The more common is as I described. I believe BOTH forms abuse the mechanics of the game.

Position is the main component of this game. Ships should not be allowed to just bump and stay in the same position without sufficient penalty. Stress is a mechanic that punishes bad flying. Ships bumping into each other should have more than just actions taken away. Abuse of mechanics should be designed out of the game. This is why harsher punishments for players who intentionally abuse the bumping mechanic are necessary. By including a stress to a bump, it now makes sense that the ship cannot take an action because ITS stressed. This is the whole point of consistency.

But since it is already laid out in the rules that bumping (or going over an obstacle) causes the loss of actions, there is consistency. It doesn't require a stress to block the action because there is already a penalty, one that many believe to be sufficient. You seem to ignore this for the sake of your arguments, and considering this is the third time I've seen you make suggestions about basic game mechanics that show some unfortunate tunnel vision, I'm really starting to see a pattern.

I must ask, what is your background in game design?

15 hours ago, Lace Jetstreamer said:

X-Wing 1.0 had a serious problem with players exploiting the rules around bumping. The concept of castling was born out of this exploitation. Intentionally bumping your own ships should have negative consequences. Just losing an action is not enough and isn't consistent anyways. So I propose the following fix for x-wing 2.0.

It is still possible to do castling; however, the player will be punished with stress tokens. Players will no longer have the option to exploit bumping to remove stress while keeping their ships 'in place'.

Punishing bumping with a stress, promotes 'good flying'. Good flying is not bumping into ships (even though some of you will argue otherwise).

This is worse than your "Genius" whine.

Just. Stop.

If there were a ship or ability that benefited you for bumping into your own ships, I might be inclined to agree with Lace (for that specific ability.)

As is? No. And I'm a bad pilot.

Lets make a poll on his next "Oh my god sky is falling fix 2.0" topic. My suggestions:

1 OMG, Y-wing with barrel roll is broken, no one will hit, fix it now.

2 OMG, Z-swarm is 100000X more broken compared to Tie swarm, fix it.

3 OMG, people are playing better than me and keep guessing all my maneuvers and blocking them, fix it (wait, this is the topic of this one.. need to think another)

Add in rule:

"Stalemate: If no player has attacked by 45 minute mark in the round, any player may choose to instantly end the game with a "Special Final Salvo". Each player rolls 4 red dice, the player with the most hits crits is the winner."

Gives no advantage to red dice final salvos. Allows more than enough time to self bump in a corner (like Palp Aces) for positional strategies. And if the game is actually being played and players are just vying for best position for 45 minutes, then players can keep playing.

TOs can just announce 30 minites left in the round, and that is the time for determination of a stalemate.

7 minutes ago, Redblock said:

3 OMG, people are playing better than me and keep guessing all my maneuvers and blocking them, fix it (wait, this is the topic of this one.. need to think another)

So you think that now, but lace has shown a willingness to cover the same topic multiple times.

IF you still think you need a third, how about "People can dodge my turret because I don't know how maneuvers work and it should be able to shoot wherever." Then add some pseudo-logic and poor theming to get 1.0 turrets back.

2 minutes ago, wurms said:

Add in rule:

"Stalemate: If no player has attacked by 45 minute mark in the round, any player may choose to instantly end the game with a "Special Final Salvo". Each player rolls 4 red dice, the player with the most hits crits is the winner."

Gives no advantage to red dice final salvos. Allows more than enough time to self bump in a corner (like Palp Aces) for positional strategies. And if the game is actually being played and players are just vying for best position for 45 minutes, then players can keep playing.

TOs can just announce 30 minites left in the round, and that is the time for determination of a stalemate.

Won't fix things. One player still doesn't want to attack in certain instances, this just changes those instances.

Spoiler: If bring bombs and/or have a ton less red dice than me to GenCon, I'm gunna castle.

12 minutes ago, Do I need a Username said:

Won't fix things. One player still doesn't want to attack in certain instances, this just changes those instances.

It takes away advantage of red dice for castling final salvos. I think that is the main problem with castling. If you have more red dice, castling is an advantage, instead of a strategy to bring the opponent closer or draw the fight to your side of the mat. Take away red dice advantage. In some circumstances, castling is a strategy. The most infamous castling was the regional finals with the triple Kwings vs 3 Mist Hunters and a Z-95. Kwings only have 6 red dice and misthunters and Z have 11 red dice and castling in the corner. There is NO reason for the misthunter player to leave that corner. He has almost double the red dice for final salvo. He is instantly in an advantageous situation. Take that away, where each player is on even ground. Castling should be a strategy, not an advantage.

When the game begins, there should not be "this player is already in the lead because he brought more red dice". All players should be at 50/50 until the first engagement. That is my point.

I can recall exactly one specific match where Castling was called out. It was at a Worlds Event during the height of Whisper Madness, and the Rebel player created a 4-ship castle and refused to move. It was the only way he saw to beat Whisper with X-Wings and B-Wings IIRC, and even then I remember that the Whisper player completely ignored a blind spot on one side of the board that would have let him approach from relative safety. That was the most egregious thing: the board showed the possibility for a small fighter to destroy a fortress by running down a narrow trench , and the player did not take it.

That was three years ago. I haven't heard of another situation where castling has actually worked since then.

8 hours ago, Lace Jetstreamer said:

Castling can mean any time in the game, a player can intentionally choose to block their own ships for positional advantage. This is seen at high level play at the start of matches especially used by Low Initiative swarms. You might be referring to players who 'Point Fortress' and force their opponent to come and get them 'waiting' in the corner of the board the whole game. That is only the extreme case. The more common is as I described. I believe BOTH forms abuse the mechanics of the game.

Position is the main component of this game. Ships should not be allowed to just bump and stay in the same position without sufficient penalty. Stress is a mechanic that punishes bad flying. Ships bumping into each other should have more than just actions taken away. Abuse of mechanics should be designed out of the game. This is why harsher punishments for players who intentionally abuse the bumping mechanic are necessary. By including a stress to a bump, it now makes sense that the ship cannot take an action because ITS stressed. This is the whole point of consistency.

A Point Fortress is a side effect of the tournament scoring system where having fewer ships is advantageous because of the less granular scoring.

Fortressing (or castling as it's being called now) is when you set your ships up in a position where if you repeatedly execute the same maneuver they never move. The developer view on it back when it was a hot topic was that doing so is so action inefficient that it puts you at a disadvantage and therefore they didn't need to create rules to stop it.

Blocking your own ships isn't fortressing. As for if blocking counts as abuse, that battle was fought in Wave 3 and blocking won. It's a developer acknowledged part of the game.

3 minutes ago, wurms said:

It takes away advantage of red dice for castling final salvos. I think that is the main problem with castling. If you have more red dice, castling is an advantage, instead of a strategy to bring the opponent closer or draw the fight to your side of the mat. Take away red dice advantage. In some circumstances, castling is a strategy. The most infamous castling was the regional finals with the triple Kwings vs 3 Mist Hunters and a Z-95. Kwings only have 6 red dice and misthunters and Z have 11 red dice and castling in the corner. There is NO reason for the misthunter player to leave that corner. He has almost double the red dice for final salvo. He is instantly in an advantageous situation. Take that away, where each player is on even ground. Castling should be a strategy, not an advantage.

When the game begins, there should not be "this player is already in the lead because he brought more red dice". All players should be at 50/50 until the first engagement. That is my point.

Where does castling actually work as a benefit? Seems like the assumption is that one can't find a good way to engage the held enemy position.

7 hours ago, LagJanson said:

Agreed here. It's the scoring that invited castling, not the bumping rules.

Then why was it is a thing before Final Salvo? Just to anticipate the response, "It became much more prevalent after Final Salvo" ...

... it also became much more effective after Final Salvo, for all the reasons that have been touched on (primarily passive mods and move/no-move shenanigans).

... it also became much more prevalent as the player-base swung harder against Fly Casual toward Gotta Win.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the rules for bumping invited fortressing. (IMO, the changing goals of the player-base is what invited fortressing.) But the bumping rules did nothing to discourage fortressing, and they easily could have, given errata. (TBH, I think it will be addressed in the 2.0 rules reference.)

16 minutes ago, wurms said:

The most infamous castling was the regional finals with the triple Kwings vs 3 Mist Hunter s and a Z-95. Kwings only have 6 red dice and misthunters and Z have 11 red dice and castling in the corner. There is NO reason for the misthunter player to leave that corner [ ... ]

... unless the player actually wants to play X-Wing.

Fortressing is, primarily, a player-created problem, arising from "desire to record a win" being valued significantly more highly than "playing a game of X-Wing."

FWIW, I think your solution, while clunky, would work just fine.

nope, thats not a big enough punishment. it should be if a player bumps his ship into a friendly ship both are destroyed.

6 minutes ago, bageldrone said:

nope, thats not a big enough punishment. it should be if a player bumps his ship into a friendly ship both are destroyed.

This is HARD CORE MODE.

41 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

... unless the player actually wants to play X-Wing.

Would argue that, against AdvSLAM triple K bombers, "playing X-Wing" was never an option to begin with.

I mean, if the K-Wing player is throwing red dice more than two or three times, they've made a mistake in that game.