On 2/16/2019 at 12:07 PM, Varulfr said:

Ha so I'm seeing a bit of both responses then? To those that argue that the rules make for a better game, is there anything specific in the improvement you could comment on?

I know that it helped with some of the competitive scene, where some overpowered or poorly balanced squads were making things stale... but does that equally apply to casual games? Most of my students just like to fly whatever appeals to them aesthetically, they're not min-maxing or playing to any kind of meta in any way. So is there something in the base ruleset changes that they would find appealing?

Honestly I might be swayed, if there is nothing else even, if 2.0 is just faster to set up!

As a couple of examples only (there were a LOT of changes that effected the game balance)

REINFORCE AND EVADE: 1.0 was reduce attack damage by 1, in 2.0 it was reduce by 1 but a MINIMUM of 1 damage still gos through. This is huge for keeping 2 die attacks relevant. Also, due to double actions being limited and an evade token nerf, this also keeps 2 die attacks relevant (and *cough* 3 die attacks).

THE TURRET POWER CREEP: As a short history, someone at FFG decided to make a ship (ywing) that could shoot outside of its front arc. This was powerful so it was kept to range 1-2 and small attacks. But it created a nice paper, rock, scissors balance of Jousters, Arc Dodgers, and Turrets. All was well UNTIL.... some moron (no offense) at FFG thought, “Hey you know what would be awesome? A massive arc-dodging, heavy laser cannon 4 die attacking turret ship that blows to smithereens the balance (Dash, also Han had his share of blame).” Which led to Autothrusters and the ability to not get hit by 4 die attacks. Which led to the Twin Laser Turret... et cetera. A LOT of ships were just simply left behind and were no longer playable.

INFINITE BOMBS AND REBEL REGEN: Don’t get me started...

PUSH THE LIMIT AND VETERAN INSTINCTS: seemingly unimportant, but surprisingly tough to deal with. FFG had to ponder the difficulty of EVERY ship being able to jack it’s ps up by 2 or taking 2 actions. Now a ship can be designed without this dilemma. It’s ps does not change and ships only get very specific double actions.

THE PUNISHING ONE: Yeah.... sooo .... still so “fixed” my scum player buddy can’t talk about it. FFG got a lot right but not everything.

POINTS AND UPGRADE SLOTS: In 2.0 they are no longer printed on the cards it’s all managed electronically via the website or app. Thus if there’s some accidental imbalance in the game (Vader on a Tie Phantom) then boop! That ship looses that upgrade combo or the points go up. It’s similar to computer games (Overwatch, Etc) where they keep releasing balance updates.

Anyone else have any other big ones to add?

Most of these honestly probably aren’t major concerns in pretty casual settings. But man... it was oppressive to play against EVERY TIME at your LGS. Much like Boba, Whisper and Redline in 2.0 but then Boop! Point change let’s play something new now!

As a casual player, the biggest thing for me was seeing the disparity between good lists and bad lists shrink a lot. In First Edition, you could often tell who would win simply by looking at the lists, and several ships were utterly unplayable outside of a single pilot in specific lists.

In Second Edition, there are still some lists that are better than others, but the difference is smaller, so that I almost always feel I have a chance, and can usually give my opponent a good challenge. And with the possible exception of the Jumpmaster, no ship feels like it's an automatic loss to take.

EDIT: I'd also add that in my opinion, the game is much more tactical now. In First Edition, you often saw ships doing the exact same thing every single turn. They were built to do one sequence of actions, so by golly that's what they'd do! In Second, you still have some of that, (e.g. a TIE Phantom is almost never not cloaking at the end of a round, if all goes right) but in general, I feel there are a lot more choices to make, and a lot fewer instances with only one correct, obvious answer.

I'd argue correct balance is even more important for casual players than competitive ones. The purely competitive gamer doesn't care about theme, and is perfectly happy to run The Best List. Casual players, on the other hand, wants to run ships that are cool, thematic and fun to play, but still have a fighting chance. In 1.0, I regularly had to dissuade newcomers from picking up their favourite ships, explaining to them that if they did, they'd lose nearly ever game. Now, in 2.0 (or is it 2.1 now?), I don't, and THAT is great for the casual community.

2 hours ago, Okapi said:

I'd argue correct balance is even more important for casual players than competitive ones. The purely competitive gamer doesn't care about theme, and is perfectly happy to run The Best List. Casual players, on the other hand, wants to run ships that are cool, thematic and fun to play, but still have a fighting chance. In 1.0, I regularly had to dissuade newcomers from picking up their favourite ships, explaining to them that if they did, they'd lose nearly ever game. Now, in 2.0 (or is it 2.1 now?), I don't, and THAT is great for the casual community.

Great point! I feel like now a friend inexperienced with the game could say I wanna play X ship because it looks cool or is my favorite ship, and I’d be able to put together a strong squad based on it.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

As a casual player, the biggest thing for me was seeing the disparity between good lists and bad lists shrink a lot. In First Edition, you could often tell who would win simply by looking at the lists, and several ships were utterly unplayable outside of a single pilot in specific lists.

In Second Edition, there are still some lists that are better than others, but the difference is smaller, so that I almost always feel I have a chance, and can usually give my opponent a good challenge. And with the possible exception of the Jumpmaster, no ship feels like it's an automatic loss to take.

EDIT: I'd also add that in my opinion, the game is much more tactical now. In First Edition, you often saw ships doing the exact same thing every single turn. They were built to do one sequence of actions, so by golly that's what they'd do! In Second, you still have some of that, (e.g. a TIE Phantom is almost never not cloaking at the end of a round, if all goes right) but in general, I feel there are a lot more choices to make, and a lot fewer instances with only one correct, obvious answer.

Excellent point. I’m continually surprised how close my matches tend to be. It’s normally down to a couple rounds of good dice or a couple errors that could have sent the match either way.

No more of the guaranteed loss/win combos...

I was in the same boat, out of about 10 people nearly everyone used my stuff. I was buying 2-3 ships per month during 1.0 (have 300+ ships) and now I've only bought the starter, rebel and imperial conversion kit in 2.0. I stopped playing in tournaments and haven't attended one in over a year now.

I recommend getting at least the starter box and one of each conversion kit. I recommend this because FFG may not produce the kits in future years and you'll likely get the itch to buy new ships but they'll only be 2.0 compatible.

The game improvements are good although the requirement to use the app sucks. If your group is casual the new game doesn't offer much if you like it as-is. It does offer the following good things if you want changes:

• system phase keeps bombs sensible
• use of charges for many upgrades that were 1-shot
• medium bases
• linked actions keep certain ships balanced
• pilot abilities are balanced
• support ships generally get Coordinate
• simpler initiative without veteran instincts
• upgrades are less mandatory

The Casual format which involves prebuilt ships, lets just say it is not that good (especially since all the extended ships don't come with threat cards). Correct me if I was wrong but did they had to errata one of those threat cards?

1 hour ago, Marinealver said:

The Casual format which involves prebuilt ships, lets just say it is not that good (especially since all the extended ships don't come with threat cards). Correct me if I was wrong but did they had to errata one of those threat cards?

I don’t know about the threat cards being errata’d. But there are PDFs online from ffg to cover all the extended ships in that quickbuild format.

14 hours ago, ScummyRebel said:

I don’t know about the threat cards being errata’d. But there are PDFs online from ffg to cover all the extended ships in that quickbuild format.

Yes, some Quick Builds were errata’d. Just like point cost updates, I view this as a good thing. A couple builds that were priced poorly were adjusted. The changes have improved the format. But more changes are still needed and will hopefully happen (four Upsilons in an 8 Threat list is silly).

Aside: I keep my Quick Build Squad Builder updated to FFG’s latest information on the Quick Build format. No need to comb through the annoying PDF’s!

Sell all your 1.0 on eBay, buy whatever you can afford from the proceeds. A couple of core sets and a few ships to taste.

On 2/18/2019 at 11:59 AM, Marinealver said:

The Casual format which involves prebuilt ships, lets just say it is not that good (especially since all the extended ships don't come with threat cards). Correct me if I was wrong but did they had to errata one of those threat cards?

Have you played this format? It's a lot of fun and I've heard nothing but good things from people who have tried it. One of the best parts is that it's a completely different approach to squadbuilding, and it lets you fly some builds that are normally illegal and are highly thematic.

2 hours ago, gadwag said:

Have you played this format? It's a lot of fun and I've heard nothing but good things from people who have tried it. One of the best parts is that it's a completely different approach to squadbuilding, and it lets you fly some builds that are normally illegal and are highly thematic.

I like the concept and think it has a lot of potential for alternative formats maybe even a co-op campaign. But it has been for the most part ignored by OrgPlay and the rest of the Community. It is a shame, there is a lot you can do with the threat system.

On ‎2‎/‎16‎/‎2019 at 5:07 PM, Varulfr said:

Ha so I'm seeing a bit of both responses then? To those that argue that the rules make for a better game, is there anything specific in the improvement you could comment on?

I know that it helped with some of the competitive scene, where some overpowered or poorly balanced squads were making things stale... but does that equally apply to casual games? Most of my students just like to fly whatever appeals to them aesthetically, they're not min-maxing or playing to any kind of meta in any way. So is there something in the base ruleset changes that they would find appealing?

Honestly I might be swayed, if there is nothing else even, if 2.0 is just faster to set up!

As a fairly casual player, the changes are pretty minor but they are all positive ones.

• Almost every ship now has at least a red boost or barrel roll - repositioning is not the exclusive preserve of stuff like interceptors
• Almost every ship now has a segnor's loop or koiogran turn - which means that even if you joust, you don't end up doing it in boring straight lines.
• Charge mechanics give you a lot of funky new options - most things like torpedoes, bombs and so on have 2+ uses, and quite a few powerful cards have multiple-turn-cooldown times. Equally, a lot of things which were unlimited use now have a charge cap, meaning (for example) Luke with R2D2 can be killed with a TIE fighter's 2-dice attacks. Eventually .
• Limitations on the mechanics (evade changes a result to an evade, it doesn't add one, and reinforce reduces damage to a minimum of one) means it's easy to be tough but almost impossible to be invulnerable in the way you could in 1.0. Even without specifically trying, you can get scissors-paper-stone matchups far more easily than with current lists.

It is a big chunk of cash for conversion kits, but on the other hand, if it's all your stuff, you can limit the scale.

If you've got a Force Awakens Core Set, Heroes of the Rebellion, a T-70, a TIE/fo and a TIE/sf, for example, you can come close to a decent set of squads with the Resistance and First Order core sets, which are cheaper. There's no need to rush off and buy the more expensive Rebel/Imperial/Scum unless people decide the update has really grabbed them.

If you are looking for new and interesting without going to 2.0, you can always go with Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. It's co-op and very fun.

On 2/21/2019 at 1:31 AM, Marinealver said:

I like the concept and think it has a lot of potential for alternative formats maybe even a co-op campaign. But it has been for the most part ignored by OrgPlay and the rest of the Community. It is a shame, there is a lot you can do with the threat system.

I think that's fine though, given that it is a casual format; people interested in organised play almost by definition aren't as invested in it. It's fun for quick thematic games at home though.

So I finally got my kits and core set and bit into it, and a few observations to make:

Good

-Liking the simplification of rules and reduction of some of the upgrades. Having my TIE Advanced finally have access to abilities that I previously had to purchase a Raider for it great!

-Love the turret changes. I used to think turrets were practically an I-win with the right loadout.

-Aesthetic changes to cards and tokens are nice, there's a cohesiveness achieved that I appreciate

-LOVE changes to ordnance and target lock. I honestly would pretty much never bring ordnance at all because it just never felt worth it to spend a target lock and one-use card. Also, multiple ships have reload now? Love it.

Meh

-Dear God there are so many cards what is this!? I had to buy an entire box of new sleeves for the upgrades. I actually rather like the overlapping nature and think they reduced a lot of cards in general, but man... 30 bucks more just to sleeve the things to protect them...

-I have realized that the Saw's expansion, though it says it is 2.0, doesn't include the same tokens.

-Why are there still some cards like servos? These seem redundant, couldn't they have been included in the ship cards like other upgrades were?

Bad

-The punchboard for the rebel kit was lousy quality. I had small tears in several of the larger ships base cards that I had to glue a bit. I saw this complaint in some of the reviews too.

-Barely any tokens were included in the kits. No shield tokens at all, no Ion tokens at all... I have all these ships, I've been told that this kit included everything I need but it blatantly doesn't. I have to cannibalize old tokens to make it work. That doesn't make sense.

-Still getting crooked TIE fighters. I don't think I've been able to acquire a single TIE since I've started this game that didn't have some kind of problem. For paying extra for new expansions, I'd expect a bit better quality control...

Still perusing, still have a ton of dials to put together... but overall I think it was a good buy in and I'm fairly happy with it. Hopefully I can sell off the extras!

5 hours ago, Varulfr said:

-LOVE changes to ordnance and target lock. I honestly would pretty much never bring ordnance at all because it just never felt worth it to spend a target lock and one-use card. Also, multiple ships have reload now? Love it.

They do, but just be aware that Reload now only recharges a single charge on a single upgrade (rather than flipping all upgrades, as in 1E).

5 hours ago, Varulfr said:

-Why are there still some cards like servos? These seem redundant, couldn't they have been included in the ship cards like other upgrades were?

The S-Foils are a separate card because they are dual-sided.

On 2/16/2019 at 10:43 AM, Varulfr said:

So I'm considering converting my current pile of X wing stuff to 2.0, but I really am not sure it's worth the cost just yet. I run a tabletop club at the high school I teach at, but we don't have much more than 3-5 people on a given day and we have a number of other games in our inventory as well. X wing comes out every once in a while, but it is far from being a big competitive scene or anything.

Main issue is that it's mostly me footing the bill for all this. It means the collection is pretty much just one of most of the expansions, which is good because I would only need one of each conversion kit.

That said, each kit is what... 40 bucks each at best? So that's 80 for the conversation and another 30 or so for the core, at best? Without scum which is another 30 at best? 110-140 dollars to play with a new set of rules?

I just don't know if a new ruleset is worth that kind of hit to my wallet, considering we don't play competitively... especially when we can get some of the new legion stuff for well within that price.

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated though, if it would sway one way or another.

Honestly, going based on my own collecting (and very very very LITTLE gameplay) 2.0 at the very least will offer better looking X-Wings, and Y-Wings (So far those the only mold changes i am aware of)

11 hours ago, Zeoinx said:

Honestly, going based on my own collecting (and very very very LITTLE gameplay) 2.0 at the very least will offer better looking X-Wings, and Y-Wings (So far those the only mold changes i am aware of)

The Scum fighter got spinny wings, didn't it?

12 hours ago, Zeoinx said:

Honestly, going based on my own collecting (and very very very LITTLE gameplay) 2.0 at the very least will offer better looking X-Wings, and Y-Wings (So far those the only mold changes i am aware of)

Not so sure about the ywing. The new turret they put on the cockpit is just awful.