Clouds should roll for damage, but o nly do damage on hits. Or only damage on focus or something. That way they are less dangerous than asteroids, but more dangerous than Debris.

Rebels had an episode with gas clouds, and the clouds were like melting ships and stuff.

____

Or something weird like, "If you perform an attack at range 0 of a gas cloud, suffer one damage" to represent if the gas is easily ignited or something.

But I guess that concept contradicts their defensive buff . . .

10 minutes ago, HanScottFirst said:

Rebels had an episode with gas clouds, and the clouds were like melting ships and stuff.

Depends on the type of clouds. Dust cloud would be a minor irritant, particularly to unprotected eyes... though at high speeds could be damage inducing. Acid cloud melts things. Clouds of chlorine gas? Yeah, don't play with that. Sulfur? Well, that stinks... Ion clouds... nah, that'll never happen.

21 minutes ago, LagJanson said:

Depends on the type of clouds. Dust cloud would be a minor irritant, particularly to unprotected eyes... though at high speeds could be damage inducing. Acid cloud melts things. Clouds of chlorine gas? Yeah, don't play with that. Sulfur? Well, that stinks... Ion clouds... nah, that'll never happen.

Yeah good question! Hmm.

We can only hope they are not Methane clouds

7 hours ago, Cloaker said:

Need to work out the other elements but Scum Han with title and trick shot is in the running.

I've built pretty much this list, and I've got fearless terry and trick shot han backing up guri with predator and advanced sensors. For Han, I've brought the big L debris (because it's simply enormous) and then I'm packing either two big rocks or two big gas clouds or maybe one of each. The toss-up is between using qira crew on han for shooting through gas clouds with impunity (although I'm not sure if Han gets enough actions to spare a TL onto a cloud very often) or bringing Beckett to plonk a rock in the way of a swarm.

I’m not a fan of them. Sure, you lose an action for going over them, but you trade it for a version of reinforce with no other risks. I think they lower the value of maneuver choices and that seems counter to one of the goals of second edition.

10 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Black Hole. If a ship overlaps it, that ship is immediately destroyed. Also, it gains a stress.

If a ship is within range 1 of a black hole at the conclusion of its move, it MUST perform a 1 straight or 1 bank maneuver.

Gotta get that slingshot.

8 hours ago, HanScottFirst said:

Clouds should roll for damage, but o nly do damage on hits. Or only damage on focus or something. That way they are less dangerous than asteroids, but more dangerous than Debris.

I kind of don't think they should give damage, but I certainly believe they should have given Strain. There'd be a cool parallel there: they give better defenses if you don't get stuck in them, but if you do, the effort of getting your ship out weakens your defenses. It'd make simply flying over them a lot riskier. Losing a die is probably worth the evade-turn effect, but I think it'd be a more fair situation than the status quo.

10 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Static mines: hit them and take (more) damage than just an asteroid. This may (single mine) or may not (mine field) remove the obstacle from play.

Space Slug: An asteroid with an innate "attack" out to range 1

Or, yeah, just go whole hog.

Singularity: if you cross this obstacle, you are considered to have fled the battle field. You reappear in the next game you play, on a matching obstacle token. 1 stress.

...

Oh baby, a triple (post)

Honestly, the designers have been horrible at giving us obstacles. They gave us debris fields when they gave out Dash. YUCK!

Well 2nd edition is having a heavier focus on terrain with 3 different types of terrain and new interactions such as landing on terrain. (Still can't use huge ships as obstacles ). For the longest time every X-wing fight took place in an asteroid field where the Big One was the exclusive terrain feature. You had Debris clouds but the only people who took that were those that played Super Dash but by then Debris clouds have been in for a year.

Now we have 3 different types of terrain for official competitive play (FFG still didn't know what to do with those satellite tokens). Asteroids seem to have the most severe effect for passing through but there are so many ships and upgrades that negate those or even interact them in a different way other than getting punished. Debris Clouds seem to be the least popular even though they have a negative effect for passing through them. There just isn't anything to take advantage of that stress in the meta. Gas clouds seem to be the softest penalties only skipping your action step but they give you essentially a free evade token.

Now hopefully when huge ships are out FFG allows them to be used as obstacles, that way they have a place in competitive play even if it isn't a direct one. It shouldn't be too much of a benefit for choosing a CR-90 instead of 3 rocks/clouds. But it would be nice to see some thing that puts more of the space feel to it since all these changes are ludologicaly elaborating the 2-dimensional playing field of X-wing IMHO.

I had a bit of a concern with these with the 5 Y Ion VTG being a thing where I play, actually Y VTG in general. 8 Hull is a lot to chew through, then add an auto evade every shot, thats a bit crazy. I think a decent way to counter the clouds is to put them as far out of play as you can, if you have initiative, you should be able to get 2 out on the edges.

But as the OP said, I think the the main thing to come out of using clouds is going to be much longer games.

I think making sure to leave a few points spare for seismic charges is a nice idea. Being able to clear your intended engagement area is a nice trick.

I played my first game with gas clouds and one was stuck in the middle of the first and second round of engagement. A B-Wing was shot at by two Torrents and Anakin in the first volley and took no damage. Return fire from two B-Wings through the cloud did one damage on a Torrent. Fortunately, closing the gap for the second volley left each of us with at least one unobstructed ship, so firing just shifted to avoid the crowds cloud (leaving the B-Wing that was parked in the cloud that should have taken two range one shots from the enemy left completely alone).

Early engagements are important for whittling away health and setting up choices for players to prioritize targets of opportunity. The gas clouds can be a major interruption to this and single handedly extended the duration of this game by quite a bit. Both players benefited from the clouds, but I am not a fan of them.