2 hours ago, ayedubbleyoo said:

I've always thought this is a strange thing about X-Wing... seems 90% of discussion is about lists and maybe 10% is about tactics and ideas about flying.

There are one or two articles about things like rock placement and turn zero, but not much talk about it on the forum and in the community. A few of the podcasts have started up theory episodes, which is great.

Has anyone noticed this, or it bothered them? And what are your questions about strategy?

Well, this IS the XWM forum.

You didn't think 2.0 would change that, did you? Really?

There's now more discussion about why there's more discussion about lists than there is about tactics than there is about tactics.

1 hour ago, Micanthropyre said:

I think this is largely because X-wing is a tactical game, and the "right choice" is extremely dependent on the board state, and reading the board state is also nebulous. I've been talking with one of my people a lot lately regarding strategy and tactics and how to play, and what I always come to is "we need to play a game against each other, but each turn we should talk about the options". This exercise is extremely time consuming, but the more you do it, the more effective it is because the lessons learned start to translate to other lists and situations.

Its really hard to do this online. There have been a number of "what would you dial in this instance" but that is of limited value without the rest of the game being discussed, and logistically that isn't really viable.

I find X-Wing is actually very similar to billiards in that you can't really learn strategy from reading a book (though you can try!) but you can do exercises alone that can help you get better at the game:

1: Scatter some obstacles in a pattern that could happen in a game. Set up your ships, and then pick an area on the board to build a killbox or formation fly to engage in. These first three turns of positioning are important, and making sure you know how to place your ships in setup and get from point A to point B without screwing up is key. After you do this, leave the obstacles alone, set up again, and pick a new area on the board and go there.

2: Choose 3 different ships of different initiatives and weave through an asteroid field. One of the most common things that I see (and sometimes do myself) is failure to consider initiative order when moving. Work up to 6 ships, one of each initiative and fly them around the board. Combine this with exercise 1 for even better results.

3: Set up obstacles and "race" through them with a single ship. Your goal is to turn those corners as close to the obstacles as you can. Most of my current errors are going too fast or too slow on the previous turn, and now I can't do my preferred turn or bank into the obstacle field. Sometimes dialing in the 3 straight now allows you to do the 3 bank next turn, which is actually faster and better than doing the 4 straight and the 2 turn so that you don't hit the rock in front of you. Remember that getting from point A to point B is the sum of all your maneuvers, not just going really fast every turn.

None of these things care about ship builds or dice, and all of them will help you get better at the game.

The 3 points mentioned are by far the best advice I have had. I only entered the game with 2.0 and a friend said that these three things are the best I could do. Whenever I get a new ship or build a new list, i set up my kitchen table and try and get to various points of the board without hitting obstacles/ least or most moves etc so I get used to how the ship flies.

Other than that, it is very situational and I do feel that the best way to learn is to play! (Although I watch many a podcast on games and consider what I would do vs what happened, how it could have been better etc)

If we wanted to tie this to a broader aspect of military strategy we could bring forth the old saw about amateurs talking about tactics while professionals talk logistics. Flying is tactics while list-building is logistics. We're professionals here. 😎

1 hour ago, ThinkingB said:

If I had to guess, it's because flying is frankly kind of difficult to describe effectively in a text environment. In my experience, most in person tactics talk is flying because you can just move ships and obstacles around easily to illustrate your point. It's just a chore to have to describe ships, where they are relative to each-other, where obstacles are, how things are facing, where moves will end up, etc. If I had to guess, that's the most direct explanation. People are just too lazy to have to describe everything.

A highly situational opening (especially in the current meta). Much easier and more interesting to just talk about lists.

-edit- In case you were wondering about the ship choice (for sure outdated) in this already overly-situational setup

23 minutes ago, player3010587 said:

A highly situational opening (especially in the current meta). Much easier and more interesting to just talk about lists.

-edit- In case you were wondering about the ship choice (for sure outdated) in this already overly-situational setup

It’s funny, the Wolffe, Saeese, Mace list I’ve been flying lately I’ve beem setting up like you see. Saeese on the outside edge, Wolffe about 1 base width inside, and Mace towards the middle or opposite corner (depending on what my opponent has deployed)

And it works. Supernatural Mace, deployed at 45° in a corner, dial a 5 straight and then boost into location of choice. Works wonders, and I can get the ships where I want them. Which greatly depends on my opponents list!

A pair of Bwing aces and I have second player? Boost Mace at their face, and turn 2 Supernatural to 5k behind them or 3 bank depending on their move and the rocks. If it’s Anakin? Boost my board edge 5 straight turn 1, and have Mace cross under Saeese and Wolffe who will engage Anakin while Mace pins the rest of the list (pair of Torrents and an Arc) down.

But that’s my style, and my list, and applying a tactic depending on situation. How I fly is completely different when I’m moving last versus moving first against 5 I5’s.

Which is, as others mentioned, why tactical talk is hard here, it can be very situational.

With boost and barrelroll, what is there to talk about? After you reveal dials, move ship either closer into arc, or get out of dodge.

Well if you want to talk about mobility and how it interrupts the flow and if it is a good thing or a bad thing. I know a forum for you, r/halo. There are a lot of discussions on how enhanced mobility have improved/ruin the game.

Over here if you try to talk about removing boost, all the Arc Dodgers will come down at you for ruining the intricate balance and fun of the game. Now of course the reason may be people consider movement to have more skill just because there is no random element in movement. As with just about all table top game the movement is measured while the combat is randomized. Back to another comparison when Halo Reach introduced bloom, a randomizing element that had controlled mitigation (sounds familiar?) the pros over at MLG hated it. To them randomness removes skill .

Now if you want to add in some randomness to movement, put in some ways to interfere with the dials by a random rotation. Then you might see some more pieces about movement, but then again it is more likely you will see posts demanding the removal of said mechanic.

1 hour ago, Frimmel said:

If we wanted to tie this to a broader aspect of military strategy we could bring forth the old saw about amateurs talking about tactics while professionals talk logistics. Flying is tactics while list-building is logistics. We're professionals here. 😎

🤨 Sort of. List building is Strategic. Tactics is how you do things on the board in response to what is happening there. Logistics is being familiar with the needs of the list and meeting those requirements.

Yes and no. The game had been largely returned to it's 1.0wave0-3 state on maneuvering being important. I'd talk about it more but as I'm sure like many of the old vets on here it's a kinda old hat to us. Also there's already plenty of YouTube and whatnot on the subject so what's left to talk about? There's only so much that can be talked about on rule of 11, ring around the rock, K-races, etc. Realistically we could have an at length discussion about some things like Resistance A-wings and the different things they can do depending on build out. But again meh, old hat. I mean if someone asked specifics of be happy to help. It's hard on the forums since image sharing sucks.

By the way, I'm a firm believer that solid openings can bring you a looooong way. What I mean by opening largely overlaps with what is called turn 0:

• analysis of the opponent's list
  • identifying the largest threats and the conditions in which they are
  • thinking about target priority
  • thinking about their threat maps
• obstacle placement
• deployment of your list
• first 1-3 turns of movements

All these points are part of your opening, and they can all be prepared in advance to some degree. I could see openings being used for the first 1-3 turns of movement only and calling the rest turn 0. It's anyway muddy at this point. Maybe battle plan is an alternative to describe the whole thing. Which brings me to Moltke and a pet peeve of mine.

One of the most misunderstood quotes is Moltke's "no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force", often paraphrased as "No plan survives contact with the enemy." or "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.". It's misunderstood because the false conclusion is not to make any plans. Instead what militaries do is to prepare alternative plans for eventualities.

20 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

One of the most misunderstood quotes is Moltke's "no plan of  operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force", often paraphrased as "No plan survives contact with the enemy." or "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.". It's misunderstood because the false conclusion i  s not to make any plans. Instead what militaries do i  s to prepare alternative plans for eventualities. 

Yup, which one has to understand the relationship to his sentiment and the Schlieffen Plan to fully grasp what he said, and why.

Agree 100%

Locally, we have a guy who will record matches then comment on them while the game progresses. Not a play by play, but ideas of stratagies that work, don't work, and what else could have possibly be done. I enjoy these more than the just watching syle that is the norm on YouTube.

Everybody flights perfectly. It's always list or dices to blame. You can't change dices, so we discuss lists. Easy.

31 minutes ago, Oldpara said:

Everybody flights perfectly. It's always list or dices to blame. You can't change dices, so we discuss lists. Easy.

We can also discuss the best way to throw dice

I've thought this very same thing. I've been in these forums for over a year and only playing grown ups since 2.0 dropped. This place has been a weird mixture of invaluable and useless.

The good stuff tends to arrive in flashes, the odd post that shifts my perspective. Or just links, where I can read or watch specific examples of how certain things are achieved.

Tactics and actual flying are just really, really simple and actual manoeuvres are entirely situational. So discussion is difficult...

Bait, switch, flank, joust, block, range control, obstacle placement. Anybody with enough experience can say what these are and outline ways to use them.

But in application, every game and every squad is different. Judgement of the space, the opposing squads strengths of approach and your own response with your particular squad, can only be gained with actual table time. I'm still only beginning to understand how to make practical use of these things, in my own context, myself.

The puzzles were really good. What I'd like, rather than what does this ship do here, is to see the entire board state at turn 3 and ask what went wrong for who, and where...

One of the very best collections of writings I've seen about X-Wing tactics is @Biophysical 's blog. Starfighter Mafia.

Space Owls is another fantastic blog that consistently manages to go over my head.

If I were smarter about this game, I would write stuff like this too. Alas, I am not, so I'll leave it to those two.

Another unmentioned factor is that flying has less marginal utility in 2.0 vs 1.0 since dice can screw you way harder

ATs and perma double-mods could be annoying to play with/against but the relative consistency of their results meant that range control and arc control (ship-dependent, of course) reliably made the difference in battle outcomes. You could still get varianced out despite better flying, but it was rarer. My favorite 1.0 list was 3xSilencer with AdvS/Optics/AT, with which I could comfortably out-fly everything but double Lancer if I was the better player, since each ship was flexible and could leverage the dial, focus bank, AdvS, and ATs to weather the attacks of and killbox any of the aces flying around.

Fast forward to 2.0; range control helps, but if your opponent rolls 6/6 red and 5/6 paint with his lead ships to your 4/10 paint on red and 3/8 on green, it doesn't matter that you outflew him on the opening engagement. His ships are unscathed and one of yours is crippled, which will snowball readily unless the dice swing back towards you later. There's nothing you can do yourself to even out the results-- no token banking, no safety nets, etc. The best you can hope for is to survive long enough to set up engagements where you get blocks but still shoot with all of your ships and pray they don't roll 3 or 4 hits per ship anyway.

In an ideal world, your ships can shoot theirs without getting shot back, but if your opponent is even a little bit competent it won't happen very often and you'll have to rely on the dice to behave. Enter list-building: To mitigate some of the crazy variance present in 2.0, people have doubled down further on the list-building portion of the game in discussions. Token stacking (Soontir, Phantoms, Defenders, HWKs), ridiculously underpriced movement aids (Leia), and fully modded dice (RebHan, Boba, Poe, Drea Swarms, etc.) that approach the power level of their 1.0 equivalents are the de facto kings still, with ships like Y-Wings making up for the lack of mods with boatloads of health, attacks, and ion control. Building a list that's variance-resistant is far more important than flying an extra 10% better than your opponent flies their variance-vulnerable list, because in a tournament setting, variance against a similarly skilled opponent is just as likely to take you out as a brutal flying beatdown.

So people gravitate towards the part they can control independent of the dice and the opponent to set themselves up for success. And as others have mentioned, outside of generalities like "don't donate 50+ points to your opponent," flying is extremely visual/situational and hard to discuss in any interesting detail, particularly on mobile.

Responding somewhat to the general group and to @RampancyTW , flying is way more important now in second ed, just not where it used to be. Towards the middle and end of First Ed the most critical stage of flight had become the deployment into the initial engagement. Where as he points out range control mattered a lot. Probably too much certain alpha strike lists baked everything on that sequence. That part of the engagement was very easy to define, process, and teach. It also had very obvious results. Now it's back to more early first Ed where that initial run sets the tone, but there's a ton of follow through. I consistently 'lose' my initial engagement, but I see up the approach to apply constant pressure for the rest of the game from multiple angles and that's how I've won very consistently. The larger presence of generic pilots is evidence to me that this is not my singular observation, because to even attempt that strategy you need numbers more than aces. Now that two attack die pools are dangerous again (see resistance a wings) as long as your getting even some shots your going to make progress. Diversified investments in your point weight mitigates loss due to inborn variance. So back to the op question, they're right, learning about old school basics like ring around the rock, and k-turn races is once again really important. A year ago the most important thing to know was the beginning, now you need to know the middle and end. Which again as Rampant points out, isn't easy to do on the forum and mobile.

25 minutes ago, ForceSensitive said:

Responding somewhat to the general group and to @RampancyTW , flying is way more important now in second ed, just not where it used to be. Towards the middle and end of First Ed the most critical stage of flight had become the deployment into the initial engagement. Where as he points out range control mattered a lot. Probably too much certain alpha strike lists baked everything on that sequence. That part of the engagement was very easy to define, process, and teach. It also had very obvious results. Now it's back to more early first Ed where that initial run sets the tone, but there's a ton of follow through. I consistently 'lose' my initial engagement, but I see up the approach to apply constant pressure for the rest of the game from multiple angles and that's how I've won very consistently. The larger presence of generic pilots is evidence to me that this is not my singular observation, because to even attempt that strategy you need numbers more than aces. Now that two attack die pools are dangerous again (see resistance a wings) as long as your getting even some shots your going to make progress. Diversified investments in your point weight mitigates loss due to inborn variance. So back to the op question, they're right, learning about old school basics like ring around the rock, and k-turn races is once again really important. A year ago the most important thing to know was the beginning, now you need to know the middle and end. Which again as Rampant points out, isn't easy to do on the forum and mobile.

Recently lost a league match largely due to an inability to push damage through on a 2h/1agi and 2h/0agi ship over the course of 5 rounds with 2 attack ships and more generally a net -15 natty h/c relative to my opponent

Flying is more important compared to the absolute worst offenders of 1.0 but the lack of recourse against variance swings in 2.0 is real and the list-building phase is really important if you don't want competitive performance to be significantly affected by dumb luck. It's been pointed out by plenty of players better than me that it's rarer in 2.0 for the match result to run counter to the LadyLuck output.

I have yet to find an in-kind replacement for the 1.0 triple Silencer list, but probably going to give StarVipers a whirl soon since they seem nice and squirrelly

Edit to say I do want to make it clear that I like 2.0 and all of the mechanic changes made to emphasize flying, the issue I'm highlighting is that the field of options for mitigating variance has shrunk considerably so the top ships are the few that can either mitigate it better than their peers or the ones using overwhelming efficiency due to aggressive costing (current Ys and Resistance As) so the list-building phase is now less concept-oriented and is thus even more specific, hence the continued dominance of conversation

13 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Um, cuz it would be boring?

The only point of the game is to fly around and shoot the other guy. Not much of an interesting story there.

Once we get missions/scenarios (hopefully), now you can spin a yarn about what you did (or didn't do) to succeed (or fail) at the mission. There is a story worth telling that revolves around the way you flew your list.

Really? I catch snippets here and there of people mentioning a tactic with which I'm unfamiliar, and I personally find it far more interesting than the discussions of whether a list I will never fly is slightly better with this pilot I don't care about or that pilot I don't care about.

10 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:

One of the most misunderstood quotes is Moltke's "no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force", often paraphrased as "No plan survives contact with the enemy." or "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.". It's misunderstood because the false conclusion is not to make any plans. Instead what militaries do is to prepare alternative plans for eventualities.

As my CCW instructor said, "Having a plan gives you something to deviate from." That is, by having a plan, when something does go wrong, you can more quickly judge how it's gone wrong and how you should react.

It's much easier to talk about lists than about flying. That said, the midwesternscrub and starfightermafia blogs do a good job of discussing actual flight tactics

So I'd be interested in whether we can solidify broad styles and approaches. I talk a lot about flying 'Velociraptor style' and a lot of my squads have that quality of bringing a big tough main threat to draw the enemy's attention, while the real killer sneaks up on the side. Then there's 'Jesus take the wheel', which is just a straight dumb joust and hoping the maths falls in your favour, 'Roundabout' where you deploy opposite corner with rocks in the middle and just run round the outside faster than the opponent does, so you get behind them, 'Bait & Switch'?

Get into too much detail and each of those branches endlessly into options you can't discuss as they're all special snowflakes, but I think there's some broad overarching strategies you can coalesce into something tangible.

Players have a common understanding of lists and are able to control them completely. Because of that, lists are much easier to talk about. When I’ve been on forums for other games, many discussions happen about lists as well.

This is a great thread, and I 100% agree with the need for more discussion of tactics. I'll echo what's already been said about 1.0 resources on obstacle placement, formation flying, etc on youtube and the aforementioned blogs. If you're new to x-wing and haven't checked out, do it. It will change your life.

If I were to quibble with this threads complaint, though, it would be to point out that a true apples to apples comparison would be tactics vs the strategy of listbuilding (which there isn't much of that either.) Discussion of specific pilots/lists is more akin to threads discussing specific game mechanics/interactions, and there are lots of those.

7 hours ago, JJ48 said:

As my CCW instructor said, "Having a plan gives you something to deviate from." That is, by having a plan, when something does go wrong, you can more quickly judge how it's gone wrong and how you should react.

That's very useful. Thanks for sharing that. Speeding up your OODA loop is good. Though it is similar to "Failure to plan is planning to fail." Folks bag on me sometimes for being organized and having a plan and I always reply, "Chaos requires no assistance from me."