If you are taking an ace, how much do you like to leave for a bid? Is a one point bid pointless?

Maybe. Depends. If you are really skilled with your list you can do whatever you feel is comfortable. I’m comfortable with only a 5 point bid. Any more and there’s probably some upgrade I should have in my list. That being said, removing upgrades that don’t make sense for the squad and then finding out no other upgrades make sense will most likely leave you with a bid that fits your squad.

Depends on the meta. At my local store 4 points is a massive bid. Also depends on your strategy. A point-fortress like Anakin or Guri will probably benefit from a large bid in a way that Soontir can't.

Possibly dumb question, asked in a spirit of genuine curiosity after playing a game out at a store and seeing this come up:

Given that simul-striking is a thing in 2E, does bidding even matter anymore? Like... even if you kill my ship with your same-PS ship, it’ll still get to shoot at its initiative before it gets removed... right?

30 minutes ago, CoffeeMinion said:

Possibly dumb question, asked in a spirit of genuine curiosity after playing a game out at a store and seeing this come up:

Given that simul-striking is a thing in 2E, does bidding even matter anymore? Like... even if you kill my ship with your same-PS ship, it’ll still get to shoot at its initiative before it gets removed... right?

30 minutes ago, CoffeeMinion said:

Positioning is where bidding is usually important. Typically you see initiative 6 aces wanting to move last so they can reposition accordingly. Conversely, you may want to move first so you have a better shot of forcing a bump. That's not as common, but not unheard of-it depends on the list and player.

It also impacts firing order, which can impact things like who has green tokens when, etc. So that could impact a bid

init 6 small ship pilots are pretty much everywhere you like right now.

there is a log jam at int 5 also so it depends what ur flying and what ur expecting to fly against.

iv been playing since 1.0 wave 1 and im only now starting to see the importance of an init bid at the higher end of pilot initiative. As stated here already the repositioning 'with full information' is often worth a bid... question is how much bid can you safely go down to?

Depends on a lot of stuff. How risky my ace is. The more I need to keep safe from other high Init ships, the more I'm willing to invest in bid. Some ships won't mind as much. How much they care about moving last. Whisper, Nien Nunb, and to some extent even Anakin don't mind being first player. How much can be cut from the list. A favorite list of mine is 3x Fangs (Fenn/Old T/Kad Solus--who always lowkey contributes and is surprisingly fun with Elusive), and that's really easy to bring a pretty healthy 10-ish point bid, because they can't really take any upgrades. On the other hand, Fenn/Old T/Guri has ships which are a lot pricier, and there are a lot more key upgrades, so it's hard to incorporate a bid.

Anyhow, I guess my answer is ideally 5-10, but I'll sometimes go as low as 2 if I'm flying a list which cares about aces, just judging from how I play where I live. I feel like even small 2-3-4 point bids matter. A lot of Rebel Beef runs Wedge pretty close to 200. Anakin/Mace lists can frequently run around 198.

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Is 1 point useless? Not exactly. I feel like it'll useful less often than 2 or 3, but I think it's of enough worth that I wouldn't change an upgrade just to fill up to 200. However, I'm probably also not compromising my list to get a deeper bid. I'm not cutting Predator for Crack Shot on Soontir, for example, to go from 199 to 198. But I wouldn't cram in an upgrade I didn't think I needed, either.