We're not getting super complex ships in Xwing. The game is built upon its relative simplicity re other miniature games

Bwings with two point HLCs is the most I'd hope for

In regards to adding multi dots to upgrades...yeah I'd be all for that. More variety; more ways to balance things out

1 minute ago, ficklegreendice said:

Literally all you need is cheaper cannons

Let's not get 1st Ed up in here

While it's true Bwings will almost always default to primaries...well, **** em

Ships like the gunboat, scyk, resistance transport etc will serve as fine homes while a 3-die primary ship would probably really appreciate a 2 point HLC (it's a more difficult to trigger predator, two points is fine)

I agree.

Additionally, as someone who flies mostly generics, my decision process when building a squad and choosing between B-Wing and X-Wing is usually whether or not I have 2 dice primaries, because in certain matchups single-modified 2 dice attacks basically can't do damage, so I need to fit a tractor beam in there somewhere. The cannon slot is still the selling point of the B-Wing for me and the only reason this isn't reflected in the meta is that the B-Wing, like most ships, has the word-laden higher-initiative ships be severely undercosted compared to the generics, and the Rebel 2-dice generics that combo with this are probably overpriced. Ignoring Braylen and Ten and their insane amount of offensive mods for a minute, the niche of the B-Wing is probably an X-Wing with cannons, since it's pretty equivalent in terms of survivability.

Well, the Bwing is an Xwing with cannons, sturdier stats, and a SLOW dial (and no servomotors)

Bwings, despite being jousters, are still incredibly distinct from other ships of its role (only the Torrent, of all things, is comparable...the g1-a is medium base)

Adapted from the defender thread, how about a system upgrade saying:

After you perform a primary attack, you may spend a charge to perform a bonus attack with an equipped cannon weapon. If you do, prevent all damage the defender would suffer from uncancelled hit results.

Balance to taste with the number of charges.

The wording stops you double-tapping with an HLC, and also prevents the equipped ship tractoring then shooting.

It gives canons a place as control upgrades on ships with system/cannon (B-wing, ig2000, mist-hunter, defender, gunboat, upsilon, lambda, any others?), which seems to be a list of ships I have never seen use a cannon* (aside from maybe a tractor lambda).

*Jamming beam doesn't count.

1 minute ago, player2072913 said:

Adapted from the defender thread, how about a system upgrade saying:

After you perform a primary attack, you may spend a charge to perform a bonus attack with an equipped cannon weapon. If you do, prevent all damage the defender would suffer from uncancelled hit results.

Balance to taste with the number of charges.

The wording stops you double-tapping with an HLC, and also prevents the equipped ship tractoring then shooting.

It gives canons a place as control upgrades on ships with system/cannon (B-wing, ig2000, mist-hunter, defender, gunboat, upsilon, lambda, any others?), which seems to be a list of ships I have never seen use a cannon* (aside from maybe a tractor lambda).

*Jamming beam doesn't count.

This is interesting. I like it being a sensor slot instead of a mod as it competes with AS or PS on low-I B-wings and Aggressors so you're less likely to see it spammed. Makes Ion cannons a pretty poor choice though, and it basically rules out AB and HLC... I guess those might be taken anyway for the situational offensive boost. I'd probably just prefer to see cheaper cannons, but this could work.

I'd love to see cannons that augment and modify your primary attack, rather than being a whole separate weapon.

Ion Cannons could then be, "After you perform an a Forward Arc primary attack that hits, assign one Ion token to the Defender." Same thing for Jamming and Tractor Beams. HLC could just add a bonus die when attacking a ship in your bullseye arc, but maybe using it requires you to change a crit to a hit. Certain ships would be able to equip two cannons, which would allow them to stack the effects of both and be priced accordingly.

Tiered pricing for cannons based on 2/3/4 primary, this means much cheaper cannons for the Upsilon, but balanced for 3 die primaries without being am absolute steal on Scyks and Gunboats, otherwise no Scyk would ever use a Torp or Missile excluding maybe Quinn/G.Red/Serrisu.

If ion cannon was three points and Scyks get a point drop (which is think ks comming you could field 30 point ion Scyks, which I think is too cheap.

I suppose the problem is if ion cannon is 2 points on an Upsilon and HLC is 1 would tractor and Autocannon drop to 0? Tbh I don't think that's unbalanced considering the required carrier is giving up a 4 die primary.

I think the extra points cost on lower attack dice ships represents needing more resources to power the cannons, while 4 die primary ships have plenty of power to spare, and it's not problem to have them running alongside the regular guns.

What fo you all think, tiered pricing good or bad. (Seems to be working for Agility and base size for some upgrades but is this too far?)

5 hours ago, theBitterFig said:

Then HLC has to be priced for Poe.

HLC is marginal on Poe. The whole idea of repoing into || using his perfect knowledge is plagued with opportunity cost. Were we talking about a ship with only repo econ it'd be a diff story, but too often Poe would be better or almost as good taking the token.

HLC is much stronger on Sycks, 2x the die boost and access to Drea for rerolls.

8 minutes ago, PhantomFO said:

I'd love to see cannons that augment and modify your primary attack, rather than being a whole separate weapon.

Ion Cannons could then be, "After you perform an a Forward Arc primary attack that hits, assign one Ion token to the Defender." Same thing for Jamming and Tractor Beams. HLC could just add a bonus die when attacking a ship in your bullseye arc, but maybe using it requires you to change a crit to a hit. Certain ships would be able to equip two cannons, which would allow them to stack the effects of both and be priced accordingly.

Maybe a cannon slot upgrades that allowed you to spend results following a primary attack to apply ion/tractor/jam/strain/stress?

Even restricted to just one token type you could choose to apply, that's much more flexible than current cannons being able to choose when damage goes through vs control tokens, or double stressing an ace/ triple ioning or tractoring a large base.

But it is design space unexplored and Ig2000's with ion/tractor at will are rather appealing.

5 minutes ago, Scum4Life said:

Maybe a cannon slot upgrades that allowed you to spend results following a primary attack to apply ion/tractor/jam/strain/stress?

Even restricted to just one token type you could choose to apply, that's much more flexible than current cannons being able to choose when damage goes through vs control tokens, or double stressing an ace/ triple ioning or tractoring a large base.

But it is design space unexplored and Ig2000's with ion/tractor at will are rather appealing.

Multple token types would be way too flexible IMO, basically completely negates the desire to ever take Sabine crew, and weaponized stress should never, ever, ever come back in any form.

A single token type, maybe at a higher cost than the standard cannon (advanced ion battery, advanced tractor beam, etc) but I don't think it's really necessary for anything except ion as if you're using tractor or jam you want to put as much through as possible.

TBH there are so many solutions that would work, but currently the single issue is that all the cannons are attack replacements, meaning they cannot be good on 3atk ship without being OP on double tap or 2die ships.

I was hoping autoblaster would be some sort of additive power boost but it has exactly the same issue. Now the best hope we have for cannons in the short-term is attack based canon cost scaling with VTG/brobots/etc being correspondingly priced at whatever needed to not be OP.

Current HLC seems fine to me. 1.0 they were everywhere and it felt wrong; now they are mostly a tech option against medium bases, which is more thematically appropriate and prevents them from being must-haves on every single ship with a cannon slot.

Slightly overcosted and niche 4 dice weapons are much better than '4+ dice or go home' loadouts that became far too common.

6 hours ago, ficklegreendice said:

While it's true Bwings will almost always default to primaries...well, **** em

A radical idea would be:

Ships with NO (or very weak) primary attacks that basically require a cannon upgrade.

What if the B-Wing chassis was cheaper because it assumes that it will be armed with secondaries, and thus has a weak primary attack?

12 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

A radical idea would be:

Ships with NO (or very weak) primary attacks that basically require a cannon upgrade.

What if the B-Wing chassis was cheaper because it assumes that it will be armed with secondaries, and thus has a weak primary attack?

Resistance transport

16 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

Resistance transport

Well, 2 Attack isn't weak anymore, is it?? That's basically standard/baseline.

I mean the chassis has 0 or 1 as a primary. So it's add a cannon or be support only.

3 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Well, 2 Attack isn't weak anymore, is it?? That's basically standard/baseline.

I mean the chassis has 0 or 1 as a primary. So it's add a cannon or be support only.

Try the Scyk. Never used naked because they’re not worth the points. Cannon (or torps) or bust.

Tiered pricing based on primary weapon value would make sense, since cannons are more of an opportunity cost the bigger your main gun is. For future-proofing they'd have to think about how it works if a ship has multiple primaries with different values. I'm not sure there are any such ships with a cannon slot at the moment, but if e.g. they release the Otana it could conceivably have a cannon, front primary and turret (or cannon and double turret).

7 hours ago, ClassicalMoser said:

Try the Scyk. Never used naked because they’re not worth the points. Cannon (or torps) or bust.

Not too far off a First Order Tie, for the same price and no free Jam cannon, but blue 2 turns and some segnors loops

Perhaps a card that reads something like.

"After you perform a primary attack that does not hit, you may perform a bonus attack from secondary Cannon weapon"

9 hours ago, ClassicalMoser said:

Try the Scyk. Never used naked because they’re not worth the points. Cannon (or torps) or bust.

I feel like that's missing something. Cannons are so cheap that, if you already had a Scyk, it makes sense to just throw on a cannon anyhow. Is Sunny Bounder playable without a cannon? Probably. Or at least, not less-playable for lack of a cannon. But why not spend 4 points for an HLC? (Init 1 is bad with bullseye, but Sunny likes a 2-red attack well enough, so the positional-highroll of the HLC makes more sense to me than Ion or Tractor) Serissu can be sneaky-good, with those rerolls helping to keep ships alive, and because Init 5 is good for I-Kills and such. But 2 points for a Tractor or 5 for an Ion Cannon just makes sense. If you've invested 40 in Serissu, those last few points are worth it.

Don't get me wrong, Scyks without special weapons aren't particularly exciting ships. But even if the naked ship is good enough, you'd still fill the cannon slot.

10 hours ago, ClassicalMoser said:

Try the Scyk. Never used naked because they’re not worth the points. Cannon (or torps) or bust.

3 hours ago, Scum4Life said:

Not too far off a First Order Tie, for the same price and no free Jam cannon, but blue 2 turns and some segnors loops

So wait. Serious question.

I thought that 2D primaries now had a place in the game with the lack of token stacking. That people don't fly TIEs just because swarms are exhausting to run.

Is that not really the case??

Ok...Lots of cannons were used in 1.0. Ion cannon has been straight nurfed due to its cost and the way it applies its effect now, but tractor has actually gotten better due to the fact that you can apply more than one token in a given attack for a relativly low cost.

HLC is...balanced. That's all I'll say.

What we're missing is this:

They are trying to do SOMETHING similar with the autoblaster:

They have made a 2.0 version of the previous autoblaster, but what FFG have really done is set down a moderate damange doing cannon and are going to wait and see what it does to the meta. I think that the autoblaster MAY be a good add on gunboats, but...we'll see.

I still say that the game lacks a good bread-and-butter cannon like the the manger, but that may be for the best.

26 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

So wait. Serious question.

I thought that 2D primaries now had a place in the game with the lack of token stacking. That people don't fly TIEs just because swarms are exhausting to run.

Is that not really the case??

2 dice primaries can be useful at the right price.

The Scyk does not have the right price.

And they're mostly useful in large numbers or well modified, and the Scyk can do neither.

22 hours ago, ficklegreendice said:

Well, the Bwing is an Xwing with cannons, sturdier stats, and a SLOW dial (and no servomotors)

Bwings, despite being jousters, are still incredibly distinct from other ships of its role (only the Torrent, of all things, is comparable...the g1-a is medium base)

Bs being more "very stout" or "great jousters" is a common perception, but Bs die to basically the same number of attack as an T65 .

If you wanted beef with cannons, you'd just fly Heroic T70s.

The Bwing chassis' only real advantages atm are the sensor slot, focus linked BR, and good close-in maneuverability (Bs are a lot better at blocking that an X)

Its silly that 2 cannon slots over not advantage at all, but as is, I'd trade them both for a single pt in a heart (and not just to make BBBBB possible)

4 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

2 dice primaries can be useful at the right price.

The Scyk does not have the right price.

And they're mostly useful in large numbers or well modified, and the Scyk can do neither.

We have a local that has taken 1st on local tourneys with the drea syck swarm while the rest of were flying meta more-or-less, including beef. Its pretty strong. Autoblasters is going to make it meta if its 3 pts or less.