4 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:I would treat it as action equivalent. An extra die is always roughly as good as a dice mod, right? 3+focus gives you the 2.25, 4 dice gives you 2 expected damage. So, pushing someone down from 4 to 3 with deplete is roughly like them not getting a focus.
In the same way, denying a green die is similar to denying a defensive token. In that sense, outmaneuver is a conditional passive mod. There are some additional benefits, particularly going against 3agility. But I really like the card, and spamming it on jousters might lean a bit much into variance, and it makes those kturns or tallons way more dangerous.
I guess more what I mean is that it's kind of a mugs game to try to say "Well, these two attacks I made from behind whichever ship with Outmaneuver didn't matter, since the 2nd one was a massive overkill," or "Well, that Outmaneuver attack got evaded anyhow, so it didn't matter." You kind of have to ignore the experience of the dice rolls, and trust that the long-run statistics which say that Outmaneuver works out to be about as good as an action.
You have to keep in mind how often you actually are taking out-of-arc shots, since that matters, but dice are gonna dice, and you've got to power through that.
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My doubts about Outmaneuver, however, are that it works out--statistically speaking--to be about as good as Advanced Optics. If a 3-dice AO ship makes an attack with a focus token to spend, the bonus damage added by Optics is about as much as would have been added by Outmaneuver. The advantage of Outmaneuver is that it works without actions. Not always geometrically, but there's nothing you have to do to turn it on. You can boost or K-Turn and still get it. The advantage of Advanced Optics is that it works without position. Maybe you get blocked or are stressed or have to spend the token defensively, but when you are able to spend it offensively, the expected damage from the attack are about the same as the expected damage from an Outmaneuver attack.
What do I care about more? Positioning requirements, or action requirements?
It's nice that Outmaneuver lets you Boost and K-Turn and still get "dice modification." There's something really freeing when you realize you don't have to take an action every turn. Stay stressed and pull that white move. But you've got to get those out-of-arc positions.
Optics hits harder when an opponent keeps you in their arc, but you're wasting points on those turns when you don't focus. Also in Optics favor is that it saves points and allows Heroic, which is half-a-Hull-Upgrade for a single point.
