It seems like it happens with every point update:

A ship is seen as too expensive for what it does. To fix this, it is finally lowered to a level where you can add another chassis of the same type. Suddenly, that ship becomes the new meta until its points are again increased and it becomes too expensive again. Or the cost of the ship is never lowered because they already allowing an extra ship of that type would be unhealthy. Hello, Jumpmasters and VCX!

Rather than working purely with points, what if they added a field to the point cost PDFs that would restrict the number of ships of each type that you could include for every 100 points of the list? You could use increments of 0.5. Something like a VCX could have a limit of 0.5 or 1 per 100, so you'd still only get one of two of them in a 200-point list. Jumpmasters could stay at 1-2 per 100. TIE Fighters and Vulture Droids would be something like 4.5 per 100. You could even introduce this for problematic upgrades like Ensnare or Juke.

The idea behind this would be to have a second lever for game balancing beyond point values. By basing it on values of 100 points, it would also be scalable for things like Epic. Meanwhile, it would allow ships to be priced without concern about putting them below a given breakpoint and introducing unpleasant spam lists. Jumpmasters could be priced below 40 points without seeing five of them on a table.

Thoughts/criticisms?

A better way that strict limited dots, to be sure. The fact that it scales nicely into Epic games is a big plus.

I'm generally of the midset that it wouldn't help much. It can shave a few points off of ships which are really close to the bubble, but ships still need to be priced pretty close to fairly, or else balance overall just breaks. Limited numbers on underpriced things are still underpriced, and still give a list a lot of room to fit in more stuff.

We've seen this happen whenever unique pilots are underpriced, best example being the old Squad of Legends Imperial list, or Wretched Hive Scum, back before the first points adjustment, or the heyday of Wedge/Cassian/B/B. These were squads of single-dot limited pilots, and still really strong, because all the pieces were underpriced.

Juke is another good example. Juke on Whisper or Echo is really strong, and if limited to 1 per 100 points, it'd be busted to let it drop as low as 4 points or something. A limit to 1-per-100 doesn't let Juke get cheap enough to be used on silly fun jank ships like Palob or Leevan Tenza.

The more or less canonical example at this point is 2x Defender + Vader - if too cheap is too cheap, adding limits just means players mix two different chassis that do basically the same thing.

As was said, this isn't the worst idea, but it wouldn't work great.

'Too cheap' is a weird concept, because points balancing is always contextual, and there are things you can do to totally change the value of points without turning too many dials or knobs. Many games use a system pretty similar to this actually.

For example, 40k has limits on how many units of a given type you can use for both thematic and balancing purposes. In some editions of 40k, HQ units who are meant to be your cool badass leader characters that in some ways represent you on the field are uhh... bad.... because their stats are too 'concentrated' for their price in a game where you really want to be able to fight in multiple places at once. However, when they get awesome abilities and upgrades that allow them to fight way beyond what any other individual model can do, you have a problem, because concentrated stats are really good: Space Marine Commanders in the current edition grant everyone near them a powerful re-roll to make their combat phases extra deadly, so in many ways it makes sense to take spare captains with no wargear to shove near heavy weapons. So the game limits how many you can have, so that they can be extra powerful and feel good to take without being busted. Infinity uses a similar system of 'special weapon points' to prevent you from just cramming your list full of super deadly reaction fire weapons that would annihilate anyone trying to do anything against you because you could use more tools that win the game's 'head to head' shootoff system than your opponent has control tools like hacking or smoke to shut that system down: The game wouldn't be fun if you could just deploy a bunch of Ariadnan tank hunters stealthed to kill everyone with AP machineguns, but at the same time the game already biases a bit towards 'generic troops cheerleading a hero' so they can't increase their price too much. Instead the system just gives you a seperate resource to buy weapons with such intense effects.

This is subtly different than dot limiting individual points by ship though. It isn't just captains who are limited, every HQ, who tend to have force multiplier effects or just be bonkers good fighters, is limited, because they are all similarly underpriced or very efficient. Dot limiting an individual ship and then making it cheap presents a problem because the reason a ship tends to be at a price floor is stat efficiency: The X-wing is at a price floor because if it goes down it isn't just that you might fit more X-wings in it, it is that you suddenly can fit in UUXXX to get 15 attack dice with 34 health behind 2 agility. This might not be an apex list, but it would be annoying as ****.

The idea that a ship dropping gets dangerous when it allows you to add extra ones is a bit off from the actual problem: A ship's price in X-wing going down becomes dangerous once it allows you to stuff more stats into a list. If the U wing and B wing didn't exist, the X-wing's price probably COULD go down. But in the context of rebels, the X-wing is sorta 'locked' in place.

So this system might be good for say... limiting how many torpedoes you can have, or crew with a 'commander' tag. Or it could be useful to heavily encourage a 'type' of ship, for example in 1.0 Epic wasn't very epic because epic ships were bad, but if epic ships were comically underpriced so you ALWAYS ran one with a ton of upgrades, but you could only have one per 200 points, it would allow epic to be on a seperate balance scale than regular ships. But that is also subjective and those changes would have costs: that might make epic too epic ship scale focused, and torp limits might be weird because certain ships are intended to have free access to them.

But that system really it wouldn't work great on individual ships unless ships got categories they belonged to to limit them globally, or the ship had some crazy ability that scales extremely hard with the number of them you have. If you tell me I can't have 3 VCX if they drop to 65, that is fine. I would just take 2 and an M-falc, or Norra, or Luke, and will still have a list that does way too much damage for the insane amount of health you gotta chew through. Low key, it probably would even be better because I could toss in a crew or two by taking a very tiny stat penalty.

The real problem here is sometimes a ship is overpriced, but reducing the price increases the stat efficiency of the ship too much, which prevents a price decrease for the purpose of allowing upgrades to fit on the ship to let that ship get stronger. Basically, points decreases tend to bias towards the 'low end' balance point because stats are such a good deal, and it is hard for points changes to affect the 'high end' like stronger pilots or upgrade cards on that ship.

In that case, there are a few systems that don't require changing the listbuilding rules from the ground up from other games X-wing could use.

Many use a system where upgrades are cheaper on that ship as a sort of 'phantom' points decrease, because it is effectively decreasing the points of that ship but preventing the dangerous aspects of decreasing the price that affect other ships in the list (letting them get upgrades, or getting stronger different ships). In X-wing this is problematic, especially if it scales in price, due to it complicating the spreadsheet, listbuilding, and scoring. This could be emulated by giving ships free points for upgrades to under-preforming pilots, that neither affect the rest of your list nor scoring. A X-wing with 2 points of 'free' upgrades is effectively 2 points cheaper but those 2 points can't be used to suddenly force in U or B wings into the list, and is instead reserved for non-stat based boosts like talents, astromechs, or torps.

Another potential way to buff a ship is to give it access to new capabilities, either by actively changing the ship so that it can do something it couldn't before, or giving it access to talents that are deliberately undercosted. For example, this is what was done with the Jumpmaster: The canon slot fundementally changes how the ship works in a manner that makes adding a canon 'more worth it' for the Jump-master than other ships, so having access to the option to buy an upgrade that tended to not be used when the Jumpmaster was in trouble was a 'buff.' Another example was the B-wing config: Post beef nerf, B-wings were a bit in trouble and they still are to a degree, but the new stabilized S-foils are comically undercosted for what they do and help push power in the B-wing away from comical points efficiency if they can get Leia and Cassian, and into being super deadly if they can stay on target. Their 'price issue' wasn't fixed, instead they got something to increase their power so that it better reflected the price where they need to be.

The second one seems to be what FFG is trying to do now, as we saw from the new points that a few upgrades seem pretty clearly to be intended to help out underperformers. For example, APT is a great boon to any tech-slot ship that doesn't have a ton of dice to spare to attack, or which has consistency problems offensively, like the transport pod. Instead of buffing 2 dice attackers without access to support platforms giving them mods via a dramatic points drop, they are looking to give them more impact that isn't just a cheaper price. Conc bombs seem to be bombs intended for 'real bombers' rather than Jango, starbird slash might help rebel A's more than resistance because resistance already solved their impact problem, ect.

This can be a bit dangerous of course, but it is generally the 'best' solution because often times (not always, see the E-wing for a good example of when this isn't true) the core chasis of an under-preforming ship just lacks enough hooks to make it interesting in the first place, and a more nuanced mechanical effect being added to it is also easier on balance than suddenly more stats jumping into a list like with 6 nantex. But the key takeaway is that its generally not that you can spam a repeat of a ship, it is the idea of spamming a similar level of stats at all. So if you want to fix that for ships you can't reduce in price further because they become too cheap, you need to find another way to limit stat spam, or ace spam, or whatever.

Something like this has been something discussed before. Not that bringing up again is redundant at all, it's always a good idea to revisit ideas.

There are some ships and upgrades that I feel are not priced correctly, but pricing them lower introduces spamability that itself presents a NPE.

Juke mentioned by @theBitterFig is I think a perfect example. As of right now, I think Juke is overcosted to take on its own, but is costed correctly to prevent someone taking multiple copies. This means Juke rarely ever gets taken. One thing someone suggested awhile ago on a blog (and I am so sorry, I can't recall who or what blog) is the idea of scaling points by instance. For example the first copy of Juke in your list costs 2 points, the second is 4 points (6 overall), third is 6 points (12 overall) and so on and so forth.

The benefit of this is that it can be used to tune something in without pricing it out of the game entirely like we've seen with Delta 7B and Supernatural Reflexes.

This does present two problems:
1) How do you tally points at the end? Do you go by the cost of how that ship is calculated? Is the first one you destroy worth the most points or the least points?
2) Players who still like to bang rocks together complain about list building complexity when using their PDF and completely ignore that "There's an app for that...infact there are multiple apps and even websites for that...".

The first is really the key issue, the second one is an issue of player mentality that can't really be changed and personally my general response to that argument is "you can't choose to use the axe over the chainsaw to cut down the tree and then complain it's taking longer and is harder."

Anyway...back to the point...

I think if a theoretical 3rd edition was to be released in 10 years time it should have baked in the ability to limit based on chassis to prevent spamability but allow ships to be costed below break points. Not too much, because if you can then fit another ship in then...yeah. However, I do think sometimes the break point can be above what makes a single instance of that ship to be costed effectively. I don't have any evidence for this, it's just how I feel.

1 hour ago, Ebak said:

One thing someone suggested awhile ago on a blog (and I am so sorry, I can't recall who or what blog)

I believe that it was the Midwest Scrub

5 hours ago, dezzmont said:

As was said, this isn't the worst idea, but it wouldn't work great.

'Too cheap' is a weird concept, because points balancing is always contextual, and there are things you can do to totally change the value of points without turning too many dials or knobs. Many games use a system pretty similar to this actually.

For example, 40k has limits on how many units of a given type you can use for both thematic and balancing purposes. In some editions of 40k, HQ units who are meant to be your cool badass leader characters that in some ways represent you on the field are uhh... bad.... because their stats are too 'concentrated' for their price in a game where you really want to be able to fight in multiple places at once. However, when they get awesome abilities and upgrades that allow them to fight way beyond what any other individual model can do, you have a problem, because concentrated stats are really good.

[...]

This is subtly different than dot limiting individual points by ship though. It isn't just captains who are limited, every HQ, who tend to have force multiplier effects or just be bonkers good fighters, is limited, because they are all similarly underpriced or very efficient. Dot limiting an individual ship and then making it cheap presents a problem because the reason a ship tends to be at a price floor is stat efficiency.

[...]

So this system might be good for say... limiting how many torpedoes you can have, or crew with a 'commander' tag. Or it could be useful to heavily encourage a 'type' of ship, for example in 1.0 Epic wasn't very epic because epic ships were bad, but if epic ships were comically underpriced so you ALWAYS ran one with a ton of upgrades, but you could only have one per 200 points, it would allow epic to be on a seperate balance scale than regular ships. But that is also subjective and those changes would have costs: that might make epic too epic ship scale focused, and torp limits might be weird because certain ships are intended to have free access to them.

But that system really it wouldn't work great on individual ships unless ships got catagories they belonged to to limit them globally.

[...]

Didn't the designers just add keywords, with each pilot having up to 4 or 5 Max.

So now we can take the force multiplier pilots like Howlrunner, Serrisu, Torkil, Drea, etcetera, and add the 'Commander' tag and day, no more than 1 commander, or no more than 2, and no more than 2 Aces, etcetera.

It would make use of a tool they have just added, and it not hurre dously different to the "solitary" keyword already on a few CIS upgrades, but enables us to retroactivley add it onto pilots/upgrades.

A possibility I've thought about to avoid the spam/breakpoint issue is giving each pilot an "upgrade budget" as follows:

• Only pilots/ships count towards the point cost at list building, not upgrades.
• All pilot costs are increased.
• Each pilot can equip upgrades with a combined point value up to their upgrade budget. They cannot go over their budget.

This would allow ships to be made stronger by giving them more upgrade points, without necessarily allowing too many of them on the table. It could also give a bit of flavour to different ships and pilots. For example ships typically equipped with ordnance or secondary weapons could receive a higher upgrade budget, you could have generic pilots with "light" and "heavy" loadouts as well as (or instead of) different initiative, or certain named characters could have more or less budget. Maybe Prince Xizor could be made more viable by having a bigger upgrade budget than the other StarViper pilots, for example, instead of his bodyguard getting all the fancy toys.

20 hours ago, Ebak said:

One thing someone suggested awhile ago on a blog (and I am so sorry, I can't recall who or what blog) is the idea of scaling points by instance. For example the first copy of Juke in your list costs 2 points, the second is 4 points (6 overall), third is 6 points (12 overall) and so on and so forth.

Instance Scaled Pricing article/blog.

15 hours ago, Scum4Life said:

Didn't the designers just add keywords, with each pilot having up to 4 or 5 Max.

So now we can take the force multiplier pilots like Howlrunner, Serrisu, Torkil, Drea, etcetera, and add the 'Commander' tag and day, no more than 1 commander, or no more than 2, and no more than 2 Aces, etcetera.

I potentially like this idea, but more for aces than force multipliers since those are often a one-off in a list anyway. Maybe aces are closer to fine at their current costs if you can only take 1 or 2 of them? Worth a thonk.

43 minutes ago, Npmartian said:

I potentially like this idea, but more for aces than force multipliers since those are often a one-off in a list anyway. Maybe aces are closer to fine at their current costs if you can only take 1 or 2 of them? Worth a thonk.

Well triple aces has been a viable list, I'm not sure if I dont want that to be viable.

Perhaps they could do this in hyperspace or even a new tournement type

The biggest problem seems to be specific combinations, i.e. Juke and Phantoms. There are issues with trying to aggressively cost specific upgrade/chassis combinations without affecting all the other ships. In one of the FFG Live videos the devs acknowledged this and admitted the best way to address it is with specific upgrade costs per chassis, but doing costs like that would make the points lists overly complicated.

I would instead propose a modification to a ship's list of upgrade slots. Next to each upgrade slot on a given ship there would be 0-3 arrows, similar to force/charge recovery indicators. These would indicate that a ship has to pay a different cost for a given upgrade type and the direction and number of arrows would indicate the cost difference. For example Phantoms could have 2 arrows up next to their talent slot leading to a 9 point Juke or a 3 point Crack Shot or K-wings could have 1 arrow down next to their payload slot for 2 point Seismics or 4 point Proton Bombs. This would allow more specific cost tailoring to individual chassis and pilots while being easy enough to convey on the points list. It may be overly simplistic and problematic by affecting all upgrades of a given type for a ship, but in the end I think it would open up a very interesting design space and could even address the playability of some of the less used ships.

On 9/28/2020 at 9:32 AM, svelok said:

The more or less canonical example at this point is 2x Defender + Vader - if too cheap is too cheap, adding limits just means players mix two different chassis that do basically the same thing.

Because of this, the only way I can see this working is if they assign roles to ships and then have limits on how much of each role you can have (but no minimums). I think this is a terrible idea for this game and FFG definitely isn't going to go this route. Could work okay for a game designed that way from the ground up.

2 hours ago, Scum4Life said:

Well triple aces has been a viable list, I'm not sure if I dont want that to be viable.

Perhaps they could do this in hyperspace or even a new tournement type

I think tri-aces is way less interesting than people seem to think it is. The ultimate goal is to deny interaction and utilize overwhelming modification power and I-kills to win interactions when they happen.

Some aces lists are healthier than others (Imp aces is okish because a lot of the pieces die if they get in 2 or more arcs pretty fast) but X-wing always felt more interesting to me when you were discouraged to concentrate your initiative at the low end or high end. This also solves a really critical flaw in the initiative system that makes aces mirrors really terrible bidfests: If you can be sure your opponent will have a lot of their list in stuff that is below I5/I6, getting bid on kinda matters less as opposed to now where bid is stupidly important if you think you might face an ace. It also increases the value of the 'odd man out' initiative of I4, which is in this weird space right now because vs most lists its functionally identical to I3, and you can't really plan around using that initiative because ace matchups are relatively common: Knowing for sure vs any list in the game the I4 will out initiative SOMETHING but not necessarily EVERYTHING helps I4 actually feel distinct as an initiative.

To put another way, a game with an I1, I3, and I5 vs an I2, I 4, and I6 is way more interesting than 8 I1s vs 3 I5s and 6s. Trying to 'force' people not taking their turns in 'blocks' and turning the game into sequential turns would help preserve a strength of X-wing

I have often wondered if the game would be more interesting if the standard was 'duo ace+duo generics' rather than 'tri-ace' for aces lists, where the aces can't serve as such a strong points fort anymore and aces need to give up at least some information just like their opponent.

Also, aces avoid a big problem that @CaptainJaguarShark pointed out, which is that to make this a listbuilder keyword requires assigning roles to ships in a way that I don't think works great for X-wing, especially because its hard to justify those roles thematically like say... 40k does where its really obvious why your HQ is HQ, why your elite is an elite, why your troop is a troop, ect. How would you justify tagging Cassian and Leia the same? They are basically complete opposites as characters! It might work for stuff that is planned in the future (Ex: I think a 'cycle' of rebel 'high commanders' in the form of Leia, Ackbar, Mon Mothma, Sato, and Hera as characters who have a big recurring charge ability that takes a few turns to recharge, to make rebels the 'big turns' faction, but only allowing one in a list, would be cool), but its harder to retrofit into a game. Especially in a game like X-wing where ship count is crazy limited anyway, and the fundemental way lists are made is very different. But its super clear why an ace is an ace, even if not every ace is technically an ace (Looking at you, Obi-Wan).

That said I imagine that FFG doesn't want to destroy an extremely popular archetype, regardless of the problems all high initiative lists create for the game. They are super evocative and make you feel like a super skilled and slick pilot, even though it 'cheats' at this by like... literally giving you perfect information at your final position. It definitely requires skill to fly and prediction still matters, but it matters less than for literally any other archetype, which is kinda wierd and... actually really a neat illusion in a sense.