This is actually a bit tough for me now. I've gotten pretty much every ship I've wanted, and I think I want these wishes to be a bit bigger than my major remaining ship wish this once. However, I haven't been playing the game recently to get a feel for what I might want, so I'll stick to these inspired by other posts:
On 10/19/2020 at 4:20 PM, LUZ_TAK said:C) Cleaner rules reference, rulings, card interpretation, general tone down of complexity
I'm not into the game enough to have run into the rules problems so many others have, but when I read about them I entirely sympathize. Sometimes I'm confused as to how things released the way they did, and I don't usually have a mind for that sort of thing. We definitely need some more consistency.
My particular pick for complexity is the obstacles. I actually played for quite awhile without using obstacles at all, so it was a bit rough for me to get used to them. Since then, they've added several
types
of obstacles, and there's no intuitive consistency between their effects. That would be really annoying to learn as a new player, and I'm not really sure what it adds to the game. The obstacle types should share more effects (including bumping another ship, which always has bugged me that it doesn't work at all like bumping anything else), with one thing that distinguishes them.
I could add an honorable mention about Purple Actions. I was wrong about how they'd be implemented, but the reason I guessed what I did was because it was the consistent thing. I think it's best if mechanics that look the same act the same, because it makes it much easier to learn and retain a greater number of rules. Red Actions adding a token and Purple Actions removing a token adds an unnecessary extra bit of information to commit to memory. The balance reasons make sense, obviously, but there are other ways you could have achieved the same effect.
On 10/19/2020 at 2:02 PM, GreenDragoon said:1. Separate hits from damage by adding different dice
After reading that big post about how clever the pairing of Damage vs Defense dice is right now, I feel less strongly about this (although it would probably remain just fine if you switch that out directly with the To-Hit dice), but I do think it would open up a lot of design space without significantly increasing the complexity of the game (largely because it would be an intuitive change).
5 hours ago, Frimmel said:More down to earth I would like a greater variety of modifications, illicits, and rebel astromechs. There is too much "stock" about things especially the various freighters.
I don't know if this is how you meant it, but it made me think of what I think is more of a pie-in-the-sky wish.
I wish there were more upgrades across the board with a greater expectation that you'd take them. Not huge upgrades that make the game super complex with everyone having a handful of paragraphs on each ship, but lots of small things that allow you to nudge things toward your particular playstyle.
The game might be better the way it is, but it always catches me off guard how upgrades work in this game. My brain wants them to be a way to customize a ship, to make it your personal way of flying that particular model. Instead, they're largely specific combos, and in a lot of cases you're going to run completely naked ships. Sometimes, even when a ship technically has a lot of options for a particular slot, you still only have one or two options in practice because some of the cards literally don't do anything on that ship, they end up being ludicrously situational for the ship, or the benefit is simply not worth the cost for that ship (and frankly, that's if you're lucky; too many ships have too many slots where they only have two or three options to begin with, and you're almost always going to skip it).
I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, and it might require a significant overhaul to the game (more like a spin-off than even a Third Edition), but maybe something more like Star Wars Squadrons? More the idea of switching out basic components like your primary weapon, hull plating, and shield emitters (where applicable) on every ship, than adding extra attachments or special abilities on top of an immutable stock frame.
Edit: For instance, instead of squeezing extra damage out of your A-Wing by equipping a Talent, your Primary Attack itself is a slot, and you can switch from the default 2 dice laser cannons, to a Rapid Fire cannon that has 3 or 4 dice, but cannot fire at Range 3 or maybe even Range 2. Or you have alternate Hull choices, like one that gives you more Hull Points but increases the difficulty or decreases the speed of some maneuvers. Technically that sort of thing could be added in X-Wing right now through Configurations, but I'm talking about the upgrade system being built with this in mind from the ground up.
Edited by Jokubas