Idea - Protect?

By Hida77, in X-Wing

Posted at

So something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the issue that a lot of people have when building a list using some of the higher cost/skill pilots. The issue many hit is that these pilots, while useful, are frequently singled out and killed right off the bat. The most obvious example is Wedge. Whenever anyone wants to build a list using Wedge, they have to constantly think about how he dies just as easily as any other X-Wing, and will likely draw all the fire from their opponent at the beginning of the game. This basically means they feel inclined to spend a lot of points trying to keep him alive or try to build a list with a backup plan in the eventuality he is killed. This is the case for many named pilots: Howlrunner is another classic example. While not as costly as Wedge, she is a pretty big markup over most TIEs and is usually dust after turn 3.
So what I'd propose is something that is already in the rulebook: the protect action.
In the Senator's Shuttle mission, any Rebel ship can spend its action if in range 2 to give the shuttle an evade token, which is supposed to help you keep the shuttle alive so it can escape. What if a similar rule was added to allow squad-mates to protect each other?
In my opinion, it could be worded like:
"In addition to the actions on their action bars, every ship has the following action available:
'Action: Protect squadmate. Give 1 Evade token to an equally sized or smaller ship in your squad that is within range 2. A single ship may not have more than 2 tokens granted to it in this way, but may still perform the evade action itself if that action is available to it.'"
If the other ships in a squad were able to "protect" the named guys, they would be much more attractive and would likely create very diverse builds.
I put the limitation of no more than 2 to prevent swarms from simply stacking an insurmountable amount of tokens on the same ship every round. The limitation of size was to prevent people from using small/cheap ships to basically act as flying evade actions for the large ships, which I think already have plenty of survivability on their own.
This would allow ships to somewhat cover for each other, and likely make the expensive but powerful pilots less likely to be just focused and killed straight away.
What do you all think? Too broken? Would it make the game more interesting? Thoughts?
My biggest concern would be Biggs protecting himself and his evade goons from damage entirely. Not sure what could be done there. Maybe change Biggs to have text previnting him from gaining evade tokens from other ships?
I could see maybe adjusting it to simply increase their agility (thus not necessarily granting free evades), as another idea
Posted at

Hello!

I was thinking just last night about implementing the concept of protect into my games…I thought that it play along the idea of having one of your ships acting as a wingman to the the other. I like your ideas and rules but would add the notion that the ship acting as a possible wingman is the one that can offer the protect skill to the other. Another option would be that if protecting, no other action can be taken during that round. I can visualize ships flying a cross-cross pattern protecting each other…it would be great when attacking a larger ship…kind of wingman cover me while I go into the attack!

What do you think?

Posted at

Third time I've mentioned this, try flying in groups of two for the entire encounter/game. That way Wedge has a wingman and if that wingman is Biggs well the fire will go straight to him andyou have a double punch to hit back with if 'Red Shirt Darklighter' survives the first rumble with your opponent, and if you gve him R2 as well then the meat sheild will last longer.

I'm new to playing but I'm already seeing great sucess in formation flying tactics, of course I very likely to be wrong.

Posted at

Ok, First off…Biggs.

Biggs is great. Stealth + R2-F2 makes him even better. 4 defense X-wing is pretty nice, especially against a swarm of weaker enemies.

If you are expecting a smaller but more elite group of enemy units, then R2-D2 plus a shield upgrade makes Biggs pretty hard to take out quickly.

Secondly…Not a big fan of the protect idea. It allows the Rebels to throw evasion tokens around on their ships which unbalances things a bit as they don't have this by default (except the A-wings). Thematically I'm not even sure what a Y-Wing at range 2 is doing to protect Wedge.

It also negates Biggs' ability by making any cheap fighter thrown into the mix a decent substitute.

It gives some serious boosts to other ships. Luke with a couple A-Wing protectors with stealth would be really hard for anyone to shut down. A couple of cheap protectors to back up the large ships would unbalanced also. Their weakness is the fact that they are huge, easy to hit targets.

It's not a bad idea at the core, just not a very balanced one.

Posted at

Perhaps this instead. What if we allowed ships to take an option where they use an action and instead of attacking during the combat phase they perform an attack right then that deals no damage but if it "hits" reduces the enemy's attack value by one? For balance's sake it wouldn't stack with itself and fluffwise it would represent a ship shooting inaccurate "suppressive fire" to force the enemy to dodge and spoil their shot. Can it "Interference" or "covering fire".

Posted at

No mucking around with with a simple and elegant rule system is a bad idea, there are ways to protect ships if you think you need too. I think if you can take the shot take it when it's your combat turn other wise lump it. I like my "I'm not leaving my wingman" concept at the moment, it might make things trickier around asteroids but that makes the game more enjoyable.

Posted at

Kemmster said:

No mucking around with with a simple and elegant rule system is a bad idea, there are ways to protect ships if you think you need too. I think if you can take the shot take it when it's your combat turn other wise lump it. I like my "I'm not leaving my wingman" concept at the moment, it might make things trickier around asteroids but that makes the game more enjoyable.

I agree 100%. Wedge costs more points becasue he is better. If you are worried about pilots getting killed too fast, take Luke instead of Wedge. Luke with the right droid can be pretty hard to kill, but then you get hte exact opposite problem. Luke isn't any better at killing stuff than any other W-wing. (except for his skill of 8, wich is pretty good)

Trying to decide what pilots to take is part of the fun of the game. It would be less fun if Wedge didn't have a down side. I know players who think the way he draws fire makes him not worth his points, same with Howlrunner. But I love these pilots and take them when ever I can.

It actually makes the game cooler that we dissagree.

For as much as I think Maarek is the biggest point sink in the game short of Marksmaship, other people dissagree, so their lists are different from mine. IF there was one "Best" list to run that would actually make the game less fun.