Many people think the Empire is stupid. It was neither stupid nor cowardly.

Then how do you set it up so a typical bunch of PCs can beat them every week?

Easy - they don't.

Easy - they don't.

I don't think that is going to be enormously helpful advice to most of the players of the game. On the whole in an RPG the PCs win, and I don't think a Star Wars RPG is really the place to be trying to challenge that.

As for that one poster's remark of "well I'd demand they put that hull plating back on!" it could very well be that hull plating that got removed has long since been recycled for the Alliance war effort. Hard to put something back on that doesn't exist anymore, or may not even be in the same system. But hey, if your pilot wants to go sulk in their bunk while pilots who are willing to take risks for a cause they believe in fly the mission instead, go right ahead.

I think you completely missed my point Im not talkin about EU or even official canon here Im talking entirely based on what FFG have said. The ywings plating is described as largely cosmetic in THE OFFICIAL EOTE CORE BOOK RULES , and having being removed for maintenance only. They also describe it as being heavily armored and I am quoting the EOTE book again on that. they have even said that the plating was removed to make maintenance easier. This infers that the original plating could be put back on but that there was little point as it was largely cosmetic.

Also in a comparison of toughness between the two Im not referring to canon I am referring to X Wing miniatures which, strangely enough is made by FFG, so IMO they are only contradicting themselves, as inthat game a ywing is 60% tougher. An X wing should not have the same armor as a corvette.

Also in a comparison of toughness between the two Im not referring to canon I am referring to X Wing miniatures which, strangely enough is made by FFG, so IMO they are only contradicting themselves, as inthat game a ywing is 60% tougher. An X wing should not have the same armor as a corvette.

You're also using an entirely different game with entirely different rules and an entirely different design intent to justify the Y-Wing being uber-tough in comparison to the X-Wing.

But since you're so hellbent on using the X-Wing game as a justification, let's take a look at that, shall we? Using the base pilot cards for an X-Wing (Rookie Pilot) and a Y-Wing (Gold Squadron Pilot), here's what we've got on stats alone (no upgrades attached)

- Y-Wing has higher hull value and higher shields value

- X-Wing has better accuracy and better ability to avoid attacks

Right now, there is squat to in the X-Wing's stat block to reflect better accuracy compared to the Y-Wing or that it's a more difficult ship to hit in the first place. The X-Wing is more maneuverable, which will help to resist Gain the Advantage attempts by enemy fighters, but that's a situational increase to defense. Higher defense scores instead? Then you've got folks whining about how the X-Wing's shields are better than the Y-Wings. It could very well be that FFG decided the best and simplest way to mimic the X-Wing's greater ability to avoid getting damaged was via Armor. Now I've said in this thread that I think the X-Wing armor could stand to be reduced down to 4, as 5 is a bit too high, though it seems that's been ignored quite a bit in everyone's furor over the designers having the perceived gall to give the ship a higher Armor score than the Y-Wing.

Also, you're putting far too much emphasis on the word "cosmetic." Quite frankly, the body panels on your average automobile are primarily cosmetic, as the car will operate just the same without them as it would with them, and it's not too horribly difficult to arrange for the more delicate portions of the car (namely the motor and wiring) to have their own protection from external elements. However, those body panels do serve another purpose... to protect the passenger in case of an accident. So while the Y-Wing plating might be "cosmetic" it's not entirely without purpose. The Alliance techs probably figured that removing the panels/plating to speed up repair time was worth the trade-off of the ship not being as well-armored as it normally would be.

I'm done with this thread, as it's gone long past the point of intelligent discussion and is really more about whining about how the old and outdated Y-Wing is being short-changed by the newer and more modern X-Wing. I almost hope the designers stick to Armor 5 on the X-Wing just to spite the naysayers.

I dont think that the x wing should be inferior to the ywing it just does not make sense in any world that its more heavily armored. I take the point though that under the limited rules you have to make the xwing better somehow. Why not make the xwing 5speed , more shields and maneuverability. This would be more 'accurate' however this encroaches on the canon that the TIE fighter is faster.

As an example try to compare a lancaster bomber with a fighter at the same era. As for the plating you are talking about defense against energy weapons, most current weapons might well treat it like paper for all we know. The armor might actually be whats protecting the systems underneath the hull plating.

I'm done with this thread, as it's gone long past the point of intelligent discussion and is really more about whining about how the old and outdated Y-Wing is being short-changed by the newer and more modern X-Wing. I almost hope the designers stick to Armor 5 on the X-Wing just to spite the naysayers.

I don't think the designers need you to stick up for them.

Every post you make comes off as if they can't make errors, and as though you are taking personal affront that people care more about existing Star Wars lore than whatever the designers think up.

And as for the rest of your post: If that's the case, they kind of painted themselves into a corner. Almost all ways in the system to avoid damage are based on being TOUGHER: 1 Shields, 2 Armor, 3 Hull. A faster, more maneuverable A-Wing is no harder to hit than a lumbering Y-Wing. And even WITH Gain the Advantage, if an A-Wing went Evasive, I think you would be better off just SHOOTING at it than to try to do the GtA dance with it.

I'd be tempted to make a house rule of some type to give an advantage to ships with higher handling in avoiding damage, but I don't know what it would be at the moment that wouldn't step on the toes of shields and armor. Maybe have Evasive Maneuvers upgrade your to hit a number of dice up to 1 + handling (minimum 1)? It would be a double edged sword because it would make it harder for YOU to hit things too, but because of your speed and handling advantage in lighter craft, GtA would be more attractive for you anyway.

... Ok that would give some of the ships a crazy high number of upgrades, and especially be bad for TIEs vs like a Freighter. Idk, I just have this slight annoyance at faster craft being no harder to hit EXCEPT in the very specific case of the dogfighting manuever, and in the case of that, I think that with it being only one upgrade, you might as well just SHOOT.

Many people think the Empire is stupid. It was neither stupid nor cowardly.

Then how do you set it up so a typical bunch of PCs can beat them every week?

You have to give the players something to work with. So what advantages do the PCs have over their enemies that they can exploit?

I don't. My players have only fought Storm Troopers once, and they ran because they would have lost. In fact my players run a lot. Know why? Because there is only three of them. Our Tech/slicer, colonist/doctor, and force sensative/bounty hunter/gadgeteer only fight when they have a reasonable expectation of winning. They fight mostly gangers, thugs, and their bounties and only when they have to. Now, they do handle TIE/fighters fairly well on occation, but thats mostly because I gave them a good ship and they can take out the first wave of fighters and then jump to hyper space before the rest of a squadron comes bearing down on them. And I often use the TIE stats even for non-Imperial pilots just to keep it mixed up from the old here comes the cloaks and Z-95s again.

Well, that escalated quickly. O_O

I'll agree that the system seems to weigh things more towards "survivability" stats -- albeit with shields essentially being "setback dice to attack rolls against this starship" instead of what-gets-hit-first ( just like Defense-granting personal armor, which however also provides soak except for personal deflector shielding) -- and that the extent of abstraction/"small numbers" gives little wiggle room for reflecting small differences* but the thing is that even at Armor 3, the X-wing is "in between enough" between the TIE/LN and the Y-wing to show where the advantage lies:

The TIE/LN is a speed/maneuverability-focused dogfighter while the Y-wing is more "survivability" stats, but then the X-wing wins its fame against TIE/LNs by being an oh-so-deadly mix of both concepts, the shields of a Y-wing (with close-to HT) joined to the speed and ST of a TIE/LN, and even potentially the hardest-hitting with its guns too. (I'm discounting the Y-wing's two additional torpedoes and ion cannons.)

... the TIE Defender's stats I've read are even more out of whack. Then again, I would have written them as "they're what happens to players who get too cocky like Han told Luke not to be"...

@ TCBC: I'm guessing that you're from the "less (frequency) is more (meaningful/significant)" school? Well, Rule Zero > anything in Star Wars , so I'm cool with that.

* This is a system where page 226 of the core rulebook outright says that "the maximum amount of defense a ship or vehicle can have in any of its defense zones is four points, regardless of its size ."

I don't. My players have only fought Storm Troopers once, and they ran because they would have lost. In fact my players run a lot. Know why? Because there is only three of them. Our Tech/slicer, colonist/doctor, and force sensative/bounty hunter/gadgeteer only fight when they have a reasonable expectation of winning. They fight mostly gangers, thugs, and their bounties and only when they have to.

Is that going to work in Age of Rebellion where the players work for the Rebels and their active goal is to take down the Empire?

I don't. My players have only fought Storm Troopers once, and they ran because they would have lost. In fact my players run a lot. Know why? Because there is only three of them. Our Tech/slicer, colonist/doctor, and force sensative/bounty hunter/gadgeteer only fight when they have a reasonable expectation of winning. They fight mostly gangers, thugs, and their bounties and only when they have to.

Is that going to work in Age of Rebellion where the players work for the Rebels and their active goal is to take down the Empire?

I thought thats how you do that in any star wars game system?

In every game I've played in, you don't stick around after fighting stormtroopers, heck you hear Darth Vader is coming you make yourself scarce!

At some point you have to strap in to an X-Wing and blow up a Death Star.

(Slike, if the GM wants Frodo to take down Sauron he needs to give him a magic ring to chuck in to a volcano. All too often you end up with a party of an ageing professor of ancient history, a flapper and a drug addicted poet standing on a hilltop looking at twenty thousand heavily armed cultists dancing around a sacrifice table from which they need to rescue the innocent to save the world looking at the GM with confused expressions and wondering exactly what he expects them to do about it.)

At some point you have to strap in to an X-Wing and blow up a Death Star.

Well I'm surprised nobody has run an adventure where a group of Rebels and smugglers sercetly infiltrate the latest Imperial battle station and mine the reactor core and link it to a comlink on the surface near an otherwise harmless cooling vent so that when a proton torpedo blows up close enough it sets off the mines around the reactor core...

Then again whats stopping someone swapping the circuits so that activating the planet destroying laser causes the hyper matter reactor to detonate?

That probably means you need to give the Imperials fairly lax base security, and infiltration missions in RPGs are kinda notorious for turning in to a massive shootout at the first failed fast talk or stealth check. Something like Metal Gear Solid helps the player out by having the NPCs forget they were looking for someone after about thirty seconds and go back to their patrol routes, and Thief depended fairly heavily on the quickload button to reset any mistakes.

I'd be tempted to make a house rule of some type to give an advantage to ships with higher handling in avoiding damage, but I don't know what it would be at the moment that wouldn't step on the toes of shields and armor. Maybe have Evasive Maneuvers upgrade your to hit a number of dice up to 1 + handling (minimum 1)? It would be a double edged sword because it would make it harder for YOU to hit things too, but because of your speed and handling advantage in lighter craft, GtA would be more attractive for you anyway.

Probably Horrible Idea #1 : Full Evasive Maneuvers, an Action. Normal Evasive Maneuvers is just a Maneuver that grants 1 to Defense while giving 1 Setback to your attacks. An Action version of this could allow a Pilot roll and +1 difficulty to any gunners on the ship. A very good roll can give multiple Defense, up to a maximum equal to the craft's handling? Each uncancelled success grants 1 Defense up to handling?

Probably Horrible Idea #2 : Handling gives Setback (positive) or Bonus (negative) to attackers. Probably too much since that could mean 3 Setback for some craft before shields are even considered.

Probably Horrible Idea #3 : Evasive Maneuvers is needed to grant a number of Setbacks equal to handling (so ships with 0 or less handling could never benefit from Evasive Maneuvers).

At some point you have to strap in to an X-Wing and blow up a Death Star.

Well I'm surprised nobody has run an adventure where a group of Rebels and smugglers sercetly infiltrate the latest Imperial battle station and mine the reactor core and link it to a comlink on the surface near an otherwise harmless cooling vent so that when a proton torpedo blows up close enough it sets off the mines around the reactor core...

Then again whats stopping someone swapping the circuits so that activating the planet destroying laser causes the hyper matter reactor to detonate?

Easy - they don't.

I don't think that is going to be enormously helpful advice to most of the players of the game. On the whole in an RPG the PCs win, and I don't think a Star Wars RPG is really the place to be trying to challenge that.

Since when do they always win? That's fairly simplistic, and frankly kind of boring. The best games are when you don't always win, because then, when you do win, you relish it.

Easy - they don't.

I don't think that is going to be enormously helpful advice to most of the players of the game. On the whole in an RPG the PCs win, and I don't think a Star Wars RPG is really the place to be trying to challenge that.

Since when do they always win? That's fairly simplistic, and frankly kind of boring. The best games are when you don't always win, because then, when you do win, you relish it.

Someone gets pro wrestling, I see... there's money to be had in the chase.

Hey Sturn, since it seems that the majority of posters find the Armor 5 a dead horse quibble, Morningfire's declared himself "done" with the thread (read: ragequit) and ErikB's managed to derail the thread again, why not give your house rules (to lend more weight to the Handling stat) a go and let us know what happened in practice with them?

I don't. My players have only fought Storm Troopers once, and they ran because they would have lost. In fact my players run a lot. Know why? Because there is only three of them. Our Tech/slicer, colonist/doctor, and force sensative/bounty hunter/gadgeteer only fight when they have a reasonable expectation of winning. They fight mostly gangers, thugs, and their bounties and only when they have to.

Is that going to work in Age of Rebellion where the players work for the Rebels and their active goal is to take down the Empire?

Their called hit-and-run strikes for a reason. When I start using the AoR stuff they'll play like Rebels. If the empire hits their base in force, they'll run, if they attack an Imperial outpost it'll be to take out one objective and then they will be out of there as fast as possible.

And the Death Star run was 30 fighters of which 3 made it out (not counting the late arrival of the Falcon). The Rebels rarely stood and fought to the last man, they just didn't have much choice against the Death Star.

Since when do they always win?

Possibly you can entertain us with some stories of times your players have lost.

Their called hit-and-run strikes for a reason. When I start using the AoR stuff they'll play like Rebels. If the empire hits their base in force, they'll run, if they attack an Imperial outpost it'll be to take out one objective and then they will be out of there as fast as possible.

So we could say that a critical advantage of the Rebellion is that their superior, more flexible command structure that puts great emphasis on allowing low level leaders to act on their own initiative allows them to more rapidly react to changing situations, while the Empire, which tends to force choke initiative and willingness to take responsibility out of its commanders, is generally slow to react and pursue?

Cause if you want the Rebels to run away they need to be able to run faster than the bad guys.

(Indeed the ponderous nature of Imperial forces compared to their Rebel opponents means that Rebels will often draw defenders out of position with diversionary attacks, and attack their main target while the Imps are still milling around wondering where the Rebels they were chasing went.)

Their called hit-and-run strikes for a reason. When I start using the AoR stuff they'll play like Rebels. If the empire hits their base in force, they'll run, if they attack an Imperial outpost it'll be to take out one objective and then they will be out of there as fast as possible.

So we would say that a critical advantage of the Rebellion is that their superior command structure allows they to more rapidly react to changing situations, while the Empire which tends to drill initiative out of its commanders is generally slow to react and pursue?

Cause if you want the Rebels to run away they need to be able to run faster than the bad guys.

More like the Rebellion relies on individual initiative and differing tactics, while the Empire relies on discipline and overwhelming numbers which yes makes them slower to react in many ways, but initiative isn't drilled out of them, there are examples in the EU of Imperial officers who are a real thorn in the rebel's sides because of their skill at command and their ability to anticipate the rebel actions and over come them. I wouldn't say either is is superior, they're just different tactics and both work better in some situations. The Empire won far more often than the Rebellion, but the Rebellion won key battles. In the end it was Darth Vader's betrayal of the Emperor that let the Rebels win, not a military victory. If it had come down to military ability, because the two were different sides of the same coin, the stalemate they had would have gone on.

Edit: also this is fiction, so all the real world logic we use to say if and what should happen means very little. The rebellion was meant to win, and so they did. And rightly so I say. I wish it worked that was in the real world.

On the whole, given that everyone is playing Rebels, it makes bugger all sense to not make the Rebels the cool side everyone wants to be on.

I can assure you now, no one shows up to watch the GM go on and on about how awesome his GMPCs are.

On the whole, given that everyone is playing Rebels, it makes bugger all sense to not make the Rebels the cool side everyone wants to be on.

I can assure you now, no one shows up to watch the GM go on and on about how awesome his GMPCs are.

Believe me, I think the Rebel's are the cool side; and they should, and do ultimately, win. But I'm not nerfing the Empire for my players to "feel powerful," either. I want them to know they really accomplished something when they win a battle or hit a target without losing a single man, or even setting off any alarms until that Imperial outpost went up in flames.

My players will want to play the Rebels because they are the underdogs fighting for freedom. Not because the rebels can't lose and are all powerful.

Edit: it is much more satisfying to know you really overcame something hard then to have you GM hand you victory on a silver platter. And maybe that means the first attack on that Imperial base failed, but then we go back in with a better plan and next time when we win, it'll be even more awesome.

You know how you make the players feel cool: By them overcoming crazy odds and beating competent opponents.

And really the Empire vs Rebellion thing is the issue with a lot of real modern day wars: Its really hard for a standard military to fight against a guerrilla war.