Does anyone else play solo games for practice?

I've only had the opportunity to play against an opponent a couple of times since I bought the game, I love collecting the ships as much as I enjoy playing, so its not a big deal. But I find playing against myself is actually a great way to learn the movement dials, try out different squads and even do crazy stuff with my builds just for fun that I doubt anyone would do against a real opponent. It also increases my overall familiarity with the rules, pilots, upgrades, etc.

Of course my personal bias sometimes sets in and can affect my game, but for the most part I just try to stay as honest and objective as I can and play each side to the best of my ability.

So does anyone else play against themselves? If not, how do you practice if you can't find anyone to play with?

Playing against yourself is a great way to test out the crazy fleets!

I bought several cores and practice flying by laying out template maneuvers and bases. I saw where each ship was in which turn. It really helps to practice flying the big ships with small ships, i think.

I made a maneuvers testbench program in C# and made a thread here. Whenever I update the program, I update that thread (and several other places, like on BGG)

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?showtopic=79445#798058

You can also play your fill of games whenever you have trouble finding live opponents, if you play on vassal. Some people have written guides, a good one is here:

http://www.afewmaneuvers.com/_/afm-articles/x-wing/another-guide-to-playing-x-wing-on-vassal-r118

(written Oct 17th 2013)

Absolutely do this!

I can usually only get in real life games every other weekend or so. I still play at least the opening pass to a game every day using maneuvers and vassal. You get much more familiar with remembering game state and with possibilities even if the sizing is t perfect.

It's even ok to be a little bias... Find the best way out of a sticky situation and then remember what you did. Just don't count these games against yourself as your "record" with it.

Anything you can do to manuever more is going to make you a better player in he long run

I play against myself often enough. Some matches turn out a little weird, weird because I know where all of the other ships are going though. I also like to practice formation flying. If you keep your ships right next to each other doing two bank maneuvers of the same speed doesn't actually work. It's good to experiment with ways to move those tight blocks of ties.

I use two methods depending on my objective. If I'm testing the viability of a build I plan both sides, alternating the team that I plan first, and see how each performs.

If I'm trying to practice maneuvering a specific squad I plan that squad first, then during each ships activation I roll a D6 twice, once to indicate speed, and one to choose a maneuver. I then check to see if that's an intelligent maneuver, and if it isn't I purposely give the ship the best maneuver it could have possibly chosen given the current position of my ships. This way I'm flying against either unpredictable, or extremely good pilots, and I have to focus on maximizing the effectiveness of my arcs, and corralling opponents into short range.

Still human opponents are more helpful so any chance you get to play someone else, take it.

I have tried playing myself where I randomly spin the dials so I don't know what the other fleet is doing. It isn't very satisfying, but it okay for practice I suppose.

Vassal?

When I first got into the game I played in a group at a local store. During the games infancy, there was one guy in the group who told us one day that he spent the weekend flying ships through a random mess of asteroids while trying to keep formation etc.

We all laughed at him...

Until we each took a turn playing against him and he STOMPED all of us by flying with PERFECT maneuvers, doing tight turns and missing asteroids and bumps by millimeters while maintaining formation. Our mouths were agape, shocked at how good he was.

The next week we all got together again. I asked around, "so, did you guys practice your maneuvers playing by yourselves?" "Yup." "Yup." "Yeah, I did." "Me too." were the replies.

Step 1) A good way to practice by yourself is to lay out or throw out the asteroids onto the table and maneuver through them to each side, without going off the table and back to where you started from. Just like SleeplessKnight said, it will improve your confidence through the asteroids.

Step 2) After you get good with moving through the rocks, put focus tokens around the play area and try to land on them or at least have the maneuver templates overlap the tokens.

Step 3) Once you start to master that routine while changing the configuration each time, then add critical tokens out there with the focus tokens. You need to shoot the criticals while trying to land on a focus. 1 hit destroys it, but it gets to roll a defense die eventually when you're ready.

Shoot the Reds, collect the Greens, avoid the rocks.

For solo practice i choose my side build both sqauds reb and imp, then if im playing say reb, i randomly choose each imp manuever, then play as regular but if the imps go off the edge i have the redo the manuever or just switch to the opposite angle, usualy only redo if they are going straight and would have needed a K turn, sometimes in that case ill just give them the needed K turn. But it makes for fun and surpirisingly difficult games cuz you cant predict the enemy movements.

I found some basic AI rules for the X-wing, TIE Fighter and TIE Advanced that I use all the time for solo play in order to figure out maneuvering around constantly moving hostiles. I usually give the AIs either a boost in points or respawns to compensate for the fact that they're generally stupid pilots.

can you link that place for us.. that sounds like what everyone needs

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=no_antivirus&id=0B1wMq2w-qjQ-UGZsWTRubUo2MFU

That's the X-Wing AI. It works pretty well all in all, I use it to test out my new lists. It doesn't have any of the Wave 3 stuff in it yet, and it can't deal with astroids at all. But still it works ok for what it is.

There's two ways you can use it.

What I tend to do, is set the dials on my side first, then use the AI for the other side. I then use exactly what it says, even if it doesn't make sense. I do this because then I know that the level of the AI is always the same. So I get a good base line for my new lists.

It's not a matter of if I win, but rather how much I win by. If destroy the other side with no loss and no real damage, then I know I have a good list. If I struggle then I know it's either a bad concept or needs tweaking.

Other option would be to set your dials then 're-role' the AI until you get moves that make sense.

One word, Vassal.

One word, Vassal.

It may just be me. But I find that while Vassal is great. I use it a fair amount, I still perfer putting the models on the table. I find it easier to see where ships will go that way.

Vassal isn't really going to help anyone who doesn't have someone to play with.

But... There are a lot of people on TC who play on Vassal, so if you are looking for people to play with it's good idea to check that out.

I spent a good chunk of last night playing with myself.

I'll pause there for comedic effect.

Anywho, I put PTL on Soontir (30pts) and had him face off on wedge at 29 points, and then again with veteran instincts at 30 pts.
In this case it's seeing exactly how much difference the initiative makes.

In terms of bias, I am inherently biased towards the Imperial side, but for this exercise, I moved each with the premise that I was trying to outguess where the target was going to move.
In the instance that the target had multiple viable options I would rewind and simply play out both.

Where Soontir had initiative, I could keep him out of Wedge's arc 100% of the time, more to the point I could put Wedge in his arc about 75% of the time (out of 8 activation phases) MOST importantly, I was able to avoid that Initial contact head on exchange (PTL FTW)

Where Wedge had initiative (Veteran Instincts.. I know how often does a person put VI on a 9 ps pilot?... this was merely an exercise to showcase the importance of initiative) I was not able to get the advantage on Soontir (and believe me I honestly tried) The best I could manage were a few head on passes, where Wedge would be stressed, at range 2-3 and soontir would be stressed but of course focused, and more often than not, focused with an evade.

The dice were pretty fair on this second matchup, and because of the guaranteed focus, soontir lost nothing, and was able to wear wedge down.

So.. that 1 point of veteran instincts was pretty huge

I will have to run this again but no PTL on Soontir.. Initiative is big, but 2 actions is HUGE.