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Whilst I love playing X-Wing, the recent two Waves (9&10), haven't really excited me and I'm starting to get the feeling there is a certain amount of barrel scraping regarding ships (Quadjumper I'm looking at you) as the game was always going to have a finite pool to draw from.

The again it could just be me have a bit of X-WIng burn out as I've played it farily heavily since release and attending most local tornys within reasonable driving distance, which for a fat lazy hobbit like me is quite the departure from the norm.

Thoughts ?

I'm with you.

The way I see it, they are starting to implement changes for the sake of changes.
Too gimmicky for my tastes, but well... I'll still be playing since the new stuff doesn't impact my playstyle.

I'll still buy 2 protectorate starfighters for my scum...

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
Whilst I love playing X-Wing, the recent two Waves (9&10), haven't really excited me and I'm starting to get the feeling there is a certain amount of barrel scraping regarding ships (Quadjumper I'm looking at you) as the game was always going to have a finite pool to draw from.

The again it could just be me have a bit of X-WIng burn out as I've played it farily heavily since release and attending most local tornys within reasonable driving distance, which for a fat lazy hobbit like me is quite the departure from the norm.

Thoughts ?

Waves 9 & 10, 7 ships in total, 4 of which featured in the films, whilst the other 3 featured in a popular Star Wars spin off TV show. That's good enough for me, I have had more exposure to those ships than any of the ships in waves 4 & 5 for example. I would imagine that's the same for most general Star Wars fans.

Agreed. Someone getting into X-wing and Star Wars in general today will probably do so via the films & rebels.

"Sabine's TIE" will make far more sense to them than the Starviper - and definitely FAR more than the Khiraxz.

Yep.

Rogue One can't come soon enough. I lived through the prequel era playing the Decipher CCG, seriously enough to haul my arse out of bed early on a Sunday to drive to the nearest sanctioned tournaments when they happened (alongside TJ and a human lightning rod.)

My abiding impression of the era was the introduction of new, often convoluted, mechanics (pod racing, I'm looking at you) which added nothing to the game.

This is starting to feel a little like that.

I sure am hoping that with Rogue One coming out, there will be some stuff to bring a lot of the unused older ships back to life. Like titles to bring the T-65 back on part with the T-70, I don't need more fancy weird ships (except for you TIE Striker, lemme buy you), but new pilots for the older ships and modifications to rebalance old stuff.

I don't even play Rebels, but it is depressing to see the ship the game is named off of be rarely used. Even with Imperial Veterans, I don't see anybody besides myself trying to make a TIE Bomber focused list. There are plenty of ships that are a joke right now, let's go back and fix them to make the pool of ships we will see on the table be just a bit larger. Getting pretty tired of just seeing the same ships week after week.

I might be the minority, but I like the Quadjumper, I think it hits the fluff of Scum & Villainy quite well. A modified tug boat fitted to be a smuggler's ship, it was kind of a surprise choice, but probably another push by Disney since it is a ship from their movie.

I can understand that FFG is most likely under pressure from Disney to churn out products related to Star Wars Rebels, so I can't say anything bad about that, besides the blending of the factions with a Rebel TIE and the ability for it to take an illicit upgrade. Would like a little more faction seperation.

Honestly we knew from the get-go that X-wing would have extremely limited design space. Stat profiles have rather limited variance forcing FFG to rely on Gimmicks to make new ships different from old ones (Remember back in Wave 2 we got Turrets, Auxillary Arcs, bombs, titles, modifications, and cannons). So we knew for a while that complexity would increase every release. There is also limited design space simply due to the limited numbers of ships- with only 5 ships per faction in the original trilogy, we hit this mark as of wave 3. From here we got increasingly obscure [old] Expanded Universe ships.

Now "Old Guard" Star Wars fans loved getting stuff like the TIE-Defender, the K-wing, Z-95 Headhunters, etc. However, they are less excited by stuff from a kids show (Rebels) that they are less likely to have watched. But, there is a "New Guard" of fans who have never played the old X-wing and TIE Fighter games, for whom waves 4-7 have nothing they recognize as Star Wars. For them, the appearance of stuff from Rebels in Wave 8 is probably far more exciting.

Big problem is, a lot of ships that have come out (Especially for Scum, but also the TIE Punisher TIE Phantom and HWK) are the sort of thing where, while it has fans, most people didn't know it existed before X-wing (Again see all of Scum between "Most Wanted" and Wave 9). So a lot of people probably lost interest before the Disneyverse ships began to appear. That said, this means that overall the Disneyverse ships (Plus the ARC-170) are probably good things. Compared to the resoundingly "Meh" response to a lot of mid-wave stuff, the fact that rebels stuff has some fans will probably go a long way towards helping the game continue.

Going forwards, I hope that future waves will follow in Wave 9's footsteps and only release 3 ships at a time (1 per faction). This means that releases will be a little slower allowing them too milk new ships for longer (For example Wave 8 would be spread over 6 months instead of 3). This also means that they are no longer giving Scum 2 ships per wave (one of the biggest sources of forgettable release filler in the mid-wave period). It would be nice for Rebels to get more generic pilots though (they've gotten one in the four ships in Waves 8-10).

Going forwards, I have mixed feelings. In terms of being able to produce cool new ships, I am fairly optimistic. Rogue One promises to at least provide fodder for the main factions with the U-wing and TIE Striker. There is a new season of Rebels coming up, which offers more potential. Rogue One and Rebels Season 3 also offer some potential for a Rebel Veterans Pack, with presumably new X-wing pilots in Rogue, and the preview of some Y-wings in Rebels. This will come with additional complexity, since design space is almost gone for generic profiles. There is a lot of stuff (Eg. Agent Kallus) that could work as a condition card. So, condition cards are either a formalization of an older informal mechanic in a manner which makes it easier to remember, or they are adding complexity in the interest of seeming "New". Last game I played which ended up in this position (Increasing complexity with every release to compensate for limited design space, running counter to it's original goal of being an easy game to get into) was Mage Knights, and it died.

The critical game flaw IMO was there weren't enough stats. You had one value that dictated everything: Firepower. Either you had 2 (barely usable), 3 (normal) or 4 (rare, absurdly good).

There was no difference between accuracy and hitting power. So thus, a heavy laser cannon (attack 4) was both the strongest weapon AND the most likely to get a hit on a hard to tag target.

So thus, you can't have say, a fast nimble ship with accurate but weak weapons to hunt other nimble ships, be different from a fast, nimble ship with a powerful but inaccurate weapon for bombing hard targets.

This leads to weird rules like the Twin Laser Turrets, to try and get around this awkwardness.

Poor design space also lead to the 360 fire arc fiascos, that dominated the game (and still do) by the virtue of their sheer flexibility.

As for ships...

We're dead out of anything recognizable short of new cartoon stuff, and the handful of video game ships that haven't yet shown up. Alas, poor XG-1 and Missile Boat...

Although it might feel like that at the moment...

We're going to get one movie a year until at least 2019, and if the movies are called "Star Wars" for a reason, there are bound to be designers chomping at the bit to give us cool spaceships. I agree that some ship choices, especially for the scum faction, were a bit lackluster.

I'll admit, I'm not a fan of the condition cards as a mechanic, but I'm willing to give it a try. And I'm not going to call the game critically flawed or already dead. The game designers at FFG are nimbler than other company's designers.

I am excited for what Rogue One brings us. The main two characters are supposed to be based off of Jan Ors and Kyle Katarn if I am not mistaken, so I want to run all four of them together!

I don't think design space is a big problem; I'd happily buy different models of the same ship (such as customised YTs), if the models were cool. In fact I'd prefer a system based around a handful of well design archetypes, over constantly struggling to force something new into the gaps. There is plenty of room for new upgrades, and probably more than enough room for additional pilots.

I think the biggest problem FF face is refreshing and rebalancing the meta. Unfortunately, they seem reluctant to errata points and stats (perhaps understandably). At the moment it seems that slowly creeping the power up around the best ships and upgrades, is the only reasonable way to nerf them.

I was only saying the other night that while the Y Wing is in a pretty good place, there's still an awful lot in terms of named pilots etc that could be fleshed out.

Card packs for existing ships would be good, expanding on older types to offer variety without necessarily turning the whole game on its head.

Sadly, I just don't get the vibe that this is something FFG is able/willing to do, and buying a new ship of a type I already have enough of for one or two new cards will get old eventually, although I only tend to buy ones or twos of most expansions, so the Vets, Aces etc haven't felt too bad this far.

I was browsing on Woookiepedia, and I stumbled on a mention of the T-85 X-Wing, the more recent version of the ship that Poe Dameron also flew.

Can you imagine what kind of monster that has to be, stats-wise? You can't make it too powerful otherwise TIEs won't stand a chance and the First Order wouldn't have bothered to manufacture them.

I imagine the T-85 X-Wing as pretty much just being the same as the T-70, maybe some new avionics but thats it.

 VictorVonTzeentch wrote:
I imagine the T-85 X-Wing as pretty much just being the same as the T-70, maybe some new avionics but thats it.

Actually I feel that there is a lot that they could do. System Upgrade, Barrel Roll, Slam, Better agility, More green on the dial, Hard 1's, Firepower 4 base etc. Any two of these would make the T-85 feel just as advanced over the T-70 as the T-70 is over the T-65, and push it into the same point category as the TIE Defender.

Hit, and gone past I think. Power creep is a problem, complexity creep is a huge problem, and there just isn't much design space left without making those problems even worse. And the more this keeps going on the more the game becomes random EU and TFA ships instead of the classic stuff that made us love Star Wars in the first place. I think things started to go downhill with the initial scum release, where balance started to break with the addition of a new faction that FFG had no apparent balancing plan for. Every scum release so far has been either borderline game-breaking or complete garbage, with no middle ground at all. And the only counter is massively over-buffed imperial lists, where the critical mass of Palpatine + autothrusters + PTL token stacking has made ships that can arc dodge everything and are virtually immune to red dice (other than u-boats, of course, because balance!). Things are badly broken, and it's probably going to take a second edition of the core rules along with major revisions to specific ships/upgrades to fix the problem.

I don't see a reason to balance tbh. They're making bank and people will continue to play with overused, overpowered tournament lists because it wins.

I just feel like they don't care about balance. If they did they would release cards on their own in packs so you wouldn't have to buy a 15 dollar ship and a bunch of other cards you dont need.

And saying 'just buy the cards from an independent seller' is pointless because it has nothing to do with FFG's mindset.

 Don Savik wrote:
I don't see a reason to balance tbh. They're making bank and people will continue to play with overused, overpowered tournament lists because it wins.

People said that about 40k. It turns out that you do in fact lose customers if your game is terrible, no matter how stubbornly GW refuses to admit it.

I just feel like they don't care about balance. If they did they would release cards on their own in packs so you wouldn't have to buy a 15 dollar ship and a bunch of other cards you dont need.

Having to buy ships for the cards has nothing to do with balance. If the game had perfect balance you'd still have to buy all the ships.

It has to be said there was a certain elegance in the early waves of X-Wing. I now have well over 200 pilot cards and over 400 upgrade cards, and haven't even got all of the latest wave yet, and this is only going to get worse. I think the game in it's current format is becoming borderline unpenetrable for the beginner (perhaps one of the reasons why people stick to meta lists, as trying to find your own style of play/set of cards would require a large amount of time and investment), and just unwieldy with the amount you have to carry around/manage (I have an Ultra-Pro folder twice the size of any 40K rulebook, in addition to all my ship carry cases, my token trays etc).

I'm not even mad at the ships they are introducing as I'm a huge fan of the EU and enjoy collecting the models, but at the same time, I'm not sure that even with all the new ships that will be introduced through the films, how the game can continue in it's present state, something will need to be done to reign the juggernaut they've created back in.

You can always do what I do... choose a couple of lists before hand and carry that in a travel case. Mine is no bigger than a lunchbox. A construction worker's lunchbox, but still.

Maybe this is just their plan to get us all to play Armada for a few cycles?

I am one of the "old school" fans that was talked about earlier in the thread. I loved the X-Wing and Tie Fighter computer games and Dark Forces is still one of my favourite games of all time (which may be more to do with nostalgia, but still) so I happily bought up things like the TIE Defender and Z-95. Even though I knew beforehand that the HWK wasn't too hot I knew I had to buy it anyway. In fact, I own everything up to wave 8 with the exception of the Scyk and a couple of huge ships.

The past couple of waves hasn't really done much for me. I've seen and passed on the Punishing One, Ghost, Mist Hunter and other stuff more than once. Hell, my most recent purchase was a 4th Y-wing.

Right now I'm looking over the entire range of what there is and what's coming and I'm not even all that convinced to finish the collection off. I'll certainly buy a few here and there that I like. Imperial Veterans is definitely on the list.

I think we reached peak X-Wing a while ago. The last few waves have been uninspired at best and they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for new ships.

I love the game but I've bought no new ships in almost a year. This means I'm behind the curve on new upgrades, but I resent having to buy models I have no intention of using just to obtain fixes for models I already own.

Sadly this seems to be FFGs business model though.

I'd hate to say it because there are a bunch of die hard fans that will argue with you that everything is great. However I stopped at imperial vets and even that was I guess I have too purchase hoping for better releases.
I've picked up 2 of nearly every expansion since release and I'm done....
I was happy with the bounty hunter ships but I didn't like the ghost of other cartoon ships and none of the new stuff in wave 9 or 10 is good.
I was looking for an xwing veteran pack, maybe a decent campaign like heros of autari cluster, and maybe another decent epic ship with revamp of the epic game to make it more engaging.

However I basically just accepted heroes of autari cluster is the best campaign we are going to get and that fan made campaign is pretty much good up to wave 5 and everything after is pretty useless for it.