Відео

Thank you for doing these videos, I think you do a super good job!

Thanks for sharing the insights on the upcoming release! Have a great weekend at the tournament.

Excellent video, I am very interested by your insights here. Plus I'm always happy to see a ROAD enjoyer. I've played every system of X-wing since 2017, and I've taught so many friends to play X-Wing. In my opinion 2.5 is the best system X-Wing has had for new players *and* skilled players, It has both simplified it and made it more complex in interesting different areas

Taylor Larry Hall Paul Taylor Larry

It's really nice to hear a balanced view on the good the bad and the ugly, I'm hopeful that we can give a game back to the community that they can enjoy!

One of the key factors of the scenarios is that it led to a significant contraction in how many lists were considered "viable" for the game. Gone were the days of anywhere from 2 to 8 ship lists. Now everything had to essentially be 4, 5, or 6, with few exceptions. This severely reduced any form of list creativity and sucked a lot of the fun out of it for me. It didn't help that AMG didn't run the 2.5 ruleset as an open beta, if they had, they wouldn't have driven away quite so many players so suddenly and given them time to get things right.

Some great points Nick, and I agree with you for the most part. Objectives: Objectives were a positive addition to the game, and I disagree that they took anything away from competitive play in favour of RNG. They fundamentally changed the game, so that you need to understand where your points are going to come from in a given match and drive home the need to execute your plan and adapt to the objective situation. Even if you decide to ignore the objectives yourself and go for a kill list, you need to have a plan for which enemy ships to target and your thresholds for letting them dominate the objectives. High level objective play is still high skill X-Wing, it's just a different set of skills than straight up dogfighting. I do agree with you on the choices of scenario missions being not the most thematic, though it's really only the picking up of crates that's a thematic disconnect for me. I think the area control, tagging and dogfighting ones are fine. I would like to see the addition of some more classic scenario play and asymmetric missions. For example: Escort mission (one side needs to protect an NPC ship and have it escape the opponent's board edge, while the other side tries to destroy it), Ambush (one side starts with some ships in reserve which appear at a later turn), High Value Target: one ship on each side is worth double points. Stuff like that. Heck, maybe even have different objectives per player so you can each earn bonus points for doing different things? Maybe some missions that involve Epic ships as centrepieces with special rules and interactions? Bumping: I'd prefer a simple, single bumping rule that affects all ships the same way. I think it could be as simple as taking a strain and losing your action, no range 0 shots (unless you have a range 0 weapon). A strain makes you more vulnerable to an attack, so it is a disincentive for swarms to bump for position, but not as punishing as taking a damage. I think red focus actions are slightly problematic as they allow many abilities and weapons to trigger from gaining the focus. ROAD: Really a non-issue. It's a perfectly fine way to do things. But maybe we could make initiative determination a randomised part of setup? Maybe sometimes it's ROAD, sometimes ROBD, sometimes randomly determined at the start of the match, sometimes Alternating. Maybe an asymmetrical mission works best if one side always has the initiative? Or maybe each player chooses a subset of missions that their squad is best at, and randomly determine the player with initiative, who then has to pick one of their opponent's missions to play?

Love the rule vids. On ROAD, I agree with you that it opens up the decision/flight path space, but clearly the 2.0 folks enjoyed more perfect information. Offering some kind of game mechanic (maybe an objective variant) that allows you to win initiative would be a neat way to split the difference - even if it just affects a single ship while it holds an objective area (I HAVE THE HIGH GROUND, ANAKIN) or maintains a special token. I was an old-school Halo 2 kid and loved the optional tactical struggle over power weapons in the middle of the map. You didn't have to care about grabbing sniper/overshield, but if you fought and won those objectives, it could change the way you play. I'd love to see X-wing objective maps explore this type of thing, maybe mario-cart style power-ups to increase/recharge shields or a way to add a die to the next attack. Another idea regarding objective game types would be 'active' obstacles, neutral entities that would attack ships directly. A big neutral pirate station that care fire at 4 range in the center of the map. Could get points for destroying the station and now we get even more diversity in flight path decisions similar to the stuff you're talking about with ROAD. You could get a nifty little flank on the next turn, but you'll have to withstand an attack from the pirate station with no evade. Other ideas could include global effects that affect all ships. Imagine environmental hazards that ionize or stress all ships during a round - could even be triggered by claiming an optional objective. Maybe if you blow up the pirate station, the debris explosion causes all ships to take a stress to evade colliding with debris. It feels like there's just this enormous play sandbox of possibilities that the XWA can play in and I hope they use objective gameplay as a way to 'salvage' some of the cool stuff we loved from former editions. Make a limited scenario that allows us to build ships that are outrageously OP like we did in 1E. Give us scenarios that allow us to gain initiative and limit perfect flight information more similar to 2E. If X-wing is ever going to successfully recombine the split communities, it truly seems possible thru variant objective play.

Thanks for doing this

I actually think that a mix of the two is the way to go for sure. I could see also making the points systems for a "simple" and "advanced". list construction that should be able to balance each other out. a new player offered the ability to pick 20 points worth of precon ships with pre-picked upgrades, can take that to a local level or regional level event and have a fair match against a 200 Advanced construction list. it should be a goal to keep a game this complex open to new players. every ship can come with 1 precon for a given platform that is just all about a simple power gameplay structure. Let's go take the decimator and make the precon unit Captain Oicuun. his pilot ability is forgiving ( you can always bump with his big butt) and then pack in dauntless, intimidation, a close range weapon like Adv. proton, a mine that sticks around like conner nets, ruthless so you can promise damage at a cost (and teach a new player self damage is not immediately bad), agile gunner for easer piloting. this to me, looks like a ship that is fairly simple to use, forgiving for a new player, but powerful enough to actually do something in any game format. and if a really good player can use the precons to squeeze out what would end up a 210-215 list otherwise? cool. he's stuck in precon creation which won't give them advanced mechanics that can be used by an equally skilled player to get over such an advantage.

My biggest problem with X-Wing has nothing to do with what rules are being used. It's that there's simply too much content to entice anyone new to jump into the game, and all the veteran players jumped ship prior to COVID. Combined with the fact that Star Wars has fallen from grace in many people's eyes over the last few years, there's simply no one in my area who is interested in meeting up to play the game. And I don't have the time available in my life right now to be the game ambassador in this area like I used to be.

I like the idea of large ships being able to shoot small ships at range 0. Large ships always felt weak and it really sucks flying a large expensive ship into a swarm and your opponent is forcing bumps every turn.

I don't like the way you build your list in 2.5. However I do like how your list are bigger (more ships) in 2.5. I was looking forward to scenarios. Then scenarios came out. Agree that some do not feel like combat scenarios. Looking forward to seeing what XWA comes out with.

YESSS this is the video I was waiting for!

Agree on all points. I think the loadout point system warrants a bit more talk; honestly once I got used to it, its probably my favorite aspect of 2.5. I really like the idea of getting to pick ships/names/pilots, then sort out upgrades later. However, I also really like granularity of 2.0's points... "hey, if i drop Luke's proton torpedoes, i can upgrade this generic Rz-1 up to Ahsoka!" Our local group has started playing both versions, and most people have started bringing a list for each format during open play nights; and we have a lot more engagement now.

When discussing whether a certain change to the rules increases or reduces the skill level required to be successful at the game, I think it's also important to discuss whether the skills required are ones you think it's interesting to put focus on. As an example, I generally don't enjoy playing 18XX games because they usually require you to do a lot of mental arithmetic where you plan out your spending for the turn. Being good at that is an important skill for playing (most of) those games well, and I just find that boring. I like other types of games that have similar elements (spatial planning, stock markets etc), but those particular games require a skill I just don't want in my I'm-doing-this-for-fun activities. Some people do, and more power to them. I think that's the kind of thinking you need to do around the skills needed for X-Wing. What complicates this regarding bumps is that I think there are two main types of bumps: Surprise enemy maneuvers, and mistakes. But I'll try to get into it anyway. Starting with mistakes, I think this is the main source of feel-bad experiences. You thought the movement you were making would put you in one spot, but it moved you just a little too far or a little too short, and now you can't shoot and maybe your favorite ship is out of action, perhaps even get destroyed because of this. If that happens because you misjudged a distance by a fraction of a centimeter, that's rarely going to feel great. If you bump because your opponent made a maneuver you hadn't expected, that doesn't have the same feel-bad result. OTOH, if they have made you believe they were going to do something else than what they're doing, they should have other advantages regarding position. Fundamentally, how harshly bumping should be punished (if at all) depends on how much weight you want to put on the skills required to avoid it, or to cause advantageous bumps for your own side. As X-Wing is at its core a game about spatial positioning, doing that well should be a skill that's premiered... but should making judgements of a centimeter this way or that be the key part there? I'm honestly not sure. To me, bumping has always felt like a necessary rules kludge that became a much more important part of the game than it was ever intended to be. Because we're playing the game with physical miniatures on a 2D surface, we need to handle the situation when one plastic ship moves in a way that would make it overlap another plastic ship in a way the miniatures can't handle. But the way this became a core part of the tactics of the game does not feel like it fits with the theme or like it promotes fun gameplay. The sticky issue is that the rules can't distinguish between intentional, exploitative bumping (like the old infamous corner castles), bumps caused by intentional actions by your opponent, and simple mistakes, and I don't think it's possible to create those distinctions without a lot of unnecessary rules overhead and the creation of grey zone corner cases that will create more problems than they solve. So we're stuck trying to manage a situation where bumping is going to happen and it needs to have consequences, but we don't want those consequences to be so harsh that they dominate the game, while (at least from my perspective) simultaneously wanting to avoid making bumping a key part of tactical play.

I'm really glad you're talking about this and I think this is a really important discussion to have as a community. Personally I don't enjoy any of the changes that AMG made and I say that as a person who is actively playing 2.5 every week because that is what my local group is playing and I don't want the game to die but I would rather play 2.0 or even maybe 1.0 than 2.5. Personally I find the bumping rules have more downsides than upsides. I can see why some people like ROAD but personally I would rather lose the bid every time (as I usually did in 1.0 and 2.0) than have ROAD. ROBD does sound better though I haven't tried it yet. I just find that it slows the dial decisions down, as you said it is interesting to not know who moves first but I find it makes people play to try to hedge more because it can really punish you if you move in the wrong order, especially combined with red focus after bumping. I find a lot of people purposefully slamming into opponents ships to try to get the red action rather than risking being out of position or risking a punishing self bump. I'm in it for the long haul but I do hope we eventually get back to the x-wing that I love, something with at least the ethos of 2.0. (Also as a side note, I don't play unlimited but I think your videos on it are great)

Thanks Nick! Love the video. I guess I’m going to have to try ROAD now 😂. My whole gaming group dissolved after the first 2.5 tournament but I’ll have find someone to play with ROAD because you made it sound awesome. Thanks again!

Cant really complain about any of your logic. Just gonna drop in my feels. The damage on friendly bumps made me completely write off running swarms. Losing a damage on 3 tie fighters in one turn during activation was not a positive play experience. If they want to keep the 20 point list building then every faction needs access to a 1 point ship. If my squad lands at 19, I need to rework the squad or hand points to my opponent every game. Thanks for the content. Looking forward to more. 👍

Great vid! I certainly of the opinion that scenarios need to be further expanded on to help facilitate more dogfight play instead of leading away from it. Honestly the Armada scenarios have a great library of options that can be translated for xwing to really push that without relying on scenario points. There are scenarios that can assist with offense for players that control that space or make a particular ship a designated target increasing it's points value. These would be options to the game that can enhance the experience and should be part of a tourney rotation even if for a season. I would like to give ROBD a try to see how that plays giving yourself full information about initiative.. Can't wait to see further expansion on the topic of hero wing.

Flippin love x wing talk... some good stuff in this video. I agree you can disagree with the way in game is played without being a negative nelly. I have not played competition since co-vid. Just some causal play. love the format of the video. Long live x-wing

When friendly ships bump, they should take a strain instead of taking damage. I think shooting at range 0 is OK (not sure completely...) but the red-focus is not OK. It is not punishing enough. interesting that you like ROAD. I was not initially against it and went with it in 2.5. But recently I played a 2.0 game (haven't in years) and it was so good to not roll the dice for that! It made the game much more fluid.

I believe that the main issue with scenario play was that it should have been introduced as more of a beta, a work in progress, earlier in the development process. They were released as the "new way to play tournaments, and right from the get go there was huge problems with scoring, when you could score objectives right from Round 1. Still today, I think that you score too many points from objectives, in the overall of the game, and that leads to games lasting way too few Rounds. Changing scoring of the scenarios with more objectives is something I think could be checked, making it so that players score a point if they hold objectives, and 1 more to the player that has more objectives than their opponent (instead of scoring 1 per point). On top of that, I'm sure that there is space to create new scenarios that promote different strategies than simply "bring more ships to the table", for example there could be scenarios where each player has some points in their deployment zone that their opponent can destroy to score points (so do you defend, attack, or split your forces?), or some where each player is escorting a ship, gaining points if it reaches certain places in the board, but you are also trying to prevent your opponent from doing so (then you would promote bombs and ion). I'm sure that there are many more ideas that could be tested. Having a larger pool of scenarios that rotate in and out would be awesome. Also there could be small iterations of existing ones, even if it is just changing the deployment, instead of having two of the edges of the table, you could deploy in opposing corners, or even have each player deploy in two opposing edges, having to split their list (try to merge your forces and destroy one of the opponent's halves, before he does the same to you).

Come on, people. Let's get some likes 60+ views and only 2 likes.

lol imagine a meathook massacre in this game,that would be brutal

G'day, Nick! I started following you for X-Wing content, but now my friends are getting into this game, so I'm happy you're covering it now. Is there any chance you'll post live play games?

Giving you a like and a comment to help you out mate keep up the good work

Great for twin suns. 14:16

Hello there is a great way to counter Snoke when he is played to allow a unit to maybe put in the final blow.

If they ever made a format where you could play the unit side of your leader as just a card in your deck (must have backed sleeves) the Arena would be busted. Paying 4 life into a twin Suns game is suicide though.

In Twin Suns you have two leaders, which would be relevant to that base.

Lets go!

So glad to be watching hairy nick videos again.

Good riddance. AMG was a blight on the game and the community as a whole. The only downside of it being discontinued is no more model production so getting new players will be harder. But I have full confidence in both X-Wing Alliance and the Legacy Devs that the game will continue to be loved by many.

hero of bladehold lol

Was really hoping they would go back to dog fighting/2.0 as that would have got me back in the game, that's the game I got in to and the game I want to play. Best of luck to all who are continuing with the game.

love these two cards! Really excited about set 3.

Once you move this from a pure dogfighting game to scenario driven, mechanics like collisions had to change because 2.5 is a zone control game, not a dogfighting combat game. It’s fundamentally a different kind of game.

Dogfighting was what drew me to x-wing in the first place. That to me was the beauty of the game paired with my love for Star Wars. The pacing with trying to outmaneuver an opponent with hidden dials completely sold me on the game as soon as I saw it.

I was happy playing casual 2.0, still am. I was happy with dogfights - scenarios were always an option since 1.0, but I prefer a straight fight. No interest in 2.5 whatsoever.

I just want to buy ships.

Another aspect of the 200 point system that I love is that you’re not forced to put upgrades on ships to make them a viable list. I loved running great pilots with light upgrades and being forced to run upgrades isn’t always my thing. Also, from a new player standpoint. Seeing a table full of upgrade cards all the time makes it a lot more difficult, whereas I used to be able to set up competitive squadrons with light upgrades to help them focus more on flying well and less on remembering a bunch of upgrades.

I spent the entirety of 2.0's lifespan waiting for Dash Rendar to be rebalanced; instead they nerfed him into the ground and forgot he ever existed. Talk about disappointment, lol

I'm allergic to grass, Nick!

2.0 brought in a lot of nice clean-ups (short of halving piloting skill) and I will not play 2.5 with it taking away the ability to "build what you want" Having played Wings of Glory, bumping should include the possibility of collision - I wish the game would handle overlapping. I am fine with it preventing shooting/actions, though I think it might be good if you could take stress to shoot/take actions (as if it were a modified red maneuver) so that a 1-v-1 scissors fight doesn't become a stalemate. I welcome scenarios, but straight-up dogfighting should be one scenario that can be chosen.

The way 2.5 killed the game for me was with the fixed points per ship (3 x Alpha Class Star Wing Imperial List couldn't be done because you couldn't load them up anymore) / Banning my good friend Ved Foslo in the TIE X1 that featured in my Imperial Hyperspace list. Lastly my Rebel list suffering from Arvil, Intimidation and Droids being crippled and banned. All 3 of the lists i carried to my FLGS were invalidated.

I've been a huge advocate of giving AMG the benefit of the doubt and embracing the changes implemented in 2.5 while accepting they were a work in progress and largely a global playtest on the path to a fully fledged 3.0 version. But I have to agree that the best thing about 2.5 was adding objectives and tournament-legal standard loadout cards. ROAD got a lot of people up in arms, but turned out to be a bit of a non-issue, and I like the thematic Ion-related tweaks (assigning a dial, can bank, breaking locks, and gas clouds potentially ionising a ship). Pretty much everything else though is either net neutral or negative. I totally get the argument for X-Wing to be a game of hero ships, but generics were always an important part of the game - whether you are going for pure value of cheap ships, or even a core part of a faction identity for swarm lists. That interacts directly with initiative and blocking as well, making pros and cons to taking high initiative aces that can react to the battlefield and shoot first, versus low initiative ships that can be confident of completing their manoeuvres and getting their actions, and maybe becoming an obstacle for higher initiative ships. That is all part of the cat-and-mouse positioning game that is somewhat lost when you can bump focus. And rolling for damage with a self-bump is extremely punishing to run a swarm of cheap low health ships. This has lead to swarms being no longer a thing, and that is a loss to the game as a whole. With regards to the point system, I really quite liked the loadout system. I have been thinking for a while all the different things we could do to address the problems raised by people who don't like it. There is a definite loss of granularity with the 20 point squad point system. If we bring generics back into the fold it realistically has to increase. If we're going to do that we will want to keep the numbers nice and round to minimise the maths required to see where you're at while playing a game. Since we don't have to account for upgrades/loadout with squad points, we might as well go to 100 which is an easy number to get your head around in terms of how much a ship is worth to destroy, and it opens up scenario points to be adjusted so that they count more or less towards winning a game. That way we can have scenarios that are objective-heavy and ones that are kill-heavy. The problem with increasing squad points is that it makes it difficult to spend all your squad points. Even if we partially address the issue by offering multiple versions of pilots at different squad point values and different loadouts, it's going to be rare to be able to take the ships you want and have that add up to exactly 100 points. And that means handing those points over to your opponent before the game even starts, losing perceived value, or going back to a bid. Or perhaps a way to convert squad points over to additional loadout points, at which point why not just go back to 200 points combined and use other upgrade restrictions to limit problematic combos. What I would like to see is the addition of more mission types and more experimentation with the value of objective points within missions. I'd like to see something implemented along the lines of Armarda or some other minis games where each player chooses a couple of objectives that their squad is best suited for, and maybe do a roll-off once at the start of the game where the winner gains the initiative for the whole game, but has to choose one of their opponent's objectives to play.