I'll use it for roleplaying purposes. When the YV gets blown up, I'll immediately fly the z-95 off the table while shouting, "I'll get you next time, Gadget! NEXT TIME!"

Just curious, do you feel that people are avoiding shooting Fel's Wrath due to his ability and concentrating on other targets? I'm assuming that people are underestimating him a lot as they often underestimate Alphas (which I run a lot).

General advice is difficult as a lot depends on what you are running. The best advice I can give is to try and funnel it into an unfavorable position. Rocks and board edges are your friend and much easier for smaller ships to maneuver around. I fly a lot of 3+ small ship lists and when attacking a turret ship I will try and attack it from multiple directions at once. It limits the locations that the turret ship can move to and increases your chances of blocking it. Stress and lots of ion help too. When you limit a large turret ships movement options, its 3 attack dice become pretty inefficient for the cost.

And that's my beef with it. No matter what the Math says about the Defender, it is a lot stronger than that efficiency. MJ even admits having only a medium degree of certainty about it. I think what you really need to do is take a step back and reconsider why you are choosing to "have a beef" with Mathwing. Mathwing doesn't have feelings. Mathwing doesn't have an agenda. Mathwing is data. Mathwing has never been billed as the end all be all of X-Wing. People sometimes make points or arguments based upon that data. Sometimes they are good arguments and sometimes they are flawed. Mathwing never said anything mean. Mathwing didn't hurt other people's feelings. Mathwing is data. Mathwing ate my lunch and kicked my dog...or was it the other way around?

Scroll down to the bottom: http://critical-rocket.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/star-wars-x-wing-character-and-ship.html You can also find all the other crits on this site.

I've been having a lot of fun with this lately: Omicron Group Pilot (21) Advanced Sensors (3) Mara Jade (3) Engine Upgrade (4) It's kind of expensive, but flexible enough to get work done and will ruin someone's day at range 1.

I've been doing pretty well with this lately... Colonel Vessery (35) Outmaneuver (3) Flechette Cannon (2) Omicron Group Pilot (21) Advanced Sensors (3) Mara Jade (3) Engine Upgrade (4) Royal Guard Pilot (22) Push the Limit (3) Autothrusters (2) Targeting Computer (2) Royal Guard TIE (0) Total: 100 View in Yet Another Squad Builder Usually, I end up placing the shuttle before the other player due to PS in my meta. I slap that thing down in the middle of the table, with Vessery & the RGP off to the side. I have the shuttle do a zero and slowly move in the other two. Once I see where the other player is going to go, I beeline the shuttle towards them, forcing them to deal with the shuttle. The shuttle tries its best to block and stress while Vessery and the RGP pick at the sides.

Looks like they updated the article. Makes sense now. Both Eldar units die, the Space Marines win the combat.

July 30th.

From what I've heard Forbidden Stars isn't being released until GenCon.

And hey, if you win every round MOV doesn't matter at all.

I hope FFG gives us some news soon so that the forum has something worthwhile to complain about. People complaining about other people using math is just not fun to read.

1pt upgrades are for the most part situational. Still, that 1 point upgrade helps a lot for those HLC or range 1 shots.

100% agree on this. There are a ton of great scenarios and epic is a hell of a lot of fun. Whenever I try to get anyone else to play those though, it's always, "Nah, let's just do a 100 pt battle."

If a witch put a curse on me that made me roll poorly, would I be considered cheating? After all, I would technically be using magic to alter my dice rolling.

The partial MoV calculation is just health left/total health x point cost, and you only have to do it for surviving damaged ships, not every ship on the board. The maximum number of times you'd ever have to do it is eight and that's incredibly improbable, it's more likely to be one to three ships needing it. It's not much harder than adding up the ships to calculate MoV. As for checking, it's got the same inbuilt check as MoV does: both players are doing it and have vested interests in opposite directions. It's actually quite a lot of burden on the players. Currently, you just count points destroyed. Simple addition. Say you have two damaged ships and your opponent has three. You need to do the calculation for your ships and your opponents ships to check them. You're doing more difficult calculations and the amount of calculations you need to do has increased dramatically. Say if you disagree...now the TO has to do the calculations for both players. And this is just one match in one round. Multiply that over multiple rounds in a 30+ player tournament and that's a lot of math. Yes, those calculations might be easy for me and you, but they're not easy for EVERYONE and have the potential to add considerable time to a tournament.

I'm not opposed to the idea of partial points, I just don't think the current preferred method (calculating points based on remaining hull) is really doable during a tournament. The amount of time required, and how prone it is to errors would just be problematic. How about if a ship has less than half its hull, you get half its points rounded up. It's easy, it's quick and you can have all the points calculated before a match even starts. Yes it's not as exact as doing the full calculations, but it's pretty close and would be very fast with no room for disagreement between you and your opponent.

Yeah, that's probably why they don't perform very well in tournaments. To play Devil's Advocate again: The final's are untimed. Fatness of ships is irrelevant. The vast majority of matches don't go to time. Aren't the amount of fat lists seen in tournaments decreasing? Couldn't partial-points also reward sloppy play? It is entirely possible that someone could win a game by not focus-firing and instead just going after targets of opportunity. What is normally a very inefficient way of playing could possibly win you games. Not to mention, in certain situations how would partial points even really help. Take the really fat Falcon. Generally it is only ever dead or slightly injured. When that list wins, the Falcon generally has barely any damage on it. How would partial points benefit? Same with Corran. Corran is usually either dead or at full health due to regenerating shields. On a partial points system, why would you ever take a Decimator? That thing would just bleed points to your opponent. For example, a 60pt Decimator vs 60 pts of TIEs. The TIEs can put out more damage and are better at protecting your points. Also, why would you ever take Vader? Unless you only use it for hard-to-get killshots, you could end up giving your opponent more points than what you are getting back.

I dunno...the more I look at actual tournament results, the less I feel that it's an actual problem in practice. Just looking at the UK results, there were 234 untimed matches. Of those, 43 went to time. Of the 43 that went to time, 28 had a point spread of 30 points or less. Of those 28, 5 had a point spread between 21-30, 13 had a spread between 11-20 and 10 had a point spread between 0-10. (there was one tie). Granted it's only one regional, but I'm curious to see what it looks like once more regional data comes in.

Firstly, MoV already requires calculations. They're simpler, but required. Secondly, yes, people will get calculations wrong. They probably get MoV wrong too. As for what checks the calcuations? If the result of this calculation determines whether you advance to the next round or not, you're not going to just leave it to your opponent. And the likelihood of both players screwing up is let's just say not the highest. Is it more demanding? Yes, but I don't think it's demanding enough to offset the benefit of killing the artifical incentives the clock gives to list building. Yes, but partial points require MANY more calculations. If there is a disagreement, the TO would have to be the final arbiter. With current MOV, the TO would just have to calculate the points for each ship that is dead. With the new system, the TO would have to calculate the points for every injured or dead ship to get points. During the course of the tournament, all of this can add up to a significant amount of time. Then you have tournaments that run longer, or tournaments that need shorter rounds due to hard cutoffs. The current MOV system does have problems and does need some type of adjustment. Whatever adjustment it needs though needs to be very, very easy. Something that can be done very quickly with very little margin of error. I just don't think that the forum's current iteration of partial points is that system. For another point, let's say we have bbbbz vs Dash/Corran. Dash is 58 points. All of the b's are heavily damaged but no ships were destroyed. Dash is killed but Corran is at full health. The Dash/Corran build would actually win without destroying a ship. Is that what you want to reward? Granted, this is an outlying hypothetical just to illustrate a point. Every system that anyone comes up with is going to have problems. We just have to decide what kind of problems we want to live with at the end of the day.

You've got to do MoV calculations at the end anyway. (Health Lost/Total Health * Point Cost) is not a hard calculation. And given you've got tournament software it's even easier. The difficult of the calculation isn't an issue. It could be the easiest calculation on the face of the planet and someone is going to find a way to screw it up. Then when you add 30+ players in a tournament, the chances for errors increase dramatically. Then, who's going to be doing the calculations? For time, you would probably want to rely on the players to do the initial calculations, but who's going to check to make sure they're correct? If it's on the TO's, imagine the TO having to enter the remaining health of every ship in every list after every round. That would take some time.

I disagree. Say you have bbbbz vs Dash & Corran. If the bbbbz player just kills 1 ship, the Dash & Corran player needs to kill 3 before time to win. Them's pretty good odds for the bbbbz player.

This is actually a really good idea. My main problem with the partial-points system that everyone has been talking about is the paperwork involved. Even if you have really good software, you'd need the players to keep accurate records which would then need to be entered accurately into the software. But this idea - VPs assigned to ships based on the ship count - is amazing. It changes the game from trying to kill a particular ship, to trying to kill your opponents list, while trying to preserve yours.

It still boggles my mind that arguments like this even happen. I mean really...saying that you are required to buy a LUXURY item. If you play at home or on Vassal, you don't have to buy ANY ships. If you want to play at an official tournament (which is again, by choice) you need the relevant upgrades. But again, this is for LUXURY ITEMS. As in things you don't need, but just want.

Epic play is WAY more fun than 100 point battles in my opinion. I wish more people would give it a chance.