Nightshrike
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Posts posted by Nightshrike
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I'm glad you bolded the part about rash inferences. While you're searching definitions, you might also want to look up the difference between pessimism and pessimist.
I'm sure there's something snarky to be said about the type of person who reads the worst into another's posts, but I'll leave it for you to infer.
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You keep calling me a pessimist but you've got zero evidence for that as i've said i'm a sceptic that does not mean i have a negative outlook it means i take nothing at face value.
Monsters sucked and godzilla was a large disappointment ergo i view the director poorly, same goes for jar jar i've watched things like fringe, lost and the star trek movies and disliked them, my opinion is informed by prior experience.
I spend alot of time trying to make people laugh on these and other forums generally thats not indicative of someone who's miserable, in fact the only real trigger i have is the prequels because it took something i loved as a child and broke it for 10 years i couldn't touch anything star wars related.
Your making a baseless assumption without the evidence to support it and as a result are coming up with a false conclusion, as my old IT professor always used to say "garbage in means garbage out".
I actually never once called you a pessimist.
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Pessimism does shorten lifespans though, multiple studies have confirmed it. And anyway, it's not faith to withhold an opinion until more facts are in, it's good science. Also, in the absence of confirming evidence one way or another, it's probably emotionally healthier to look forward to something than to dread it.
The correct response to any and all things is always scepticism we have a word for taking things at face value without evidence:gullibility.
And i'd rather have a shorter lifespan and control of my mind and bowels than live to be 120 and have to wear adult diapers while drooling all over myself.
Did you read the article you linked? It said, in general, religion is associated with positive psychological benefits. It's only the "born again" movement which produces stress to the brain. Properly speaking, a pessimistic atheist, according to my research on pessimism, and the article you linked, is likely to die something like 10 years sooner, whereas the religious optimist will live to 120 with a healthy mind and sound body and a community of friends. And yes, I'm an atheist myself, but the article showed positive benefits to religion, so much so that the atheist author is attempting to mimic religion without the faith to get those benefits for himself.
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Pessimism does shorten lifespans though, multiple studies have confirmed it. And anyway, it's not faith to withhold an opinion until more facts are in, it's good science. Also, in the absence of confirming evidence one way or another, it's probably emotionally healthier to look forward to something than to dread it.
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You know, Hobo, pessimism shortens lifespans.
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Actually the DS has 2 hull.
They got a crit. and direct hit.
I'd have to actually say that the Death Star has infinite hull, and a special rules text that it can only be killed by a crit. After all, the rebels did make a bunch of useless strafing runs that did nothing to the station.
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I'd not be all that eager to see Jan and Kyle myself, at least, not in their Dark Forces guises. That was a classic 90s game of play the male hero and be a badass, occasionally rescuing your female sidekick pilot who ferries you around and serves as a romantic interest. Very different from a woman being a lead in her own right. That being said, we'll just have to wait and see what they end up producing.
catachanninja and 433 reacted to this -
Also, things like the TIE advanced fix exist because of systems like Mathwing pointing out how inefficient the base ship is. Without it, it would be hard to understand why some ships are favored and others are not. Mathwing provides a language for understanding the mechanisms behind player choice and tournament success. What you do with that information is up to you, but it's a mistake to shoot the very-well-educated and hard-working messenger.
I'm replying to this without having caught up on the thread yet, so apologies if I repeat other posts.
How do you know that that's why the TIE Advanced fix came about? Have FFG said so? The only reference to mathwing I've heard from them is that it's interesting but not how the game is designed.
The problem with mathwing isn't simply that it's based more around winning than fun. The problem is all the thigns it doesn't consider - the dial, the options for how you can fly certain ships. Basically, it doesn't tell you how good a ship is; it tells you how good a ships is under certain conditions, which are very rarely likely to be the conditions under which you play it.
That's not a dig at the guys who came up with it, whom I think acknowledge it's limitations, but it is a reason it shouldn't be given all that much weight.
I actually didn't say mathwing was specifically used to balance the game, rather that these kinds of mathematical analyses are crucial for understanding why some ships are popular and others aren't, why some seem to be more successful than others, etc. Without knowing these things, you can't begin to balance a game. I don't know if FFG rely on Mathwing, or if they have their own in-house system, but I'd be shocked if they weren't running statistical analyses to balance the game.
WickedGrey reacted to this -
Cool. If the red stripe on the bridge glows, then you'll be able to have it do double duty as a Cylon vessel.
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My idea wouldn't overcomplicate the game, it would simplify it and make it more logical.
That's not making the game more logical, it's making it less logical.
X-wing is still a space combat game set in the star wars universe where nothing makes any real sense.
If you want to make the game more logical then you'd need to completely rebuild the movement system from turn circles to straight lines with turns in degrees (or just simplify it to a clock face) you would need to introduce thrust values, one for each side of the craft, their would be no speed limit just acceleration and deceleration
Next forward momentum would be completely independent from the facing of the craft, so yes you can fly in reverse and shoot at the ship on your 6
Yeah, I don't disagree with a pure space combat sim, but Star Wars seems to have a luminiferous aether in my opinion, as the ships behave as though there is friction, we have sound in space, etc. That, or the ships are designed in such a way that they intentionally behave as though there is an atmosphere. Given that, I think the best replication of the experience, and the most logical one, would be one which treats them more or less like atmospheric fighters. If we were doing Battlestar Galactica, I'd totally go with something akin to your system. However, everything I've said about turn circles would still be accurate, as things like B-Wings are way more massive, and thus require either a huge amount more thrust to keep in the turn, or are going to turn wider.
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The question is simple: if MathWing did not exist would the Meta be more diverse?
The simple answer to that is everyone starts out playing mini's games because the mini's look cool. It's only when players start to concern themselves with winning do things like "meta" become an issue.
In other games, models and figures come unpainted and building and painting of those becomes a huge part of the enjoyment of the hobby. Other fringer types like to discuss and argue the mythology of the universe their game is set in. That goes pretty deep too.
If you're playing on a Saturday night with a couple of hard ciders and and bowl full of finger sized cheeze puffs Mathwing is something you might tip your hat to...hell, you might have had some rather cogent thoughts in the daytime about how you planned to run your list, but when you've got a good buzz going, you don't give 2 ****s about the numbers. You're playing something that you love and you're comfortable with.
Sure there's a ton of people running netlists. A lot of them aren't going to have instant success with them either and that's going to kill their enjoyment of it. I read a guy's post who says all he runs is Xwing lists and he kicks ass at it because he knows his ships so well. I didn't hear him complaining about how crappy the Xwing was in the current meta. He enjoys using the Xwing and that lessens his investment in wins and losses, which makes him a better player. You kinda need to use the force to escape the meta...
Just as Thomas Merton wrote:
“The Need to Win”
When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous/
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets—
He is out of his mind !
His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting—
And the need to win
Drains him of power.
This quote is so accurate to archery. I lost a national indoor title to nerves that I totally should have won a couple of years back. Caring about the result is death in archery. I shoot fives all day (on an NFAA face) until I notice that I've shot four in a row, then that fifth arrow in the set is going to be a 4. Screw you, archery.
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Personally if I were trying to make X Wing more like air combat I'd get rid of K turns as well. The maneuver is real, its an Immelmann turn, but in game terms it doesn't promote actual turn fighting. Either remove it or limit it to air craft that actually climb well to represent BnZ tactics.
Yeah the K-turn really doesn't work because if you're pulling an Immelmann, all of the same turn circle restrictions still apply, they're just translated to the vertical. You literally can't turn in the vertical faster or tighter than you can in the horizontal (though you do get an additional G going over the top, giving your flight path an egg shape, but it doesn't appreciably cut the corner because it slows you down so badly). What Wings of Glory does is force you to make a full speed straight before and after the Immelmann in order to simulate the vertical component of the maneuver. In X-wing, that would get you killed, just like in real life if you try to go straight up with somebody on your six. Pilots call those "strafe rags."
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My idea wouldn't overcomplicate the game, it would simplify it and make it more logical. Radzap, if you wanted to do a house rules variant that was more logical for air to air combat, I would recommend tweaking the dials. The wider the turn, the "greener" it would be, and the tighter the turn the "redder" it would be. So, for the X-Wing, I would tweak the dial to give it a green hard 3, a white hard 2, and a red hard 1. This shows that the X-Wing pilot is stressing himself and his airframe (and potentially greatly reducing his speed) by cranking into the 1 turn, whereas, turning at the 2 level is sort of the "best turn rate" for the X-Wing, where it is able to sustain its energy, and the 3 is an easy speed for the X-Wing to fly around the circle, not really putting it through its paces. Then, all you would have to do is apply that rubric with the X-Wing as your middle of the road ship, and everything else relative to it. I would leave the TIE fighter's dial untouched (except to make the 3 hard and 3 bank green). I would add a 1 bank and a green hard 3 and bank 3 to the TIE interceptor dial, and mirror that for the A-Wing. The Y-Wing would have a white 3 and a red 2, to show how bad it is at turning, ditto for the B-Wing. The TIE bomber, because it is lighter and more agile, would score a similar dial to the X-Wing. The large base ships would turn tightest at the 3 level most likely, but I would leave their lower-tier banks intact. Then, I'd give every ship barrel roll and boost as reposition actions, though to highlight their maneuverability, I'd probably give the A-Wing and the Interceptor the option to boost with a 1-hard, though I might make this cause them stress, not sure. I'd have to play test it. Nonetheless, it would be a more logical system than what currently exists for X-Wing and it would lead to battles in which ships actually behave the way they would in a "real" fight, more or less.
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Don't blame math wing for being what it is. A descriptor.
You can fly 3 defenders. But you'll find out that 9 attack dice, 9 hull and 9 shield are going to die quickly without doing much damage. And you can't blame math for that.
Also cards not seeing play came out long before math wing. Sure, with math you can find out that 4 unmodified dice don't roll hits as often as 3 dice with a focus. (The math wing description of expose) but expose wasn't being used long before that.
Don't blame the person describing the box as red for the box being red.
And yet 9 hull autoceptor lists with the exact same number of attacks have been doing great against turret lists.
To claim three attack ships can't do enough damage to kill a big ship is plain silly.
Chirpy fel lists have six attacks, whisper bumped it up to seven did they fail to kill anything?
You're arguing against a straw man here. He pointed out that defenders are inefficient. Autoceptors are quite efficient and have a huge pool of reposition actions which everybody recognizes.
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I didn't neglect player skill, I just pointed out that there are limits to margins of error, and that there are builds which are so disadvantageous that player skill cannot be expected to overcome it.
... and I stay a billion miles away from the people who insist on using these ships with the up to the second meta-bettah-builds.
I never said I was personally obsessed with Mathwing, I barely understand how to make it work when I want to use it. Rather, I was pointing out that Mathwing provides a service - it tells you how mathematically efficient certain ships are. If you don't want to know how mathematically efficient they are, then fine. There are those who think that Mathwing makes the "meta" by somehow cajoling competitive people into playing min-max lists, but we all know that all of the competitive players are min-maxing with or without Mathwing, it's just a source of information. Moreover, as I said in my first post, Mathwing gives us a language for understanding why some ships seem to be more successful than others which enables the game designers to balance the game more accurately, thus increasing diversity of ships over time. That's all.
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Right, there may be some aspect of confirmation bias going on, but these things are played over dozens of iterations. If Mathwing predicted that the most efficient ship combination was something like 4 pre-fix TIE Advanceds, that might get lots of players trying it out. I doubt very much if that meta would survive, however, because it really isn't an efficient combination. The fact is, while Mathwing has a margin of error and the game has a degree of randomness to it, the margin of error has limits. Knowing those limits helps to improve the balance of the game over time.There you've neglected the thing MathWing also neglects: player skill. X-Wing is, relatively speaking, a very well put together game. All the ships are pretty close together. Granted, if you made predictions about the TIE advanced being amazing you'd be empirically proven wrong very quickly. However, if you said the B-wing was awful from the get go you'd probably kill it off, and two similar lists (say XXBB and XBBZZ) where it very much would come down to player skill could be made or broken by their MathWing predictons. MathWing has disproportionate influence over people's list building.
I didn't neglect player skill, I just pointed out that there are limits to margins of error, and that there are builds which are so disadvantageous that player skill cannot be expected to overcome it.
Punning Pundit and Rodafowa reacted to this -
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Given that most players are playing a game rooted in the most efficient 100-point builds, it's fabulous that some of the more mathematically-inclined members can help shed light on which combinations are efficient, and why that's the case.
Which would be great were it not for the nature of the metagame: it likes to self-perpetuate. A list at the top has a tendency to stay there because people copy it: the more copies of a list are entered into a tournament the more likely it is to win. In a tournament where every list is a Fat Han, Fat Han will come first. It'll also come last, but we don't have the data on what fails spectacularly. We only see the winner.
This also applies to MathWing. Mathematical predictions would be great for confirming why things are winning if the people playing in the tournaments couldn't see MathWing. But they can. MathWing predicts a ship as good, it gets used. It gets used more, it turns up at the top more. It turns up at the top more, that's taken as a validation of MathWing's prediction.
On the other hand, I do think people put a bit too much stock in mathwing. It's still a random game, and a slight efficiency improvement isn't going to be noticed in a single, or even ten, games.And MathWing also has a margin of error: it's not a perfect model. It may not even be right.
Right, there may be some aspect of confirmation bias going on, but these things are played over dozens of iterations. If Mathwing predicted that the most efficient ship combination was something like 4 pre-fix TIE Advanceds, that might get lots of players trying it out. I doubt very much if that meta would survive, however, because it really isn't an efficient combination. The fact is, while Mathwing has a margin of error and the game has a degree of randomness to it, the margin of error has limits. Knowing those limits helps to improve the balance of the game over time.
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Also, this min-maxing strategy rooted in a mathematical approach exists because of the 100-point dogfight tournament system which dominates X-wing play. Efficiency would matter less if you weren't playing a version of the game (the tournament version) where efficiency is paramount. Given that most players are playing a game rooted in the most efficient 100-point builds, it's fabulous that some of the more mathematically-inclined members can help shed light on which combinations are efficient, and why that's the case.
Also, things like the TIE advanced fix exist because of systems like Mathwing pointing out how inefficient the base ship is. Without it, it would be hard to understand why some ships are favored and others are not. Mathwing provides a language for understanding the mechanisms behind player choice and tournament success. What you do with that information is up to you, but it's a mistake to shoot the very-well-educated and hard-working messenger.
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Ok I can give you that the fuselage does look inspired by the P-61 but that's all it has going for it.
It still looks meh.
The hull and the giant engines both. But the ARC has grown on me. I initially didn't like it, but the more I looked at it the more I found that I did like it, and now I think it's pretty sweet-looking. It's basically what they should have made instead of the K-Wing for the heavy bomber in X-Wing, but whatevs. I'll never understand why people prefer silly EU ships to ones that were actually in Star Wars movies, but to each her own.
Because the ARC isn't a heavy bomber and some people actually LIKE the K-wing? If you're gonna complain about people who think ships from the PT are stupid, I have every right to complain about people who think ships from the EU are stupid.
I didn't complain about them, I just said I didn't understand them. As to the ARC not being a heavy bomber, well, that's fair enough. Heavy attack ship is probably a better way of putting it. Still would have been a super cool addition, though I realize there would have been canonical issues with giving them to the rebels (where they look like they would belong on a visual basis).
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Looking deeper, I think this story is probably rooted somewhere in the Skybolt Crisis, but I can't find any reference to the proposed British solution. This sums up the crisis nicely: http://www.nhdasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Skybolt-Crisis-2011-Debate-Diplomacy.pdf
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I just read through the entire UK nuclear weapons wiki page, and it seems that the US was not forthcoming with nuclear weapons in general, but that later they became more cooperative with thermonuclear weapons, eventually sharing designs, and that from the beginning, they were willing to sell missile systems to the British, beginning with Skybolt and continuing through Polaris when Skybolt was canceled. So, I am thinking this is a myth that makes a nice pub story.
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Ok I can give you that the fuselage does look inspired by the P-61 but that's all it has going for it.
It still looks meh.
The hull and the giant engines both. But the ARC has grown on me. I initially didn't like it, but the more I looked at it the more I found that I did like it, and now I think it's pretty sweet-looking. It's basically what they should have made instead of the K-Wing for the heavy bomber in X-Wing, but whatevs. I'll never understand why people prefer silly EU ships to ones that were actually in Star Wars movies, but to each her own.
PIMP my FIGHTER: Z-95 Headhunter "N Dru Suhlak"
in X-Wing
Posted
Beautiful stuff.