They were always one of mine too. Them and the B-wing.
So here’s one of all my favorite ships that just don’t see play.
Though, honestly, I’ve actually managed to make the A-wing pair decent recently. But @Panzeh can appreciate that when I say that I took a list with two Green Squadron A’s, two TIE fighters, and a sheathipede and beat Timewalk Asaaj with Nym how hard that would be.
Think taking down a rhinoscerous with B.B. Guns.
There was a point when 5 A-wings with Snap Shot and Crackshot was a going thing but yeah the really good defense stackers and alpha strikes blow them out of the water in 1.0
My favorite ships were always the TIE Interceptors. High power, high speed, high agility, low armor. Exciting, high skill ceiling, just tons of fun to play.
I believe about two and a half years ago, Palpatine hit the scene and then Soontir, Carnor, and Palp in a shuttle were the terror of the local store for a while.
They were indeed, but I hate Palpatine’s ability.
Yeah it was a little longer, but I never had Palp. I flew trip aces at that time.
But they died when the Jumpmaster came out, and Dengar with 4lom and Zuckuss just hard countered Interceptors. If you had Palp you might be ok, but without it was literally unplayable.
Then they nerfed that, Soontir was ok for a bit, then the Ghost came out and Interceptors were gone for good.
The palp aces meta was extremely brutal as you watch ships with normal-type attacks just not able to penetrate the autothrusters+2-3 tokens+palp defenses. It’s probably the impetus behind the massive inflation of attack mods and ordnance.
2.0 Palp is a lot more reasonable. 2.0 aces seem more reasonable, and you don’t need to be an ace to use the maneuverable ships, which is a big plus to me.
What’s stopping them from doing a bunch of stupid shit that breaks 2.0, and then releasing 3.0, ad infinitum, like Games Workshop?
Nothing I guess, other than burning whatever goodwill is left from their customers that ponied up $x to transition to v2.
I’ll take my chances… 😎
There is also the fact that several changes make the new system more resilient.
Having point costs in app, rather than printed on the cards, is one such thing. If a ship is over, or under, powered the can adjust points and slots more dynamically. Same is true of upgrades.
Plus they are already indicating alternative play formats included in the app, which is a long requested feature. 100/6 as the only competitive mode is fine, but the community has been experimenting with other interesting options.
World Championships were palp aces vs brobots, and the brobots won(the sensors/control loadout has an excellent game against the no-agi rebel builds that were quite common).
I haven’t played for a few years, but my favorite list at the time was an A-Wing, B-Wing (maybe 2?) and the Hawk. It wasn’t considered competitive at all in the meta, but it was a ton of fun to play.
I stopped playing because people around here got really into the Heroes of the Arturi Cluster(?) thing and I just wanted to do regular games. When they started getting back to regular games, the playerbase had gotten really big and more competitive focused, so I lost interest. I still kept up with the meta somewhat though because it was interesting to see what FFG was doing.
So it’s interesting to see them do this. It’s funny that Team Covenant (who I always thought had the best coverage of the various FFG boondoggles) had talked about some of these same ideas in the past, sometimes in conjunction with other games.
A lot of the changes look really good, and I agree that the game was likely in need of a clean slate from the weight of years of trying to employ countermeasures against the dominant components of the meta. I also think it’s really cool of them to offer conversion kits because there’s no way they could have made all the old stuff obsolete without a huge uproar.
This still isn’t going to get me back into the game, but I’m interested to watch what happens from here.
Oh, and I think I heard somewhere that they were raising the base MSRP for new ships (small ones) by $5 to $20. That’s a little disappointing, but supposedly manufacturing costs have also gone up. It’s still probably a decent price for a pre-painted mini of that size compared to other games, but it’s hard not to lump it in with FFG/Asmodee trying to raise the profitability of an already hugely profitable game for them.
Yeah, the price bump.
Now, also to be fair, they’ve gone back over some of those early ships and redone the molds. The X-wing articulated the s-foils, the Y-wing is just a straight up better mold, see the picture up thread I linked, and has a rumored rotating turret.
But yeah, it’s still a big jump. Though prices hadn’t changed in the 6 years the game has been out, and so you had to expect at some point…
But supposedly they’re also making every card available to every faction going forward, which would take a big chunk of the sting out. No longer would an imperial player need to buy the scum autorhrusters pack.
If they hold to that.
For those interested in something similar to x-wing but (much) cheaper, I recommend checking out Gaslands by Osprey Games. It’s car combat instead of spaceships (which is equally cool, IMO), but it uses a similar movement system with templates. Since it’s played with toy cars,it’s dirt cheap to get into. Also, since t doesn’t use special ability cards, you don’t have silly metagame cheese. It’s really cool!
I’m not 100% sure how that even works. Are they planning to always put the same upgrade cards in every ship, regardless of faction? Are they going to stick to point adjustments and errata as they only tools to make adjustments for the sake of the meta?
And yes, the molds definitely are looking cooler. I’d be curious to find out if they actually cost them significantly more to make. Presumably there’s been some advancements in manufacturing in those 6 (!) years as well.
We flat don’t know. Speculation time: upgrade cards will be more wave based, rather than ship based. So instead of Autothrusters being limited to a single ship for the scum faction for 2+ years, it’ll also show up in the same wave craft for Imps and Rebels.
That’s one speculative possibility. Which would naturally lead me to conclude they probably create more faction locked upgrades, to help with their stated goal of faction identities.
This is not the X-Wing I was looking for.
Weirdly all these changes have made me more interested in playing the game than I have been for several years. Well except the price increase and the $140 I’ll have to spend to make most (but not all) of my small collection of existing models playable.
Hitler reacts to X-Wing 2.0:
edit: Sorry if some folks find this meme tired, I’m not gonna lie, I never stop finding it funny if done well.
