Evaluation and Calculation: What is best in X-Wing?

How do we decide whether a ship is strong or weak? In this series of article, I'll describe how I evaluate ships. The goal is to keep things as non-technical as possible and focus on tips you can use to help you evaluate ships.

Since my Ship Efficiency Model is a reflection of how I evaluate ships, these articles will also explain how it works and what it looks at. You can always find the latest version linked at the beginning of this page.

Evaluation and Calculation series index:
- What is best in X-Wing? (1v1 effectiveness)
- Heroes on that mission (Focus fire effectiveness)
- Gains from trade (Efficiency)
- It's time for action (Actions)
- Stayin' alive (Durability)
- Dealing the damages (Damage)
- Dial me up (Maneuver dials and firing arcs)
- If you can dodge a wrench... (Arc-dodging)

What is best in X-Wing?

That is good! We just need to fly well and roll well, and it's a lot easier to fly well and roll well when we have strong ships. How do we tell if a ship is strong or not?

For hard questions like this, it's often best to start with the simplest scenario and make it more complex as needed to cover different situations. The simplest scenario would be comparing two ships in a 1v1 without any sort of arc-dodging. How can we tell which ship is likely to win?

X-Wing is a game about crushing your opponent's ships (figuratively, not literally!). If your ships couldn't deal any damage, you're probably going to lose. So, our ship rating system probably has something to do with damage output.

Of course, ships deal no damage when they're dead. If we want to describe a ship's total damage output (let's call this the ship's effectiveness) in a 1v1, we can use an equation like this:

In other words, the ship's effectiveness is its total damage output over its lifespan, which is the number of rounds it shoots multiplied by the damage it deals per round.

Damage output also includes support abilities which buff your squad's damage output. It sounds obvious, but one application of this tip is that support upgrades are better on tanky ships. Drea Renthal is better than Howlrunner mainly because she's harder to kill, so her friends get more uses of her buff.

If you weren't sure how to rate ships, this is a great place to start. Try to imagine how much damage the ship will do (through their own attacks and through buffing your other ships) before it explodes. That's the value of the ship.

We can make that our first guideline:

• Rate ships by their total damage contribution in an average game.

The power of multiplication
That brings us to our second set of guidelines. We've not only described how effective a ship is, we've also described how it changes. The value of giving a ship one extra round of survival and shooting is how much damage it deals that round, and the value of giving a ship one extra damage per round is the number of rounds it shoots.

So here's our guideline:

• Effects that increase a ship's durability are better on ships with higher damage output (whether individually or through support abilities).
• Effects that increase damage output are better on more durable ships.

Shield Upgrade may cost the same on an Academy Pilot TIE Fighter as it does on an Alpha Squadron Pilot TIE Interceptor, but I think we all know which of the two we'd rather have it on.

Want to know why Luke Skywalker in the X-Wing is so good? His force and ability increases both the number of turns he survives and how much damage he deals every turn. If we just throw him headfirst into a bunch of 1v1 fights, the combined effect of his force and ability is he'd deal more than twice the damage of a Blue Squadron Escort before exploding!

A quick review of algebra gives us another guideline. Remember this equation when you learned how to factor in grade school?

This equation says multiplication gives you a bigger result if the two numbers are equal than if the two numbers are skewed in one direction. In detail, the equation says multiplying a number by itself (that's x-squared) gives you a bigger result (you have to subtract 1 from x-squared) than if you multiplied a slightly larger number by a slightly smaller number (that's the (x+1)(x-1)).

Hey, our equation for effectiveness multiplies two numbers together! That leads to our next guideline:

• Ships that are balanced in survivability and damage output are generally more effective than glass cannons or tanks.

An X-Wing might be an example of a more balanced ship, a TIE Striker is a glass cannon, and a TIE Defender is a tank. Obviously more durability is better than less durability so the TIE Defender is more effective than the X-Wing, but it really wishes it could have more damage output. Even a small increase in the TIE Defender's damage per turn adds up over those many rounds it survives!

X-Wing is a dice spreadsheet positioning game

X-Wing is a game about positioning, so a ship's dial and arc-dodging is important. I'll talk about these more in future articles. The maneuver dials talk is especially messy and awkward so let's leave that for when we're older.

How can we fit arc-dodging into our effectiveness model? When a ship arc-dodges, it gets extra "free" attacks while not taking damage. The easiest way to think about arc-dodging is to treat it as avoiding a certain percent of attacks. With that in mind, we can add arc-dodging to our equation for effectiveness:

With that in mind, here's a quick guideline for evaluating arc-dodging capabilities:

• Evaluate arc-dodging capabilities as an increase the ship's survivability.

An in-depth discussion about arc-dodging is best saved for future articles. For now, we see repositioning is better on better ships. It's much better to get an extra round of a 3-die attacker than an extra round of a 2-die attacker, and it's more frustrating to catch and kill a durable arc-dodger than a fragile one.

Stay tuned!

We've learned to how to evaluate ships in 1v1 situations. However, X-Wing allows for focus fire. How does that change how we should evaluate ships? Find out on the next episode of Evaluation and Calculation!