Evaluation and Calculation: Gains from trade

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)

Gains from trade

The point cost is the single most important piece of information when evaluating any ship or upgrade.

People may talk about how Obi-Wan is bad because his force runs out too quickly, or how bullseye effects are bad because they rarely trigger, or how the mid-initiative TIE Advanced/x1 pilots are bad because they can't reliably get target locks for Advanced Targeting Computer. They sound very different, but really they're saying the same thing: these ships and upgrades cost too much for their effectiveness.

People may talk about how Tallisan and L'ulo are good because they have a rear turret, or how Hate is good because it bends the rules on 1 force per turn, or how VTG Y-Wings are good because they roll lots of red dice. They sound very different, but really they're saying the same thing: these ships and upgrades are too cheap for their effectiveness.

Once upon a time, there was a pilot with 3 Force. He saw some play but wasn't considered one of the strongest pilots. People usually left him in their binders in favor of his friends. One day, his full loadout got a 5%-10% discount and he now consistently makes top cuts at tournaments. To put that in context, a 10% difference in efficiency is roughly the gap between the 25th and 75th percentile of ships and between the 75th and 97th percentile of ships. His name? Darth Vader. Obi-Wan would love to regenerate multiple force every turn, but that's not what he needs to be viable. He just needs a point cost decrease. (Note Hate was also released at this time, but many players are succeeding with different upgrades on Vader.)

Y-Wings with Veteran Turret Gunner have been part of the game since the beginning, but they saw little success at first. An 11% discount later and people are asking whether the ship is healthy for the game.

These examples show point costs are the single most important factor for determining a ship's strength. The ship with the worst attributes can be wildly overpowered if it's too cheap, and the ship with the best attributes will never see play if it's too expensive. Ships feel satisfying mostly when they can do their job, and the job they need to do depends on how much they cost.

So what does that mean for evaluating ships? What we really care about is bang for the buck: what we get for the points we spend. In other words, we care about efficiency.

If we define efficiency as the ship's effectiveness divided by its point cost, we usually end up with a very small number that's hard to work with. Since we have 200 points in a standard list, let's define efficiency as effectiveness per 200 points:

We can summarize this section as a few guidelines:

• If you are considering whether a ship is strong or weak, you must consider the ship's point cost.
• If you are discussing unreleased content which doesn't have point costs, it's more helpful to discuss how many points the ship or upgrade should cost to be average or strong, rather than only considering the effectiveness of that ship or upgrade.

Come Get Your Armor

At first glance, the efficiency equation seems absolutely useless for people who'd rather play X-Wing than do math for X-Wing 😊. A ship's effectiveness isn't easy to calculate! Fortunately for us non-droid carbon-based lifeforms, there's an easy way to use the efficiency equation to compare ships and evaluate upgrades.

Let's start with upgrades. An upgrade will change a ship's efficiency by increasing both its effectiveness and its point cost:

Thankfully, since most upgrades increase a ship's effectiveness by a percentage, we don't need to calculate the ship's effectiveness! We just need to figure out the percent change in effectiveness and point costs.

By the properties of multiplication, it doesn't matter whether the increase in effectiveness comes from stronger attacks or greater durability (although this may be important for other aspects of list-building). A 20% increase in offense or a 20% increase in durability both increase the ship's effectiveness by 20%.

With this in mind, let's get down to evaluating upgrades. We want something easy to use instead of something precise, so here's a simple "good enough" method:

1. Find what the upgrade does in the list below. Adjust the percent changes by the percent of the time you'll get the benefit.
2. Add all the adjusted percent changes together.
3. Divide this by 2. This is the percent increase in effectiveness (roughly an 90% weight on focus-fire and 10% weight on 1v1 effectiveness).
4. Divide the cost of the upgrade by the ship's cost. This is the percent increase in cost.
5. Take the increase in effectiveness and subtract the increase in cost. This is very roughly the increase in efficiency, although this will be imprecise for large changes in effectiveness and cost.

Value of attack upgrades:

• 2 -> 3 attack: +80% effectiveness
• 3 -> 4 attack: +50% effectiveness
• unmodded -> single-die mod (force or 1 reroll): +60%, +55%, +50% effectiveness for 2, 3, and 4-attack
• unmodded -> one mod (focus or TL): +80% effectiveness
• one mod -> one mod + single-die mod: +30%, +25%, +20% effectiveness for 2, 3, and 4-attack
• one mod -> double mod: +40% effectiveness

Value of defense upgrades:

• Extra hull/shields: percent of previous total hull/shields
• 0 -> 1 agility (assume no mods): +17% effectiveness
• 1 -> 2 agility (assume no mods): +18% effectiveness
• 2 -> 3 agility (assume no mods): +20% effectiveness
• Unmodded -> calc: +15%, +25%, +30% for 1, 2, and 3 agility
• Unmodded -> focus: +15%, +27%, +40% for 1, 2, and 3 agility
• Unmodded -> evade: +25%, +33%, +40% for 1, 2, and 3 agility
• Unmodded -> calc+evade: +30%, +40%, +50% for 1, 2, and 3 agility
• Unmodded -> focus+evade: +30%, +45%, +55% for 1, 2, and 3 agility

There's a bunch of shortcuts here so this method gives you an imprecise answer, but the important thing is it's easy to use and it's usually close enough. These are also rough numbers based on some assumptions about the meta and 2 attacks received per round, but they should be pretty reasonable.

If you care about precision, then for step 2, multiply (1 + the percent changes) together and subtract 1 at the end instead of simply adding the percent changes together. For step 5, divide (1 + total percent increase in effectiveness) by (1 + percent increase in cost) and subtract 1 afterwards for the percent change in efficiency.

Example 1: Suppose we're looking at Advanced Optics on an RZ-2 A-Wing. The benefit of Advanced Optics for a 2-attack ship is probably lower than adding a single-die mod to the ship (especially at Range 1), so let's put it around 24%. We'll say the A-Wing probably gets focus on attack about 2/3 of the time. That puts the increase in effectiveness at 18%. Divide by 2 for focus fire, and we're at 9%. If Advanced Optics costs less than 9% of the A-Wing pilot's cost, then it improves the ship's efficiency when taken.

Example 2: Consider the Delta 7-B configuration on a Jedi Knight or other pilot without support abilities. Going from 2 to 3 attack is +80% effectiveness, going from 3 to 2 agility is -20% effectiveness, and the 2 extra shields is +50% effectiveness for a 4-health ship. Adding it all up, we have a +110% increase in effectiveness, or +55% after dividing by 2 for focus fire. If the Delta 7-B configuration costs less than 55% of the pilot's cost, then it improves the ship's efficiency when taken.

Ships with support abilities are tricky because the value of support abilities usually don't scale with attack upgrades. You'll have to reduce the effectiveness increase of attack upgrades by your best guess at the fraction of the ship's value the support abilities represent. To evaluate support abilities, you can figure out how valuable it'd be as an upgrade for the ship you're supporting, and then discount it by some fraction because it requires both ships to be alive (I currently discount the value of support abilities by a third).

Upgrades that improve a ship's maneuverability are also tricky. The best way to think about it would be to guess how many more shots the upgrade would let your ship take or avoid as a percentage of . As a baseline, you can expect a max of 14 rounds in a standard timed game with 8-10 rounds where at least one ship is shooting.

That one's garbage

We can compare ships using the same process. Treat one ship as the baseline and upgrade it until it turns into the second ship. Find the list of differences between the two ships, add up the total percent change in effectiveness, and compare that to the percent difference in point costs.

It's important not to use the official point cost for things like Hull Upgrade to value differences in statistics. There's no guarantee the official point costs properly reflect the value of those upgrades for that ship. For example, Hull Upgrade costs the same for an Academy Pilot and Soontir Fel, but there's no way Hull Upgrade is worth the same on both ships.

The most important thing is to pick an appropriate benchmark. If you use one of the most efficient ships in the game as your benchmark, then of course most ships are going to look bad compared to it. Pick the benchmark to suit your purpose. If you want to find ships that are competitive, then compare it to other ships that do well in tournaments. If you want to see if a ship is good for casual play, then compare it to an average ship.

Stay Tuned!

We've covered evaluating upgrades and ships for efficiency in this article, but we glossed over the components of ship efficiency so far. How do we tell how durable a ship is or how much damage it deals? We'll cover these topics in the next few articles!

Evaluation and Calculation: Heroes on that mission

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)

There were heroes on that mission

According to TV Tropes, the first principle of Mook Chivalry is to attack one at a time (disclaimer: I claim no responsibility for any time lost to that website). Unfortunately, chivalry is dead in Star Wars. Once a swarm gets all their guns on target and someone misreads Crossfire Formation as Deadman's Switch, action heroes quickly turn into dead heroes.

In the last article, we talked about rating ships in a 1v1. Isolated matchups happen in X-Wing, so we do want to rate ships in these scenarios. However, we also need to rate ships in the far more common situations where multiple ships are shooting on the same turn. Two 3-attack ships with 4 health each is roughly a fair matchup for one 3-attack ship with 8 health if they attack one at a time. If they attack at the same time, the two 4-health ships deals about 50% more damage than the single 8-health ship!

This leads us to a common guideline for list-building:

• For the same points, adding a second copy of a ship is better than doubling the effectiveness of the first ship.

Of course, this rule of thumb conflicts with some earlier ones. You want to put good upgrades on strong ships that already survive a long time and dish out good damage, but upgrading one ship gets less and less effective in focus-fire situations. Play-testing or a math model can help you figure out when it's best to stack a ship with upgrades and when it's better to spend your points on more ships.

Lanchester's Square Law

To deal with this issue, we need to do something to the effectiveness formula so multiple small ships are rated better than one big ship with the same total health. We can do that by shrinking the value of big ships more than the value of small ships.

Normally, I'd reach into my bag of math tools and pick a well-known function that shrinks big numbers more than small numbers. In this case, someone has done the hard work and found exactly what function to use! If we had a really large number of ships that can focus fire each other, Lanchester's Square Law tells us to take the square root of their 1v1 effectiveness to get their effectiveness in focus-fire situations. Through simulation, MajorJuggler found that the small number of ships in X-Wing means we shouldn't quite take the square root, we take the 1.85th root instead (shrinks numbers less than the square root does, but it's pretty close).

Taking the nth root is the same as raising to the exponent 1/n, so if you look in the spreadsheet, you'll see something like this equation:

If you're not familiar with square roots or exponents, the important thing to remember is we're shrinking big numbers more than small numbers. Here's what the 1.85th root looks like. If we plug in 1, it stays the same. Plugging in 4 (3 higher than the previous number) gets us a number slightly larger than 2, and we have to plug in 9 (5 higher than the previous number) to get a number slightly larger than 3. The larger the number we plug in, the more it gets shrunk.

It's dangerous to go alone!

You can't have focus fire without having multiple ships, and multiple ships introduces a limitation of the effectiveness model. Our measure of ship effectiveness is pretty good when the squad is just multiple copies of the same ship. It's less reliable when some of the ships are tankier or more fragile than others.

Here's some more guidelines:

• It's not ideal to mix tanky ships with glass cannon ships in the same list.
• Generally, you want to kill your opponent's glass cannon ships first and leave their tanky ships for the end.

Sloane swarms are a great examples of lists which take advantage of these guidelines. TIE Interceptors and TIE Strikers are on the glass-cannon end of the spectrum, while ships that carry Sloane are normally tanks. However, Sloane is a powerful offensive support ability that flips its carrier's profile toward offense, and as such, all the ships in the Sloane swarm have similar offense-to-durability profiles.

Stay tuned!

We've learned about how to think about a ship's effectiveness, but that's only half of what's needed to evaluate ships. Since X-Wing is a game with a points budget, we also care about the ship's point cost. In the next article, we'll talk about point costs and efficiency and how to evaluate ships and upgrades.

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!

Hot Takes Abusing Chess Annotations: Jan 2019 Points Adjustment

!! = OP, ! = tournament-viable, +? = not sure

Loosely-ordered. Specific pilot details sometimes missing. Not all upgrade combos are considered. Assumes balanced initiative meta. Based on incomplete! version 1.5 of ship efficiency model. Use at your own risk :).

Faction Tier List (based on top lists?):

Scum!!, Rebels!!, Empire!, Resistance?!, First Order?

Rebels: 

Y-Wings w/ Dorsal!!, ARC Norra!! (+Leia!!!?), Luke Skywalker!!, Wedge Antilles!!, Attack Shuttles w/ Dorsal!!?

E-Wings (not Corran, no Torps)!, Ten Nunb w/ Advanced Sensors!, Kanan/Hera VCX w/ Dorsal!, other ARCs! (+Leia!!?), Warden K-Wing! (+Leia!!?), Blue/Heff U-Wing! (+Leia!!?), Blue Squadron X-Wing!, Bandit Z-95!, E-Wings w/ Torps!?, Fat Han!?

Empire: 

OGP w/ Admiral Sloane!!, Colonel Jendon!!, Maarek Stele!!, Major Vermeil!!, Darth Vader!!, Imdaar TIE Phantom!!

TIE Phantoms (no Juke?)!, Whisper w/ Juke!, other TIE Reapers! (+Sloane!!), Duchess!, Deathrain!, Captain Jonus!?, other TIE Advanced!?, TIE Swarm!?, Turr Phennir!?

Scum: 

Drea Renthal!!!!, Scurrg w/ Dorsal!!, Quadjumper!!, Captain Seevor!!, Y-Wing w/ Dorsal!!, G-1A!!

Guri!, Kimogila!, Asajj!, IG-88 (not A)! (Tribots!!?)

Resistance: 

L'ulo!!, Tallissan!!

Rey!, Wexley + Composure!, Chewbacca!, Lt. Bastian!

First Order: 

Upsilon Shuttles!!

Scorch, Avenger!, Recoil!, Quickdraw!

My thoughts on the Hyperspace format

FFG introduced the Hyperspace format as the premier competitive format going into 2019. It features a limited list of legal ships and upgrades, currently limited to 2.0 releases. Overall, I think the Hyperspace format is the right way to go, but the format is risky and can potentially produce worse metas. If you're strongly against Hyperspace, I think there are some strong reasons to support it. If you're strongly in favor of Hyperspace, I think there are some reasons to be cautious.

The restricted Hyperspace format is needed to make the game accessible to new players. Asking new players to buy out-of-print ships at some ridiculous mark-up on Ebay or shell out hundreds of dollars at one time for an exiting player's collection is not a reasonable way to build a competitive game. It's disappointing to not be able to use my full collection more often (I think there will continue to be some Extended events), but that's a price I'm willing to pay to make sure the game continues to grow and attract new players.

Some people seem to be hyping Hyperspace up as the answer for all the meta woes. I want to caution against these expectations. It's certainly easier to balance a smaller list of pilots and upgrades. FFG seems to have severe headcount limitations, so focusing their limited resources on a smaller card pool could be what's needed to create a balanced and open meta. However, a restricted format doesn't automatically create more balanced metas. Anyone who's played Magic: the Gathering or any other game with rotating formats knows this from experience. In fact, without a points adjustment, Hyperspace would probably be dominated by Marauder-Han Boba, Luke and Wedge, maybe TIE swarms, and perhaps some Resistance or First Order options. FFG will have to put in the work to keep this format balanced, especially with new releases (which isn't confirmed but will likely be Hyperspace-legal).

A smaller card pool could actually make the competitive play experience much worse. For example, suppose 10% of pilots are overpowered. For a format with 300 pilots, that means 30 pilots are viable at the top levels of competition. You can probably find at least one list you enjoy playing that has reasonable matchups against the best tournament lists (this has been my experience for most of 1.0 and the extended 2.0 format). For a format with 100 pilots, that means only 10 pilots are tournament-viable, and these don't have to be evenly-distributed across factions or archetypes. Your favorite faction might not have enough strong pilots to fill out even one tournament list. Your favorite archetype might not have any strong pilots in it. Your favorite archetype might only have a couple strong pilots which you don't like. You're less likely to find a list you enjoy playing that has reasonable matchups against the best tournament lists.

The solution would be to balance the game so more pilots are tournament-viable. If the top 30% of pilots are strong in the 100-pilot format, then we're back to the same number of viable tournament lists as the 300-pilot format with fewer traps. Even better, the gap between a strong pilot and an average one could be smaller. But again, this won't happen naturally; FFG will have to do the work to broaden the field of competitively-viable ships.

Part of the risk is the long 6-month time frame between rotations and point cost adjustments. On one hand, stability is good for creativity. I'm not motivated to list-build when I know the point costs will all change in a month. On the other hand, if there's a bad meta, it could take a long time for it things to change. These risks could be reduced if FFG committed more frequent reviews (maybe bi-monthly) for emergency point adjustments and/or bans. These reviews should be extremely limited and changes should only be made to the most egregious offenders. Most of these reviews shouldn't produce any changes, but having that safety net would go a long way to reducing the concerns of having a lopsided meta.

Overall, I think Hyperspace is the way to go simply to keep the game accessible. I just hope FFG puts in the work to keep an open meta with a restricted card pool.

Some remaining long-term concerns with X-Wing 2.0

X-Wing 2.0 is lots of fun and much better than the original edition. With the first point cost adjustment, I'm hoping to see some of the stronger options nerfed and more viable tournament-level options. Still, while a point adjustment can fix a lot of problems, there are some remaining systemic issues with X-Wing 2.0. These issues limit the design space and create list-building traps, and fixing these will require something beyond simple point adjustments.

There isn't enough variation in attack values

A 2-dice primary deals about half as much damage as a 3-dice primary, ranging from two-thirds against 0 green dice to one-third against 3 green dice with focus. A 4-dice primary deals about 60% more damage than a 3-dice primary.

These massive gaps between the available attack options severely limit the available design space. There are three stats to adjust a ship's durability, and extra points of agility only create differences of 15%-20% in average damage taken. There's only one stat which affects offense, and with rare exceptions, it can only take on two values.

As a result, ships feel "samey" on offense. Ships fly and take damage very differently, but without further upgrades, it's very difficult to make ships hit harder without making them too strong. I could never get over how the intimidating Decimator hits just as hard as the cute Mist Hunter or tiny Attack Shuttle. The mechanics simply don't fit the fantasy.

Worse, the low damage output of 2-attack ships makes it very hard to build lists around them. They're almost always relegated to being support ships. A list with only 2-attack ships can even auto-lose to tanky ships like Luke or Boba Fett before the game starts. Expensive ships with 3 attack suffer from similar problems where they can't put out enough damage to justify their point cost.

This is in theory possible to fix, but there were several systemic options that could have been implemented for the new edition that are now difficult to implement. Attempts to fix this now will create mandatory upgrades, confusing new players and forcing all players to buy (possibly multiples of) specific expansions.

The upgrade model is wrong

The benefit of upgrades depends on the ship's strength and durability. For example, a tanky ship gets to use an offensive upgrade for more turns, and a defensive upgrade is more valuable on a ship with higher damage output. The cost of an upgrade is a flat number. This is a big problem.

And no, variable costing is unlikely to fix this problem. Shield Upgrade is much better on Soontir Fel than on an Academy Pilot and it's better on Luke Skywalker than on Wedge Antilles. For variable costing to solve this problem, the cost of upgrades probably needs to be a percent of the ship's base cost, but this is too cumbersome for list-building.

This mismatch creates two problems. First, ships of different strengths can take the same upgrade. As an example, consider Shield Upgrade on a Blue Squadron Escort X-Wing compared to on Wedge Antilles. There are two approaches FFG can take and both create list-building traps. Shield Upgrade could be balanced for Wedge Antilles but too expensive for the Blue Squadron Escort. Outside of special synergies, this effectively makes Shield Upgrade a trap for any ship with a damage:durability ratio worse than Wedge Antilles. Alternatively, Shield Upgrade could be balanced for the Blue Squadron Escort and ships that make better use of the upgrade would pay a cost for their modification slot. This makes Shield Upgrade mandatory on those ships, which again creates a list-building trap.

The second problem is this mismatch encourages ships to either be run with no upgrades (outside of special synergies) or loaded with upgrades. Outside of dice caps, upgrades not only scale with the base ship's effectiveness but also with other upgrades. If you just gave your ship an upgrade to make it hit harder, then a defensive upgrade protects more value. If you make your ship harder to kill, it now gets more use out of an offensive upgrade. If upgrades are balanced for fat ships, they'll be too expensive to throw as a single upgrade on a ship. If upgrades are balanced to be the only upgrade on a ship, then fat ships will get too much from them.

It's important to note this isn't just a problem where some upgrades are stronger on some ships than others. For example, Juke is especially strong on the TIE Phantom and Whisper in particular. I don't think it's ideal, but it's not a big deal to make Juke a mandatory upgrade for them. This problem is systemic and affects all upgrades across all ships.

There is a relatively easy fix. Ships and pilots could get a flat discount or premium for all upgrades (similar to the 1.0 Vaksai title). For example, the Academy Pilot could get a 1-point discount on all upgrades while Dash Rendar must pay a 2-point premium on all upgrades. This means naked Dash can be balanced without making him a monster with upgrades, and those same upgrades can also be balanced on weaker ships. Costing each individual upgrade differently for each ship is too complicated, but the added complexity of this system is low enough so list-building remains feasible.

Effects that have wildly different values across matchups are impossible to balance

Suppose the meta is 50% list A and 50% list B, and an upgrade provides 2 points of value against list A and 42 points of value against list B. How much should that upgrade cost?

22 points sounds like the obvious answer, but there's a big problem with this. Against list A, taking the upgrade gives you a 20-point disadvantage and you're probably going to lose. Against list B, taking the upgrade gives you a 20-point advantage and you're probably going to win. By costing the upgrade at its average value, the game has turned into a coin flip decided by the pairings.

The solution is to overcost the upgrade, but this has its own problems. Let's say the upgrade is costed at 32 points. Now it becomes a trap. Someone might take this upgrade and effectively put himself at a disadvantage against the field. Even worse, someone playing list B might run into that player and take a random loss from their 10-point disadvantage.

The best thing to do with these upgrades is to make them so expensive they're effectively removed them from the game. High-enough point costs can be enough to discourage even newbies from taking it, thus also preventing random auto-losses from the pairings.

Thankfully, most effects don't have quite such a high swing in effectiveness across different matchups so this problem is more limited, even when those effects can be taken in multiples. Low amounts of matchup-dependent power is fine as long as in-game decisions can still overcome it.

Unfortunately, FFG has shown no fear of creating effects that differ drastically in power based on matchups: see Trajectory Simulator, pre-maneuver repositioning, and both versions of Rebel Luke Skywalker. Ahhav is a more recent example of this, although his gap in effectiveness is only ~10 points. The problem of large initiative bids and first player deciding games is a result of this systemic issue.

FFG's attitude seems to be to throw out cool effects and sort them out later with point cost adjustments, but I hope they realize some things are extremely difficult to balance through points and to stay away from them in the future.

Ship Efficiency Model: Best and Unseen Ships by Faction

I've been working on a Ship Efficiency model, and the first version is ready for release. I don't think it's perfect, but I'm at the point where I need some outside eyes to take a look at this and give suggestions. You can find the spreadsheet here. If you're interested in what the model does, you can read the summary here. Feel free to also make a copy of the spreadsheet (File -> Make a Copy) so you can dig into the calculations and/or change some assumptions.

If you need a clickbait title to get you through some exposition, you'll never guess the galaxy's best TIE Interceptor pilot! :)

(EDIT: I tried making the images bigger so they're easier to read on mobile. Apologies for how they overflow the sidebar on a PC, but the clarity is probably more important!)

As a quick introduction, I model the value of each ship in three situations, taking into account almost everything about the ships including their actions and dials. I compare these ships to the benchmark 65th percentile ships in three categories:

• Joust Efficiency is the ship's efficiency in focus-fire situations where repositioning isn't useful (e.g. your other ships will still be in arc).
• Focus Fire with Repositioning (FFwR) efficiency is the ship's efficiency in focus-fire situations where the ship's maneuverability and repositioning abilities can let them survive to make more attacks by avoiding arcs.
• 1v1 Efficiency is the ship's efficiency in end-game or isolated situations and includes the bonus for repositioning.

Focus fire situations value multiple ships over one ship: two 3-attack ships with 4 health each are better than one 3-attack ship with 8 health because they attack twice.

I use the three efficiency values to calculate each ship's balanced point cost, and the discount is the difference between the balanced point cost and the ship's official point cost. Right now, I have 80% of the weight being placed on Focus Fire with Repositioning with the other two receiving 10% of the weight.

(Quick note: Using an equal weight of 0.33 on all three categories also seems to give pretty reasonable balanced point costs. E-Wings with Proton Torps end up with higher point costs, which is desirable. It also values pre-maneuver arc-dodgers a bit lower; for example, it would say Guri's fairly-costed.)

Here are the main items the model doesn't handle well so you can adjust for them in your head:

1. It doesn't handle the flexibility of focus tokens. Ships with low agility and evade and ships with single calculate and target lock may be slightly overvalued.
2. It's not great at modeling attacks which require a target lock. I use a hack to address this issue, but low initiative ships may not have a large enough penalty compared to mid-initiative ships.
3. Even when I exponentially discount ship durability, the model seems to undervalue front-loaded damage. For instance, it recommends both the E-Wing with Proton Torps and the VCX-100 should cost under 67 points.
4. Keep in mind squad efficiency is different from an individual ship's efficiency. If you pair glass cannon ships with tanky ships, your squad efficiency will differ wildly based on which your opponent attacks first.

While this model is grounded in some objective numbers, play experience, and tournament results, it requires many assumptions and judgment calls. Don't think of this as the literal truth, but rather as a consistent metric that I think can be used to value ships. Definitely play around with the numbers and feel free to use assumptions you think are more reasonable. You have my personal permission to play ships with low numbers as long as you're having fun, and you're not a bad person if you only play ships with the highest numbers.

Benchmark ships

It's helpful to see what the ships are compared to before we go into the factions. I'll focus mostly on the Focus Fire with Repositioning efficiency in the later sections, but first, let's take a look at some ships the model believes to be correctly costed against the benchmark of the 65th-percentile ship.

Conveniently, the model says the generic T-65 X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Firespray are all appropriately costed. Boba Fett without the Marauder/Han combo, Duchess, and Attack Shuttle Hera with a Dorsal Turret are also benchmark ships. I had the model weigh Focus Fire with Repositioning efficiency most heavily when calculating balanced points, so these ships are all close to the 65th-percentile there but can differ wildly in the other efficiency metrics.

Best Ships: Rebels

At first glance, Rebels have several extremely efficient ships including the four most efficient ships in the game. Why are they under-performing in tournaments?

A closer look reveals their problems. First, their top pilots are often repeats. If Rebel players could use Legends cloning technology to bring three Luukes or five Saabines, they'd probably win more games (amusingly, Rebels still wouldn't have good tournament results since these players would count as Scum). Second, Sabine and Luke are dependent on arc-dodging in a balanced initiative meta. With 25% of ships in tournaments having initiative 5 (often with large bids) and 15% having initiative 6, their arc-dodging abilities become less valuable.

The list of efficient Rebel ships is rounded out by the other Rebel standout Wedge Antilles and a bunch of problematic ships. The Sheathipedes are efficient, but have few ideal support targets. The other Attack Shuttles are good but face a different kind of cost constraint (the one in the real world).  The ARC-170s are poor squadmates for Sabine and Luke because of their mismatched damage-to-durability ratios. They don't have enough damage output to punish opponents that focus on Sabine and Luke first. Thane Kyrell is the best of the rest. The list of good Rebel options is noticeably shorter than other factions.

Rebel's best bet might be to stuff Luke, Sabine, Wedge, and a good fourth ship (Thane) into a list. Pairing Luke and Sabine with Shara Bey and a Sheathipede is another potential option. Adding Selfless on an ARC-170 might also be enough to make them good partners for the more fragile Luke and Sabine.

Best Ships: Imperials

The buffers Captain Jonus and Colonel Jendon top the list with their best squadmates. They're still in the top 25 if you're crazy like a fox and take a naked Captain Jonus or bring Colonel Jendon with Sloane and five naked TIE Bombers. Even better, the best squadmate for these ships, the TIE Bomber (with or without Barrage Rockets), is also extremely efficient.

The popular Imperial aces also show up: Whisper, Redline, Soontir, Vader, and the other Juke Phantoms round out the top 50. It's no surprise these ships often place highly in tournaments. Other popular ships include the TIE Reapers and Lieutenant Sai.

Turr Phennir is the biggest surprise (we've answered the clickbait question!). The model says he's one of the strongest ships in a balanced initiative meta. He's probably the biggest victim of today's top-heavy meta: his efficiency drops to 2% below the benchmark when 40% of ships are above initiative 4. Keep an eye out for him if the popular high-initiative ships get nerfed. Saber Squadron Ace is a similar but less extreme story.

Secret Service Iden Versio shows her value when she's protecting Madam President Howlrunner. Note Howlrunner herself is nowhere on the list (she's -4%), and Iden's also much less efficient without a VIP to protect.

Finally, Night Beast reprises his early 1.0 role as a cheap and efficient filler. He's less of a damage threat compared to several of the other TIE Fighter aces, but he's much more likely to stick around. You might want to give him a try next time you need a filler ship.

Best Ships: Scum

The usual suspects come early in the line-up. Quadjumpers, Escape Crafts, Drea, Guri, Marauder/Han Boba Fett, and Palob all top the list. 4-LOM would probably be a bit higher if it was easier to properly value his ability; he's a top-35 ship with Advanced Sensors and the title if he cleared his stress every round without passing it to any ship, and he's still efficient naked if his ability was just worth 3 points.

Unkar Plutt seems to be the best Quadjumper by far even with a conservative estimate of his ability, but it seems like few people take him over the cheaper generics. I'm wondering if higher initiative is a big handicap for Quadjumpers (I'm currently not taking initiative into account for the tractor beam). Quadjumpers are also big targets, so maybe the extra points aren't worthwhile for a ship that will be focus fired early.

The biggest surprise is probably Han Solo, especially since he might be more efficient without the title than with it. After some initial hype, it seems like Scum Han couldn't overcome his default 2-dice attack and mostly disappeared from the top tables. That said, my assumptions may be generous, and I don't add any value for being able to dock an escape craft.

One last thing I want to highlight is the Bounty Hunter with the Marauder/Han combo showing up at #45. As we saw earlier, Boba Fett and the generic Firespray are pretty fair. I think we can all agree it's Marauder/Han that's too strong. I hope Boba Fett won't face any direct nerfs despite his strong showing in tournaments.

When Your Faction Identity Sucks

Rebels were advertised as the faction of friends helping each other out. Well, part of the reason Rebels are having so much trouble is because their support ships are almost all bad.

It's a bad sign when taking upgrade so you can use your pilot ability makes your ship worse. Rebels do have some efficient ships with coordinate, but so do all the other factions. Their best non-coordinate support ship (ARC Garven) is highly unreliable.

But maybe the buff targets are really good so the support can be worse (even though this doesn't really work)?

Well, there goes that idea. Shara Bey and Edrio Two-Tubes are decent when supported, but not enough to make up for having to bring a wildly inefficient support ship.

It's no surprise Rebels are weak. I'd expect significant buffs to all of these support ships and at least a 1-point cost reduction for Perceptive Co-Pilot.

Beyond the lackluster support ships,

Where's the TIE Swarm?

The TIE Swarm had lots of hype before the new edition launched, but they haven't seen much play afterwards.

The model suggests most TIE Fighters are appropriately costed or slightly overcosted. They might actually be fine since the model doesn't seem to value up-front burst damage as highly as it should. Why doesn't the TIE Swarm see any play?

I think we all know the answers to that question. First, the top tables are filled with much stronger ships. Second, they have to compete against better swarms. We've already seen how efficient Jonus, Jendon, and Drea are. The Sloane swarms have equally average TIE Interceptors and TIE Strikers, but these glass cannons get the most value out of Admiral Sloane's Biggs effect on a tanky ship. Finally, the TIE Swarm suffers the most from Trajectory Simulator, something which is not in the model.

I love the looks of a TIE Swarm on the board, and hopefully the first round of buffs and nerfs will bring these back into popularity.

Jumpmaster Woes

I have to eat some crow here. I never thought the 2.0 Jumpmaster was great, but I thought it might be decent. Well, it's not. To be fair, I don't give the Jumpmaster with the title any credit for its mobile arc. Still, rotating the arc requires taking a stress and the Jumpmaster's green maneuvers are not ideal so it's not worth that many points. Scum has a lot of good options, but the Jumpmaster isn't one of them.

The Slumber of Fat Turrets

Fat turrets were too strong in X-Wing 1.0. In the transition, they lost half their arcs and all of their good action-efficiency upgrades. Their current state is not pretty.

The Scum Falcon's OK (although I'm not sure they qualify as "fat" turrets), and Lando in the Rebel Falcon is the closest other ship to matching the benchmark. The rest are extremely weak and it's no surprise they don't see much play.

These ships will probably see some buffs, but more importantly, they'll also improve when better upgrades are released. Fat turrets should have their day in the sun again soon.



Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this introduction. Feel free to check out the spreadsheet and let me know if you have any suggestions for improving it!