Star Trek Attack Wing: Literally play X-Wing Instead

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Star Trek Attack Wing: Literally play X-Wing Instead

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

I keep looking at Star Wars Armada and keep thinking that it would have made a much better system for modelling Star Trek fights that the flightpath system ever could. I must admit that i haven't played STAW but my basis of Star Trek combat is Starfleet Command, and in that game the ships don't move like zippy fighters, they move like ponderous capital ships.

There are so many things that work extremely well in Armada for a Star Trek-like combat:
- Multiple shield facings!
- Engineering commands, concentrating firepower, going faster/slower/turning sharper!
- Multiple fields of fire, with the only difference that you have less firepower in certain sections!
- Tiny little fighter squadrons (like in DS9!)/runabouts/shuttles etc
- More swooping flight system

Just seems to work so much better. Hopefully wizkids doesn't get any ideas though.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 17:06

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 06:49

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

It depends where you live really. If you have a buddy to play with and you both play casually, it isn't an issue, but the pool of people playing will necessarily be smaller.

Also I found this on BGG, a review of STAW from the heady days of 2013:

quote:

The game mechanic is outstanding. If Attack Wing had been released before X-Wing, I think you would have lots of people saying "Why can't X-Wing pilots change ships like they do in Attack Wing?"

The answer to that question is 'Because it leads to just one or two captains being on every ship'.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 17:14

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Looks like the thread title was updated :v:

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 13:12

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Well I heard horror stories about how the Mage Knight miniatures game was hosed over as well thanks to bad OP/unbalanced poo poo.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 13:36

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Attestant posted:

I really liked Mage Knight. It was my gateway drug from MtG to miniatures games. But boy did they gently caress it up. It should be a goddamn case study on how to not run a collectibles based game.

Though it did last a fair bit longer than a couple of releases, which was a huge part in why it tanked so bad in the long run. First they made a promise never to introduce set rotation or anything similar. Then they released a bunch of super powerful miniatures as convention exclusives, tournament rewards, or insanely rare chase rates. Think "less than 5 of these exist." in worst cases. The game got pretty huge, with a strong secondary market. But the issue was that the high tier competitive game relied far too much on the super exclusive promos, and the game was really steep to get in to, if you hadn't been there from the start.

So rather than do the sane thing and selectively ban promos and slowly rotate out the old set, they rebooted the game entirely. New rules and factions that immediately obsoleted all of the old sets and promos, and killing the secondary market overnight. The backlash was pretty bad, and the reboot never took off. If it weren't for nerds eating up heroclix to this day the company would have died on the spot.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 13:51

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Basically wizkids are a real example of cargo cult design.

Hey MtG does blind boosters, Mechwarrior: Dark Age can have blind boosters!
Hey X-Wing is popular and we have the Star Trek license, let's make a Star Trek minis game!

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 13:52

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Lest we forget, Wizkids also has some of the worst quality products/painted minis in the business as well.

These, for example, are the painted minis that come with the Mage Knight Board Game (not to be confused with the Mage Knight Miniatures Game):

Heroclix is one of the main reasons why the company is so successful, and also one of the main reasons why people thought that prepainted minis could only have poo poo paint jobs. Then came X-Wing and wow, pre-painted minis can actually look good? Incredible!

Let's have a comparison:

They can't even be bothered to ink the drat ship, it looks like a plastic piece of poo poo

Actually a pretty nice paint job, and this isn't a MacDonald's Effect photo

Not only that, but the material quality of their cards is poo poo, their tokens are poo poo, they can't do inserts worth a drat and also the following:

MikeCrotch posted:

Except the Mage Knight board game, that's the only thing they make that is worth your money (thanks, Vlaada!)

Having said that, they managed to print 2 expansions for the game where:

1. The cards were of a different thickness and sturdiness, so you could physically see which cards were core and which were expansion when looking at a stacked deck
2. Tokens were made that were different colours and sizes to the ones they were supposed to match in the original game

Quality control is not Wizkids strong suit

Wizkids are eternal fuckups and not the endearing kind. There's a reason why I put a warning on the Board Game thread OP not to buy their poo poo (even though the Mage Knight Board Game is beloved by goons).

Tekopo fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Jan 21, 2016

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 14:10

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Tekopo posted:

Otisburg, was the Weyoun/Varel combo ever fixed, because one of my friends that used to play STAW told me about it and it sounds funny as hell.

Basically the weyoun captain allows you to keep any crew that you would need to tap/discard by instead tapping Weyoun instead. Varel was a crew card that allowed you to just outright cancel an enemy attack against the ship, before dice are rolled, without allowing the enemy ship to attack anyone else, as long as you discarded Varel, which thanks to Weyoun you didn't need to do. This is a game where they had to institute a 50 point limit on ships because 2 ship fleets with one souped-up ship were too common

Otisburg posted:

You forgot the punchline. When this was already running buckwild in the pre wave 4 meta they released another guy (on an exclusive prize ship, LOL), that you could sac instead of your captain, so you had this rube Goldberg thing that let you cancel one attack with Varel by saccing him, one more that same turn by disabling Weyoun, and if things were desperate, a third one by finally ditching her for realsies.

The fifty point cap kept you from putting her on any ship worth a drat since she cost double points on anything but one specific tiny, mostly useless ship, but it was mostly falling to the wayside around the time the meta turned almost entirely to Picard and Dukat's Borg Balls.

Oh man they applied so many clunky retroactive "fixes" to thing. My favorite was to retroactively try and turn the word "may" to a "once per game round" keyword, which needed a bunch of exceptions for some things to work right. The "may" ruling prevented you from using Varel to cancel attacks more than once per round.

Jesus Christ that stupid combo. I remember getting into an argument with a TO from another venue playing at mine who insisted that using it meant that another guy had to literally pick up and discard a placed minefield token that overlapped a ship with her because that was his "attack," even though there's nothing to remotely imply her ability can remove minefield tokens already in play.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 15:32

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Also bear in mind that while swarms (cheap ships that you can field a lot of, like tie fighters) were still useful in x-wing, what the gently caress are you gonna do with a whip that has like 2 attack dice and can be one shot by one of the big ship builds?

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 15:35

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

There are relatively few ships which see absolutely no use in tourneys and at least FFG goes back and fixes (even though it's just extra money for them).

As a means of comparison, x-wing has an issue with 2 attack ships being slightly edged out of the meta. I can't even imagine how far below the meta curve 2 attack ships would be in STAW. There is an upcoming ship in x-wing that has a 360 arc radius and in order to upgrade its attack from 2 to 3 it costs 12 points! The Borg sphere has a native 6 attack on 360 and its 38 points :lol:

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 16:43

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Went to my FLGS to play some X-Wing and had a good time, but the funniest thing was the 1-2 shelves were the store has all of its Armada/X-Wing/Flightpath stuff: all of the STAW stuff had been taken off (and kept out of sight, I couldn't see it anyway), and the one/two boxes of D&D attack wing had also been removed. Another FLGS I had been to a day previously had a small stock of X-Wing and absolutely no stock of STAW as well. The FLGS that has enough space for tourneys doesn't even advertise STAW tourneys any more. The only explanation is that STAW is selling gently caress-all stock and it's not financially viable to keep it on display :lol:

STAW vs X-Wing is a prime display that Rules and Balance Matters in a game.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 09:13

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

I don't thing they are ending them: there's still money to be made squeezing out nerds that are invested in Star Trek/D&D

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 08:51

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

It has 10 waves IIRC. You have different colours of dragons, but you get other flying creatures as well. There are also ground troops which was the only thing that actually interested me, but nobody actually played it and it was a Wizkids game so :shrug:

They have released some big dragons as well which look kind of cool: bahamut, tiamat and some huge brass dragon as well.

How did armour work?

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 11:58

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Otisburg posted:

iirc it prevented damage on a per attack/per round? basis, and regenerated at the end of the turn, but there were some attacks that specifically broke it so it didn't function for the rest of the game or until some other effect restored it.

That sounds pretty neat and seems to fit about D&D and ST better than X-Wing in terms of how the mechanisms work. This is what I find infuriating about Wizkids, they can get good rulesets out there (even though yeah, they took the flightpath system from FFG) but all of their other stuff (balancing, tournament structure, card interactions, quality assurance, model design/quality etc) is just shite.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 12:12

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Otisburg posted:

There was ground poo poo, too. Like giants, and trebuchets and poo poo. And I guess you could land and claw at the ground stuff, and some of it could shoot up at the dragons? And there were other flying baddies besides dragons like wyverns and ghosts and pegasii and poo poo. Apparently there are/were 10 waves?

IDK I'm not an expert on the dragon one.

I will say that at least the dragon miniatures mostly looked decent out of the box. There was some actual effort there. Not as good as wangs, but closer to wangs than trekships.

Yeah, some of the dragons were nice, this is Bahamut:

I would actually buy this.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 12:36

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Wizkids have become self-aware, abort, abort!

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 14:11

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

That's just part of the immersion factor of STAW, they want you and your opponent to :technobabble: your way into shaping the rules in a way that is favourable to you. They think of everything. Also the confusion that you feel when reading the rules is the confusion that the characters in Star Trek feel when they find something weird and alien.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 14:22

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Well, for a game like X-wing, it kind of is, because the play testing has to be extensive, time-consuming and expensive in order to achieve balance, and the more ships you add the harder it gets. It's relatively cheap to just come up with a bunch if cards, not even check what is present already (lol @ corborite manuever), package that stuff and release it. X-wing has gaps of at least 4 months if not more between waves, wizkids had 1 month gaps, cause they just had to squeeze that cash cow dry before people wised up. All the extra time spent on X-wing is time spent pay testing and FFG are almost starting to become better at it as time progresses because they have institutional knowledge of their products.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 23:26

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

I would have preferred the directional shields/shield repair, more tactical feel of Armada for a Star Trek game. Having to reinforce certain shields sectors feels very treky to me (mostly because I was a fan of Starfleet Command). As well as that, the different coloured attack dice for Armada fit well with the variety of different weapon types that Star Trek have, what with disruptors, phasers and photon torpedoes, which all could be represented by different dice, much like in Armada you have red for turbolasers, blue for ion cannons and black for ordnance. It would fit so well and even considering that, I still wouldn't want Wizkids to make an Armada-like game.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 10:51

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 11:57

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Otisburg posted:

shield quadrants is pretty common when people try going hog wild with modifying it.

polishing_a_turd.txt

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 13:35

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

I forgot about the :riker:

emote, but it is perfect for this thread. Maybe a mix of that and :techno:

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 13:43

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

He did, wizkids is just like an ex that reminds you of the good times to get you back (but omits reminding you about all the bad, bad times)

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 09:07

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

MikeCrotch posted:

Federation Commander?

"There are now 8 impulses instead of 32" :stonk:

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 11:03

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Yeah going from Starfleet Command, it's basically TOS-era ships with a whole lot of new factions added that don't exist in Star Trek canon. And there isn't any TNG-era stuff at all. I didn't know that they were two different meta-verses so I was pretty confused when I bought SFC. Still, Hydrans own!

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 11:16

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

I love everything about this article. Oh cool, a 1 attack, 2 agility, 3 HP ship with a lovely dial and expensive upgrades, I'm sure that's gonna do well in the meta. Also paying five points for something that will shave either 1/3 or 2/3 of your HP if you use it. In a game with 6 dice 360 turrets. Holy mother of god.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 21:33

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

The end of the article is the best, it basically says "the ship is really loving lovely but im sure you are going to make it work with your pro piloting skills" *does a 3 forward and a sphere blows it up*

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 22:10

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

The Lord of Hats posted:

That ship would be hot garbage in X-wing, and the numbers there are infinitely tighter. What the hell are they doing throwing it into the land of dice bloat?

Maybe if they made it 1 point, so you could just take a hundred shitships and hope that you could eventually plink them down through force of numbers, it would work.

Well you see wizkids uses a highly accurate, scientific formula to calculate points which is much better than the 'random number out of my rear end' of X-wing. To wit:

(1 attack + 2 evade + 3 hull) * 2 = 12 points

this is obviously balanced and furthermore

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 22:28

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Yep, just been released, which is why I got to know about it.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 22:51

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

"...fan favourite Wesley Crusher..."

:eyepop:

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 07:07

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Alright, going through some of the wave 23 stuff, I noticed this article. Now, it's kind of funny that they are just making you buy ships for models that already exist, but that's something that has happened in X-Wing as well.

What I really love is something that I hadn't noticed before and I'm not sure if it is universal, but encapsulates the design philosophy of STAW perfectly. The non-named ship is 22 points, and the named ship has 24 points. But the 24 points doesn't fit The Magic Formula(tm), so just bump up the shields by 1 and now it fits! :downs:

Is this true for all ships? Why isn't the cost of the ability taken into account?

The last thing I noticed about the article is that the ship model on the top banner is backwards. Attention to details!

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 18:26

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Otisburg posted:

Yep! The ship ability has always been "free." On ships with no shields, the cost is the same between the named, and the blank generic.

So in those situations, why wouldn't you take the special ship? What's the point of having the smaller ship at all?

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 11:15

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

kingcom posted:

How can torpedos be worse than proton torpedos in x-wing. The status of proton torpedos is still 'never take them'

From the sound of it, it's due to dice bloat. 4-5 dice ships are endemic to STAW, while being relatively rare in X-Wing. So in X-Wing, taking Proton Torpedoes to boost your dice to 4 and have a special ability can be worth it, but in STAW your 4-5 attack dice ship is gonna waste a target lock to throw 5 dice at something for just a small bonus? What's the point

Also X-wing protons will actually be kind of nice once Guidance chips are out as well.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 13:37

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

The last refuge of the die hard brown nose is to blame the player, not the game. It isn't the rules that are badly written/balanced that drove people away, it's the players trying to take advantage of badly written/balanced rules that drove people away :downs:

If it is the player's fault, why is X-wing booming and STAW dying? Does STAW just attract rear end in a top hat players for some reason? This is exactly the same excuses that people use for GWS product and it's just as much of a lovely excuse there as it is for STAW.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 08:46

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

That's fine, but direct design decisions have lead to the game being more or less unplayable at a competitive level, although unlike AoS this wasn't an intended feature of the design (I'm not saying this is a plus for AoS, but at least they acknowledged it out of the box). The problem is that to play the game casually and still make it have sense, you are required to make rules in order to prevent the excesses. In X-Wing, it is entirely possible to play casually even with try-hard netlists, because even though the top meta lists are more likely to win, the gap between them and more casual lists is lower, especially if the casual list still uses sensible design principles (ie nothing by MWG).

# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 12:09

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Tekopo fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Feb 13, 2016

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 21:22

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

For some context, the Yavin open is part of an 8 country special tourney where the winners go on to do a tourney at Star Wars celebration 2016. The regional for X-Wing only opened about 10 hours ago and only 72 slots are left open. Compare this to the STAW National, which only has spaces for 32. And nobody has signed up :lol:

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 21:40

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

3 people?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 02:25

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

Also tickets sold for the STAW UK national after more than a week has gone up to 9. I just attended a Store Championship for X-Wing where we had 57 people attending.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 02:28

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 06:49

Tekopo: Oct 24, 2008; When you see it, you'll shit yourself.

What's the actual arc then?

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 06:05

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