Begun, the Initiative Wars Have

Ooh, I’m in a funk about X-Wing.

I like my blog to be positive and optimistic so usually when I’m in a funk about X-Wing (which does happen from time to time) I’ll just not write a blog about it.  In this case I really want to just get it out of my system and hopefully there’ll be some catharsis in this, I’ll shake it off and be right back to feeling chipper about the game.

So, my last blog saw me navel-gazing about the prospect of going to the UK Games Expo regional national world championship qualifier whatever event under the old points regime.  Fortunately my problem was solved moments after I wrote that blog because we got the new points update, and so I was able to swiftly switch gears and start looking at what new nastiness I could brew up in a short space of time.

I’m one of those people who LOVES it when something new lands and shakes a game up.  I always have been, right back in playing Magic: The Gathering in the 1990s the new blocks, new expansions, new formats were always where I got to stretch my deckbuilding/squadbuilding wings and try to get out ahead of the competition for a brief period.  So the new points landed for X-Wing and I was like…

But then pretty soon I was like…

And now I’m like…

I like almost everything about X-Wing 2.5.  I like ROAD, I like bumping with focus, I like objectives, I like the split points squadbuilding, I like the asteroid rules… to varying degrees I think Atomic Mass have done an excellent job in putting their mark on the game with a clear vision of how different the game could be and still be basically the same.  I’ve stood up and championed AMG in various places around the internet, not because I need to support them but because I think they’ve been getting things right.  

But I worry a lot about the impact these new points are having.

GAME FUNDAMENTALS

X-Wing is a game that has survived for a decade and proven very popular and successful.  For most of that time the most commonly played format of game has been within pretty well-defined and unchanging parameters: a 3x3 game area, played with squads of 100pts of ships (that then became 200pts of ships, but ships cost twice as much as they used to).  I would suggest that some of the fundamental game mechanics are balanced around situations that occur on a 3x3 table with 100/200pts of ships, by which I mean things like how fast ships move, how long a range ruler is, how wide firing arcs are, how many turns ships survive can incoming shots and their points cost relative to that.  Those are the situations the game was balanced around.

At the start of the year we were already playing lists that were probably more like 250-270pts in old money.  I felt like the game system was starting to stretch at the seams, but at the same time the move to objectives had meant those 250 points actually tended to be spread around the table a little bit more widely, so often it was more like you were playing two 125pt games at the same time and the effect of that points inflation wasn’t being felt too badly.  At the same time, though, I was very clear on what I thought the next round of points change should be – the good stuff like Vader, Scorch, Boba etc needed to get a bit more expensive, so that the rest of the game could close the gap and be considered worth playing.  

What we actually got was the opposite.  Instead of a deflationary points change we actually saw points inflation turbo-charged to the extent that very few of the things that were good in March could still keep up with the pace that was being set in May.  From being a ~250pts game it was now pretty reasonable to be fielding around ~300pts of value on the table.

I think that’s right at the red line limit of breaking the game.  

When the opponent can field ~300pts of efficient damage-dealing ships, especially when they can do it at a high Initiative, it becomes almost impossible to cost a lot of ships where they’re playable.  There’s 50% more lasers sitting across the table now than there was in 2020, but your ships don’t have 50% more Hull and Shields, they just melt faster.  And when that fire is all coming in at I5-I6 your ships could well be melting before they even get to attack.  What’s an attractive cost for a ship that will never fire and just gives the opponent 20% of their win condition when you put it into the table?  There isn’t one.

This has been a very theoretical fear that I’ve held ever since I saw how aggressively the points were being pushed, and to be honest I was a bit surprised that we didn’t already hit this problem in the last points iteration.  Potentially we actually did start to hit it and I didn’t notice it personally because I was playing the good stuff – if you look back at the old points there was a lot of stuff that was simply pushed out of the game.  But I also think that the way the efficiency point seemed to pivot around I4 ships that were primarily jousters meant the game retained a decent amount of balance and flexibility.  There was still room for I5 and I6 ships to ace their way around the table against the I4 jousting blocks.

In the new points it seems like the efficiency of I4 has gone and there’s no longer any real brakes on the Initiative inflation – you can bring ship-melting firepower at I5 and I6, you don’t have to play I4 at all.  And that seems to be shrinking the available pool of options exponentially vs what we had just a few months ago.  I think the initial response of players was to go “oh wow, everything got cheaper, I can add an extra ship!” but that has quickly turned into “oh wow, everything got cheaper, now I can just play higher initiatives!”.  The reality of using those extra points to buy more ships turned out to be that you were just feeding points to the guys who used them to buy high initiative sledgehammers instead.

Personal opinion, which may be wrong and you are free to disagree with – I find it difficult to justify playing any ships of Initiative 1-4 at present (aside from obvious stuff like the TIE Bombers), because they’re just going to get initiative-killed.  As players increasingly move towards big Initiative numbers it feels like in the majority of games it seems like an I4 pilot may as well be I1.

And I think the problems start to compound each other very rapidly once it becomes too easy to bring a lot of I5+ firepower.  

• You degrade the effectiveness of another massive chunk of pilots at I4, who used to be able to trade shots but now are quite likely to die without firing.  
  
  
• You degrade the value of arc-dodging and positional aces at I5.  More of the time they’re going to be moving first against the big guns across the table and can’t rely on being able to arc dodge an I4 jousting block.
  
  
• The more the game consolidates onto I5-I6 the more the ROAD roll will come to be pivotal in who moves first and decide more games.  And that matters A LOT more when players are tied at I5 than it did when you were tied at I4 because the I5 ships tend to include more aces with positioning/positional abilities.
  
  
• The more that I5-I6 jousting blocks come to be dominantly successful the more we pull back from the advantages of spreading those squad points over a wide table and the more we see the consolidated firepower of 300pts brought to bear on a single spot.  

• We've seen the variation of 3-ship to 6-ship squads pretty much entirely gone in favour 4-5 ship squads of high initiative pilots.  So as much as high-ship count efficiency lists are being removed by initiative kills I also think it makes things much harder for low ship count ‘murder lists’ to work.  A big ship like Rey or Boba usually had the advantage of knowing where the opponent was to arc-dodge and the advantage of being able to initiative-kill opponents, all to offset the natural disadvantages of bringing a lower ship count.

Oh, and another thing.  The lower loadout points.  That’s something I didn’t expect to be annoyed by but actually it’s really pissed me off because just as the game as hardened into a tough problem that I’d usually set out to try and crack creatively, I’ve had a lot of my choices for how to be creative with B-Tier ships taken away by their reduced opportunity for customisation.  

I didn't know where to stick that loadout gripe into the narrative flow of this blog so I just hurled it there.  Sorry!

SOME METAGAME STATS

I wanted to add some wider context to my own personal experiences, so I turned to Listfortress and Metawing.  I pulled all the recent tournament results, sorted by Pilot, and then I compared them to what was being played in April and May until the points changed.

At the crudest level, I looked at how each Initiative tier was performing.

In the old points you could see the impact of that I4 jousting efficiency that I talked about and the variation of successful and unsuccessful initiative values as you moved up through the tiers.  In the new points the story is sadly a lot clearer – every Initiative does better, on average, than the one below it.

There’s a further detail here, actually, which I want to point out – I3 and I4 are very close to each other on the face of it.  The only reason I3 is so close to I4 is one pilot – Keo Venzee, who tends to crop up next to Han Solo in the big Rebel lists we see around.  If you take Keo out of the mix then the whole of the rest of the I3 pilots drop away from the I4 pilots and sit a lot closer to I2.  

So does that mean Keo is really good?  He’s played all the time and has a high win rate.  Well, before the points change Keo was also played a lot but had a very low win rate.  I would suggest Keo is a small cog in a big machine and his win rate is not about what Keo himself does, but about how good all the I5 and I6 pilots around him are.

I3 Pilots in the old points

I3 Pilots in the new points

So is playing more I6 pilots really the easy answer?  It’s always more complicated than that, but I’d like to share the journey I’ve been on in the few games of X-Wing that I’ve played in the new points.

At first I played a melange of I3-I5 pilots, but found myself losing ships to being initiative killed too often.  So I made a Republic list with four I5 pilots and Anakin as an I6.  And that was fun for a couple of weeks but then there was a noticeable change in the lists I was playing against as my opponents adjusted to play more I5 and I6 pilots themselves.  My initiative advantage was removed and replaced, in the first instance, by the fact that ROAD now mattered hugely as I was trying to land a lot of positional effects at I5 (CLT arcs, Chopper R1 bubbles etc).  The another week or two went by, and now my opponents were bringing multiple I6 pilots and simply moving after me and countering my positioning abilities.

So I played with one I6 pilot and lost to the list with two I6 pilots.  I  learned my lesson and a fortnight later I played with three I6 pilots instead and beat the list with two I6 pilots.  This past weekend I saw multiple lists capable of making 4 or 5 attacks at I6, all to get ahead of the other I5 and I6 lists.  It seems like a lot of players are in a race of trying to scramble over each other for who fires first and hardest… and that’s a race where we’re going to hit the ceiling pretty damn soon because there’s not that many ways of firing 4 or 5 times at I6.

So far the movement of pilots through the initiative is quite gradual - about 4% of I1 to I3 pilots have moved up to I4+, but that trend is accelerating and I expect it to continue as the store championship season cements players into the most successful archetypes.

There's another smoking gun to watch the rise of in this metagame: Swarm Tactics.  In First Edition we had periods of time when Veteran Instincts became an essential Pilot Talent upgrade because of how fierce the Initiative wars were.  We don't Veteran Instincts around any more (thankfully) but we do have Swarm Tactics as a crutch that players can use to bring even more guns to bear at high initiative phases of combat.  In the old points Swarm Tactics was in 5% of squads (basically just the Midnight/Whirlwind combo that Chrispy popularised) while in the new points it's already in over 8% of squads and being used by multiple factions, especially Rebels.

WHAT TO DO?

We've been here before, of course.  Sometimes the X-Wing competitive metagame makes me happy and sometimes it doesn't.  In the past I've always been happy to duck away from competition for a while (eg. pretty much the whole of 2017!) and just go and pootle around with some janky stuff on the kitchen tablex, play tournaments only now and then.  It's frustrating that I can't really do that because the loadouts have been so culled, and it's not helping that the power level of the high initative ships is so strong that it can't really be bridged by a smattering of cunning tricks and a can-do attitude. 

So… I’m in a proper funk with X-Wing.  My squad builder has never been used so little because the idea of trying to build a squad to solve this problem seems largely futile.  If I1-I4 pilots are mostly bad then I’m immediately building my list almost entirely from a much smaller pool of I5-I6 pilots.  I’ve got less pilots to choose from and less points to customise them with.  For the first time in the entire six years of my playing X-Wing I’ve simply built a squad, put it in a box and then forgotten about squadbuilding and just taken the same thing everywhere.

But on the bright side... if you look at List Fortress there’s FAR more squads registered in the new points than there was in the old points, even though there’s a bigger time span in the old points.  The relaunch of proper official Organised Play tracks has seen activity pick up massively.  It’s great to see that many events of X-Wing being made, that many games being played.  Great that so many people who had been turned off 2.5 are coming back to it and finding it’s not what they feared it was.  Even if I'm personally in a funk as it happens.

I’m just a bit concerned that they’re returning just as so many of the things they worried about are finally coming true.  

• Granularity of points *shouldn’t* be an issue in a game with a two-tiered points system because you can compensate for one with the other, but at the moment it feels like the expensive ships have been brought down in cost so much that the points are less granular in 2.5 than they’ve ever been and the dynamic range for ship costing is narrower than it’s ever been.

• It feels like the random variance of ROAD rolls matter more than ever as we’re all cramming ourselves onto an Initiative system with basically only three settings (I6, I5, Everything Else) and we’re all overlapping, and overlapping with pilots and ships where the timing can really matter.  I played 2.5 from day one and I’ve complained more about ROAD influencing games in the last month than I have in the whole time leading up to it.

• Squadbuilding decision-making is being simplified to moving a few Duplo blocks around for maybe the first time in 2.5.  We’re still not in a world where we’re being forced to take Standardised Loadout versions of pilots and there’s no customisation, but the potential for customisation has been cut thinner than we’ve ever had it.

All though all the hoo-ha about X-Wing 2.5 and the transition to Atomic Mass Games my advice to people who didn’t like what was happening to X-Wing was simple: stop playing X-Wing and do something else instead.  And so that’s what I’m finding myself increasingly doing… I’m doing something else.  I’ve got my squad, I can leave it in a box and not worry about it and not have to open my squadbuilder and not have to think about X-Wing or talk about X-Wing because right now X-Wing isn’t holding my attention.  

Right now I’m actually playing Blood Bowl for the first time since 1995, and I’m waiting for my Kickstartered copy of the Apex Legends game to arrive, and those are happily filling the gap that X-Wing has left.

So, it’s kinda sad that I’m feeling disappointed when a Blood Bowl game falls through and I *have* to play X-Wing instead.  But also if I’m having fun doing something else instead then it’s kinda positive too.  

I hope that the next iteration of X-Wing points reverses a lot of what has happened.  Or that somebody cleverer than me finds a way to pivot this I5-I6 dominated metagame on its head and reopen up squadbuilding and game play.  And while everyone else seems to be having loads of fun playing X-Wing then clearly something is going right.  I'm happy to be at the thin end of the wedge.

Even if, right now, I’m in a proper funk about X-Wing.