X-Wing 2.0 Design Review - Action Economy

Well, that came as quite a shock didn’t it? The announcement of X-Wing 2.0 at last week’s Hyperspace Report took most of us by surprise. While a 2.0 version of X-wing has been something a (vocal) segment of the fanbase has been wanting for a while now, it wasn’t something anyone seriously thought was coming. Now that it’s here, I found myself wondering, is this 2.0 version necessary for the long-term health of the game? Before the announcement, I hadn’t been rooting for it.

So I’m going to begin a series of articles taking a look at some of the new features and design decisions coming with 2.0, what they bring to the game, and whether a version 2.0 was necessary for them to succeed. For our first discussion, we’re going to look at Action Economy.

Action Economy – The Curse of Push the Limit

What’s changed?

Push the Limit, the Elite Pilot Talent against which all EPT’s were compared, has gone the way of civil political discourse. If a pilot had an EPT slot, the first consideration was can I use PTL effectively? Followed by would I be better off taking Veteran Instincts, which is also gone, but we’ll get to that in another article.

Why was PTL so powerful? Double actions. Success in X-wing comes down to maneuvering and action choice. And due to the reposition actions, your action was often the more important of the two choices. Because of the impact your action had on the game, getting two of them was an incredible boon to any ship that could do it. Two actions was the reason Darth Vader, despite the TIE Advanced kind of sucking for a long time, still saw play.

Okay, so PTL is no longer in the game. So, what? Is it now impossible to get two actions? Doesn’t that really screw Interceptors, A-Wings, and other ships that rely on repositioning?

It would, but fortunately, they found a more elegant solution than just outright banning PTL. In the new system, some ships will come with PTL baked right into the ship. As part of the actions available for a ship, some ships have linked actions. You can see here on the new TIE Advanced that it has the option to take a Focus action and then perform a barrel roll. A red barrel roll. The function is similar to PTL, two actions, end with a stress. But the design is less overpowered.

Before, any ship that took PTL could take any two actions in its action bar. Ships with lots of actions would benefit from this the most as they had more choices. But it also created a perceived requirement. Why not take PTL? All other EPT’s become unnecessary.

With PTL built in, now ships are free to use their EPT for other effects. Generic pilots that lacked an EPT slot aren’t unduly hampered compared to the Aces in the same ship. Additionally, it also puts some constraints in place. Instead of being able to do any two actions, now you can only do them in a particular order. This limits overpowered combos. For instance, no turtling to stack focus + evade for extreme survivability on any ship with those two actions.

It also allows for a tremendous amount of design space to be added to the game.

Design space?

Yes! By adding linked actions you gain a tremendous number of options to help differentiate ships. Compare the TIE Advanced to the Jumpmaster 5000. Both have linked abilities but of a very different style. The TIE Advanced, a superiority fighter, can focus and then barrel roll to change its position. The Jumpmaster, a turret carrier, can focus or target lock (just lock now) and then rotate its turret’s arc.

Adding this linking effectively takes the game from having the (currently) 12 unique actions to 132 (66 unique pairs but since order matters each action can be paired with all others, except itself). All without having to learn anything new. This allows ships that are very similar stat-wise (hull, shields, attack, defense) to still have very distinct action bars.

Furthermore, the array of available options grows even more with the addition of red actions. Some ships have gained access to unlinked actions that are red. The Y-wing, for example, now ha a barrel roll as a red action. Now, these clunky ships natively have access to a reposition action but at the cost of a stress. Meanwhile, ships with standard maneuverability have access to white versions. And very maneuverable ships can get linked versions so they can reposition while still getting some other capability.

Did anything else change with actions?

Yes, actually. Now, when you attempt an action and fail, barrel roll onto an obstacle, you lose the action. Before, if you failed to do an action, it didn’t cost you anything. This led to you being able to use actions you knew you couldn’t do to give you game-relevant information.

The most common abuse of this loophole was declaring a target lock on a ship that is obviously outside range 3 in order to get a range measurement on something closer. This would allow you learn if other ships were in firing range and not cost you an action, allowing you to then use your action to get out of range. In Houston’s Apollo Squadron, this was known as taking a “Lupo Lock,” after a player who made liberal use of it. It was a perfectly legal action and we all agreed it was kind of stupid. Both that it was allowed and to not take advantage of it because it was allowed.

Did we really need version 2.0 to accomplish this?

It would have been a simple FAQ to make failed actions cost you the action. I’m actually surprised it lasted this way as long as it has. And banning PTL would be a simple way to solve the over-reliance on it in the current 1.o version of the game. But that would mostly be a nerf to ships that are not overpowered (Interceptors, A-Wings). And it would do nothing to open up the array of actions available to ships.

In the early waves of the games, most ships had two to three actions. Within the game itself, most of the actions didn’t even exist yet. Access to new actions came through new ships and through upgrades rolled out slowly each wave. But this method necessarily made the whole process a bandaid to an early design mistake. Why shouldn’t a TIE Bomber have the Reload action but a Kimogila does?

Now, all 50+ ships are being redesigned simultaneously and with the same philosophy regarding actions in mind. This allows them to take advantage of all of those new actions instead of limiting them to just new ships. Now the original movie-famous ships become relevant again. That, I think, is the biggest benefit to a 2.o version that could not be accomplished well with just an FAQ.