Article 3: X-wing Basics 1, Threat Maps

Author's note:  After two fairly meaty opening articles, I kept stalling out on the articles I wanted to write.  Consequently, there are a handful of partially completed articles that didn't get finished because I found it difficult to convey the ideas I was trying to discuss.  My free time has also been throttled back a bit lately.  Because of this, I decided to start chopping ideas up into smaller pieces to make it easier for me to write, and perhaps easier for you to read.  The result will be a series of "Basics" articles focused on ways to think about the postitional nature of this game.  If you've enjoyed the lengthy nature of the first two articles, I apologize, I hope to have a few more of those in the future.  For now, this is what I've got.  

There are a lot of ways to approach this game.  It’s easy to approach as a card game, by focusing on card or attribute interactions to maximize the strength of the particular pieces you select to use.  That's also the easiest aspect of the game to talk about, so it is consequently the aspect of the game most frequently discussed.  It’s just a bit harder to look at the overall meta, using expected frequencies of opponent selections to inform which ships you decide to bring to a game.  Requiring further work is thinking about the game in 2-dimensional space.  This is harder because it’s both a more complex idea, but more significantly it’s a more difficult type of thing to discuss using just words.  This is a part of the game that I find particularly interesting, however, and the next few articles will discuss the basics of looking at the game from this point of view.  They will start from a very basic 2-dimensional view of ships and work up to coordinating movement between multiple ships to achieve a desired result.  As always, this is just one man’s opinion.  The thought process I’ll describe is something that has worked well for me when I'm making decisions during games, and it’s an area of the game that I’ve not seen extensively discussed.

Article 3:  X-wing Basics 1, Threat Maps

When most players consider a ship’s raw strength, the first thing they look at, appropriately, is its basic stat line.  There is good reason for this.  The stat line, along with the dial, is what determines how the ship operates on the board.  The stat line is more complex than this, however, because while ships are a collection of offensive and defensive numbers, these numbers aren’t directly compared, as Creatures in Magic, for example.  They are modified by ship abilities, ranges, obstacles, and support from other ships.  While a creature in Magic compares its strength directly against another creature’s toughness, an attack vs defense value in X-wing has many other factors.  Consequently, a ship’s ability to inflict or sustain damage (and therefore win the game) is not a zero-dimension intensity value, but a function of a variety of factors. 

 To start simply, let’s say offense falls into one of 5 categories.  The choice of 5 categories is pretty arbitrary, and for any number of situations it can vary quite a bit.  In this article it's more for illustrative purposes than a hard and fast description of anything real: 

                Threat Level:

                Very High:  4 dice, more than one modification (red)

                High:  4 dice modified (orange)

                Moderate:  3 dice, modified; 4 dice unmodified (yellow)

                Low:  2 dice, modified; 3 dice unmodified (light green)

                Very Low:  Worse than 2 dice modified (dark green)

Our humble TIE Fighter has a threat of Moderate at Range 1, Low at Range 2, and Very Low at Range 3 due to the extra defense die granted.  An X-wing would be High/Moderate/Low.  Looking at the diagrams, we immediately see things that are not obvious from the stat line. The higher threat zone (Range 1) covers a very small area, while the lowest threat zone (Range 3) is far and away the largest area. 

A note on the following figures.  I thought about just using captured Vassal images, but that ends up being a bit disingenuous, because they eye, or at least my eye, isn’t so precise.  These childish freehand drawings using the mighty MS Paint are probably more accurate as to what is in my head when viewing a board, and it makes it easier to use splashy colors quickly and easily.

Secondary weapons like Proton Torpedoes increase the threat if certain requirements are met (range and Target Lock in the case of Proton Torps).  The effect of this is even greater when you look at the threat map.  For two shots per game, any ship you can lock can be hit with a High Threat attack at any range, not just Range 1. 

This brings us nicely to the next facet of a threat map.  The map is different depending on the target.  A Red Squadron Veteran with Proton Torpedo will be able to use that Proton Torpedo much more easily against an Academy Pilot than Gideon Hask.  The Academy Pilot moving at I1 sees the full High/High/High threat map of the proton torpedo armed X-wing far more frequently than I4 Hask, who moves after.  Similarly, some ships can sustain attacks better than others.  A TIE Defender with Focus/Evade certainly has much less to to fear than an X-wing with just Focus.  The extra defense die and tokens allow the Defender to ignore a single 3-dice attack almost indefinitely in the context of a 75 minute game.  Consequently, a normal X-wing has a threat map more like a Moderate/Low/Very Low threat map against a TIE Defender, and the Torpedo armed X-wing is Moderate at all ranges as opposed to High vs a “normal” target.  

The complexity is enhanced further by the presence of asteroids.  The asteroid casts a shadow on an area, reducing the threat in that shadow because of the added defense die. 

This is, of course, a simplification.  An extra green die on a ship with no tokens is of limited utility, while an extra green die on a Focus/Evade ship or a ship with defensive rerolls will have a much greater impact.  We remember that tokens are one use, of course, which means that two firing arcs on a target has statistically more than double the effect of a single firing arc.  This makes the regions of overlapping arcs have an especially high threat (potentially maxing out the simple scale discussed above.

  

On top of the effects discussed above, threat maps change with the game state.  Early in the game, a single damage on a key ship is problematic.  Damage adds up over time, and even one damage is a significant step on the path to half points against a ship like Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker.  In cases like that, one might be justified in increasing the threat of the map generated by opposing ships against an end-game ship.  As the game progresses, ships either take damage, or they don’t.  A ship with a single hit point remaining likely views any arc as at least a “high” threat.  Conversely, an undamaged ship may view any single attack as a “very low” threat.  This is further nuanced by the current state of the game.  A player ahead by a small margin on the last turns of the game can rarely afford to take extra damage just to get into a better position, they need to make good immediate damage trades, and preferably take no damage at all.  A player behind on the last turn must do damage to get a victory, and so might ignore the threat posed by an opponent’s ships entirely, knowing that their only hope for victory lies in favorable dice variance.  At this point we see that the arbitrary threat assignments as previously laid out are really of limited use.  What matters as a player is how much a ship needs to avoid a certain area.  At the risk of getting less quantitative, I think it's actually more useful to think of threat values more like this:

Very High:  Going here can make it very difficult to win

High:  Going here can make it harder to win

Moderate:  This place will favor my opponent more than me

Low:  This place is okay, but might cause some problems

Very Low: This place is probably fine to be in

We can see now that a simple attribute of number of attack dice has an effect on the game that is anything but simple.  The threat map it generates changes every turn, dependent on tokens, range, obstacles, supporting attacks, and game state.  This fluidity is where the game of X-wing becomes, to me, especially interesting.  The coordination of ships to mitigate an opponent’s threat maps and maximize your own on important turns is. what keeps me coming back to this game, even in the darkest days of 1.0.  The next article in this “Basics” series will focus on ship dials.  We have to get our threat maps where they need to be, and the dials take us there. 

Thanks for reading.