Article 1: Information flow and maximizing freedom of action

Our friend John Boyd (who inspired the name of the blog, if you skipped the introductory article) thought about this back in the 60s with a decision making approach called the OODA loop.  OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  The idea, as I understand it, is that by accurately Observing the positions and capabilities of an opponent one can Orient oneself to the capabilities and plans of the opponent, Decide what needs to be done to counter those plans, and Act on those decisions.  If one progresses through this system faster than the opposition, one is able to respond to the current situation, but the opponent is responding to what the situation used to be, i.e., the opponent is responding to a situation that does not represent reality.  The crux of this cycle is the Orient step, whereby one takes in all the available information and interprets that information to build a picture of what the future will look like.  The better you are at using the available information to determine what your opponent will be doing, and the harder you make it for your opponent to guess your own actions, the greater will be your advantage.

X-wing shares a lot with chess.  Like chess, both players fully know what the opponent’s forces are capable of.  They know where the pieces are on the board.  They know what kinds of moves an opponent’s pieces can make.  There is some uncertainty in outcome in X-wing due to dice and hidden planning phases, but much of the planning and strategy happens in an environment of open information.  Yet there are consistent winners and losers in chess.  This stems from the fact that even though positional information is available, a player’s plans are not.  It is the burden of the opponent to assimilate the available capability and positional information to understand how a player is trying to coordinate their pieces and gain checkmate. 

We should be thinking about X-wing the same way.  By understanding how each player is trying to do to win, we understand how they will move, and we can understand what moves are needed to counter those moves.  While there is a lot of open information, plans are hidden, and there is a flow of information between players as the game progresses and plans are made known.  One can work to control that information flow in a variety of ways to make it more difficult for the opponent to understand and react to your squad. 

Understanding what your opponent is trying to do with their squad, and understanding how your opponent views your squad are essential for informing the decision making process.  Inaccurately interpreting information that you’ve observed will inherently ruin your decision making process.  The more information you have the better.  Likewise, the more information you can obscure from your opponent, the better.  This assertion, however, raises the question:  How do you control information on an open tabletop?  By having options.  The more options you have that lead to an eventual victory, the less clear your methods will be to your opponent.  The less clear your methods are to your opponent, the harder time they will have planning to counter what you want to do.  This idea applies to a hierarchy of X-wing decision making:

1        1.)     How does your squad win?

a.       Doing as much damage to the opposing squad as possible

b.      Preserving points of an expensive centerpiece ship

c.       Avoiding damage through high defense or engagement denial

2        2.)    How does your squad engage opposing ships?

a.       Single powerful attacks

b.      Coordinated massed attacks

c.       Blocking/Control

d.      Reacting to opposing positions using enhanced maneuverability

3         3.)    How do individual ships respond to different situations?

a.       Maximizing attack

b.      Minimizing damage

c.       Maximizing opportunities on subsequent turns

The answers to the first question (for both you and your opponent) inform the answers to the second question, which inform the answers to the third question.

A single path to victory

Squad 1:  Vader/Miniswarm:

A squad has 104 points of Darth Vader in his TIE/x1 (including the bid).  It likely aims to win by having Vader with that full 104 points left at the end of the game.  Its primary way to win is killing more than 104 points of the opponent’s squad.  The remaining 96 points of TIE Fighters are probably there to harass, distract, and block, but aren’t expected to win the game against the opposing squad.  Targets are selected based on how much of a threat they are to Vader, dials and actions follow accordingly.

Now, if your only way to win a game is to keep Vader alive, the opponent knows exactly what they must do to ensure victory:  Kill Vader.  If you, with Vader, can also win by destroying the opposing squad or by denying engagement, you have more options, and your opponent is less certain about which strategy you will pursue. 

Squad 2:  4 X-wings

This second squad has four generic X-wings with equivalent initiative and upgrades.  It’s a fairly strong jousting list but not the best there is.  As a jousting list, it wins by doing as much damage as possible to the opponent.  However, knowing this, a couple of situations can make things very hard.  The classic strategy against a superior jousting list is to try and maneuver ahead of the engagement to break up the formation.  This usually means trying to “drag them through the rocks”, to get a squad to chase and then either take damage, lose actions, or lose coherency.  High efficiency squads with ships that end up operating independently rarely win.

The reality is that any well designed squad has multiple ways it can win.  This isn’t any kind of advanced insight on my part.  However, I expect many players don’t actively think of this when they’re approaching a game.  They either don’t have a plan at all, or they have their one plan and pursue it without considering others until their initial plan fails.  I’ve done this myself plenty of times.  A cunning opponent will take advantage of this narrow focus. If they identify the one way you are trying to win, they know what your ships will need to do to accomplish this goal, and therefore will know what they need to do to counter those moves.  If you have identified multiple paths to victory, and keep those paths open as long as possible during a game, you can either keep an opponent guessing as to which path you will take, or you can take advantage of an opponent fixated on countering your most obvious path. 

Multiple paths to victory

Squad 1:  Vader/Miniswarm

Back to a Vader example (a simplistic one admittedly).  If you have identified that you must keep Vader alive to win, you won’t take any unnecessary risks.  This means you can only commit Vader to the attack when there is minimal risk of return fire.  A cunning opponent knows that by having some portion of their squad always able to turn to attack Vader, Vader must be cautious when planning dials.  This allows the threat of an attack on Vader to neutralize Vader, even as the opposing ships decide to focus on Vader’s wingmates.  This situation favors the opposing squad heavily as half your squad (Vader) is not contributing.  However, if you think Vader’s wingmates can carry the squad to victory without him in some instances, Vader can be a part of an attack.  The mere threat of attacks against Vader no longer neutralize him, and the engagement proceeds on a more even footing.  Even if you are not willing to risk Vader, if your opponent thinks Vader may become engaged despite the presence of a threat, some resources that would be spent against the rest of your squad may be spent attempting to engage Vader. 

It is your goal as a player to obscure your initial chosen strategy as long as possible to give the opponent as few turns as possible to react effectively.  For this reason, circling Vader in a corner away from the fight is a terrible idea.  It gives maximum protection to Vader, but it makes your strategy obvious and keeps half your squad out of the fight.  Flanking wide with Vader is better because he is fairly safe, but will be able to engage more quickly once an opponent engages on the other half of your squad.  Flanking closer (closer meaning that Vader can engage on the same turn as his wingmates, although that’s not necessarily close on the table top) means the opponent now has less information about what will happen next turn.  They know that if they commit against wingmates, they might have Vader unopposed on their tail.  This situation demonstrates why high Initiative and upgrades like Advanced Sensors and Supernatural Reflexes are so powerful.  The decision to attack or avoid with Vader can be made once one knows what strategy the opponent is pursuing.  They allow decision making to take place with the maximum amount of information, your OODA loop is faster than the opponent’s, you are more often responding to the right situation, they are most often responding to the wrong one. 

Squad 2:  4 X-wings

Options are similarly important for our 4X squad.  Odds are that avoiding damage through engagement denial (and then winning through Final Salvo) is another path to victory.  This option allows you to avoid the classic strategy against efficiency lists discussed previously.  You can stay in formation in a region of the board you consider advantageous, engaging only when you think you have an advantage.  Maybe you are confident engaging through the rocks anyway, but simply having the option to deny engagements and have a good chance at victory provides a backstop against your squad being strung out and engaged piecemeal. 

Once the engagement is initiated, the 4X squad helps keep options open by having multiple ways to engage.  In contrast to a high initiative centerpiece squad, multiple identical ships don’t have strength concentrated in one element.  This can be advantageous in that it is less obvious where the attack will originate from.  It could come from three directions, or any one of four (or five or six) ships could be a blocker, with the others used for attack.  Additionally, self-bumping can allow positions impossible to single ships operating alone.  The quantity of blocking positions available to 4 or more ships that can move in any order is huge, and can present a significant analysis burden to the opponent in a situation where time is rarely on their side.  They are forced to make plans with no idea what the board state will be once their dials are revealed.

Maximizing Options

The principle of maximizing the decision burden on the opponent by maximize your own options applies from overall strategy down to dial selection on any given turn.  Ostensibly one could pick any one of the dozen+ maneuvers on a dial.  The reality, of course, is that only a few of those, perhaps only one, could be considered “good” moves.  Ideally, you want a ship to be able to attack from relative safety.  Failing that, you’d like to avoid high quality attacks from the opponent and/or bad damage trades.  Failing that, you want a maneuver to keep your ship safe and allow future attacks to be prepared.  Sometimes you have to settle for just getting a ship out alive.  Mixed in to all this, of course, is your opponent’s decisions.  The majority of the time, they should be able to do something to counter a move to attack, which means if you have only one aggressive move, there’s a good chance it won’t work.  A good opponent will either bail out to avoid the attack, or move to block you, or set up a kill box.  Multiple ways to attack make it harder for your opponent to predict where you’ll be, which means your moves will be countered less frequently.  The other side of this coin is to try and set up your attack from a zone where your opponent has few maneuvering options.  If, for example, an asteroid is in the way of the moves your opponent would take to counter your attack maneuver, you can make that maneuver more safely.  It is often said that players need to be thinking about future turns when planning dials as well as the present turn. It is the author’s opinion that this is the primary thing to think about when planning for subsequent turns.  Maneuvers should be selected to keep the most options open for future turns so one does not become restricted and then predictable in their maneuvers. 

There’s a quote I’ve heard about X-wing.  I can’t remember who I heard it from.  The essence of it was “The player who wins X-wing is the player who commits last”.  While not 100% true, it’s true often enough that it’s an important proverb to keep in mind.  When you commit to a course of action, you begin restricting your possible moves.  You become more easy to predict, and therefore more easy to defeat.  Endeavor to keep your options open and your goals obscure, and you force your opponent to make decisions with as little information as possible. 

Thanks for reading.