Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-108.17.96.8-20151114210415/@comment-81.204.197.73-20160104123817

Hello there, and welcome to the long boring television programme where we discuss what a prequel version of X-Wing would (or at least should) look like!

For starters, unique pilot cards should play a much smaller role. Earlier in this discussion we have seen that there is a lack of unique pilot cards, especially in the ranks of the trade federation. However, since many people would start with the new game especially for the unique pilots of the era, my feeling is that the logical path would be to have the Jedi and the Republic have a great deal of named pilots besides the generic ones, as there are plenty for FFG to choose from (clone wars animated show, that stuff). To make up for the lack of unique pilots, the droid army will have a rather different way of customization, namely an upgrade known as "extra programming". These will be similar to the current Elite Pilot Skills, but due to their mass-produced nature they will be non-unique. Now, the Seperatist ships will not only have their hardware shape their role, but also the programming that can make a ship harder to hit, or a harder hitter, or simply cheaper due to simpler programming or downgraded shields and weapons systems.

Of course there will be factions, but I have only seen 3 mentioned: Scum and Villainy, which I am not going to argue about, and also the Republic and the Trade Federation. I feel that these two should both be split: Republic into Jedi and Republic (the latter including the clone army, and maybe some organic pilots that flew with the Republic), and the Seperatists into the Trade Federation (droids, no surprise here) and the Sith. Yes, the Sith will have a seperate faction.

The way these Factions will work is that you can mix and match them. The Jedi can mix with the Republic, the Sith can mix with the Republic or the Trade Federation, and the Jedi can never mix with the Sith regardless of other factions in the same list. Also, certain Scum and Villainy ships can be mixed with anybody willing to pay extra for their help (example: 10% of the point cost of the bounty hunter will be added to the total), and this Scum may never cost more than half of your squad points.

As a final new list-building element, there will be squads. You heard it right, instead of building a squad, you will be building a flight group, and within that element there will be squads. These squads recieve certain bonuses when flying within a certain range of eachother, and they will always have a set leader. Optional will be a second in command, who can take over to keep the bonuses running when the leader gets destroyed. Whenever a member of a squad is destroyed or injured, a new kind of damage card known as a "morale effects card" will be drawn/ Because droids do not have morale, they are not affected. This card is unpredictable, especially as it is not always bad, but it should be known that the cards have two possibilities at all times, one bad, one either good or at least not as devastating to the squad. There will also be a pilot skill listed on the card: the pilots with a lower pilot skill than listed will recieve the first effect, those with a higher pilot skill with recieve the second, more positive one. These effects are supposed to show the effects of blows to morale, and add a form of heroicism (the positive effects). Back to squads. All members of the flight group must be in a squad. These squads only have a point cost if they have a positive effect, and the leader and his second-in-command will always cost 3 and 2 squad points more, respectively. The Tokens for squads are similar to the numbers on our ships in the current X-Wing, but they always have a colour or a specific shape to designate the squad. Also, there can be no more than 8 ships in a squad, and materials for 4 squad members of the new squad type come with each ship. Also, squad members must be in the same ship.

Gameplay will be different due to the nature of clone-wars space fights being full of large-scale battles with thousands of participants as opposed to the small scale encounters typical of the age of the rebellion. For starters, the ships will be cheaper / the amount of squad points will be larger. The ships will have a different scale to those in X-Wing, as this is a different game to X-Wing the same way Armada is. They will be slightly larger to those in X-Wing so that they are only slightly smaller, and they will have smaller bases and smaller manouver templates. This also reflects the younger audience it will face, and the ships will probably (and sadly) have slightly less detail to be able to withstand the young hands they must face. The playing surface will be similar, but asteroids will be replaced with hulking pieces of cardboard representing the larger ships, and these will be lined with batteries that shoot at anything that moves. Perhaps even the squads will share a manouver dial. This all reflects commanders moving entire squads instead of one ship at a time, with the movement becoming more individual only when the squads become depleted of ships.

Ships should come with 2, 3 or 4 ships in the packages with a chosen few more unique ships coming alone. Larger ships will come in boxes of 1 or 2. Each box will come with only a meager 1 or 2 maneuver dials, seen as that ships are moved as a group. Each ship will come with several unique pilots, while droids have a larger amount of generics and instead come with more programming upgrades to define their role. Munitions will still be expensive, as those giant pieces of cardboard scenery have hangars where ships can repair and reload (until they are shot to bits, that is.) The capital ships will be important in gameplay, as their destruction means almost certain victory or defeat.

Thats it (FOR NOW)... cookies plz?