Regrets and Retrospectives

Last week, Ryan Farmer and Dee Yun were kind enough to have me on the Fly Better Podcast. If you’re interested, feel free to give it a listen for some insights on X-Wing design, testing, and competitive metagame development!

One of the last questions they asked me was (paraphrasing) “Do you have any ships you regret designing, or would design differently?” I had to think about it for a minute. But after some reflection, there was one ship that definitely sprang to mind: a ship from the second movie of a trilogy, with a brief onscreen appearance in a larger battle but a lot of marginalia about its unique functions from the visual dictionary accompanying that film. A ship I intended to be as much a position control piece as a fighting vessel. One that has even developed a degree of infamy in X-Wing as a result.

So today, I’ll talk about what I would do differently on that ship with perfect hindsight. That’s right, it’s the Resistance Bomber! What did you expect me to say, the Nantex?

A (Re)Design Challenge

A Literary Discussion in the Second Tier, Honoré Daumier (published in Le Charivari, February 27, 1864).
Courtesy the Met Open Access collection.
Ruined by me (February 15, 2021).

Let’s get a couple of caveats out of the way:

My regrets only pertain to the First Edition variant of the ship. When adapting it to Second Edition, fellow X-Wing designer Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt did a very solid job patching up the performance of the Resistance Bomber (newly dubbed the MG-100 StarFortress) through good pilot abilities, interesting crew/gunner options, and general quality of life improvements. The Second Edition turret mechanics also innately help to give it more to do during a game of X-Wing. Pilots like Vennie and Paige Tico have seen a decent bit of competitive success; with the points tinkering since its release, the ship is in a pretty good place these days. A lot of my reflections how to fix issues with the First Edition version are, unsurprisingly, drawn from Brooks’ successes in the Second Edition redesign. But today, I want to dig into what a First Edition redesign could look like, and it does have some really interesting design limitations.

Second, it’s not like Past Me was just asleep at the wheel or something. This ship has some creative mechanics I’m still proud of designing, a miniature that is easily one of my favorites in the range, and the seeds of some ideas that would become much more prominent in 2nd Edition. It’s not bad work or a bad product. But I think it’s completely fair to say that the ship underwhelmed in the competitive scene of First Edition, and not just because of its points cost - its issues, in fact, were much more fundamental than points. With hindsight and a lot more data, I can look back and see why it didn’t really take off competitively (or even become a sleeper favorite in the narrative or casual play bases, as many other “weak” ships did) during First Edition. And maybe even learn something from it along the way!

Why Didn’t It Catch On?

Pictured: Another Troubled Takeoff

There are couple of reasons I think the First Edition Resistance Bomber struggled to find its place in the X-Wing ecosystem:

• The dial is limited. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be done about this. Star Wars: X-Wing is a game bringing the experience of Star Wars to the tabletop. That means emulating the fiction. If a TIE Fighter isn’t nimbler and more maneuverable (in certain respects) than an X-wing, the mechanics don’t properly reflect Star Wars, which is important. And, as we see in the films, the Resistance Bomber flies like a dump truck.

• 360-degree turrets were a tricky space to navigate from a design perspective. When we set to making X-Wing Second Edition, Alex, Frank, and I all agreed that 360-degree turret ships needed to go - not just because they aren’t much fun to fly against (though they aren’t), but also because they’re less fun for (most of) the people who fly them. The core interaction of X-Wing is flying the ships to line up certain angles while avoiding others, and when a ship can attack in any direction, the player is deprived of this core experience. For most people, this makes the game less fun, even if they were the one who brought the ship that does this.

• The Rebel faction was enormous and there were tons of other, far better options. If it had been part of a smaller pool of options, creative players might have found a stronger niche for it somewhere. But there was no reason to look for that niche, because the YT-1300, YT-2400, U-wing, VCX-100, and other YT-1300 were all readily available choices that were more appealing. Players weren’t pushed to figure out what to do with this thing.

What to Do in a Do Over?

Yes, I know that the World Between Worlds creates a stable time loop and also this event would be in Ezra’s future, but until WandaVision makes the Time Stone canon in all Disney properties, this is the best visual Star Wars time travel joke I’ve got.

So, let’s imagine I was making the First Edition Resistance Bomber again, for First Edition X-Wing, but I had been somehow imbued with my current knowledge by, like, a visit from Ezra Bridger using the World Between Worlds or something. What would I do differently for this ship’s design?

Copy Off the Future’s Test

What worked in Second Edition Resistance Bombers? Playmaker abilities, that is to say abilities that give you rewards for making certain moves with your other pieces. Vennie’s ability is a great example of this, granting an excellent defensive bonus if you (or any friendly ship) points its turret arc at the attacker. This ability is strong, but maybe more importantly, it makes battlefield positioning key, creating a fun dynamic to build around. Bring some RZ-2 A-wings with turret arcs, and you can make it tricky for your opponent to land a knockout blow on the already durable Vennie by flying your ships correctly.

If this ship is going to be slow (and it is, canonically), it needs to be an anchor for your whole list, and reward you for flying your other ships in creative ways. Crimson Specialist and Cobalt Leader reward you for flying the Bomber itself successfully, but due to its limited maneuver options, you’re being rewarded for doing something that isn’t much fun. By extending that reward to your other ships, suddenly this ship makes your whole list more fun to play even if the Bomber itself doesn’t have the most exciting dial in the game.

A few small changes could have helped here. Extending Cobalt Leader’s ability to friendly ships (or perhaps friendly Resistance ships, spoilers for my next point) would have made it a playmaker for your whole list. Changing Crimson Specialist to trigger Rattled on an attack while the defender is in the arc of another friendly ship (and taking out the requirement to spend results) could also have the desired effect of rewarding skillful flying with other ships in the list. Obviously these would need to be tested, but they’re where I’d start.

It’s the Resistance!

I had the right idea with the upgrade Crossfire Formation, but should have pushed this further: make the Resistance card identity matter. Resistance ships were differentiable from Rebel ships in First Edition thanks to their different card frame, as you may recall. Perhaps some of the pilot abilities like the ones I proposed above should only have been active for Resistance ships.

Besides it being thematically apt, though, why do this? Well, that’s simple: restrictions breed creativity, for designers and for players alike, and rewards can function as restrictions if presented properly. Despite being a subfaction in First Edition and only having three actual ships, the Resistance had a decent number of pilots: a whopping 10 T-70 X-wing pilots and a handful of YT-1300 pilots. And several of them were very good, competitively; Poe Dameron, Jess Pava, and Rey all were quite popular at times. So maybe players had no reason to look at the Resistance Bomber as a Rebel ship due to the many large base options available. But as a Resistance ship, it was part of a much smaller pool. They just needed an incentive to think about Resistance lists as a thing they could be building. While separating the Resistance into its own faction wouldn’t be viable until Second Edition, giving players an incentive to build Resistance lists would have made it a lot harder to simply flip past the Resistance Bomber.

Much as making it a playmaker to reward you for flying more maneuverable ships skillfully would have given it a clear role on the table, designing the Resistance Bomber as a list-maker would have given it a clear role during list building. If it gave other Resistance ships something they couldn’t get elsewhere (and then rewarded you for using them well on the table), it would have a unique function people would likely be excited to try. Even if it hadn’t pushed Resistance subfaction lists to the top, this might well have been enough to excite casual list builders to tinker with it more.

Cat-and-Rocket-Mouse

X-Wing tends to work best when players commit to a series of choices based on uncertainties. You set your dial without the knowledge of what your opponent is setting. This was one idea behind the mobile arc when Alex designed it for the Shadow Caster - it fed into the cat-and-mouse game of trying to dodge the enemy’s arcs, rather than making avoiding attacks entirely about distance-control (as it was with 360-degree turret arcs). In First Edition, 360-degree turret arcs were already the standard for ships with as many outward-facing guns as the Resistance Bomber. Which was too bad, because the mobile arc would have been an excellent option to give the Resistance Bomber a way to play with the dynamic of guessing enemy ships’ positions, then seeing if that guess paid off.

So bear with me here: what if it had a 360-degree turret arc AND a mobile arc?

The Resistance Bomber can clearly fire in numerous directions at once. If the Millennium Falcon can fire in any direction, this thing needs to be able to as well; otherwise, the verisimilitude of the game kind of capsizes. But if it had a weak attack (say, two dice) that could fire in all directions, but a strong attack (say, three dice) that could fire only in its mobile arc, the Resistance Bomber would suddenly be making interesting choices about where to aim its attacks, even if its dial didn’t give it much room to maneuver.

This would have been fun, but alone, I don’t think it would have been enough to make the Resistance Bomber competitive. Thanks to Push the Limit, aces in First Edition could pretty much go wherever they wanted after maneuvering, which meant even if they flew into the mobile arc, they’d just boost and/or barrel roll out. So this is where I think a ship-specific upgrade might have needed to come in. Something that would punish aces for flying incautiously around this behemoth. Here’s what I’d test first:

Withering Salvo

After you execute a maneuver, if you did not overlap a ship or obstacle, you may perform a free rotate action. After an enemy ship executes a maneuver, if it is in your mobile firing arc, it gains 1 jam token.

This means that when facing a maneuverable, higher-initiative foe (a lot of First Edition ships), you have an interesting series of interactions for both players. The Resistance Bomber player has to decide where to send the ship, then where to set their arc (though, importantly, it doesn’t eat up their action, meaning their 3-die mobile arc attack still has some teeth). The ship’s dial means that it can’t maneuver very well, but when you combine the number of maneuvers and the number of arc positions, the options get pretty interesting. Meanwhile, their opponent has to try to guess this and decide where it is safe to move.

Both players have to think about where their ship could go (or point its most powerful attack), where their opponent will be going (and where their most powerful attack will come from), and how to make the best of this situation. If the opponent is outguessed, they are “punished” (with the jam token), but can still choose to boost or barrel roll away from the attack. Even when the opponent gets outguessed, the agency they expected they would have in the optimal outcome isn’t totally negated. But the Resistance Bomber player’s weak shot will be somewhat better, since it is coming at a jammed foe who can’t easily stack tokens. It creates a give-and-take.

This probably isn’t perfect, but it’s where I’d start my design inquiry.

Wider Lessons

Will people get the gag, or just assume their phone has screwed up the aspect ratio somehow?

If you’re still playing First Edition X-Wing, maybe it’s worth trying this stuff out as homebrew. Drop me a line if you do. But for most everyone here, I suspect this is a pretty academic subject. After all, these problems have pretty much been solved (in a completely different way). So what can we learn here that applies to design at large?

1). Not everything in your game has to exemplify the heart of your game’s core experience as long as it contributes to it. Flying the ships is the heart of X-Wing, but the redesigned Resistance Bomber wouldn’t fly any differently. But it would reward you for flying your other ships to create particular patterns, it would give you interesting choices when you try to guess where the opponent will fly, and it would create more interesting choices for your opponents when choosing where to fly. An individual piece can provide its value by enhancing the core experience, such as by incentivizing both players to engage with it.

2). Too many available, comparable options can make it hard to draw players’ attention. Narrowing the field of players’ choices can sometimes give a particular piece of content the space it needs to shine. This can be done through restrictions, but also through rewards both explicit (such as making the Resistance Bomber reward you for choosing other Resistance ships) or implicit (such as making the Resistance Bomber reward you for taking maneuverable ships with it by giving bonuses when you line up multiple shots on the same target).

3). In competitive games, design for all players’ experience, not just the user’s. For most players, content that is flat to play against will eventually become for them to play, too. Think about the give-and-take that a piece of content creates within the context of the core experience, and try not to leave any player without choices entirely, even in their worst-case scenario.