X-Wing - Tips & Strategies

Overlapping plastic bases when moving is generally something you should avoid. The loss of your action phase is the penalty incurred when you “collide” with another ship.

There are situations, however, where you may desire to intentionally choose a maneuver that would place you in the same area as another ship. If you move one of your ships onto another (opponent’s or yours) you will be forced to back the ship along the template until it clears. This could result in a move that is much shorter or not as angled as you could normally move, or possibly allow you to remain in place. You have created a new final position which can give you better attack options through firing arcs or ranges or maybe just set up a better tactical launching point for next turn. It also thwarts opponents who can predict your most likely positions based on expected maneuverability.

It will cost you your Action Step, but sometimes the surprise value you gain will be worth it!

While I find it more fun and thematic to use named pilots, the odds clearly favor having more generic ships than fewer “quality” ships. When facing swarms though, better flying (staying in formation) and concentrating on one enemy ship at a time can help.

Keep formation. I have only played the game once thus far and was more or less practicing movement, which can be confusing at first because I’ve never played a miniatures game such as this before. But I was playing as the Imperial forces and had Vader in the advanced Tie. Each time I went to move for at least three turns in a row I was running into my other ships, thus not getting any actions for Vadar which was damaging considering he gets two. Keep a tight yet consistent formation and your forces will be able to fly around and use each other abilities easier.

I’ve been playing a lot of X-Wing with my groups, we are all waiting for the Imperial Raider so we decided to go a couple of campaign leading up to its release. In this time I’ve had a massive epiphany of the game. People have criticized X-Wing’s design for being a luck fest, offering tactics but no strategy, and in this I can not agree, but X-Wing’s strategy lies not in game play, but in the most important “phase”; Squad Building.

I equate Squad Building in this game to Deck Building in Magic. The strategy lies in examining the game design and then working with it creating combos. Playing the game should be taken as feedback on your building. I have a few tips for those who are intrigued in my hypothesis.

Think about the overall hits your squad can take.
Chain actions and special abilities.
Never underestimate upgrade cards.

Now, unlike Magic, you will never make a game breaking combo, because of the massive element of dice rolling, but use this design to your advantage and build squads that allow you to mitigate those results. Think about extra target-locks, extra focus tokens, or even automatic hits.

Finally, if you’re building a Rebel Squad, use less ships with more upgrades. If you’re building Empire, don’t underestimate the Swarm strategy.

When you set up your next game, try to select target lock tokens that have letters that can help refer to the pilots that they will be placed by(ie. “V” for Vader, “L” for Luke, etc…) Some flexibility may be needed, such as using first or last names, depending on what other ships are in the mix. This speeds up play by making it easier to know which ship has a lock on you and not having to glance around the battle to verify.

This questions was asked and thought it would be a good tip. Here is the current “max/min” builds on ship types and possible armament. Use this to help you figure out how to determine fleet points and if you are giving each player too much or too little points to work with. We find that 35-50 points works best in multi-player games. 100 pt. games are best with 2 players, 120-150 pts. with more. 200 pts., with 10+ players.

X-Wing
Least: 21 pts. – Rookie Pilot
Most: 40 pts. – Wedge Antilles w/ R2-D2, Marksmanship and Proton Torpedoes

Y-Wing
Least: 18 pts. – Gold Squadron
Most: 42 pts. – Horton Salim w/ R2-D2, Proton Torpedoes x2, and Ion Cannon

TIE
Least: 12 pts. – Academy Pilot
Most: 21 pts. – Howl Runner w/ Marksmanship

TIE Advanced
Least: 21 pts. – Tempest Squadron
Most: 36 pts. – Darth Vader w/ Marksmanship and Concussion/Cluster Missiles

‘Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.’

Or is it? The basic rules for the game include rules for asteroids, but once they are placed on the table, they don’t move, making it very easy to avoid them. You can make the game a bit more difficult and definitely more exciting by making them move around before the ships’ movement turn.

All you need to do is mark the side of the cardboard token on one side with a pen to indicate the ‘front’ of the asteroid, then take this extra step at the end of every turn:

-Before statuses and effects are removed, turn all the movement dials upside down.
-Take them one by one at random alternating with your opponent, turn them without looking at them and assign one to each of the asteroids.
-Once they are all assigned, flip all the dials and resolve the most obviously indicated maneuver – Take sharp turns as normal turns and take U-turns as straight movements.
-If an asteroid moves off the table, just bring it back on the opposite edge, facing the same way it did, finishing the movement.
-If an asteroid moves over another asteroid, nothing happens.
-If an asteroid would end movement on another asteroid, end the movement before they overlap.
-If an asteroid hits a ship, resolve the damage the same way as if the ship ran into it.
-Any ship with focus token left on it can spend the token to re-roll the damage.
-Any ship with evade token left on it can spend the token to cancel one damage.

Once all the asteroids moved, start a new turn as normal.

If you would like to represent a more constantly ‘flowing’ asteroid belt, face all the asteroids in the same direction at the beginning of the game, and only consider the amount of movement on the dials, resolving everything as a straight movement (so ignoring banks and turns).

The game comes with sets of three numbers to help identify similar ships (such as if you are running two or more Academy Pilots in TIEs). However, a better use of these is to pull out as many as you have ships in a battle. Give the highest number to the Pilot with the highest skill value and work your way down. For example, if Darth Vader is one of 10 ships, give him the #10 and if Wedge is in play, he would be #9 and so on. The side with initiative (usually the Empire) gets the higher number when skill values are tied.

What this allows is for you to quickly run through the turn order, #1-10 with activation and then #10-1 with combat. Otherwise, you are calling out Pilot Skill Rating and trying to figure out who is going in order. This will help shave the time off the total game and allow you more time to focus on actually playing.

The basic tie breaker for initiative in the rule book is that the Empire wins initiative. According to the tournament rules however, initiative ties are broken by each side rolling a red attack die, looking for hit results (with critical hits trumping regular hits). We’ve implemented that rule for our weekly X-Wing night at my FLGS, with the following change: Each side rolls 3 dice. It’s usually quicker than with just 1 die.

Also, keep in mind that when there’s a tie for initiative, the winner of the tie breaker can still decide to give initiative to his opponent.

When using the squad building rules this variant can add some variety to your sessions. Instead of choosing a point total for your build, use dice to decide a random number. The random number will create new opportunities for different squads (we all know that sometimes that extra point could change everything). This also makes the squads more spontaneous, taking advantage away from someone who has more free time on their hands to pre-build (not to mention eliminates the internet effect of just bringing a tourny crushing 100-point build that was swiped off the web!).

The current method my group uses is 5d20+30 (roll a 20 sided die 5 times and add 30). This generates a number between 35 and 130 with a bell curve trending towards an average of 82.5 points. Feel free to expriment with other formulas for different builds.