For those of you who didn’t read the first of this series, I intend to cover my journey on getting better with flying groups of 5-6 generic pilots. When I wrote that article it was a week or so before the X-Wing World Championships and the accompanying announcement of something that will massively affect this project; the second edition of X-Wing!

The info came in thick and fast after the first reveal and I was poring over it with glee, as I’m sure many of you were. As the last blog described what I thought were swarms challenges in the current environment I thought it would be interesting to discuss what’s been learned about 2nd Edition so far and what it could imply for the future of the swarm archetype (Obviously this must be taken with a pinch of salt, there is still much, much more we don’t know about second edition than we do).

The potency of attacks seems to have been brought down. For example, Fenn can still roll five dice at range one, but fearlessness now changes a result to a hit rather than adding a hit results, capping Fenn’s damage. On top of this, linked actions limit the Fenn’s ability to mod his shots with both focus and target lock actions, again limiting his damage output. This means that Fenn is much less likely to come in and one-shot one of your ships before it can attack. Similar powering down of attacks over all factions would be a huge boon for swarms.

Fenn’s pilot card and the new Fearless upgrade.

Defense has also been reduced. The devs have said that there will be no linked action to focus and evade. This greatly reduces ships to turtle up and weather fire. There also seems to be less ability for ships to both boost and barrel roll, making arc-dodging a much more challenging proposition, especially if you can overlap multiple arcs over an area.

Darth Vader’s pilot card. I don’t see any evade or boost actions! The Afterburners card can provide a boost after a speed 3-5 manoeuvre, but this allows for much greater counter-play than the freely available boost granted by Engine Upgrade (and it has charges!).

Turrets are changing. They will need to spend an action to move their turrets firing arc much like the Shadowcasters do in the current edition. This means that it will be harder for fat turrets to lead swarms on a merry dance through the rocks as they will have to spin their arcs, perform actions to mod their shots, try and keep arcs on ships that move after them etc. All in all it will be a much more challenging task to do what is relatively simple at the moment. This also combines with big ships mostly losing the ability to boost and Push the Limit to greatly swing the power balance. Watch out Dash, I’m coming for you!

The new mobile firing arc on Han Solo’s base.

Bumping will matter. The panel at Worlds revealed that the designers wanted to bring the game back to a place where player skill matters and poor flying has consequences and one of the results of this is the reduction in availability of passive mods. Even the ones we have seen have fairly severe restrictions, such as predator requiring the target to be in the attacker’s bullseye arc. This means you will be able to use your low PS to prevent attack and defence mods, as well as control your opponent’s position on the board.

Soontir doesn’t really have a manoeuvre he likes in this position.

The reveal of 2nd Edition has completely derailed the plans I had for this series, but in the best possible way. As the weeks continue I will be reporting on my 1st edition games, focusing on aspects that will transfer over to the updated game such as positioning and formation flying, dice odds, and list building.