Is it weird that my name is Tim but I am a Spike/Johnny?

NPE's are entirely subjective.

The term its self alludes to this "Negative Play Experience."

What is that exactly?

For me, its anything that makes me lose. I don't like losing, never have, and anything that makes that happen generally pissed me off. But that is part of the game so its really not a point to labor.

So lets look at mechanics that are NPE's.

Activation + init control - facing lots of actvations with init control is a big NPE that is currently at the forefront. Someone drops down a 20 activation squad and then does a mouse dump on the board. You face 2 -3 hero's and a boat load of scrubs that get in the way. you can't deal with many little pieces getting in the way, you can't get at the main guys, spend most of the game shooting little pieces while the your big guys get smashed end of round/start of round without getting into major combat with the opponents larger pieces. Leaves you feeling empty like you never had a chance.
This is extreme example (taken from my experiences of playing againt TIms NPE extreme which i played loads of times and never beat it once. Howver, Any game where you are outactivated and don't have at least parity in init control will feel like this)

Super saves - you face an opponent who brings GOWK or Zanna. Your squad is built to attack but every attack is saved on the first roll, or the second, failing that the 3rd. You have no way of dealing with the saves but you need to kill this piece to get at the others. You deal an insane amount of hits but it doesn't matter, the saves are made and you go away grumbling about "luck". You feel like it was all pointless as your squad is decimated while doing NOTHING to the other guys.

swarm Deathshots - again, you face a large amount of figures that you need to kill that don't cost much points. You can kill these (yay) except you net 9 points each time while after killing 2 or 3 your 50 point piece succumbs to being smashed as you kill them. Not only that but they likely have more activations than you and you get hammered after your big piece has died to the deathshots. (this kind of NPE also extends to dying on your own turn due to massive riposte flurries or DJEM so rallies).

Excessive stuns - THis is more prevalent in tile wars but its crap to face, and suprisingly crap to play. It consists of boositng a sith sorcerer so that he can so it many times, and often twice in a round. You stun, hit, win init stun again. I've literally played against a 22 activation squad that was killed by a 6 man band because they didn't manage to activate enough piece to compete.

Avoid defeat/ressurection squads - minotr NPE but you kill these guys but they keep coming back, keep making their saves and you lose because no matter how often they die, the don't leave the board.

Feel free to add your own, i'm kind of running out.

Some of these are top tier, some of them are tier 2 or 3. Generally, NPE's are just annoying to face but htat is in the eye of the beholder as to what that is.

A lot of people want to put a small number of figs down, play fast and win. Its simple to build, simple to play and doesn't take a lot of time scrutinizing build and strategy. Its also a simplistic verison of mini's that has never really been what the game has offered. Override, init control, activation control has always made this game more than just beat and smash. This has been the case since inception.
I remember playing a vassal tourney after RotS (no booming voice, san hill undiscovered etc) that only allowed figs less than 25 points, i won it towing Lando HoT and activations.
At the top levels of competition the game has a bunch of tactics that require a lot of thought to counter in building and in games. SOmetimes, its hard to figure out how to deal with it all and that in of itself can be an NPE.

so what is your NPE and how strong is it?

I am a bit different in my NPE's. For instance, I am starting to realize that naboo death shots is not an NPE for me. Merely I believe it is something that our game should be without. My games playing against naboo death shots generally are not negative play experiences for myslef, but I still loathe the squad for what it brings to the game. A dumb downed strategy and it forces your opponent to over think every move, while your own turns are very cut and dry.

I tend to agree with Tim on most all of his "luck" based NPE's. That is probably because we fall under the same psycho-graphic category, Spike-Jonny. Other aspects of the game, such as using override as a tool to win, does not bother me. Even when I lose in this fashion it does not create a negative play experience for me. I was out played, sweet and simple. I believe that if you figure out your psycho-graphic category your NPE's will probably align with it.

With that being said, you can have something that you do not like in the game without it being an NPE. For me that is Naboo death shots, how the game represents mouse droids, transfer essence and how Jedi go full-tard against the vong unless they have parry or makashi. Some people do not like that guns are range less, but that doesn't necessarily make it an NPE.

To answer your question donny, NPE's can be anywhere in the tiers and happen anytime during a match. It simply depends on you...

The argument about luck is superficial and simplistic. Rather, if you keep getting back to "the luck factor" then I think you need to seriously look at the statistical odds.

Here are my responses to the "luck factor" comments that I've heard ad-nauseum over the years:

Vaapad-Style Mastery: If Mace Critdu has a 20% chance of rolling a critical hit on a given attack roll (on a result of 17-20), then it makes sense that if you spend 2 fp to reroll, you are statistically likely to get a crit on one of those 5 rolls (5 chances at 20% success). To then complain that "Mace just got lucky a lot" is mistaken...the Mace player was playing the odds, and it worked out. Other times it doesn't. It takes wisdom and patience and a keen sense of timing to know when to "go for broke" and when to be safer and save the FP (or even to not make that move to attack at all). Certainly, there will be times when he does get lucky, and he strings a couple of crits together in a row (and as I’ve said from the start, I do think he needs to lose Flurry!), but with a 20% chance to crit on every attack, the odds aren’t quite as long as you’d think.

SSM: GOWK has a 50% chance to avoid the damage from any attack. And then he has a 70% chance of making the save on a reroll (if needed), and a 90% chance of making it on a second reroll for that attack (if needed). When you add the various permutations up, that leads to a large amount of damage being avoided throughout the course of a skirmish. And that is to be expected--luck has very little to do with it; it's all probability and statistics. Therefore, to say, "GOWK got really lucky on his SSM saves" is not accurate, unless he was making more than 50% of his initial SSM saves...but even then, there is plenty of room for variance before you can legitimately say that his saves were really lucky. If he is hit 20 times throughout the course of a match and he makes 12 of the initial SSM saves, that is only very moderately lucky (ie, he statistically should’ve failed 2 more initial saves than he did). So don’t think of SSM as a luck-based mechanic…think of it as a probablity-based mechanic. An alternative to SSM would be to remove all SSM and damage-negation from the game, and replace those abilities with a proportionate amount of extra HP on those pieces. Think of GOWK as having 500+ hp in most cases, and you’ll understand him properly. Thinking of him as a 120hp piece that relies on luck says two things: you are looking for something to complain about, or you just don’t like the way things played out.

LCE aside (and I can understand why people don’t like it), Zannah is largely the same thing, but with different factors. Rather than Mettle, she has Force Bubble (which is better in some situations, worse in others). But her survivability is not based on luck; it’s based on probability.

Avoid Defeat: Very similar to the above. A figure with AD SHOULD make 25% of its Avoid Defeat saves (assuming no FP). So don’t be surprised or angry if that actually happens from time to time. But even if Atton Rand makes several AD saves in a game, is it really all that different from Dash RS making (or missing) all of his attacks against a given piece? This is a game that uses a d20 for everything, so dice-based variance is going to be part of it.


In the end, rather than complaining about "luck-based pieces," I think we need to decide which we’d rather have in the game: damage-negation (SSM, Evade, Avoid Defeat, etc) or massively-increased HP on various pieces.

…either that, or remove all tanks from the game. Enjoy the _____-Paper-Scissors game.

Ugh, this one. Even if a high activation squad isn't an auto-loss for you, it's still no fun to play against.

yeah, this is true. The balance got thrown off at some point because damage per phase (on a single fig) went through the roof.
It was bad enough at a time where boba would do 40 to you and possibly disintegrate you but if he didn't you usually had a few rounds of attacking before he zapped someone, he managed to stay away long enough to kill a dude or your pieces got involved and got the job done.

then the rebels got their cannon and output went from about 90 dmg per phase to 150-160. Now you have figures that can do that in one turn.
At the same time HP stayed stagnant. Darth Bane still hold the record for hp on a conventional fig from about 8 years ago. So the game went from one of damage distribution and attrition to first strikes and crippling end of round/beginning round assaults.

The issue I have with damage negation is that, when it becomes excessive, there are a massive number of figs that are omitted by the mechanic. In order for it to be a statistical issue you need repetitions. If you need 10 attacks to get one through then you need to have a squad that can do that. If it was just a fig with 400 hp then at least you could see the needle regressing as your 20 damage single attacker got a few hits in. This was actually how the game was early days. A bunch of small attackers spreading out trying to take down Vader while he ran from one fig to the other. With some of the damage negation the needle doesn't move unless all saves fail. So its not the same. You can't calculate it and because the amount of attacks in a game on a single fig is generally very low for the most part the statistical aspect is non-significant so you have to either hope for a trend of failing saves as opposed to the opposite of making more than the "statistical mean".

In anycase, I agree with this point. Damage has gone out of control which has pushed damage negation up which as created, in my view, an unstable statistical state where you need a great deal of success with damage negation in order to compete with the damage output and conversely you need a lot of high powered attacks to deal with the damage negation.

Its come about because 2 parameters have increased (output and negation) while the other (HP and defense) have stayed relatively stagnant (in some areas defense has gotten decent boosts, HPs are unchanged).

Yes, very well said, Deri. And I agree. Unless we can find a new way to make Rocks/Tanks, or a new way of doing damage, it seems like the situation we have right now (of huge output and huge negation) will continue to exist.

I guess if we could do it over, I would prefer it if there were a measure of armor (damage reduction rather than negation), and an effective HP increase for tanks/rocks that scaled with the game's damage increases.

If we take atmsalad's view of the Tier 1 squads, which I largely agree with, and I'm interested to see if it translates through to NZ Nationals and GenCon, it's largely high activation and high movement squads:
Skybuck, Cad/Durge, Grevious T-Bike/Bxs, Double Swap and Daala Scouts

I actually think that a beefy Jedi squad can stand up most of these squads to some extent - they're obviously going to get massively out-activated in most cases, but I think they still have a decent shot of surviving long enough to cause problems. It's the builds just below the top tier that are really hurting Jedi IMO - Talon Kardde builds, Vindicated cannons, Blast bugs, and Snowtrooper swarms.

Personally, I'd like to cut the power of the tempo/activation combo - it's the Imperial and Separatist squads that can control games that are largely dominant at the moment. Is there any room for more pre-initiative abilities like the T-Series Tactical Droid or Aing-Ti Flow Walking?

As noted several times already, the addition of Aves is going to be interesting next set, and it's going to make life very difficult for some of the above squads. Seems like the high act Sep squads that don't rely heavily on CEs will still be good though - eg Cad and Durge.

No, Tim, I'm not buying it.

First, you said this:

Yes, you mentioned Reserves in that sentence...and even talked about Reserves in the beginning of that post. But then you grouped Avoid Defeat and SSM in with it, as if the three SAs all belong together in the same group. And then you said that those SAs should not be on Tier 1 pieces.

But then I challenged your statement, and you backpedaled with this:


So then are you retracting your comment in the first post, that AD and SSM should not be on Tier 1 pieces? Which is it?

Regardless, please don't make sweeping statements about AD, SSM, and Reserves, and then say that you really just meant Reserves. That's deceptive and revisionist.

You are probably the most vocal opponent of SSM, just as I'm probably the most vocal opponent of activation-abuse, and so it's natural that we're going to disagree. But if we're going to disagree then let's at least do it honestly.

I think you are reading into what he said way to much TINT. You are missing his point as a whole and taking bits and pieces and over analyzing them...