Friday 20 December 2013

Attack Wing

It's X-wing, but with Star Trek ships.

Is more or less accurate.  But there are differences.

Cloaking action.  A cloaked ship gets +4 defence die and cannot be target locked,  until the cloaked ship fires, when they will lose cloak at the end of that turn.  You also have no shields whilst cloaked.  And if you've lost them, then you can't cloak anymore.  You can also do a barrel roll action whilst cloaked.  It's an immensely powerful ability, balanced by you probably don't want to do it all the time.

Ship in general have way more attack dice.  X-wing the max is generally 3, except for secondary weapons.  Here it seems to be 3 minimum.  The Klingons get to throw 5 dice at people!!

It's Star Trek, so there are great many more factions.  X-wing is firmly placed in the original movie trilogy era.  So theres only really Rebel v Empire.  And the pirates and mercenaries/smugglers  I guess, but being in the movies they were all working for one side or the other.  Star Trek has the federation, the klingons, romulans, The Dominion, Ferengi, Bajorans etc etc.  So much more variety.

I hear a lot of hoohah about there being more ship customization, but I really don't see it.  The captain is just the same as picking a pilot, the crew are just renamed skills and so on.  Although it does mean you can pretty much put any pilot in any ship.  That would break X-wing probably.  Darth Vader in an Interceptor *drool*

There are way more scenarios.  Kudos to Wizkids for that.
Some other general optimizations.  The dials have the ship name on the back.  The range ruler has the reminder about bonus dice when attacking at range 1/3, as well as no bonus on the torpedo side.

All of the above would seem to indicate it's the best thing ever.

But their are issues.  Nitpicks if you will.

Overlapping ships can fire at each other.  This makes blocking maneuvers almost useless and removes a massive part of the tactical game.

The biggest one is it's done by Wizkids.
The minis are pretty bad.  Servicable.  But still, they aren't even the right colour.  And the detailing (or lack of it) is pretty bad.  Additionally X-Wing ships are to scale with each other (barring the new frigate/transport which are smaller by neccesity).  Being based on Heroclix which has 0 scale, none of these do.  Apart from it seems the original enterprise, which was shrunk to be in scale with some other ship, I'm guessing the Enterprise-D.

Wizkids card stock is horrible.  There used to be a Star Trek CCG done by Decipher.  They took screen grabs and cleaned them up for the cards.  Wizkids have not done this.  The image in the cards is horribly grainy in places, just like it was ripped from an early 90's laser disc or something.  Bear in mind there is like 15 years of technology between these releases, there is just no excuse for it.

Wizkids are on the bad side of the promo fence.  They support events way more than FFG do (yay).  But FFG only do alternate art cards or acrylic tokens or whatever.  Wizkids will do promo minis.  And these will probably be better than normal minis to make them desirable.  I see no evidence of this, but I 100% expect it.  The only promo so far is DS9, but it will still suck if you love DS9 and in the future you just won't be able to get it.  It's hard to get the mini as it is.  You only get a cardboard token to represent it unless you win an event.   Now part of the appeal of this is the minis.  Bad wizkids, bad bad people.

X-wing is a game of dogfighting.  It's easy to see how the rules fit the theme.  And it does a grand job.
Starships dogfighting....is an odd concept.

The Klingons seem massivly overpowered.  They roll buckets of dice, can evade, and can cloak.  I can't see how they could really ever lose.

If you love Star Trek, but for some reason hate Star Wars then this is a great buy.
If you love both of them, then heres what I recommend.  Buy X-wing for the tactical dogfighting game.  Buy Fleet Captains for a proper Trek game.