Onager Discussion and Light B*tching Thread

@TheSockGap That's not VWC, I think?

Btw, I looked at that and it looks like the high-placing non-Onager fleets didn't actually fight any Onager fleets... But it's not the easiest list to crossref like that.

@Sabelkatten Sorry, I misread. I wasn't involved in the VWC at all so I can't be of any help there.

The interesting part of the Italia tournament happened in the 20-40 positions, I think. There is a huge amount of variety amongst players who are OKish but not great and who are really experimenting. Big range of admirals, big range of ship combos, far more interesting than what happened with the top 10.

@TheSockGap I think the SSD in 14th place is pretty interesting myself. 🙂That fleet even beat one Onager fleet.

But from a game balance viewpoint looking at the "almost-rans" isn't really useful. It's the winners that find the holes in the rules.

I find the idea of testing the Onager and Starhawk against each other but not against anything else extraordinary. When I consider the play experience of the playtesters I know about I would be very surprised if none of them said 'Jinkies, this thing's going to tear VSDs a new one'.

I'm trying not to judge the ship designers and I'm not blaming the playtesters. They may well have been given a very narrow task - test the two ships against each other and report. I just find the decision baffling. Why wouldn't you test something new against everything else that's already out there, at least once?

@duck_bird Surely these were tested against old ships as well, and not just against each other?

Also, did no one see a problem with the fact that the Starhawk is harder to kill than an SSD, without being subject to crippling?

Actual play suggest that the Seppies are holding their own against CW factions just fine. The Republic is struggling more. I expect them to do better once we see the rest of the wave 10 cards.

@Sabelkatten

Once again, I suspect the real problem here is not that the Onager is overpowered or underpriced, but that most of the rest of the Imperial arsenal is overpriced and underpowered. I think if we saw a serious rebalancing of (particularly) SSD’s and VSD’s, the Onager might cease to be the dominant force in Imperial listbuilding. I also think the Starhawk needs a rebalance far more urgently; the Rebels should not be the faction with the best small game AND the best big game... and the Onager is probably a very necessary check on that brick.

I think the real error they made with that whole wave is that giving a mere large base access to 5-6 defense tokens, including redundant Braces and Redirects, was a real mistake, especially when such a tank is not subject to the huge ship “crippled” scoring rule. My pet theory is that “crippled” rules need to be abolished for the SSD, or (possibly) adopted for all ships. I haven’t had a chance to do enough testing myself to fully endorse this, but it seems like a fair assumption, given what I’ve seen of the SSD and Starhawk in the games I’ve played thus far.

@Cpt ObVus Well, it's a while to go but... it seems that Onager fleets beat most everything, not just other imperial fleets.

EDIT: A starhawk and a Sloane list have the top spots right now. So the Onagers aren't unbeatable. It looks very much like Starhawk/Onager/mostly losers now...

So either almost all good players have chosen to go with those ships,or both of them could use a bit of a nerf.

@Sabelkatten Interesting to note the results, but really, we‘re talking about just one tournament in a meta that’s been stunted by a stunning lack of games. I feel like more data is required before anything gets nerfed. And I say that fully aware of the fact that I *personally* feel like the Starhawk probably needs an adjustment (or a rules rewrite, to make everything—or nothing—vulnerable to “crippling”). I just think one needs to be careful about mistaking opinion for fact, given the limited sample size here.

There’s a very good chance that once the metagame evolves a bit, and people start figuring out how to better fight the Onager (my money’s on MC-30’s, which seem to be the answer for just about everything these days), we will see more diversity in Imperial lists. I also think that certain ships are badly overcosted (again, SSD’s, VSD’s, possibly some others), and bringing them down to modern standards might create some negative pressure on the Onager, opening things up a bit.

There is a 4-Acclamator fleet in the game with Proximity mines on all 4. Seems to be doing OK.

I'm not sure that they will have that much of a problem. In the Italia tournament I can see that 3 of the top 15 fleets out of 60 are CW faction fleets. There are a lot of Onagers and Starhawks in the top 15 too, but there were a lot to begin with, and there weren't many CW fleets to begin with.

Come to find out they didn't have time for any of their new ship designs they had notes/drawings for, so they had to recycle and munge together a lot of existing stuff in a hurry.