X-Wing: Math Matters, or, Why Not to Take Expose
ChahDresh illustrates how a little math goes a long way when evaluating upgrades.
As always, all card references can be found in Yet Another Squad Builder. If I lapse into jargon, let me know in the comments below and I’ll fix myself.
Math. The very word conjures up images of schoolrooms, grouchy teachers, incomprehensible equations, and a strong desire to part this mortal coil. Just bringing up the topic can evoke strong reactions.
I value math as one tool amongst many. It fulfills a similar purpose to pondering our actions or doing practice maneuvers: it helps you understand what is good and what is bad before the game starts, so you don’t have to think about it in the heat of the moment. It’s particularly useful when squad building.
Let’s show how it can help us understand one of my hobbyhorses: Expose.
The author’s favorite dead horse.
“Bah!” you say. “I don’t need math to tell me Expose is bad! It takes your action and it nerfs your defense, and it costs four points! More expensive than Predator or Push the Limit, as expensive as Engine Upgrade– it’s a whopper! It’s just a bad card.”
“Fine,” says the Devil’s Advocate. “But even if it’s all those things, it’s still a firepower upgrade, so it has its place.”
But is it really?
This is where the math comes in. If we examine how much of a firepower upgrade it is, we can get a more refined judgement of whether it’s worth the cost or not.
The real problem with Expose is that it takes your action. We know how important actions are in this game. A humble Focus token increases your hitting power by 50%. You lose out on the focus token if you take Expose. How much Expose outperforms the focus token, then, is the starting point for how we should judge Expose. Let’s look at 2, 3, and 4 dice attacks modified with either a focus token or Expose. The blue shaded boxes are the higher number in each case– if you have a higher number for lots of hits, that’s good; if you have a higher number for fewer hits, that’s bad.
This is astounding. For almost every ship, Expose is a firepower downgrade compared to an action anyone can do for free. Expose may raise your ceiling (i.e. two dice can never achieve three hits), but you hit that ceiling ever-so-rarely, at a huge cost in consistency. Simply taking a focus token gives you better overall results. I won’t include another chart here, but it’s true regardless of whether you’re shooting at a one-defense B-Wing or a three-agi Interceptor. What’s even more remarkable is that Expose gets worse the more dice you throw. The more dice you throw with your attack, the more valuable a dice mod (i.e. focus or target lock) gets, and the less valuable one more die is. You have to be a 1-attack HWK for Expose to be an upgrade. On its own, Expose is never worth taking. It actively makes your squad worse, and you pay 4 points and your EPT slot for the privilege.
And that doesn’t even mention this grim fact: in the event you don’t get a shot, the focus token can instead be used for defense, as opposed to no token *and* one less agility.
Adam went to great lengths to find lists that could benefit from Expose. Bully for him! The game needs mad scientists who push envelopes, because that’s how new and interesting combinations are found. For my money, the best of the lot is this one:
Keyan Farlander w/ Expose, Experimental Interface… 36
Biggs Darklighter w/ R4-D6, Integrated Astromech… 26
Leftover: 38 points
Pilots who can achieve triple actions are rare. Pilots who can achieve triple shooting actions, like Keyan (since, for him, taking a stress is basically an offensive focus), are even rarer. This quality is what makes Expose playable for Keyan. He takes a target lock as his action, uses EI to activate Expose, and takes the stress which, later, he’ll burn as a focus. That’s a double-modded 4 or 5 dice attack. That’ll sting. You offset his cost and vulnerability with Biggs. (Note: this is very similar in effect to taking Wedge + Predator with Biggs; it does have more output because adding a red die is better than stripping a green, but not by a ton, and costs more.)
Biggs: Bailing out low-defense ships since 2011.
But Keyan is the only pilot who can pull this off by himself, and even then he needs Biggs as his handcuff. That is the true lesson: In order to take this card that claims to be a firepower upgrade and have it actually be a firepower upgrade, we have to do all sorts of list gymnastics and contortions, with built-in handshakes and (therefore) vulnerabilities. It’s just not worth the effort.
Lightning round: other ships and lists that have been suggested as good candidates for Expose, but aren’t:
- Decimators: better off taking target locks (superior firepower action) or using an Engine Upgrade to boost (since arc-dodging is their only defense); if someone objects “Experimental Interface”, the rebuttal is “Push the Limit” (PtL+EU > Ex+EI)
- Ships with lots of natural dice, e.g. Talonbane: remember, the more dice you throw, the better off you are with another dice mod than one more die
- Ships that can make multiple primary attacks: as wild as it is to imagine Quickdraw spraying 16 red dice in a single turn, you’re much better off throwing “only” 12 and applying Marksmanship to all of them
To be clear: the point of this exercise isn’t to say “you can’t use Expose”, nor is it to score points by telling people a card everyone knows is bad is, in fact, bad. The objective here is to show the place that math has in our list-building calculus. In this case, a little bit of math can dispel the illusion that Expose is a firepower upgrade, and illustrate just how bad it actually is. This is why math is such a useful tool: it helps us know which promises are lies.
But it’s not our only tool, and it can lie to us, too.
Next time we’ll discuss another card that doesn’t get a lot of play, a card which has all the good math but is nevertheless bad: the Advanced Proton Torpedo.
ChahDresh is an amateur writer and an even more amateurish X-Wing player. Let him know all the ways he’s wrong in the comments below.
