I think FFG has the right thing going for them, certain pilots just shouldn't be on the other factions. With Star Trek the idea that a captain can be put in ANY ship just didn't feel right. I think they could have done away faction penalty and just made it faction pure for the captains, the crew I could more easily see being a penalty cost.

At its peak we had 8 people at one event for AW, compared to the normal 10-12 that X-wing gets that's amazing.

My thoughts echo pretty much what everyone else here said. I dumped my STAW collection in a big lot on eBay and immediately turned it into Star Wars Armada stuff and never looked back. Still play X-Wing though. Wizkids games, outside of quarriors (which admittedly I pretty much only play on my iPad to kill some time every now and then), I am done with. Recently backed Dark Souls and Massive Darkness (dungeon crawls) on Kickstarter so even though Wizkids is not getting my money anymore, it still seems to be flowing from my wallet.

I have 1 guy that shows up for our regular evening games and I get 3-4 for op events. Non-gamer girlfriend who LOVES Trek thought it wasn't anything more than a slow paced Joust. Has become our Beer and Pretzels casual game. X-Wing has casual pick up games all the time. We used to do that. Like everyone else here Balance and Glut of product hurts the game. I see TWO different builds Feddy, and Rommy. I bring Bajorans, Xindi, or Ferengi and always expect to get whooped solidly. It isn't fun for me as a regular game anymore. Casual and scenario play with friends is the most I really drag out stuff anymore. Considering selling or trading these. Heroclix Tactics figs are already on the chopping block. Sad this game has fallen.

I've been selling a few ST:AW ships over on some FB pages. There's more than a few people that I've seen lamenting the decline of the game.

The game itself could have been great, even better than X-wing if they'd have done it correctly, but when you're able to dodge EVERY attack or make massive amounts of attack dice, it seems quite un-fun on the players.

Having so many factions really hurt as well IMO. While it was inline with the show, I think they could have done a few less factions and just combined a few of them, but that's just me.

There are combos that were created because of card interaction that made it a pain to play either for fun or competitively,

Haven't checked in here in a long time, but from what I gather the folks that got into it as a Star Trek game, not a competitive or tournament game, are for the most part still playing thematically at home.

If you build your forces mostly with the fiction in mind, rather than the text on the cards, and stick to within or mostly-within faction, then I still think it's a fun, light game.

X-Wing is better balanced, but Star Wars doesn't capture my imagination like Star Trek. It's fun and I have some of those models too, but I'm not interested in tournaments and if anything I think it's even harder to find casual X-Wing gamers precisely because it's better balanced, so everybody's into competitive play instead.

Well, if GenCon was any indication X-Wing is thriving and ST:Attack Wing is dead. Now granted, WK bailed on GenCon but even at the vendor level I didn't see anyone selling ST:AW.

I'll echo Ted's comments:

ST:AW is a great home game. The themes work well, running casual scenarios is fun, cross faction can be made to work.

X-Wing is for the competitive scene - it's fun to play, well balance, but can be a bit min/max feeling for anyone that's new to the game. The competitive meta is pretty competitive (I'm a top half player, but not consistently, in our local events, have never even thought about a regional or a national event).

ST:AW - is just not well designed for competitive play. X-Wing seems designed almost entirely for competitive play. A casual game - usually isn't that friendly to one of the two forces.

I disagree. X-Wing can be a great casual game. The key word being "casual" which means the players aren't trying to build to win. I would even say that X-Wing is a better casual game then Attack Wing, simply because the game balance is much better.

The majority of my X-Wing games were "casual" games where we just played with the ships, no upgrades allowed.

ST:AW with ships and captains and no other upgrades permitted is a fine game.

It's the Voyager rolling 7 defense dice, re-rolling 3, then modifying 3 BS results to evades - that's pretty brutal. My son & I have simulated that, rolling it about 50 times. We got 3 evades only once. Most often we got 5, sometimes 6. Almost always 4 or 5.

Unless you have something throwing a brutal amount of attack dice, you're just never going to damage that ship. Or perhaps you'll do a point or two, burning some one-use upgrades. It has enough hit points that it will laugh at a point or two of damage.

It quickly becomes unfun when things like that exist in a game.

And don't start me on the overpowered, undercosted fighters. I wanted to love that mechanism - the token degrading way to model a squadron of fighters taking damage - that was about perfect. But they just throw too many attack dice and don't cost enough. The errata to have a ship with hull value of 4 - it needed to be a 5 or a 6 to make it more balanced. Else - I've seen three naked Teeny Prizes and three Fed fighters put on the map for a 120 point game - it was effing brutal.

They're starting to curb the fighters thing with more upgrades that let you perform multiple attacks or specifically do things to target fighters. They are undercosted, and pretty powerful for how much they cost, but it's getting a little better. I think I actually wish they'd release fighters for the other factions because so far it's really just the Dominion and Federation fighters. Romulans have Fighters too, but they're not as bad. As big issue is that on the first couple "clicks" of health, they just have such high Attack values. I get that fighters should be awesome, but there's no reason for them to have a higher value than most or all of the capital ships they're targeting.

Yeah, the attack values on fighters are absurd, especially given their place in the canon. Otherwise I think they're fine, they have some cool support functions that fit them really well. It's just those 6 attack dice they can throw at the start. If it had been like 3 I think they'd have never been a problem.

Though, to be honest I didn't see them too often when I was playing. In fact I think I played them more than anyone else did, locally.

At my venue, we only see one or two people use them at all, which is odd because we have some fairly competitive stuff aside from that.

I honestly kind of liked them more when they were a resource, because at least you were losing your resource slot for playing them, and you only got one. It was pricey, but it was also one of the best ways for handling the Borg at that point. I think though, that one of the large reasons they're so powerful now is that small fleets with high firepower is really popular, and fighters completely work around that. You might be able to one shot my Voyager with your build, but you're barely scratching these fighters.

I've never felt like STAW's balance problems were noticeable in casual games, so to me that's kind of a moot point.

As long as the game is fun and feels fair when no-one's actively seeking out competitive builds or loopholes, then I'm much more concerned with the setting and available opponents. For me, STAW has the edge there.

So I was just talking with the other former STAW players at my local venue. We're talking about doing a new "classic rules" league, where we'd go back to the original rules before the changes, and maybe implementing a limiting rule that disallows banking more than two of any token type on a single ship. We also discussed increasing the cross faction penalty to cut down on broken builds. The store has been continuing to acquire and bank prize kits even though. We haven't played in six months or more. Does anyone have suggestions on house rules that when added to the original rules might help balance the game for a less broken competitive environment?