Article 2: Best Practice and Advice for Solo Play

This article acts as a transcript for Episode 2 of the Back to Dials Podcast.

Hello! You are listening to the Back To Dials Podcast for the X-Wing Miniatures Game! I am your host Liam and this is Episode 2: Best Practice and Advice for Solo Play.

Something many players of X-Wing wonder at some point is if there is a way to play by yourself, without needing another player to go against. Scheduling games can be a difficult task, because both players need to have an overlap in availability.

Though this doesn’t quite scratch the same itch of a full game, the concept of practicing by yourself is an idea myself and other players have gone about on multiple occasions. Be it from not having time for a full game, someone to play with, or just wanting to improve your setup movement or positioning, solo practice is a highly useful tool to have at your disposal.

A very common way that people do solo practice is playing on the Fly Casual computer simulator. This resource has a computer system that you can pair off against that has a basic algorithmic flight path that allows you to have an opponent. There are benefits and drawbacks to this system though. Most X-Wing games between two players happen on the table and to a far lesser extent using Tabletop Simulator to play online. Both of these have different spatial visualization not just to each other but to Fly Casual as well. On top of that, the algorithm that Fly Casual uses typically just goes for the straight joust and misses a lot of nuance that many players can have.

For my recommended form of solo practice it is best to split it into two sections: setup and initial flight patterns, and maneuvering.

Setup is far easier to explain and take into one’s own practice. There are very few players I know who don’t do this when preparing for a tournament. The basic idea is simple: prepare a couple formations that you can set up with at the beginning of the game to have a good idea of how to get the opening engagement you desire. If you have a pilot like Howlrunner or Serissu who gives a benefit to all ships at range 0-1, this can entail finding a formation where you can set up and move all your ships while staying in that range 0-1 bubble. Or if you have a ship equipped with Lone Wolf, setting up so that ship can stay out of range of the rest but still being able to be a part of the fray. Sometimes this goes for more than just ships too, such as obstacles and if playing with 2.5 or XWA rules objective setup. If you wished to be in line to land on an obstacle with your Vulture Droid or Hyena Droid where all corners would be covered for the obstruction bonus, practicing your obstacle setup with your squadron setup would be of great use.

Then there is the more complicated to explain but in my opinion a far more important long term way to practice which is in the general idea of maneuvering. This is something I originally did back in the game’s first edition, having trouble keeping my VCX-100 from landing on obstacles. What I did was just take out all the obstacles I had and threw them randomly on the table, only making minor tweaks to make sure the closest obstacles were about range 1 apart. You can also include bombs, mines, and obstacles like spare parts canisters and rigged cargo chutes in this for variety. Then I threw a bunch of tokens on the board randomly as well, and decided that they’d be my track. My goal was to fly my VCX-100 through the field of obstacles to each of the tokens without hitting any of them. At first it was a struggle I will admit, but eventually after the third or fourth time I set down a new random assortment of obstacles I felt pretty good about it.

When Tabletop Simulator became popular I once again struggled with my depth perception with the obstacles, so I had brought back this exercise then as well. Though I did this with a VCX-100 you can do it with any ship base and dial, and with any type of reposition you may need practice with. I have also done this with Tie Phantoms, A-Wings, Tie Reapers, you name it. It’s simple once you’ve tried it out and helps out so much with practicing spacing.

The next step adds another layer of complexity. As one knows X-Wing isn’t without its enemy ships. Instead of putting down tokens that one tries to fly to, put down some bases and arcs. The goal is up to you, but I would recommend practicing flying up to these bases from multiple initial positions to get the shot you want while avoiding their arcs. This was extremely useful when I first decided to try flying Soontir Fel, getting the bullseye while avoiding their arc, and when practicing lining up trick shot shots with a Falcon and with Blackout.

It’s important to note that sometimes from where you start it is impossible to get your perfect final position. In these cases it is best to think about what the second, third, or even fourth best all the way to what the worst final position would be. Then consider what the best final position you could get would be. Sometimes it is one without even being able to get a shot. Yes the primary goal of any game is to kill your opponent’s ships, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of losing your own ships in the process.

Turning up the heat a bit more, assign a dial with each of these ships. Now, knowing what those dials are, dial in what you would need to get your best position possible with those other ship dials in mind. This is akin to trying to figure out what your opponent is trying to do in a game and making the best maneuver to counteract them. Once you get the hang of this, give those ships repositions. You may realize that the best position you can get changes when those ships can “react” to where you moved to.

Then it’s good to start thinking of moving multiple ships at the same time. Using the same examples of Howlrunner and Lone Wolf, how do abilities like that affect your movement patterns? Eventually, you get to the point of selecting multiple different maneuvers that could be on the opposing ship’s dials and picking maneuvers that put you in the best possible position against all of the opposing options, and, taking that end position as your new initial position for the next round, repeating the process. In my opinion, this is the closest one can ever get to replicating the multiplayer X-Wing experience in solo practice. The benefits of doing this include, but aren’t limited to, practicing your spacing and engagements, thinking about what the opponent may do when playing against them, being prepared for as many outcomes as possible, and genuinely thinking about not just how to play your list and beat your opponent but also how your opponent would think about beating you.

If there are any other strategies that you may use when it comes to solo practice please let me know. There’s a lot of nuance when it comes to how one approaches X-Wing without another person to play against and what works for me may not necessarily work for you. Notably I focussed on positioning alone and not dice rolls or modifications, this is because I feel like solo practice should just focus on the things you can control and not necessarily the parts that are left up to chance. If I were to include dice at all in this I would just recommend using dice averages instead of actually rolling.

This has been Liam of the Back To Dials Podcast, and as always if you have any questions or feedback feel free to email us at feedback@backtodials.net. We’ll see you on the table when it is time to go Back To Dials!