Like any good wargame, Star Wars Shatterpoint‘s winning strategies involve combining units that work well together. In practise, that means making sure your force’s Primary Units (your main characters) and their personal squads of Secondary Units share plenty of keywords. But after two years of constant new releases, it can be very tricky to keep track of which units work best with who – unless, that is, a community-minded Redditor builds a public spreadsheet that cross-references all those key stats for all 133 units in the game…
Which, of course, they have. Redditor TheFatSoviet (yes, that’s really their name) posted their heroic creation in the Shatterpoint subreddit this week, saying they “wanted a way to quickly look through what units would theoretically work well together”.
“So I went through all the unit cards and compiled all their keywords and how many of their abilities are targeted towards other keywords,” they explain in their post. “I figured there’s probably people looking for something vaguely similar to what was I looking for”.
This open access Google spreadsheet must have been no mean feat to make. For all 133 Primary, Secondary, and Supporting Units, it lists:
- The kit they come in.
- Their primary Star Wars era (and any secondary eras they appear in).
- Their points cost.
- Their faction allegiance.
- All their keywords.
- The main keyword the unit’s abilities synergize with.
- How many of its abilities use that keyword.
The upshot is that, when building a list, you can read down TheFatSoviet’s sheet and clearly see which characters and troopers share the most keywords, and which characters are most teched up with abilities that play off those keywords – immediately spotting the character/secondary/support combos that are likely to pop off the best.
These kind of stat-crunching cheat sheets can be invaluable when trying out new unit formations and army lists in the best miniature wargames, because – unless you’re a Mentat from Dune – it’s all but impossible to mentally map every mechanical relationship between every unit, how and when it’s best to exploit them in-game, and which unit combinations are best in different situations and matchups.
I sometimes try to do it for my own favored Warhammer 40k factions before a game, or when reviewing a new Warhammer 40k codex release, and it makes my brain ache – at some point you just have to write stuff down to refer back to. It’s even better when someone else writes it all down for you!
If you haven’t tried Shatterpoint out yet, you can grab a starter set for $115 right now from Amazon – but read our Star Wars Shatterpoint review first to get a feel for it.
And, for more coverage of the latest on the Star Wars tabletop, check out our recent post on a top Star Wars Unlimited TCG deal – or else read our buyer’s guide to the best Star Wars board games available.
Source: Wargamer
