After trying out my first game with the Decimator I thought I'd share my play philosophy with you all and see if anyone else is interested in this sort of play.

I am a huge life-long Star Wars fan and I love playing and making games, so when this game came out and I watched the tutorial I knew it was for me. You can see in my signature I have a ridiculous number of ships - but I haven't had time to play at the tournament level yet (although there is a good store here where they play). While I'm competitive by nature, I prefer thematic play. I hate how everyone's posting "this ship is broken and will never be competitive" or "this ship is overcosted." The competitor in me recognizes that this is absolutely true. But the Star Wars lover in me, the one who bought a ton of these ships, wants to play with them anyway. So since I typically just play with friends, I'll illustrate an example of this play style with my Decimator game.

I made almost identical squads:

PS3 Decimator

Proton Torpedoes

Proton Bombs

Gunner

Ysanne Isard / Mara Jade*

Fleet Officer

PS1 TIE Defender

Ion Cannon

Ion Pulse Missiles

PS1 TIE Defender

Proton Rockets

Heavy Laser Cannon

*This crew member difference gave my friend initiative.

The goal of this game was to explore what the Decimator brings to the game. It has a bunch of upgrade slots so we just loaded them up, then threw in a couple Defenders with different roles to balance things out.

Since ships tend to be overcosted my games are usually around 130-140 points - we just match points with each other. While I know competitively you have to make choices - for example, do you spend the points on an R2 unit or a systems upgrade for an E-Wing? This is part of what makes tournaments fun. But in "real life Star Wars" an E-Wing has both upgrade slots! To fit thematic play I just load up both, and make sure my friend/opponent gets equal points to balance things out.

I'll go into a game thinking "man, I've got all these A-Wings - let's try six A-Wings!" Then to make things competitive I won't give my opponent a bunch of slow ships - I'll match up with some Interceptors or a combo of speed and power. In the "rock-paper-scissors" meta it's not any fun for me to take rock when I know my opponent has scissors. I'd rather take two rocks and see who can out-fly and out-roll the other.

Anyone else enjoy playing this way or have suggestions for house rules? (I'd really like to make a Bomber squad fun - I'm thinking half-price ordinance for bombers only - any ideas?)

That's the way I roll. If a player in my group wants to fly something and it's over 100 pts, just balance up. For our first year of play we also used a far too big play area as we used the whole of a random piece of black cloth we had.

I played a Ociunn Dauntless Decimator + 2 Black Squadrons against a Fat Han and HLC YT-2400.

My ships got into the 1-range dead zone of the YT-2400 for a turn to cause some havoc. After the YT-2400 was down, I was chasing the Falcon, ramming it from the backside. That was fun The Falcon can't flee from collisions forever on a 3x3 mat - it has to turn! :devilish:

I think next time I'll trade the Intimidation upgrade for Daredevil to give myself a chance at two collisions in one round.