It's actually the ships that have to spend time repositioning and can't just rush into the fight ASAP that will be hurt. PTL Interceptors and things already have to play defensively to win some matchups. It'll be pretty difficult for those ships to get full wins against swarms and lists with lots of ships/hull, even in 75 minutes.

I am personally not a fan of this idea, because a time limit already forces over aggressive behavior. Now any defensive playing, such as disengaging from a fight, which is the best choice some times, will be penalized even more with not even a full win when time is called and ahead by 12+ pts.

I agree that ships that lose a round or two to re-position are a bit disadvantaged under time limits, but we already have that situation. It's why I say TIE swarm is a bad matchup for dual Aggressors; winnable, but the Aggressor player is disadvantaged for sure (in a tournament setting). I don't see a way to fix this without doing away with time limits altogether, do you?

I admit to a little confusion: you say that a time limit "already forces over aggressive behavior", but there's a thread full of people here complaining about slow play under the current time limit rules. Which is actually the case?

Create the system that encourages the play you want.

Don't create a whole bunch of arbitrary rules to force the play you want.

Somehow this got lost in the thread, and I am not sure why. If there is to be a solution to what is perceived as a problem, it will need to somehow encourage the type of aggressive play that folks seem to want. That's how Congress does it, after all: if they want people to behave a certain way, they incentivize it somehow (usually through tax breaks). Works like a charm.

You'll have to forgive me, because I'm new to the game: have full points always been awarded for a timed win? I find that to be a little unusual. To me, the simplest solution is not to give games that are called on time the same credit as games that finish before the clock runs out. If a game goes to time, you get a Modified Match Win (3 points). All that has to happen is FFG deletes a single sentence from the current tournament rules:

The barrier for a modified win was 33 pts more than the opponent. This created a lot more modified wins. But, this also pretty much kept TIE Swarms from being viable. Because once you got paired with another Swarm, you are out of contention for the top spot, for the most part.

The barrier for a modified win was 33 pts more than the opponent. This created a lot more modified wins. But, this also pretty much kept TIE Swarms from being viable. Because once you got paired with another Swarm, you are out of contention for the top spot, for the most part.

Never having seen a TIE Swarm vs. TIE Swarm furball, I imagine it is a mess (but a fun mess). I realize that all of that movement and rolling has the potential to drag on, but certainly it's possible for that game to finish under time providing the players keep up the pace. (A recent local tournament saw a 7 TIE swarm face off against XXXZZZ and they (barely) squeaked in under the wire on time.)

Isn't that the point of whatever rules alteration folks want? To encourage faster play? If both of the swarm players wanted the full win, wouldn't they make a conscious effort to play faster?

As big of a fan of the game as I am, from my perspective the tournament rules currently suffer from some of the same quirks that basketball does: they don't incentivize aggressive play late in the game by the player in the lead. Instead, as written, they encourage slower play and stalling (the basketball equivalent would be fouling the other team just to waste time). If the tournament rules were structured in such a way that as the clock wound down, players made every desperate gamble they could think of in order to earn the full win, wouldn't that be more interesting and fun?

Well, the issue with the Swarm vs Swarm, is that rarely would you be able to get a 33 pt lead. A lot of times, you are lucky if you have killed off 2 more TIEs than your opponent.

The basketball analogy is backwards, but I get the point. The losing team fouls the winning team to conserve time. The team ahead wants to play keep away (just like Fat _____)

Apologies, basketball isn't really my game (and football/baseball don't have a similar analogy).

Oooooh, football works too! The team that's winning RUNS the ball, keeping the clock running. The losing team turns to the passing game (riskier, but also conserving time with clock stoppages after incompletes) in order to catch up.

This is actually a better analogy I think, as we have no way of fouling in xwing as in basketball.

Sorry, I love a good analogy.

we have no way of fouling in xwing

Wanna bet?