Hawkstrike: That's just the way it is. You paid for that ability in the points it cost you. Maybe you had a chance to use it maybe not. You take a chance as a player that it is going to help you, maybe you get a crit that kills that ability.

The issue of how to deal with regenerating points from R2D2, Chewbacca, or other mechanisms is another (having fought Corran to zero shields only to have him restore to full; I'd like that addressed).

But at the same time, thematically, a fully regenerated corran suffered no ship damage and thus requires no repairs. Thus would be worth 0 points.

To get partial to work with regeneratives, you can just tally the inverse. Instead of counting the damage dealt, subtract the remaining hits from 100.... whatever each hit is worth.

I really see the shutting the door on lower agility ships out of the competitive scene as the biggest problem for the Partial Point System. Most of the Counters use Han as the reason for wanting the new system. If it's your desire to stop the Han builds with a new tournament system, perhaps we should look for a different fix beside flipping the whole system on it's head.

well for me, it's a personal vendetta

the more general problem is that any large ship can take advantage of the situation, since all of them are worth jack unless destroyed and all of them move faster than non-soontir/jakes small ships (large base displacement). Everyone who isn't flying a shuttle can run the clock on a match, it's just by far easier to exploit with a turret (they do not have to make the decision between flying defensively or having an attack that turn)

I really see the shutting the door on lower agility ships out of the competitive scene as the biggest problem for the Partial Point System. Most of the Counters use Han as the reason for wanting the new system. If it's your desire to stop the Han builds with a new tournament system, perhaps we should look for a different fix beside flipping the whole system on it's head.

How do partial points 'shut the door' on low agility ships? BBBBZ is predicated on inflicting massive damage with guns that are hard to remove from the table, not surviving to time. Can you present a mathematical model, as MajorJuggler has done in the past, that demonstrates the incredible advantage that high agility values would gain under a partial points system?

I see your point about the current system. I don't disagree that the current MoV rules aren't working and are causing problems. I don't believe that partial points solves this. I think it just changes it to a different set of problems. I think we need something different

There is no perfect solution, so waiting around for The Perfect Solution and ignoring a good solution is nonsensical. Partial points are more difficult to game and better reflect the actual game state than all or nothing points, full stop. The only drawback is that someone would either need to alter tournament software, or someone would have to write-up score sheets.

Which apparently is too much for people to handle, I guess?

No wonder my generation ain't making it to the moon. :|

I don't need a perfect solution, but I'm not going to jump on the partial point bus if with a little effort we could find something better.

I really see the shutting the door on lower agility ships out of the competitive scene as the biggest problem for the Partial Point System. Most of the Counters use Han as the reason for wanting the new system. If it's your desire to stop the Han builds with a new tournament system, perhaps we should look for a different fix beside flipping the whole system on it's head.

I'm not sure how that's really different from the current system, though. There's already an incentive to play ships that are very unlikely to die in the course of the match, where you can get away with it--again, it's one of the major advantages of BBBBZ over XXXZZZ or 8 TIEs (BBBBZ gives up MOV more slowly because it has a smaller number of more defensive ships). It's also one of the major advantages of Chiraneau/Whisper.

We already have incentives pushing us away from some ships and toward others. How would it be worse with (say) a half-points system?

One more round would almost certainly be enough for me to win.

One more inning and we'd have come back and won.

Two more minutes and we'd have kicked the field goal and won the game.

Thirty more seconds and we'd have had time for the game-winning three-point shot.

When a game ends, whoever's ahead wins. It doesn't matter what would have happened had the game just gone on a little longer.

Really should just move to objective based play. So much better....

One more round would almost certainly be enough for me to win.

One more inning and we'd have come back and won.

Two more minutes and we'd have kicked the field goal and won the game.

Thirty more seconds and we'd have had time for the game-winning three-point shot.

When a game ends, whoever's ahead wins. It doesn't matter what would have happened had the game just gone on a little longer.

But in all of those examples, the playing field is level. Suppose instead we're talking about a football game (set aside the complication of the PAT for a second) where one team gets the usual 7 points for a touchdown that goes the usual distance, and the other team gets 35 points for each touchdown but they have to do it on a 500-yard field.

Really should just move to objective based play. So much better....

Ask WizKids how well objective based play worked out for Pirates of the Spanish Main.

EDIT: ...Oh, are we already at the Sports Analogy level of the fallacious argument pyramid? We should be arriving at the Car Analogy level pretty soon, then.

The purpose of the Partial Point System is to better determine the winner of the out come based on the board state at the end of time. By this you will find examples where the system will fail to accurately predict the winner. Take a Soontir Fel with Push The Limit that has taken 2 hits against 1 full health Tie Fighter. Both system being discussed here would show a different winner. if these ships were to Finish it would be extremely unlikely that the Tie would be able to pick off that last hull on Soontir yet in a Partial Point System he loses.

The purpose of the Partial Point System is to better determine the winner of the out come based on the board state at the end of time. By this you will find examples where the system will fail to accurately predict the winner. Take a Soontir Fel with Push The Limit that has taken 2 hits against 1 full health Tie Fighter. Both system being discussed here would show a different winner. if these ships were to Finish it would be extremely unlikely that the Tie would be able to pick off that last hull on Soontir yet in a Partial Point System he loses.

Yes, but the point is not that it could accurately predict the winner every time - that would be the job of The Perfect System - but that it can accurately predict the winner more often than the current all-or-nothing system, to a statistically significant degree.

The purpose of the Partial Point System is to better determine the winner of the out come based on the board state at the end of time. By this you will find examples where the system will fail to accurately predict the winner. Take a Soontir Fel with Push The Limit that has taken 2 hits against 1 full health Tie Fighter. Both system being discussed here would show a different winner. if these ships were to Finish it would be extremely unlikely that the Tie would be able to pick off that last hull on Soontir yet in a Partial Point System he loses.

Or a 1 hp echo against anything without a turret. Echo should be able to outfly anything else, and eventually win. But with partial points, she loses to a full health academy tie!?!

I dontt see the points system as designed to predict the future outcome. It actually points to who has come closest to completing the mission requirements in the allotted time. For what ever reason it needed to be completed by a certain point., maybe reinforcements are arriving or you had to prevent these ships from being somewhere else.

If a guy with a single Academy TIE is able to keep himself out of Soontir and Echo's arcs, yeah, I'd say I'm comfortable giving that kind of piloting a win.

One more round would almost certainly be enough for me to win.

One more inning and we'd have come back and won.

Two more minutes and we'd have kicked the field goal and won the game.

Thirty more seconds and we'd have had time for the game-winning three-point shot.

When a game ends, whoever's ahead wins. It doesn't matter what would have happened had the game just gone on a little longer.

But in all of those examples, the playing field is level. Suppose instead we're talking about a football game (set aside the complication of the PAT for a second) where one team gets the usual 7 points for a touchdown that goes the usual distance, and the other team gets 35 points for each touchdown but they have to do it on a 500-yard field.

As long as both teams are aware of those conditions and able to tailor their teams accordingly, what's the problem?

I mean, let's just fly eight TIEs against eight TIEs and make everything completely fair.

It's a squad building game. People are going to have different builds. And you bet that your ability in flying your squad and the abilities it has will counter any numerical advantage your opponent may have. If eight TIEs can't take down Han and three Bandits in 75 minutes, why should the game be tilted so that the TIEs win?

If a guy with a single Academy TIE is able to keep himself out of Soontir and Echo's arcs, yeah, I'd say I'm comfortable giving that kind of piloting a win.

Even if Echo spent the whole game gunning down the other 7 ties? It's not that that particular A. Tie kept himself out of arc by out flying Echo, it's just the last one on the table.

If a guy with a single Academy TIE is able to keep himself out of Soontir and Echo's arcs, yeah, I'd say I'm comfortable giving that kind of piloting a win.

Even if Echo spent the whole game gunning down the other 7 ties? It's not that that particular A. Tie kept himself out of arc by out flying Echo, it's just the last one on the table.

Oh, so then the game actually involved people trying to shoot each other's ships, and more models on the table to boot?

Again, I think I'm okay with this 'drawback'.

As long as both teams are aware of those conditions and able to tailor their teams accordingly, what's the problem?

I mean, let's just fly eight TIEs against eight TIEs and make everything completely fair.

It's a squad building game. People are going to have different builds. And you bet that your ability in flying your squad and the abilities it has will counter any numerical advantage your opponent may have. If eight TIEs can't take down Han and three Bandits in 75 minutes, why should the game be tilted so that the TIEs win?

Well, here are a couple of problems with The Sports Analogy:

1) It hinges on an axiom that isn't necessarily true - that Sports Game's mechanics and/or scoring system is a good baseline and something that other games ought to try and replicate.

2) Sports Game is in every way, shape and form different from the game you're comparing it to. The only similarity is that they are both a type of game. This is not ideal when you're looking for a reasonable comparison.

The idea is not to tilt the game in one list's favor, but to have a scoring impact with a small footprint that isn't heavily biased towards List A or List B. The current system has too much bias for high hit point, high defense ships and encourages slow rolling in many situations. Partial points, by comparison, has a less significant bias and does not encourage slow rolling in as many situations.

But in the "extreme" example posted, the TIEs lost 50% of their force, while the other side only lost 37%. How should that be a win for the TIEs again?

I can see partial points as a mechanic to simulate the crippling effect that a bunch of hits cause to large ships. Leaving lucky crits aside a large ship can take a lot of hits and stay at full fighting power, while the same amount of squad points spent on smaller ships like TIEs see their fighting power reduced with every ship removed. I've encountered that problem with many other tabletop games too, where large multi-wound models fight with full strength until killed and are therefore more effective than many smaller models that combined have the same amount of wounds but loose fighting strength with every wound (=model) removed.

In an objective based game the player bringing the many can split forces, keep the large "monster" busy while at the same time securing the objective(s). Of course objective based games have their own problems :-)

Partial points kinda addresses that crippling of large monsters, even if it's only after the game. Of course this also comes with its own problems.

Since I rarely play on tournaments (far too busy with many things) it will have no impact on my gaming experience ;-)

Great post!

I think you still forgot the biggest problem with partial points: implementing it! Without robust software to auto-calculate things for you, there is the risk that MoV will get calculated wrong. Of course it is up to the players to report and check their own MoV anyway, but this would make it more complicated. I personally think that it would still be OK to just have a very robust and clear tournament scoring sheet and score it manually - if you have a smartphone then you are good to go. It actually doesn't affect the TO at all unless the players need help calculating MoV. They just report the MoV like they would anyway.

(Although for stats tracking purposes it would be awesome to get per hit point results on each ship, but that's another discussion entirely.)

I do respect that others like Sean Dorcy, that have a lot more experience in TO'ing than I do, would be extremely hesitant on any sort of partial point system without a full software back-end to make it easy on the players and the organizers.

The first shift that will happen in my eyes is the playing time will extend. From my experience as a Tournament Organizer, I find the vast majority of games finish well with in time of the rounds. I would say 80% or better of the game played in 60min rounds finish in time. With a Partial Point System every hull and shield counts against me. This system will favor defensive maneuverable ships. What this will mean to the meta is an attempt will be made to protect yourself from every single damage. It will encourage players to be very defensive as to not give up points. This will increase the overall match time significantly.

That could indeed happen! On the other hand, playing defensively does not automatically grant you an advantage. If your opponent plays aggressively and does more damage to you than you do to him, then he gains the advantage.

I think it would be fair to say that once you get up ahead on points, some people may be more likely to play defensively to retain the point advantage. On the other hand, if it is a large advantage, then you might as well stay engaged and take advantage of the snowball effect, and end up with an even bigger MoV. If your goal is to completely wipe the other guy, then optimal tactics don't change with partial points.

The problem with running away is that you pretty much ensure that you are not getting more shots than your opponent. So eventually this is not to your advantage and you will slowly lose MoV and you get chipped away at. Of course you could get a 12 point lead and then run away at the end, but that requires that the game was close to begin with. Right now we have situations where the game is not even close (if it were untimed), but the player that is getting slaughtered wins because he has a 1HP ship that runs away. You at least won't have anything that egregious with partial points.

OK, this I will just outright disagree on. Higher AGI ships are not inherently more durable for their cost than low AGI ships, but they do have a much higher standard deviation on their performance. A TIE Phantom might last forever and give your opponent zero points (your example), or it might take 2-3 hits to the face on the first attack and give your opponent 20-30 points up front, in which case you will be playing from behind the entire game.

Welcome to the discussion Dr.Juggler . Currently the ordinance rule says the points of a spent missile or torpedo are not added to the discard pile until the ship is destroyed. In a Partial Point System would this also be true or would the points be seen as burnt away? Same goes for the ships that lose their secondary weapons?

Welcome to the discussion Dr.Juggler . Currently the ordinance rule says the points of a spent missile or torpedo are not added to the discard pile until the ship is destroyed. In a Partial Point System would this also be true or would the points be seen as burnt away? Same goes for the ships that lose their secondary weapons?

Interesting! I would think that the simplest (and probably most accurate too) thing to do would be to simply count the squad point cost of the ship. That is what is done right now anyway, it is just currently full points or nothing.