So! I understand that the topic may be a bit confusing, so let me explain!

Have you considered bigger battles? Like... 600+ points, up to, say, 1000? I mean, sure, it's too early for that before even wave 1 or 2 hit the shelves, but I personally long for games where my "fleet" is not made out of three, four ships.

While I understand that the game may be focused on tiny scale skirmishes to keep the tournament scene as compact as possible (like x-wing) I want to see larger forces that live up to the game's title.

Which brings me to another point - do you think that the game can support bigger battles? Maybe epic play format like X-Wing will be required for that? I'm somewhat afraid that Tarkin could come off as broken in a large fleet, but what if it was divided into naval squadrons? And even better - between several players! I must admit - I had lots of fun playing X-Wing with four players, so having a 3v3 (although 6 people may bog the game down as I noticed with X-wing) big fleet battle could be cool.

What do you guys think? Do you look forward to playing actual fleet battles?

Maybe, but you're talking about hours of play and house rules needed to activate more than one person/ship at a time to keep the game from taking forever. Won't see it often but could be a fun special event for a local store.

Unfortunately no, the alternate activation system will not allow you to play large fleet battles unless you have all day to do so. To play large battles you would need multiple fleets of up to 400pts so any global effects do not become OP, you could also have each fleet being commanded by a different player and each player activates a ship when its his side to do so.

Oh, I am already planning to the 1k+ game scale. . . It is why I want 5 MC30c's, 3 ISD's, 5 Victories, 4 Gladiators, 3 MC80's, 8 CR90's, 4 Neb-B's, 6 Raiders, and 4 MK2's. . . I already have 5 of themach squadron pack on Order as well and have 2 core sets. . .

At 300 points I can run what 3 VSD 2's with no squadrons. So at 1k points with squadrons and some upgrades I will have what (going as far as wave 2) 8 ships and 20ish squadrons as imperials. Rebels would likely have 10-12 ships but only 15 squadrons or so.

Unfortunately no, the alternate activation system will not allow you to play large fleet battles unless you have all day to do so. To play large battles you would need multiple fleets of up to 400pts so any global effects do not become OP, you could also have each fleet being commanded by a different player and each player activates a ship when its his side to do so.

Doesn't sound so complicated, I think. It's a matter of fine-tuning and adjusting some house rules, but making sides activate 3 ships and 6 squadrons instead of 1 ship 2 squadrons alternating seems easy to implement. I also thought about multiple separate fleets, especially that it encourages several players who would be doing their movement at the same time, reducing the time required greatly!

Although I still hope that FFG will make some epic play format so we don't have to come up with our own ways of balancing it.

I'm also looking forward to bigger battles.

I think 2 vs 2 should work really well. Every player brings his standard 400 points, so there are 800 on each side. Global effects only count for the player who owns them so nothing will be OP.

I also would appreciate epic Play rules by FFG.

I've played 3 v 3 players and by playing standard activation rules found it sooo boring as there is to much downtime between players having a go. Anything more than 2v2 sharing a 400pt fleet requires a mod to activation as I mentioned earlier.

I hope something comes eventually that supports larger scale engagements. Let's face it you will not be re creating the entirety of the Battle of Endor no matter what epic rules, house or official, become available.

As it stands I think we are OK for 1000 point games, with each side being split into two 500 point fleets to keep cards like Tarkin in check. That should scratch my mass fleet engagement itch sufficiently. Anything above that the rule system will struggle to cope with.

40k apocalypse games are a good example of a skirmish game trying to then become something it isn't. Most apoc games I have been involved in have been visually great but a real chore to play and at the end of the day I just wished I had played Epic:Armageddon. Perhaps FFG plan to release a 10mm equivalent fleet battle game.

Simple solution to speed things up.

ship Divisions

You declare up to 4 small ships or 2 medium ships as a division. Large ships are a division of 1. Then each player takes turns activating 1 division. For cohesion divisions must remain within medium range of each other, or suffer a penalty (only navigate commands or tokens can be used until back in range)

Squadron phase you may activate up to 3 squadrons at a time.

I'm pretty sure this will happen, and that it will probably work fairly well (until people start going really nuts and playing 3,000 points or something). The six turn limit will keep things from grinding on forever like what might be expected in a death match, and increased fire power will see ships destroyed faster - if they die faster they have less opportunity to recharge shields and defence tokens, and so die even faster again. This is not to say it wont take longer, it will, but it wont scale linearly (so if a 400 point game takes 2.5hrs, an 800 point game probably isn't going to take 5).

Its not like this game takes ages to play, its not as fast as x-wing, but its a lot faster than things like 40k or Fantasy. Had two 300 point games in 3hrs today, and that was with some poor preparation at the start, and a bit of looking through rules.

Had a 300 point game last night, only took 1 and a half hours. I like the idea of divisions for larger fleets, this would parallel real world navy organization. I think it would make it doable,

A little fine tuning and epic play should be pretty cool. I'd like the game to use a full 6x4 board.

Huh. . . My 300 point games don't even last an hour. . . It is pretty simple to play this game it is mastering it that takes time. . .

Larger, friendly games is one of my reasons for buying into this game. I think the rules easily support 600 points plus. I am working some house rules for morale checks in large games so it's more reflective of what would happen if fleets start taking a pounding.

I have plans for a 650 point game after wave 1 arrives. I don't remember exactly how we arrived at 650, and it's also not exactly the massive 1k+ fleet battle people have in mind, but I think it is at a good level to test the waters for things like length of play and whether or not fleet wide effects become broken. From what I remember, our planned commanders are Tarkin and Mon Mothma, and the sides will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 6 Imperial ships and 7 to 8 Rebel ships. I would not be surprised if both sides end up slightly lighter on ship count and slightly heavy on upgrades - it is extremely fun to take a ship and know you have the freedom to add whatever you want to it. Not that I expect to see any "fully" upgraded ship on the table, but I also doubt there will be a single naked ship either. One thing I've enjoyed about building with 650 points for this battle is that it already feels like more of a fleet than a strike force at current ship costs - although I'm positive that the introduction of the MC80 and Imperial Star Destroyer will force a reevaluation of where that point cap should sit. The decisions I'm making end up as a natural extension of the Ship Divisions discussed earlier - building small synergies into strike forces within the fleet.

The problem I see with activating a "Division" at a time is that I am not a huge fan of multiple ship activations that could all be taking offensive action against one enemy ship that it doesn't have the opportunity to react to. It doesn't seem very thematic or fun to me that four Nebulon-Bs in a division could all open fire on a Victory, and the bridge of that Victory wouldn't be reacting to the situation or changing it's position as it started to take fire. All four frigates may be in a position to fire on it no matter what it does or how it moves, but you can bet that the captain is still issuing a command to their crew. Even if their situation means certain destruction, they would still be shifting to try to alleviate pressure off of some of their shields or attempting some degree of repair or just plain firing back at someone. I also prefer the flexibility to shift assets - if you can move an individual frigate from it's objective to change the course of an engagement and maybe finish off a Star Destroyer, I think that kind of freedom should be allowed free of division movement. You're the admiral, you should be able to make that call even if it leaves another division in your fleet vulnerable. I don't think the system is for me, but maybe if no ship was destroyed until the conclusion of their division's activation? And to prevent repair shenanigans, you can make it clear that once a ship reaches 0 hull value, it can no longer recover hull points.

It's hard to get around the fact that these massive games will require a hefty time commitment. I think that my "epic" sized games will end up keeping alternating individual ship activation for now though. I would like to hear more about Englishpete's morale check rules - that sounds like it would be a very interesting addition to a massive engagement.

The problem I see with activating a "Division" at a time is that I am not a huge fan of multiple ship activations that could all be taking offensive action against one enemy ship that it doesn't have the opportunity to react to. It doesn't seem very thematic or fun to me that four Nebulon-Bs in a division could all open fire on a Victory.

While this may be an issue, it is very thematic. I seem to remember a situation in one of the movies where a bunch of ships all concentrated on one larger ship. The Rebs ended up taking that one ship out didn't they?

Don't let your ships stray from each other. Mutual support, intersecting lanes of fire. Make any ships in position to gang up pay dearly for the privilege.

I am going to be doing big battles as soon as I can get 2 or 3 other players to join in!

These rules are much too detailed and wholly unsuited to massive scale combat. Remove defense marker or simplify them. Change shields to one attribute for an entire ship. Create squadrons so that you activate by squadrons. A few things that may help. I plan on doing some of these things and converting B5 and BSG and more to a modified Armada rules set.

I've played 3 v 3 players and by playing standard activation rules found it sooo boring as there is to much downtime between players having a go. Anything more than 2v2 sharing a 400pt fleet requires a mod to activation as I mentioned earlier.

Number each player and put the 6 turn markers in a cup. Draw 1 and have that player play their turn. Give each player a set amount of time to play their turn.

If it is going to be 2v2 i would suggest 4 separate deployment zones (two on a side) to prevent integration and possibility of just having one guy control 2 forces while one person reads a book

Easy enough, simply extend the table length ala 40k apocalypse or whatever it's called. You have to enforce, even of its a gentlemans agreement, keeping such a massive fleet spread out to avoid the 20 star destroyer pile up. Also increase turn count or eliminate it. Yes your looking at a weekend long battle but it will be glorious. You loose your flank and all of assuden you've got a pair of star destroyers rolling up your flank... Or you've lost your CAP and waves of rebel fighters are bombing the [expletive redacted] your center.

Looking forward to it.

I think the biggest issue (still fairly small) will actually be mission objectives. Some of them have fixed amounts of additional points available that would become insignificant in larger scale games, and the limited number of objective tokens would encourage massive congestion. Simply scaling up the VP rewards and numbers of tokens based on the fleet point total could remedy this. Alternately, each sub-fleet could be matched against an opponent and an objective applied to each pair, although that could get very messy.

All commanders yet revealed have fleet-wide abilities, and with a one each limit their point costs don't matter as much. Sure, the ratio of effect to cost might slightly favor the more expensive commanders, but that will be minor. Even having to pay for a commander again for each additional sub-fleet would only make a difference of a single squadron or so in an engagement involving a dozen or more capital ships.

I don't think that game should be divided and I believe that shuffling units on the sides is not a bad idea. Sure, it could be fluffy having several naval squadrons cooperate as if they just arrived from their location, but a big, mixed line deployment is often better from gameplay perspective.

Usually when I was playing 2v2 40k games most players just deployed their armies separately, basically turning it into two 1v1 skirmishes instead of actually cooperating and complementing each other's force. I would rather avoid such situations, because it takes away the whole 2v2 idea away. Just mark both players' ships to know which is whose and alternate activations two ships at a time, when each player moves one of his own ships, no matter how spread on the table his fleet is.

What slows games more than anything else, though, are indecisive players, so the first thing should be telling everyone to just play instead of taking 10 minutes to decide whether to click once at 2 or twice.

We are already looking at larger games here though we are doing the multiple fleet rules. Each of us will take 4oo pts of fleets and each player moves one of his ships during activation just like the normal rules. The thing is most of the missions in the base game don't really work at larger games so we are coming up with house missions to play for games like this that actually forces us to spread out to avoid pileups as someone pointed out before. True this is all speculative planning and will adjust as we get a few games in at that level.

One thing we are planning on doing are some historical games such as from the Thrawn Trillogy since think most of the ship battles will play out very well in this game scale.

The objectives may have to go out the window and be replaced with player objectives. Something like:

If "this" ship goes down then other side wins or

Destroy 10% of the enemy fleet or

Set up some kind of scenario (Endor for example).