So a lot of people have talked about doing really large fleet battles. Replaying the Battle for Endor level. Once we have the units in hand to do that....that battle using RAW will be a long and drawn out affair. What suggestions would you guys have to speed up gameplay in that situation?

Reduce or limit ship upgrades?
Move and Act in subgroups/squadrons of ships?
Ignore the shields per facing and just use total shields on a ship?
etc......

Try using a timer... see how that works.

Command Phase - 5 minutes... any ships remaining after the timer place their last turns command on the bottom of their stack

Ship Phase - 3 minutes/ship... if not completed attacking by the end of the timer, complete the move and move on, repeat.

Squadron Phase - 1 minute/2 squadrons... if not complete slide the activation slider and move on, repeat.

Status Phase - No need for a timer, shouldn't take more than a minute to flip tokens etc...

That would keep people engaged and on their toes, this would also create the feeling that you are making quick decisions, much like your commanders would be.

Thoughts?

My suggestions: For a battle that big run it with multiple players (and leaders, I would say) on each team. Divide the map into equal sections- one section per pair of opposing players. During each activation, each player on that team may activate one ship in his section.

That should allow the game to proceed and a relatively quick speed, and be pretty accurate fluff wise with different admirals in charge of their portion of the battle.

So essentially, you would be playing multiple games all at the same time, but with the ability to fly your ships over out of your sector to help out your neighbor, and etc.

Squadron phase seems to take awhile.

I'd just limit it to 1 squadron per ship and double the squadrons hit points and damage dice to reflect a larger sized squadron.