Generally what I do is go for as much play area as possible. Last few games have been about 4x6. My FLGS has a bunch of black and blue HCD starfield mats, so putting a bunch together looks nice as opposed to a mish-mash of colors.

If you triple the points on the board but just double the map size it's going to be as cramped as a 100 vs. 100 battle on a 3x3.

Movements become more of a multi turn thing, and there is more strategy to it as opposed to tactical, "If I go 5 forward, he could large ship boost and take a first turn shot on me. Ships with 5 straights and boosts become more valuable.

I want a special playmat that's just the hull of an Imperial-class Star Destroyer. With cardboard tokens for all of it's various important systems like turrets and shield generators etc.

Then, every battle can be Razor Rondezvous, things would be truly Epic, and I can finally be happy.

You do realize that at the same scale as the other ships (1/270 for everything but the Epic ships), the hull of an Imperial-class Star Destroyer is 19'x12'? That's nineteen feet by twelve feet. It would be best to have it mounted on the ceiling so you felt like you were fighting in the shadow of a star destroyer. Remember, the Tantive IV was pulled up through the little docking square on the bottom without any trouble. It is huge, and a worthy endeavor... but not really appropriate for a mat.... Also, of note... a Star Destroyer carries 72 TIE Fighters of varying kinds. Really would love to see one at a table, but do not have a room large enough for me to tackle the project.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the models in this game are already not to scale to each other.

I have. It's hysterical! I've seen big ships run over their own allies and the enemy often. It's a nasty weapon. I've even seen Darth Vader run over!

I have too, and I think it's dumb.

If ships can fly above and below asteroids, I don't know why they can do the same for a barely mobile capital ship.

I assume it's purely for gameplay reasons, because you can't stop a model on top of a 3D capitol ship model the way you can on a cardboard asteroid token. I understand that reasoning, but I still don't like it.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the models in this game are already not to scale to each other.

Everything is in scale except the three epic ships, which are on more of a sliding "feel good" scale.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the models in this game are already not to scale to each other.

Everything is in scale except the three epic ships, which are on more of a sliding "feel good" scale.

Unless you count the senator's shuttle, but that woudl be impractical to have made a token of at the time it was released.

Everything is in scale except the three epic ships, which are on more of a sliding "feel good" scale.

Well, there you go. An Imperial Star Destroyer play mat wouldn't be to scale either.

I figure if it's 3' wide and however long it needs to be to fit the ship, I can just block off the excess portion of the mat during regulation games, and use the whole thing in cool Star Destroyer-themed scenarios.

*Disclaimer: I've never actually seen a huge ship run over a ship, much less one of its allies. I'm just being silly.

I've told this story before, but I think I'll do it again here. One Epic game, I ran a gunship CR-90 and a lot of ships with Ion weapons. When an enemy ship got too close to the Corvette, I'd Ion them, and the next turn they'd splatter themselves against the Corvette. I found it highly amusing.

Honestly, I think the discussion (and perhaps some of the arguing) we're having here highlights one of the major strengths of this game. Scalability. You want to keep it small and quick, fine. 100 point dogfights, or even less points. You want a larger, longer match with a lot more going on? Go for Epic. I play both ways, but I admit I don't get a chance to play Epic nearly as often as I'd like.

EDIT: One glass of wine, and my typing already sucks lol

*Disclaimer: I've never actually seen a huge ship run over a ship, much less one of its allies. I'm just being silly.

I've told this story before, but I think I'll do it again here. One Epic game, I ran a gunship CR-90 and a lot of ships with Ion weapons. When an enemy ship got too close to the Corvette, I'd Ion them, and the next turn they'd splatter themselves against the Corvette. I found it highly amusing.

Honestly, I think the discussion (and perhaps some of the arguing) we're having here highlights one of the major strengths of this game. Scalability. You want to keep it small and quick, fine. 100 point dogfights, or even less points. You want a larger, longer match with a lot more going on? Go for Epic. I play both ways, but I admit I don't get a chance to play Epic nearly as often as I'd like.

EDIT: One glass of wine, and my typing already sucks lol

Yup for me all of the game is cool, with the exception of a few rules mess-ups. EPIC Play represents the best part of the battles which focus around a few of the Huge Ships... and I love it, because it rocks.

ARMADA is the whole battle, with less of the characters and their ships all decked out, and so forth... which also kinda rocks in it's own way.

... on a side-note, little Grays ain't supposed to drink our wine, you get a better result with Mountain Dew.

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to play epic yet. A big part of that is not having 300 points in any faction yet, but I could definitely do Team Epic, if the chance arose.

So I decided to actually do a count today and I can make a 281 point team if I include 1 of each of my Scum ships, using the most expensive pilots and not including upgrades. So it turns out I could definitely make some epic teams right now! Looking forward to giving it a try some time!

Moral of the story: you may be surprised how many ships you actually own!

Tomorrow i gonna play 300p Epic and I#ve decided to bring both the huge ships with almost full upgrades. Don't know what the enemy bring but he plays Imps and thus doesnt use any huge ships.

Will be kinda interesting to see how this uneven matchup turns out. If he spams a lot of ships i think i gonna lose hard. However he plays Epic the first time so i expect some heavily upgraded ships that he could normaly not use together. I'll see and report to you how it went.

Yeah, certain pilots like Etahn and certain cards like Leia Organa start to get exponentially more and more useful as point totals rise, whearas a 44 point Super Whisper is still super good but isn't as hyper powerful.

Leia Organa combined with Raymus Antilles Carlist Rieekan seems hilarious to me, but I haven't actually tried it yet. Their high PS ships expect to move where you are because your Rookies or whatever are going to move first, but you discard Raymu Rieekan so that none of your ships activate until PS 12. You end up blocking high-PS ships (I'm lookin' at you, Baron Fel) then, when it's time to activate, you discard Leia to let all your ships Koiogran Turn behind enemy lines while retaining their actions. It would be so beautiful, but I bet it's hard to pull off well. Lots of your own ships would probably get blocked if the opposing squad is spread out.

EDIT: I guess I got the timing wrong. Leia would have to be discarded at the start of the activation phase, as would Rieekan.

One thing about Epic that I keep forgetting about is that you can set your ships out to range 2. This has the side effect of drastically decreasing time to engagement if you choose to joust each other, but it also gives lots of interesting ways to set up your squad. You could either stagger your assault, so the first wave fires, and then flies around for another pass while the second wave attacks, or delay the front group so a group of flankers can converge and engage the enemy at the same time. I love that part!

Tomorrow i gonna play 300p Epic and I#ve decided to bring both the huge ships with almost full upgrades. Don't know what the enemy bring but he plays Imps and thus doesnt use any huge ships.

Will be kinda interesting to see how this uneven matchup turns out. If he spams a lot of ships i think i gonna lose hard. However he plays Epic the first time so i expect some heavily upgraded ships that he could normaly not use together. I'll see and report to you how it went.

"Perhaps today is a good day to die. Prepare for ramming speed!"

I think Worf sums up your strategy very succinctly. Good luck!

I'm pretty sure a lot of the models in this game are already not to scale to each other.

I have. It's hysterical! I've seen big ships run over their own allies and the enemy often. It's a nasty weapon. I've even seen Darth Vader run over!

I have too, and I think it's dumb.

If ships can fly above and below asteroids, I don't know why they can do the same for a barely mobile capital ship.

I assume it's purely for gameplay reasons, because you can't stop a model on top of a 3D capitol ship model the way you can on a cardboard asteroid token. I understand that reasoning, but I still don't like it.

Don't park a wad of ships in front of the thing. This is like getting run over with the mobile space shuttle platform NASA uses.

If you didn't allow epic ships to do this, what would happen is that there would immediately be a dumb blob of 16 TIE Fighters stuck to the front of it with no consequence.

When a ship bumps, it's assumed that in a 3D environment they'd have enough space to swerve out of the way. A capitol ship smashes into you and you're just gone. Imagine a small personal boat or a small yacht in the path of a battleship, what do you expect?

Imagine a small personal boat or a small yacht in the path of a battleship, what do you expect?

Now imagine that that small yacht has the ability to fly above or below that battleship at will.

Space is not the ocean.

4.) People who are waiting until the Raider to try out epic are going to play one epic game and then never play one again. The epic ships are fun but if you wouldn't enjoy 300 points of fighters vs. 300 points of fighters already, having an epic ship isn't going to magically make the battle any more fun for you. The Raider is just going to collect dust like everyone's Tantive and Transport. Epic is about playing a larger scale battle, not flying a list that includes a ship with the arbitrary 'Epic' designation slapped on it.

I think a lot of people are waiting for the Raider simply to balance things out.

I think a huge ship should be required for each side (Scum could use the transport) when the Raider comes out. I haven´t played many epic games yet but most people seem to agree the huge ships are underpowered against max-number builds.

Working on a un-official S&V conversion kit for the GR-75 to fill the gap once the Raider is released until S&V gets their own huge ship. Hope to get this complete by the time the Raider is released (apparently in August).

Stop Gap measure for S&V Epic ships (House Rules for GR-75 transport)

...More calamitous mistakes as a Gr-75 careens into Corran Horn*!

*Disclaimer: I've never actually seen a huge ship run over a ship, much less one of its allies. I'm just being silly.

Well here you go then.

I think this counts as a "More calamitous mistake"

Imagine a small personal boat or a small yacht in the path of a battleship, what do you expect?

Now imagine that that small yacht has the ability to fly above or below that battleship at will.

Space is not the ocean.

Well talking about the Epic and overlapping. I have had made a proposal in THIS thread that refines the huge ship overlapping mechanics to more than just an autokill. It could still 1 hit auot-kill but not as certain.

It is a bit strange that, in space, things like obstacles have such a profound effect. I can understand when you're dogfighting that if you wind up on top of an enemy ship that you might have to veer out of the way and be unable to attack them. But why do our pilots always crash into asteroids? Why can't they scatter out of the way when a large ship is bearing down on them?

I think a lot of people are waiting for the Raider simply to balance things out.

The raider will not make a difference, because it is less useless than the Corvette. Even after the boost for the primary weapon of the Corvette, it has a still trouble enganging ships with 3 green dice. Which Imperials have plenty and Rebels few.

I think a lot of people are waiting for the Raider simply to balance things out.

The raider will not make a difference, because it is less useless than the Corvette. Even after the boost for the primary weapon of the Corvette, it has a still trouble enganging ships with 3 green dice. Which Imperials have plenty and Rebels few.

The raider will make a lot of difference because people like using bigger ships and it will serve as a punctuation mark for people to start playing Epic games.

i would just like to clarify my last post , our game was played on 6x3 table, it was a 2vs2 game and our opponents deployed everything they had on one side of the table in a nice 2 foot rectangle while we had already spread out PS 1 ships on both sides, the game was pretty much over right there and then, i had 75 points of Warthogs facing 400 points of Empire.

i would just like to clarify my last post , our game was played on 6x3 table, it was a 2vs2 game and our opponents deployed everything they had on one side of the table in a nice 2 foot rectangle while we had already spread out PS 1 ships on both sides, the game was pretty much over right there and then, i had 75 points of Warthogs facing 400 points of Empire.

This is why the increased play area of epic games doesn't get used that often. Just like in a normal 100 point battle, it makes a lot of sense to concentrate your force in one formation. One epic formation facing another leads to an epic battle in a standard play area.

In my opinion epic play is often much improved by playing scenarios, even basic ones, that require you to fight for control of different zones In the play area. This leads to interesting strategies and decisions, an increased value in ship speed, and most importantly a good use of the massive play area in epic games. I've published a few epic scale scenarios on mission control, and I plan to release more with the release of the raider.

One other thing- some of my early play tests with the raider indicate that it may not be an effective anti-fighter platform. I played a few games with it facing off against B wings, and each time the raider got smoked by a wide margin. I don't think it will be a strong anti fighter asset unless we see some really effective title cards.

So here is my short report from yesterdays game:

As I expected my opponent rather choose to heavily upgrade ships than to play a massive swarm. SO he ended up playing just 8 ships into my 7 ships (almost fully upgraded CR90 + GR75 included!).

He had two HLC Defenders a HLC support shuttle, two heavily upgrades bombers and three Interceptors one of which beeing fel i think.

I had both epic ships jan ors, dutch vander (both with blaster turrets) and 3 Z95 with assault missiles.

Setup:

The setup was kinda interesting, we didnt know if the epic ships had to be places first so we went for normal pilot skill order. I had to place my Z95 first so i set them in the middle to leave averything open (i had the crew who could give them pilot skill 12 for one activation face so i thought tehy could get TLs anyway). My opponent wanted to fly all the heavy ships together and simply blow me up on the approach while the Interceptors should flank. He had to place half of the heavy ships and half of the interceptors before my epic ships so i knew where he was going to be. I chose to let the epics come in diagonally from the left flank (where he had his Interpecptors). The HWK and Y-Wing were left of those are were meant to savely approach and overtake the epics.

Initial Turns:

I had a problem. Over 200 points with higher pilot rankings were facing my poor Z95s in the middle of the table. Even if they get their target locks with pilot rating 12 in the activation face due to moving later they would be blown up during the shooting phase before they can shoot their assault missiles. So i chose to try crossing the line of my epics whila staying away from the middle. It was a risky call though depending on how fast my opponent would move in the opening turn. He chose to advance rather fast so it would be a close call how many ships get into range in turn 2.

Meanwhile on the flank: I noticed that the HWK and Y-Wing are to **** slow to overtake the CR90 in just a few turns. but try to fly over it is also very risky and i didnt want to turn left to not get totally out of combat. My CR90 got its primary weapon buffed by ors, used its own buff and could target lock on range 5. So it blew one of Interceptors out of space with one shot.

Next turn went similar on teh left flank with the interceptors fleeing to the middle and my two turret ships having a **** bad position. The middle was were it would get exciting. I tried to escape the range of the heavy ships by taking 4 straights (although only 45° to them). Because my opponent didnt move his pack perfectly and some ran into each other not all of them came into range. My Z95 still got shot by about 3 ships but managed to survive mostly by him rolling the dice very poorly. So by biggest problem was solved the epics were approaching rapidly (with dishing out dmg mostly with the CR90 primary) and it was time to turn around and get some of those assault missiles of.

Mid game:

Half of the enemy heavy ships concentraded on blowing up the transport (it was heading right into them with its range 1 ionization + dmg upgrade beeing ready) while the other half tried to kill off the Z95. The transport was successfully taken out by heavy HLC fire in just two turns. However 2 of my Z95 managed to fire their assault missiles hitting multiple ships in tose two turns before geeting killed. The CR90 managed to dish out constant dmg to bombers and interceptors and even getting into range 2 within those turns to attack the shuttle on top of it. On the flank ors was somewhat useful through his buff while i still had a bad position with both of the small ships. I tried to cross the CR90 but the maneauvers are too **** short and both had to use several turn by turning towards the CR90 and only with the second move beeing able to cross it (y-wing with a 3bank) and slow down to turn in after the epic ship (HWK).

End game

Through assault missiles, ionizing upgrade and CR90 fire allmost all of the enemy ships had taken some minor to heavy damage (interceptors and bombers getting killed first). After the Z95 and transport fell most of my enemies ships were parallel of the CR90 so they couldnt easily turn to attack with with HLCs. Thats why he focussed dutch vander next (and one Z95 that was still alive with one hull) who was finally able to cross the lie of the epic ships followe even further behind by jan ors. Both ships hardly didnt do any damage but somehow they managed to survive long enough for my CR90 to take down one ship after the other.

In the end i had jan ors with 1 hull left and and the CR90 with only 2 shield dmg against a sontir fel that had to flee (the last range 5 shot managed to land 2 more dmg on it).

Final Thoughts:

It was a fun game. My opponent played epic the first time. He had bad luck to not take out 1-2 Z95 on the first approach and thats were it got ugly for him. Even though his firepower was rather impressive in the mid game the transporter was just a big distraction from the CR90 which probably shouldve been his main target due to how hard it turned out to take it down in the end game. I had almost 200 points in the two epic ships but managed to land quite some damage with the Z95 assault missiles. I'm not sure if there is any official ruling but jan ors ability should be forbidden to use on the CR90. 6 red dice with target lock are a pain in the a.. for most imperial fighters. On the other hand a 130+ points model should be able to hurt so its hard to say after one game.

Sounds like fun. Try it with more generic ships with low points.