Hey guys! I'm looking to start a local league, and I want to incorporate restrictions in list building that are both fun but fair. I'm expecting the league to run 5-6 games/rounds.

I'm looking for the following:

•Discouraging meta builds

•Minimal similarities between all lists

•Not putting those with smaller collections at a disadvantage

Some of the ideas I've had I think fall short of what I'm trying to accomplish:

Restriction: Uniques carry through all lists

Pros: Can only run popular meta ships like Corran, Soontir, Brobots once

Cons: Hurts limited collections, can spam popular swarm builds (BBBBZ, TIE Swarm, 4 Tempest)

Restriction: Choose Faction, choose 4 ship types

Pros: limited collections can run what they own

Cons: can pick, for ex., VT-49 and Interceptor, and two others, but only run RAC/Fel

Restriction: Minimum 3 ships per list

Pros: Excludes a collection of popular meta builds such as Brobots, Dash/Corran, RAC/Fel

Cons: Can still spam popular swarm builds, Han+3Z, etc.

I know meta builds can be a little subjective, but I just want to promote unique list building as I think it is a very important skill in this game.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks!

To start off a group of new guys I did a league that worked off of scoring points. But those points didn't come from winning games, but through meeting specific goals. Like different types of list building, etc.

Here is the league doc I made for it : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3CTtFRV9ec2RURBQjFIa0hIZjA

It went great, and got a lot of the older guys to try new builds... and eased the new guys in a bit too!

You could change the restriction each week maybe so things get shaken up a bit each week.

Other ideas for restrictions:

Can't play the same faction two weeks in a row.

Choose 3 ships or 3 upgrades, and each list must feature at least one of those things. Pick things that rarely get used so people have to be creative in their list building to work around it.

Ive got an idea: Just don't allow RAC Han Dash and IGB. There. Done.

Or even more: No large turrets with a primary of 3. No IGB.

Or: 5 point tax to large base ships except the Lambda and the Firespray.

OR: The even crazier idea: Just ahve everyone agree or understand they should not bring a meta build. And encourage use of small ships.

Here's an easy solution that I'm planning on doing the next time I get to run the league at my FLGS: award bonus points to players every time they fly a list that they haven't used in the league yet. So the first night everybody gets the bonus points, after that players have to switch up their lists and try something new if they want the bonus points.

Here's what our league that we are just finishing up did:

Week 1: Rookie pilots. No named pilots. Bonus points for having 5 or more of the same ship type.

Week 2: Asteroids. Must have one large-base ship. 8 asteroids. The asteroids move during each end phase. We used 40k scatter dice and an attack die. Scatter die for direction. Attack die for speed (blank 0, focus 1, hit 2, crit 3 - all straights)

Week 3: Secondaries. Everyone gets extra munitions for free. Must have one cannon or turret in the list. Must have one torp, missile, or bomb. Bonus points for killing designated squadron leaders with secondaries.

Week 4: Wingmen. Bring 2 two-ship lists, each of a different faction. Opponent chooses which one you fly. After you lose a ship you can bring in a wingman from the list you didn't play. You wager earned tournament points based on the value of the ship you bring in. This causes faction mixing. For example, my lists were Emon/Kath and Rexler/Fett. My opponent had Dash/Corran and Brobots. He chose for me to play Rexler and Boba Fett. I chose for him to play Brobots. I killed a bot and he brought on Corran. I lost Boba Fett and brought on Kath. This was fun and different, but some weren't happy about the swings in the standings from the bonuses around the wagering of tournament points.

Week 5: Standard 100/6 deathmatch.

Week 6: 200 points. No restrictions. This one was supposed to meld all the previous missions into one. It was two hard to craft the restrictions into a cohesive set. So we just had a long list of available bonuses related to rookies, ordnance, cannons, turrets, running ships of the same type etc.

I am fully on board with discouraging meta builds. Half the fun of the game is being creative and original with your build and seeing how it fares competitively. And honestly, the easiest way to do this?

Different squad point caps.

- Run 150-point games (put a cap on # of ships per side so there's no ridiculous 12-ship swarms). Yeah you can still take a meta-build and fill in around it, but it's more fun to try out the unique options a boosts squad cost allows. At least if someone does just supplement a meta, it's easier to focus on blasting the meta ships out of the sky since you've got more ships to do it with.

- Run cheaper lists (75-80 pts) so people can take 1 large ship but only a crappy escort, or a few small base ships and focus on maneuvering or mini-synergy builds.

- Have Ace Pilot tourneys (I think this store I started playing at does this on occasion). One small-base ship. Fixed point cap (35 works). Play on 2x2 maps.

Otherwise, just yeah, say no common meta builds.

You could run something where you start with W1 ships, and each week you add one of the ships from the next wave. Whomever won the game gets to choose which ship you can bring. You'd have to make something up for Scum.

For example, everyone can play with TIE fighters, Advanced, X wings and Y wings at any time. The first week all of the builds are made from these ships. Rebel player 1 plays against imp player 1. Imp player wins, so he chooses the Interceptor and YT-1300 as his ships. Rebel player 1 then gets the Firespray and A wing.

Now for week two, Imp player 1 can bring a rebel list consisting of X wings, Y wings and YT-1300s, or an imp list consisting of Fighters, Advanced, and Interceptors. Up for grabs in week 2 are the Lambda, Bomber, B wing, and HWK.

You can obviously faction restrict it as well, and just have the winner choose the ship for both players (Imp player A wins the first week against Rebel player A, he takes the Interceptor and gives the A wing). To make W5 a complete wave, I would add in Imperial/Rebel Aces as the other two options. If you just have the A wing from W2, you can't fly Jake/Gemmer unless you get the Rebel Aces from W5 week.

As for the scum, I would start with the Y wing and Z-95. For week 1 (Wave 2), consider the Firespray and Scyk. Week 2 (Wave 3), HWK and Starviper. Week 3 (Wave 4), IG88AB and IG88CD, Week 4 (Wave 5) Hopefully the Kihraxz and YV666 are out by then.

Otherwise you could open up Scum to anything not yet obtained (or match it Week 1 and Week 2 missing ships). You could do the same thing for Rebels/Imps if you wanted it to go on longer, but realize the longer it goes, the more "meta" lists will become.

If you really wanted to, you could put tough choices in the same wave. YT-1300 vs. Z-95. E wing vs. YT-2400. That way you prevent the oh-so-omnipresent meta lists.

Achievements can often discourage meta builds as they add points.

Achievements such as win with out a Primary weapon turret or get a kill using a missile or torpedo secondary weapon can help people who are pushing for extra points which would usually be the higher skilled or experience players. Thus they start playing builds that are down a few levels on the meta tier.

Some other ideas:

1. Run an Escalation tournament and start the first round at 40 points. You can build to popular lists, but it will take time.

2. Start with a "no upgrades" policy. For every 20 points you destroyed in a game, gain 5 points to spend on an upgrade(s) to your list for the next game.

3. Add pilot advancement. You have to start the game with all generic pilots. Each ship that survives a game can gain a PS bump to the next higher available pilot, but the points for that pilot count against the overall list points (so if your first list is a full 100 points, you'll have to give something up to add a named pilot in a later round).

The problem with running a restrictive format league is that it'll alienate some players who want autonomy to run what they want. To encourage players to fly something other than the meta builds, consider adding one-time bonus objectives. They can be generic or ship-specific and could be tailored to get the effect you desire . So, if a league player wants to fly nothing but a Chirpy/Fel list, that's their prerogative. It just puts them at a disadvantage within the league rankings.

If they have the ships, you could do a variant of Take 2: Each person brings two builds, and at the start of the match they decide which build they will fly. The two builds cannot share any uniques/ships/etc.

You could try something like running a 76-pt league with a 50pts-per-ship cap: The lower point cap makes it easier for new players to fill, and the unusual ceiling means there are no meta builds. The ship-cost cap helps cut away the fatness of turrets which require bigger lists to gun down (Though you can still manage a pretty scary Chewie, Dash or Leebo).

I threw together a bunch of lists for Jaden a few months back, and that extra point over 75 makes for quite a bit more freedom - including the potential for the skinniest brobots lists you ever did see.

80 might do just as well; the key is that it's less than 100, thus requiring fewer ships and no longer fitting the standard metas. For newer players, the lower cost makes games run a smidgeon faster, too.

I'm really liking the idea of adding extra bonuses to use non-standard stuff. Here are some ideas I came up with:

1-point for using one of these upgrades at least once during the season:

Astromech: R7-T1

Bomb: Proton Bombs

Cannon: Flechette Cannon

Crew: Navigator

Elite: Decoy

Illicit: Dead Man’s Switch

Missile: Assault Missiles

Modification: Tactical Jammer

Salvaged Astromech: “Genius”

System: Enhanced Scopes

Torpedo: Adv. Proton Torpedoes

Turret: Autoblaster Turret

I think these are some interesting upgrades that are seldomly used, so I'd like to see people try to make it work. My only issue is this will help those more with bigger collections... however, we have a friendly enough group in which people could borrow these from someone else if needed.

I like the idea from Palomarus's link also, very cool stuff. I'm thinking of incorporating some of his ideas and a few others of my own:

Gain 1 point if flown at least once in a list during the season:

3 different types of ships

35 points of upgrades

4 ordinance (torpedoes, missiles, bombs) upgrades

Rebel HWK

M3-A Interceptor

TIE Bomber

The last 3 are based on listjuggler data as most under represented ships for each faction during the championship season (Truly the TIE Advanced was for Imperials but with the release of the Raider they will be more popular).

Suggestions? Thoughts?

I feel you're starting to wander into "Bonus points for playing poorly" - or rather, you're giving incentives to playing stuff that's hard to master. If you've got a lot of new players, they may get fixated on trying to collect the 'bonus points' rather than maximising their playing the game.

Lowering the point limit breaks the 'meta' builds, and simultaneously means people can build a squad with fewer ships, without impacting what makes good choices vs bad - a useful skill to learn.

The other big thing to mitigate monetary advantages is to allow proxy upgrade cards - that way someone that wants to fly a Vader doesn't need to rush out and buy a brand new Raider in order to not embarrass themselves.

Good points Reiver. I guess too many bonus points can work against what I'm trying to accomplish. I am still planning on awarding standard tourney points (5 for win, 3 for mod win, 1 for tie) to not shy those away with a competitive nature, so that might mitigate those that just focus on gaining those bonuses.

I like the idea of lowering/raising the point from 100, but I don't think the local scene might. People will want to fly what they are used to and also get to use builds they come up with in the future.

Also, proxy cards or borrowing cards will probably be more than fine for everyone. Since it's nothing official, as long as people are aware of it I think it'll be fine

Restriction: Minimum 3 ships per list

Pros: Excludes a collection of popular meta builds such as Brobots, Dash/Corran, RAC/Fel

Cons: Can still spam popular swarm builds, Han+3Z, etc.

You could add to it that the difference in PS between two pilots can't exceed 3 or some other number. That would force a change to this list and I feel it would make things more interesting.

You could do the following:

At the start of the league, each player chooses one faction he will use throughout the league.

In the first week, everyone brings a 100 point list of the chosen faction.

For the next games, you have to use the surviving ships with the loadout they have, but you can change torpedoes, missiles and bombs, as well as add new stuff. For instance, in the first round you have one Rookie pilot surviving,m which started with a proton torpedo. You have to take the Rookie, but you can change the torpedo ta a flechette torp, and add R3-A2.

If a unique pilot got killed, you cannot use him again for the duration of the league.

Just make a requirement that all lists be 3 ships or more.

I think the game is fine the way it is. If you want to discourage "meta" builds just tell them that. What, exactly, is a "meta" build? Brobots? Phat Han? Decimator and wingman? TIE Swarm? Three Amigos? Panic Attack? Warthogs? Super Dash? Anything anybody ever posted on the internet? What is left?

Rules are rules. There will always be people that will try and min/max any set of rules out there. Every system is exploitable.

At the very least just make it faction specific and at most make it faction specifc and you cant run the same list twice. I wouldn't want to encourage anyone from running anything.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'm just looking to have people think outside the box. There is definitely a disparity in skill/knowledge, so I'm trying to make sure some that are not as experienced be discouraged if they don't do well. The key is I'm trying to build a community. We already have monthly tourneys for those with a more competitive nature.

If you don't want lists from a 100 point meta change the point value of the game.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'm just looking to have people think outside the box. There is definitely a disparity in skill/knowledge, so I'm trying to make sure some that are not as experienced be discouraged if they don't do well. The key is I'm trying to build a community. We already have monthly tourneys for those with a more competitive nature.

Just tell the experienced players to play with kid-gloves as this is to be casual and for new players. Unless they are incorrigible douches, they will understand and act accordingly. Also, tell the new players that they will probably lose a lot at first by doing new player things like flying into rocks, flying off the table, forgetting to use special abilities, crappy lists, and a myriad of other reasons we have all fallen victim to. It goes both ways.

Good points Reiver. I guess too many bonus points can work against what I'm trying to accomplish. I am still planning on awarding standard tourney points (5 for win, 3 for mod win, 1 for tie) to not shy those away with a competitive nature, so that might mitigate those that just focus on gaining those bonuses.

I like the idea of lowering/raising the point from 100, but I don't think the local scene might. People will want to fly what they are used to and also get to use builds they come up with in the future.

Also, proxy cards or borrowing cards will probably be more than fine for everyone. Since it's nothing official, as long as people are aware of it I think it'll be fine

If you want to break meta-lists, you can't also let people practice and fly their meta-lists.

I guess another advantage of a points reduction is that it's less blatant - "Guys, we're running a 76pt league, nothing over 50pts" is more easily acceptable than "Here's a big suite of things you can and can't do" - more than three ships, for instance, pretty much disqualifies flying multiple IG-88s, and that's an entire, explicitly intended archetype out the window, meta-list or not. (Yes, you can run 'em in 80pts. It's tight, but doable!)