19 minutes ago, Vykes said:

A 600 point limit? I laugh in derision, hahaha! ~stands atop a parapet with a banner of "1,000+ or Death!" fluttering in the wind-

A modified CC thing with just 1 upgrade each ship (aside from a flagship) makes it flow nice and quick. As for the rest, dunno, maybe you're all just not serious enough gamers? Come back after a few proper epic games and grovel for forgiveness for your trespasses. I shall wait, for I have time.

Of course I jest, to a degree. I guess I don't notice it much: when you use squadrons of Star Destroyers, RAF's, and Libertii, the points go quick and the games just as quickly.

1000 I have not done yet, bu I'm game. It would just have to be on a bigger table, otherwise smaller, more maneuverable ships would be kind of pointless.

One nice thing about the large epic games is you don't sweat the loss of a single ship.

I've been wondering what the effect would be if you kept it at 500, but the last 100 points could only be spent on squadrons. I think you'd see more fleets with large ships.

On 10/22/2015 at 5:12 PM, D503 said:

Bubble pipes?

Yoda it was not, Tired he is, Resign he will.

But yeah a 1,000point Epic with the Super Star Destroyer would be awesome.

37 minutes ago, thecactusman17 said:

I've been wondering what the effect would be if you kept it at 500, but the last 100 points could only be spent on squadrons. I think you'd see more fleets with large ships.

I saw you post this forever ago and have been dying to try it ever since...

Playing at 500 points at CC feels like enough! Especially for a balanced game within reasonable fleet constratints. But of course whatever poeple want...go as epic as you please

11 hours ago, thecactusman17 said:

I've been wondering what the effect would be if you kept it at 500, but the last 100 points could only be spent on squadrons. I think you'd see more fleets with large ships.

Would this variant mean that only that 100 points can be spent on fighters, or just that much has to be, but the limit is still 1/3 (167 in this case)? Limiting it to exactly 100 seems too constrained. Everyone would have exactly that and the fighters become far less relevant. But if you leave it to normal building rules just with a caveat that you need at least 100 on squadrons, the caveat would be almost a meaningless change I think. My guess is that you would see very few people who would be trying to spend less than 100 on squadrons anyway, as you would be in serious trouble against a dedicated bomber fleet. I rarely run fighter heavy, but I still end up with 60-80 in a standard list, so in 500 I could see 80-100 just as a norm.

I really think that until something is done to adjust the importance of activation advantage, large ships are still going to be a bit scarce (though it's really not a bad as many people want to claim it is).

The nice thing about 500 is that it does still seem to fit the standard play area without becoming to cluttered and such. It also doesn't blow too far out of proportion the effect your admiral has, so that's good!

Admirals: the expensive ones, Vader, Harkin, Ackbar - the feel more appropriately costed at 500 points. Could be they become even stronger at 600.

Yeah. They could get overpowered. Like 6 MC30s with Ackbar is not something I would want to face. With a full fighter wing. This would be possible in 600 points. So you could form two seperate battle lines.

11 hours ago, thecactusman17 said:

I've been wondering what the effect would be if you kept it at 500, but the last 100 points could only be spent on squadrons. I think you'd see more fleets with large ships.

That tends to be what my group does and we always spend the final hundred exclusively on fighters. The Imperials at that point like pulling the double ISD.

So for those of you not familiar with it Warmachine/Hordes is a steampunk miniatures game where the focus is around big robots and powerful spellcasting heroes, but there are also smaller units of infantry soldiers. Early in the game meta, it became clear that for reasons inherent to the design of the game mechanics that the big awesome robots which were the key thematic draw were mechanically not capable of competing with the much larger numbers of smaller infantry units at the same price point. However, they're iconic to the Iron Kingdoms fantasy setting. What to do?

The inspired solution was to change the way the point system worked to let players spend points that could only be used on these robots. The commander would give a negative point value that could be spent exclusively to buy these units in addition to the unit cap.

In my ideal testing scenario, the game remains as though you had the 400 point cap, aka 134 squadron points. However, you get an extra 100 points added just to pay for those squadrons. So the 134 points barely dips into your fleet total for ships, and you can even use only that 100 for squads. This means that every player has 400 points available for ships and upgrades and at least 100 points available exclusively for squadrons. Every game will feature at least 100 points of squadrons in play. It also theoretically restores some of the balance of large ships by making them have a much smaller negative impact on your squadron points pool.

This is just a theory I'd like to see tested, I'm not asserting it would be a magic bullet fix by any stretch.

-edit-

A good way to see this in action is to go set up a fleet as though you were starting a game of CC. Start with the initial fleet constraints but you must have at least 100+points of squads. Then use the 500 point cap to build up/add to your ships. This would give you am idea what fleets would look like under my suggested scenario above.

Urgh. As inspired as that change was, it came after their Granularity change... Where, basically, they took everything form a 100pt baseline to a 10pt baseline.... That was, I think, the single biggest mistake of their argument, and the WJ changes were a patch to that.

The problem is, making people feature at least 100 points of squadrons in place is anathema to some...

I mean, not to me. To me, its a whatevs.

But you'll have people who hate the fact that they have to take squadrons, rather than just feel like they have to take squadrons.

I'd just like to mention that I once played a game of roughly 1200 points a side (maxed out on upgrades), and the 6x3 table seemed too big, not too small, as the battle devolved into two separate engagements of roughly 800 and 400 points per side each. . .

22 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Urgh. As inspired as that change was, it came after their Granularity change... Where, basically, they took everything form a 100pt baseline to a 10pt baseline.... That was, I think, the single biggest mistake of their argument, and the WJ changes were a patch to that.

The problem is, making people feature at least 100 points of squadrons in place is anathema to some...

I mean, not to me. To me, its a whatevs.

But you'll have people who hate the fact that they have to take squadrons, rather than just feel like they have to take squadrons.

I think the majority of people having an issue argue that you have to take squadrons instead of ships in the current system. If you got to take all or nearly all the ships you want plus bonus squadrons there wouldn't be as much issue.

1 minute ago, thecactusman17 said:

I think the majority of people having an issue argue that you have to take squadrons instead of ships in the current system. If you got to take all or nearly all the ships you want plus bonus squadrons there wouldn't be as much issue.

Majority, perhaps.

But that doesn't invalidate my point, either.

22 minutes ago, NobodyInParticular said:

I'd just like to mention that I once played a game of roughly 1200 points a side (maxed out on upgrades), and the 6x3 table seemed too big, not too small, as the battle devolved into two separate engagements of roughly 800 and 400 points per side each. . .

There are two important points to consider with this statement. One is that you played a 'maxed out on upgrades' game, which means the amount of 'stuff' on the table wasn't anywhere near as big as it could have been. The second is that I would like to see the lists you used, and the reason I say that is if 6x3 seemed too big, then it sounds like you basically lined up two firing lines and went to town. While that can be fun, it severely favors the big bruisers and hampers things like CR90s. I can say that if I were to play a 1200 point game, I can assure you that the Rebels would want to be able to use their CR90s effectively, and rushing a line of Imperials with no room to maneuver is not the way to do it. I have played a CR90 swarm and felt a little cramped on the 6x3 when the game was only 400 points before.

50 minutes ago, Xindell said:

There are two important points to consider with this statement. One is that you played a 'maxed out on upgrades' game, which means the amount of 'stuff' on the table wasn't anywhere near as big as it could have been. The second is that I would like to see the lists you used, and the reason I say that is if 6x3 seemed too big, then it sounds like you basically lined up two firing lines and went to town. While that can be fun, it severely favors the big bruisers and hampers things like CR90s. I can say that if I were to play a 1200 point game, I can assure you that the Rebels would want to be able to use their CR90s effectively, and rushing a line of Imperials with no room to maneuver is not the way to do it. I have played a CR90 swarm and felt a little cramped on the 6x3 when the game was only 400 points before.

Yeah, I'm not such a big small ship person, so I hadn't invested too much in them. . .

The reason the table seemed too big was because during deployment, as myself and my opponent set up our ships, in order to take advantage of some maneuverability some ships were set up halfway across the table, and in order to counter that deployment more ships were set up in that area, so that it turned into the ISD and GSDs against the MC80s and nebs while the 3 VSDs and raider took on the whales, mc30 and cr90s. About a foot and a half separated the battle zones, and though we tried merging them, it didn't go too well.

The following links (if they work) should lead to card views of rough drafts of the lists, which were changed shortly before playing. These were only created to guestimate how large the fleets would actually be:

Rebels Imperials