The player who bribes the TO the best wins in the case of a tie. Seems like the only fair method.

Player without initiative chooses a ship remaining in play. Player with initiative does the same and whether they will attack or defend. Each ship gets one action in activation order. Then you run a single round of combat between the two ships, with the ships considered to be at Range 2 and unobstructed. Any uncancelled hits break the tie in favor of the attacker; otherwise, the defender wins.

Basically, it's a hockey shootout.

Sounds interesting. I think I'd take away the action though. Going to get a bit weird when you talk about boost, barrel rolls, etc. and then talk about Range 2 and unobstructed. So.. maybe more like:

Player with initiative chooses whether they want to attack or defend. Then each player secretly chooses a ship they want to be in the shootout. This is done by putting a white maneuver on the dial of the ship that is in and red on your other ships. Then placing the dials next to all your ships. When both players are ready, reveal who the two ships competing will be.

The attacker gets one attack using Range 2 and unobstructed conditions. If he does any damage to the defender, he wins. Otherwise, the defender wins.

Sounds pretty cool to me.

I just wanted focus and evade tokens to be available. I want this to resemble actual combat as much as possible so it's not just "Roll four dice, most hits wins."

The only reason to break a tie is because one has to go home so the other can go on. The BEST tie breaker if it is simply a tie at the end of time is to finish playing out the game or at least play it out to the next point lead at the end of a round. If that can't work then you could go with the initiative player wins although I'm thinking that a random pick would be just as fair.

Those "sudden death" ideas where you drop everything down to 1 hp and no shield regen are biased as all hell. Oh look, Fel now has one hull instead of two so he'll be so much easier to take down vs. something with no agility but still packing a lot of hits to chew through.

It could be settled by arm wrestling.

Is it legal to lift a leg like that?

Really, if it is a draw it should just be 2 losers.

Really, if it is a draw it should just be 2 losers.

That's not too bad, but I do think there's something quite nice about aligning it with the single-elimination round, where obviously you have to have a winner for each round.

Y'know, I'm sure that somewhere in the old rulebook it said that the player with initiative won on ties. Which was the TIEs.

If you deliberately give away initiative, you're doing it to declare you won the game. If it's a roll-off, you're more inclined to keep it. Remember, many lists that actually care about init care about going last in the name of arc-dodging, etc.

The thing that makes initiative so elegant is that even if it did come down to luck due to equivalent squad costs, and even if you did lose the roll, you know this at the start of the game. It's randomly determined, but you knew the stakes right as you started play - given how rare draws were, this simply places that little bit of nuance on the players to begin with: One guy knows that in the unlikely event of a tie, he'll lose, so now he can't afford to let it play to a tie.

Hell, MoV rulings had a bigger shift in the meta than this would.

I love SOS, it makes dropping to punish that braggart you played in round 1 all the more sweeter.