I dont get the arguements, "if you meet someone of equal skill you cant score 10-1"

Well if you arent better than them, then why would you be able to do really well? The whole point of a tournament is that the most skilled player wins. So if you meet someone of equal skill then by definition you shouldnt win....

I also thinks its codswallop, you can easily beat players of your own skill level by considerable margins.

I agree. I think there's some intellectual shorthand going on in here that's muddying the waters. You guys are looking at this as though the matchups are random, when in fact they're a critical balancing mechanic here.

Let's say you're super good and get matched up against somebody else super good on round one. 7-4 your favor. There's another super good guy, Mr Lucky, matched up against a noob on that round, 10-1.

"Oh no!" you cry, "not fair!"

But then this magical thing called matchups happens.

You get matched up against somebody else with a 7-4 (probably an average player). Because you're awesome and the only reason you're at 7-4 was your matchup, well, you should spank this guy, because he's right where he belongs. 8-3 your favor.

Mr Lucky, on the other hand, is up against the other 10-1. They're both good enough to have crushed their Round 1 opponents, so they split, 6-5 to Lucky.

End of Round 2, he's at 16, you're at 15. He's just beaten the other guy who was at 15, so pretty good chance you're squaring off against Mr Lucky at the top table. You need only to prove you're better than he is then, because a 7-4 to you puts you on top.

Too much thinking involved here. I just go to have fun and see how I fare against other people. Don't really care if I win or lose because I get to play a game I enjoy.

Nothing but games with people trying to do the bare minimum to only get a 6-5 win so they can have nothing but wins but the worst type of game.

NO THANK YOU!

The current system rewards people for taking risks and getting a higher margin of victory and you are rewarded for more points. It promotes battle. Your scenario would result in most games becoming a snooze fest with opponents trying to wait for engagement, hit/run, or standoffs.

Though it also penalizes people who fought equally skilled opponents and rewards people for driving unskilled opponents into the dirt (and possibly out of the game.) any time a punching bag shows up to a tournament that person is going to skew the results in his opponents' favor, and that is unfortunate. Sadly, short of finding some sort of ranking system, there is no way to ensure total equality in these events.

At our store qualifier an inexperienced player ended up taking the bye because the best players had somehow gotten paired together the whole day and got nothing but 6-5s, and he lost twice and got a blow out win against a newer player than him.

If 20 points is enough to take the win, then it sounds like everyone had a mediocre day. If everyone plays indifferently, then yeah an indifferent player can win. I don't really see the problem here.

I dont get the arguements, "if you meet someone of equal skill you cant score 10-1"

Well if you arent better than them, then why would you be able to do really well? The whole point of a tournament is that the most skilled player wins. So if you meet someone of equal skill then by definition you shouldnt win....

I also thinks its codswallop, you can easily beat players of your own skill level by considerable margins.

I agree. I think there's some intellectual shorthand going on in here that's muddying the waters. You guys are looking at this as though the matchups are random, when in fact they're a critical balancing mechanic here.

Let's say you're super good and get matched up against somebody else super good on round one. 7-4 your favor. There's another super good guy, Mr Lucky, matched up against a noob on that round, 10-1.

"Oh no!" you cry, "not fair!"

But then this magical thing called matchups happens.

You get matched up against somebody else with a 7-4 (probably an average player). Because you're awesome and the only reason you're at 7-4 was your matchup, well, you should spank this guy, because he's right where he belongs. 8-3 your favor.

Mr Lucky, on the other hand, is up against the other 10-1. They're both good enough to have crushed their Round 1 opponents, so they split, 6-5 to Lucky.

End of Round 2, he's at 16, you're at 15. He's just beaten the other guy who was at 15, so pretty good chance you're squaring off against Mr Lucky at the top table. You need only to prove you're better than he is then, because a 7-4 to you puts you on top.

This seems to happen in at least 50% of the tournaments that I've seen. In some ways, it is better to have that tough match early on when you're fresh, so that you play your best, and arguably play down the rest of the tournament.

Nothing but games with people trying to do the bare minimum to only get a 6-5 win so they can have nothing but wins but the worst type of game.

NO THANK YOU!

The current system rewards people for taking risks and getting a higher margin of victory and you are rewarded for more points. It promotes battle. Your scenario would result in most games becoming a snooze fest with opponents trying to wait for engagement, hit/run, or standoffs.

Though it also penalizes people who fought equally skilled opponents and rewards people for driving unskilled opponents into the dirt (and possibly out of the game.) any time a punching bag shows up to a tournament that person is going to skew the results in his opponents' favor, and that is unfortunate. Sadly, short of finding some sort of ranking system, there is no way to ensure total equality in these events.

At our store qualifier an inexperienced player ended up taking the bye because the best players had somehow gotten paired together the whole day and got nothing but 6-5s, and he lost twice and got a blow out win against a newer player than him.

And there you have it. How do we develope a player ranking for Armada worldwide? Are you supposed to ask everyone, hey is this your first tournament, hey do you suck at this game because if so tell us and we will give you someone else who also sucks to play against your first round? Who even keeps track if it is someone's first tournament? In a 3 round tournament the best players will get to the top even with getting a bad draw and playing another good player the first game. Regardless on your path to victory you will have to face another good player sometime. Either in round 1, round 2, or round 3. Obviously the more rounds you have the better chance you have of the top players winning as luck becomes less of a factor. But, luck plays a huge factor in every part of this game!! You can't take luck out of a game with dice rolls and random critical effects. You can get unclucky and play against a good player who has the exact counter start to your fleet and get 10-1. You can get lucky and play a very good player testing a new fleet that your fleet owns. You will never get luck out of this game. What I mainly hear are sower grapes from people who have been on the unlucky side proclaiming they want fairness in a game that has too many random variables. Is the current system perfect, of course not but it is a good system forcing players to try and get big margins of victory if you want to win.

Nothing but games with people trying to do the bare minimum to only get a 6-5 win so they can have nothing but wins but the worst type of game.

NO THANK YOU!

The current system rewards people for taking risks and getting a higher margin of victory and you are rewarded for more points. It promotes battle. Your scenario would result in most games becoming a snooze fest with opponents trying to wait for engagement, hit/run, or standoffs.

Though it also penalizes people who fought equally skilled opponents and rewards people for driving unskilled opponents into the dirt (and possibly out of the game.) any time a punching bag shows up to a tournament that person is going to skew the results in his opponents' favor, and that is unfortunate. Sadly, short of finding some sort of ranking system, there is no way to ensure total equality in these events.

At our store qualifier an inexperienced player ended up taking the bye because the best players had somehow gotten paired together the whole day and got nothing but 6-5s, and he lost twice and got a blow out win against a newer player than him.

And there you have it. How do we develope a player ranking for Armada worldwide? Are you supposed to ask everyone, hey is this your first tournament, hey do you suck at this game because if so tell us and we will give you someone else who also sucks to play against your first round? Who even keeps track if it is someone's first tournament? In a 3 round tournament the best players will get to the top even with getting a bad draw and playing another good player the first game. Regardless on your path to victory you will have to face another good player sometime. Either in round 1, round 2, or round 3. Obviously the more rounds you have the better chance you have of the top players winning as luck becomes less of a factor. But, luck plays a huge factor in every part of this game!! You can't take luck out of a game with dice rolls and random critical effects. You can get unclucky and play against a good player who has the exact counter start to your fleet and get 10-1. You can get lucky and play a very good player testing a new fleet that your fleet owns. You will never get luck out of this game. What I mainly hear are sower grapes from people who have been on the unlucky side proclaiming they want fairness in a game that has too many random variables. Is the current system perfect, of course not but it is a good system forcing players to try and get big margins of victory if you want to win.

I have a DCI card that tracks every Magic tournament/league I go to. I just give it to the judge and they scan me in. It works across the US but I'm not sure if it is world wide. Seems pretty simple to have an FFG card that tracks how many tournaments you play in. Even make an app for store owners and judges that allows each table to record their results so you can start collecting this data. The concept of tracking people is already here. Implementing it into Armada is different and going to be hard because of how small it is currently.

I honestly don't know how this thread got past the first reply

I honestly don't know how this thread got past the first reply

We are all very opinionated. And we have to validated that opinion by smashing it into someone else's face. And that's how we got to where we are now.

...or am I describing the current state of US politics? Hard to tell.

The only round that is entirely random is the first one - and the randomness of that round should, at higher tiers of tournament, be mitigated by the existence of byes. Beyond that there is little else that can be done with Swiss tournaments with long games and a small amount of rounds.

I dont get the arguements, "if you meet someone of equal skill you cant score 10-1"

Well if you arent better than them, then why would you be able to do really well? The whole point of a tournament is that the most skilled player wins. So if you meet someone of equal skill then by definition you shouldnt win....

I also thinks its codswallop, you can easily beat players of your own skill level by considerable margins.

Because if two very good players face each other then what typically happens from my experience (4 store championships, 1 regional, 1 national) is they knock each other out with a 5-6/7-4 and someone wins the event because they played less competitive players, throughout the tourney or up to the final match. Or, one the two good players tries to score big and (usually) gets crushed in the process due to Armada being unforgiving.That seems wrong to me. I can't think of anything else they can do to fix it though.

9a core decision of Armada had been to focus on objectives to determine win margin. While I agree that the winds should be n width more than two losses and s win, I've always respected that big achievements mean more in Armada than they do in other FFG games.

X-Wing: Simple scoring (now) that perfectly suits a very competitive game. Believe it or not, I don't find X-Wing to be an engaging casual game. A lot of casual 100 point Dogfights can be 'effectively over' in 15 minutes, or less. The only reason that tournament games last longer is because players are trying to gain or preserve their MoV.

Armada: Convoluted, artificial scoring that does not suit a competitive game. Armada is best suited to be a casual game. You can usually play for at least an hour and enjoy the experience, possibly with a beer and pretzels.

Competitive Armada has three main issues:

1 - Game length. There's only so much time in the day to play numerous Swiss rounds.

2 - Artificial (non)engagement, where sometimes players just want to stall in a corner - and can, because of the six game turn limit.

3 - The scoring system. It's terrible. There is something fundamentally wrong when a player with three wins, finishes in second place to someone who lost a round.

I've seen the problems with Armada from the perspective as a player and a TO. It's sad because the game is awesome, but it just doesn't stack up as a top tier competitive game.

I think I disagree with all three of your opinions on that one.

I don't think that any 3 wins necessarily trump 2 big wins, and a close loss.

X-Wing: Simple scoring (now) that perfectly suits a very competitive game. Believe it or not, I don't find X-Wing to be an engaging casual game. A lot of casual 100 point Dogfights can be 'effectively over' in 15 minutes, or less. The only reason that tournament games last longer is because players are trying to gain or preserve their MoV.

Armada: Convoluted, artificial scoring that does not suit a competitive game. Armada is best suited to be a casual game. You can usually play for at least an hour and enjoy the experience, possibly with a beer and pretzels.

Competitive Armada has three main issues:

1 - Game length. There's only so much time in the day to play numerous Swiss rounds.

2 - Artificial (non)engagement, where sometimes players just want to stall in a corner - and can, because of the six game turn limit.

3 - The scoring system. It's terrible. There is something fundamentally wrong when a player with three wins, finishes in second place to someone who lost a round.

I've seen the problems with Armada from the perspective as a player and a TO. It's sad because the game is awesome, but it just doesn't stack up as a top tier competitive game.

X-wing has the benefit of shorter games in a smaller space, with a larger playerbase. You can get more games in a tournament, making the competitive rankings more firmly delineated. If Armada tournaments were able to pack in a similar number of games perhaps Armada could shift to the X-wing win/loss model. So from that point of view X-wing is a superior "competitive game".

However, any game that runs about this length of time faces this issue. 40k, Fantasy, Warmahordes, and other games all run their tournaments in different ways, but none of their tournaments will usually run more than 3 games/day and 5-6 games/weekend. Some of these use win/loss, some use tournament points, some use Strength of Schedule, some use a hybrid system - but no system is perfect for these longer games, and complaints abound. Yet their player base is quite large, and their largest conventions draw players by the hundreds. Would you disregard these games "top tier competitive games"?

Yet I feel that the depth of strategy involved in Armada DOES make it quite competitive, in that the decisions of the players play a HUGE role in determining the outcome of the game, much more so than the dice results. I guess I find your criteria for a "competitive game" to be overly restrictive....so much that it essentially excludes any slower paced/deeper strategy game.

Your point #2 is a valid concern, but point #3 is the best attempt to address point #2, so I think you're arguing at cross purposes there.

I think I disagree with all three of your opinions on that one.

I don't think that any 3 wins necessarily trump 2 big wins, and a close loss.

I quite agree.

Imagine General Montgomery going up against Romel in the desert and launching his big push but he calls it off after 2 mins and in the end kills 4 members of the Afrika Korps but looses 2 chaps from the British side. He sends a telegram to Churchill claiming another British victory. Would he be sacked?

During the Franco Prussian War the French had very modern bolt action rifles.

In every battle they inflicted more casualties than the Germans did.

In every battle they lost.

They lost the war.

Saying "Technically we won on points" isn't enough.

Saying "Technically we won on points" isn't enough.

isn't that how this game is scored? on points? a player with 2 wins and 1 loss "Technically we won on points"?

I don't know how many people here play X Wing as well. In the last rules change FFG did away with modified wins. in most tournaments if a player received a modified win, a win of less then 12 points, they received a loss for all effective purposes. FFG saw the light and done away with this rule. A win is now a win even if it is only for 1 point. I see long term players who win with a 6 or 7 will see this the same way a X wing players saw mod wins as a loss.

I keep seeing posts against talking about sitting in the corner and taking the 2nd player auto win. This is no guaranteed way to win a tournament as MOV + wins is what you will need. X wing has a similar problem its called Fortressing. It was once a big problem but new ships and upgrades come out players learn to deal with the problem and learn the players/lists who were more likely to do it. Now Fortressing is a minor nuisance. This will be the same for Armada also.

From games I have played and games I have watched the games which produce the low scores of 6 and 7 are often the more fun and memorable games. the whole game every move matters every dice roll matters. when the game goes back and forth where the win come on the last dice roll, move, crit against a player of around the same skill level. to receive a 6 after such an epic battle and knowing that 6 is not going to mean anything in the grand scheme of things take so much away from the game you just played.

I am happy to lose at tournaments to a player who has 3 wins and a higher MOV them me even if that player did get easer matches then I did that does come down to the randomness of the draw. But to lose to a player with 1 loss, a player I may have beaten in the last round does not sit well with me

I think he means that minuscule barely victories should count less than decisive victories.

"Yay, we won! We killed two more of their dudes!" But that isn't a decisive rout of enemy forces. It's a win, but when you tabulate a series of battles the scope of each win is important to consider.

X-Wing: Simple scoring (now) that perfectly suits a very competitive game. Believe it or not, I don't find X-Wing to be an engaging casual game. A lot of casual 100 point Dogfights can be 'effectively over' in 15 minutes, or less. The only reason that tournament games last longer is because players are trying to gain or preserve their MoV.

Armada: Convoluted, artificial scoring that does not suit a competitive game. Armada is best suited to be a casual game. You can usually play for at least an hour and enjoy the experience, possibly with a beer and pretzels.

Competitive Armada has three main issues:

1 - Game length. There's only so much time in the day to play numerous Swiss rounds.

2 - Artificial (non)engagement, where sometimes players just want to stall in a corner - and can, because of the six game turn limit.

3 - The scoring system. It's terrible. There is something fundamentally wrong when a player with three wins, finishes in second place to someone who lost a round.

I've seen the problems with Armada from the perspective as a player and a TO. It's sad because the game is awesome, but it just doesn't stack up as a top tier competitive game.

I understand the the Armada Tourneys might not be for everyone, but I respectfully disagree with your 3 main issues:

1 - I've been to Armada tournaments that last the whole day, and even over two days and have had a blast. While I, again, can agree this is not for everyone, it is my cup of tea. I love the fact that this is even possible.

2 - The whole thing is an artificial exercise. We are playing with spaceships. If a player thinks their best chance is to disengage or run or not engage, that's their choice. It happens. Sometimes a 6-5 or 5-6 is the best you can hope for against certain fleets.

3 - My buddies that play Armada locally (heck even on vassal this is what happens) immediately used the scoring system to gauge how well we did, how good a certain fleet can do, etc. I'm not sure why this idea that a guy with two big wins has done better than a guy with three mediocre wins is so bad.

I will agree with you on beer. Beer is usually involved in our "casual" games which we play (in preparation for the next tournament.)

From a thematic point of view,

The winner should be the player who destroys the most with least losses.

Thats also the definition of mov

From a thematic, Star Wars, point of view - the winner should be whoever accomplishes their mission.

Did the rebels actually make it past the imperials to deliver supplies to the blockaded planet? Did the imperials succeed in destroying the ship carrying the secret message?

Hmm. I guess what I'm saying is that if we want to be truly thematic we need more and better Objectives!

Hmm. I guess what I'm saying is that if we want to be truly thematic we need more and better Objectives!

That seems pretty far-fetched.

Hmm. I guess what I'm saying is that if we want to be truly thematic we need more and better Objectives!

That seems pretty far-fetched.

The Corellian expansion will bring more tournament scenarios to add variety to the type of games being played.

There are hints at green missions too which may be non tournament scenarios designed to achieve certain campaign outcomes.

Years ago playing Star Fleet Battles they used to have Generic Scenarios and Historical Scenarios. The generic ones like Base Assault or Convoy Escort could be played by anyone. The Historic (yes I know it's fiction) scenarios allowed you to refight a combat from their background universe timeline. You would get the forces involved, where they start, what special rules to use and proper victory conditions matching the theme. They would then suggest variations on the scenario: swapping Klingons for Romulans etc. or suggesting smaller ships if you have less time.

Hmm. I guess what I'm saying is that if we want to be truly thematic we need more and better Objectives!

That seems pretty far-fetched.

The Corellian expansion will bring more tournament scenarios to add variety to the type of games being played.

There are hints at green missions too which may be non tournament scenarios designed to achieve certain campaign outcomes.

Years ago playing Star Fleet Battles they used to have Generic Scenarios and Historical Scenarios. The generic ones like Base Assault or Convoy Escort could be played by anyone. The Historic (yes I know it's fiction) scenarios allowed you to refight a combat from their background universe timeline. You would get the forces involved, where they start, what special rules to use and proper victory conditions matching the theme. They would then suggest variations on the scenario: swapping Klingons for Romulans etc. or suggesting smaller ships if you have less time.

That was a great approach to a game. The historical scenarios were the favorite of our local SFB group. We even played the "Cavalry Charge" scenario once.

Games with a real objective give a lot of life to play. If the rebels have to deliver that cargo to the planet OR ELSE - then it doesn't matter how many ships are destroyed. If they get it there they win. If the Imps stop them they lose.

That's the kind of thing I'd love to see in Corellian Conflict.

How about destroy both Death Stars? I want to play that.

Think of it this way- If you went into battle and lost half your fleet (win 6-5) that would not bold well for your cause in the future. The cost of your victory was to great in the terms of dead ships and resources. But if you went in guns blazing destroyed the enemy (9-2) and only lost a handfull of squads then the rest of you campaign against the enemy could go very well cause u have plenty of ships to use in the next battle. Quality over quantity, IMO that makes this such an interesting tourney game.

It all depends on the mission that is accomplished.

Some objectives, like delivering food to starving rebel sympathizers, are worth losing every escort ship - as we saw in the show Rebels.

There was also the destruction of the 2nd Death Star which was tremendous casualties for the rebellion.

In a well-made campaign system, there are also situations that a clever strategist can arrange to win the war by losing several battles in just the right way.