I'm still a little lost on MOV and how it effects ship selection or if it does. To sum up my question, is there any advantage or disadvantage to bringing large ships to the field? Or are you better bringing smaller ships that are also theoretically a little cheaper? The spreading of the points as it were.

I'm not per se looking for the pros / cons of a two ship lists vs. swarms. More how putting large base ships on the field effects tournament scoring?

Hopefully my question is clear. Thanks for the help.

It used to be that big ships were a big advantage, because you could put a lot of points into something that was hard to kill, and so a 60 point YT with 1 hull left denied the other guy 60 points of MoV and maybe a win.

Now however you get partial credit for a large ship if it has more than half its hull worth of damage cards, so it's not nearly as big of an advantage as it was, and may or may not be an advantage at all.

Before you got half points for large ships when they're half destroyed, large ships were better and dominated the meta.

Now a large ship has to be more than just large in order to win games. The Brobots craze was after the change though, so large ships can have their place.

If there is a small base ship that has 4 shields and 4 health, like the Gand Findsman and you lose half your health (so you lose all of your shields) your opponent does not get any points.

Now suppose you take IG-88C which has 4 health and 4 shields. If you lose your shields that is half of your health, and your opponent gets half points for your ship and all upgrades.

So what you have to decide is how much benefit are you getting for taking IG-88 over the Gand Findsman. Is it worth it to take IG-8 and to risk giving your opponent some points.

Personally I don't pay attention to that much, I want to try to win the game, since if I win every game I should make the cut, and after that pts don't matter.

Honestly, large vs. small base isn't something you really need to worry about anymore.

It USED to be a form of point hording, it no longer is. That's all.

These days point hoarding will come from the small but hard to kill unless you get lucky ships.

The advantage of large ships used to be that while they may continually suffer damage for most of a game they didn't give up points until the very end of their life. There have been suggestion that MoV points be awarded for each shield token a ship loses or damage card it takes based on starting points, shield, and hull; in many ways MoV for large ships took a step in that direction although it only uses half points and half "hit points".

Thanks for the replies. I think I get it now.