In hind sight I wish X-wing had objectives as a core mechanic. I've been playing Armada and some Imperial Assault since leaving X-wing and the objective style play is so good for those games it really makes me wonder why it isn't in X-wing.

Now I have always held to the notion that for any game that has expanding content, power creep is a natural occurrence. When you make the games goal kill all the other guys, you kinda dictate which way that creep will go. The objective play concept opens up a relief valve for a games design space in that instead of making something that competes with a particularly strong component, they can just give the new component some quality that allows another approach to become available.

Like in Armada, the direction I take to combat a particularly strong list that is doing well is usually first approached by designing a fleet to simply get on even footing with its combat stats, then design an objective set that is wildly to my favor with a bid. Alternatively knowing what objectives they have, I could assemble a fleet that preys on their objectives, and succeed because I get first activation.

In Imperial assault, for tournaments you know your going to have to play a certain set of objective games that each round will be randomly picked from, so you plan your team around that. You may plan to just kill stuff in mission A with most of your units and have that smuggler you brought act as a diversion and extra activation. But you have that smuggler snag the box in mission B, and in mission C you really want that flying unit on your team to grab that good position. And your opponent is planning a team to take those three missions in a different way.

For X-wing I'd say it's more than doable, even now this late in the design, to implement SOME kind of objective system. It would go a long way to getting me back in the game.

I agree.

Infinity was also player as a straight kill'em'all for a long time, and it has let to large selection of the army lists never being used (who needs stuff like engineers and forward observers when it's more beneficial to load up on HMGs). Then objective-based tournament rules came, where these specialists mattered, and (along with some point tweaks) it turned list-building upside down. It was suddenly not only about who can bring the biggest guns, you had to balance your list between doing the objectives and preventing the enemy from completing them. And there are still firefight-style missions in the set, where it's important to kill enemy dudes and not get killed yourself or capture ground as you do so.
They also introduced a rule where it you force your opponents force into retreat, the game ends at the end of his nearest turn. So just killing everything is not the way to go, as you will not have time to complete the objectives.

Introducing objectives really helps freshen up the game, while at the same time it does not kill the 100/6 format (which simply becomes one of the available missions) and I would really like to see them in X-Wing.

Warhammer Fantasty Battle was also a giant kill fest until 8th Ed. came around. That's like 20 years of game play. They introduced that ALL games you had to roll a d6 and play the mission. Many people said it would end the game. Many said it would end tournament play. It didn't. I think tournaments got even bigger (until GW killed the game system with Age of Sigmar).

http://direman.com/direman/comic.php?comicID=1607

a brief but good article from direman. What are we playing?

It's funny watching people who pride themselves on how bad they are at the game try to give suggestions about competitive formats.