I'm mulling over a house rule for my campaign: No consecutive rematches.

We just finished turn 2 and we played the exact same people from turn 1 with exactly the same results. To be clear: I'm both the campaign organizer and the Imperial Grand Moff and we have won 4 of the 6 matches, even though it's the Rebel team that is forcing the pairings.

We are all beginners here, and my goal for this campaign is to meet new people and play against a variety of fleet types. However, some of the Rebel players don't want to match up against some of our fleets and want at least 1 sure win.

We only meet once a month, so waiting 4 weeks to play a rematch against someone you just won or lost to doesn't seem like fun to me. Unfortunately, this would require a change mid-campaign.

What do you think? Good or bad idea?

Since you have 3 players, this seems like it would work.

It's a fine rule, but we learned that certain lists were better against others. Two guys played 4 matches in a row. I played the same guy 3 times.

I hope the next campaign has space for more players. I would likely enforce this rule with 5 or 6 per team.

More players you get the less is an issue, but I could see it being a good change for smaller campaigns or campaigns who end up having rock/paper/scissor fleets so you are always either playing the fleet you counter or the fleet that counters you.

Personally, I prefer that the two Grand Admirals have a similar understanding of what the players want out of the game and act accordingly.

That said its not a crazy rule.

Yeah maybe it doesn't have to be a formal rule... more like a set of guidelines for gentlemanly warfare.

18 minutes ago, BrobaFett said:

Yeah maybe it doesn't have to be a formal rule... more like a set of guidelines for gentlemanly warfare.

I thought that was the case but fear is driving people to act against their own fun. Sadly, it's not uncommon in gaming.

What we do is have a blind assignment. it actually adds a little bit of tension and unpredictability to the whole declaring of assaults thing.

Its an honor system based thing but basically you decide who will do which assault and defense and lock it in BEFORE you know what the enemy is doing.

You can't deliberately pair up counter fleets but you can try and outguess and out bluff the opponents.

13 minutes ago, Hastatior said:

What we do is have a blind assignment. it actually adds a little bit of tension and unpredictability to the whole declaring of assaults thing.

Its an honor system based thing but basically you decide who will do which assault and defense and lock it in BEFORE you know what the enemy is doing.

You can't deliberately pair up counter fleets but you can try and outguess and out bluff the opponents.

This is an intriguing idea. Have you found it unduly advantages the team with initiative?

its all up to the defender side to pick who will face the first attacker, its part of the game an important part , but with only 4 players you will end up facing the same player more then with 6 players. just the way the numbers work.

I'm not sure about this idea. Have you thought through some matchup scenarios with this rule? It's a pretty significant hit to the team that's behind. Normally, that team gets to pick what both of the last two matchups are. Under this system, all of the matchups are determined by the leading team, as is the initiative of the last two.

Example (letters are one team, numbers are the other):

Turn 1 matchups are

Av1

2vB

Cv3

At turn 2, letters are losing, so they attack with A.

Numbers put up 2 to defend. Numbers then gets to attack, and puts up 3 to attack. Letters can't put up C to defend because they matched last round, so they are forced to defend with B, leaving C to attack 1. The matchups are then:

Av2

3vB

Cv1

Every choice that Numbers makes forces a no-option response by Letters. The only choice that Letters gets to make about matchups is who one of their attackers is.

I think this leads to a fairly significant snowball effect.

38 minutes ago, Hastatior said:

What we do is have a blind assignment. it actually adds a little bit of tension and unpredictability to the whole declaring of assaults thing.

Its an honor system based thing but basically you decide who will do which assault and defense and lock it in BEFORE you know what the enemy is doing.

You can't deliberately pair up counter fleets but you can try and outguess and out bluff the opponents.

I think our next play through I am going to recommend that we announce anonymously who is attacking. Each side can decide who will attack and where and then who will defend against the named system. Maybe use Spynet token to get to reveal which fleet is attacking one system, allow better pairing. The only issue would be rematches and lop sided battles due to previous battles.

11 minutes ago, ouzel said:

its all up to the defender side to pick who will face the first attacker, its part of the game an important part , but with only 4 players you will end up facing the same player more then with 6 players. just the way the numbers work.

Just to be clear, we do have 6 players in our campaign.

12 minutes ago, Cusm said:

I think our next play through I am going to recommend that we announce anonymously who is attacking. Each side can decide who will attack and where and then who will defend against the named system. Maybe use Spynet token to get to reveal which fleet is attacking one system, allow better pairing. The only issue would be rematches and lop sided battles due to previous battles.

I like the idea of spynet tokens, or maybe diplomats cause who the F uses those for anything?

In our last campaign (was 2v2) we naturally ended up with some same matchups. In this one at 3v3 we are on round 2 and only 1 matchup is the same. as for lopsided battles, we also house-rule the distribution of resources, we distribute resources at the discretion of the grand admiral. If one fleet takes a particular beating, the effect can be amortized across all players to the degree decided by the team. we are playing the battles for round 2 tonight and we decided as a team to give a full 102 points to our attacking player so we could send him after a crucial rebel base while the rest of us took more modest upgrades. We find the campaign as is to be overly simplistic and while it works fine as a framework we will definitely be extending it out.

If every single player had a mirror match then that's the fault of both teams (specifically both grand admirals). The defending team can force completely new matchups, but the attacking team can force at least 2 out of the 3 matches to be new pairings.

team 1 attacks with player A, team 2 defends with player A (rematch)

team 2 attacks with player B, then team 1 can defend with player C (new matchup) which then forces the third game to be a new matchup as well.

The defending team can only force the first attacker play a mirror match, so the attacking team can just cycle out who their first attacker is each time so that nobody is forced to play a mirror match twice in a row.

59 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

If every single player had a mirror match then that's the fault of both teams (specifically both grand admirals).

This is undeniably true. For story purposes, I had decided to do a Show of Force on turn 2 as Vader is flying around the Corellian Sector blowing up innocent bases in order to draw out the Rebels. I was unwilling to deviate from this plan/narrative and bear responsibility for the rematches as much as the Rebels. I put the decision to use a "rematch house rule" to a player vote. The options are:

1. You can't play the same person 3 games in a row.

2. You can't play the same person 2 games in a row.

3. No rematches until you play everyone on the opposing team.

4. Unlimited rematches.

As we have 6 players, in the case of a tie my vote is acting as the tiebreaker (so I voted publicly first as I felt that would only be fair).

I like the idea of blind matches, as well as using diplomats to reveal an attacking fleet (and its target) because otherwise planets with diplomats are an afterthought. Spynets are already quite powerful so I don't think I would give them another useful purpose.

Blind matches just leave things up to chance and there is still a good chance of getting a rematch. It's actually worse than the current system if you think about it, since with the rules as-is only one team can force only one rematch, but with blind matches you could have everyone rematched completely by chance since it out of everyone's control.

I think if your goal is to prevent rematches, then you should just make the rule no rematches until you've played everybody on the other team at least once. Leaving the match-ups to chance doesn't really improve things.

Good luck to you and your group, you seemed like a really great bunch and I hope to play against you guys in the future.

I think changing the players, not the fleets, could work as you get what you want without the counter of forcing not optimal matches.

Of course it is only possible if all the players could bring other's fleets.

20 minutes ago, ovinomanc3r said:

I think changing the players, not the fleets, could work as you get what you want without the counter of forcing not optimal matches.

Of course it is only possible if all the players could bring other's fleets.

Because of life, we typically have a meeting where we get points, talk upgrades and plan and announce our next attacks and schedule when we will meet for battle. This works out good and with your idea we could incorporate that and give us newer players more exposure to other builds.

It doesn't seem like a terrible idea. This could be caused in part because one or more players on each side has a specific goal for their fleet design (someone wants to be the hyper-aggressive base attacker, someone wants to defend bases and outposts, someone really wants to field a gigantic pile of squadrons and is looking to play against opponents with fewer anti-squad defenses, etc.)

I'd first check with your own players to make sure this isn't an issue of fleet design guiding the matchups, then confer with the rebel Grand Admiral if the change is desired on their end. If you don't have buy-in from Rebel players then you might not be able to get this and the insistance on switching players will turn people off.