Hanger Bay is useless unless the Opponent picks the list he will face. We called it Enemy Hanger Bay. After a single tournament the players thought it was so much better format.

That means you must come to play BOTH lists from different factions.

53 minutes ago, Elavion said:

There is a pretty big difference between playing missions for fun with friends (which kinda works) and having actual highly competitive players figure them out.

I'm going to agree with this statement. Here you are correct.

55 minutes ago, Elavion said:

Not only is it borderline impossible to predict all the interactions (think Dengaroo), It'd completely redefine what is good and what is bad. A lot of ships would be left in the dust- for a very, very, very basic example, if you're supposed to go around the map and fly over objectives, all versions of SLAM become god tier (and severely underpriced), while slow ships like the quadjumper become completely useless. And just think about minefield mapper...

This is where I'm going to disagree. Clearly you're working on the assumption that it's possible to totally predict interactions in standard FFG tournament play. As proven historically, often by the Jumpmaster, this is untrue. To limit the impact things are tested repeatedly, this would be the same in objective oriented play as well. You find out where negative interactions occur before releasing the event. I'll point to Shuttle Tydirium's event at GenCon as an example where tournament-ish play was used with objective oriented rounds. Players were ranked on play, there was a top table, top players were awarded top prizes. The biggest complaints about the event was not the objectives.

Quadjumper isn't exactly breaking ground in the standard play meta, and Adv SLAM has been an issue. I don't think your example is a good one. That said, I'll grant you some ships might have a harder time. It's a shame that some ships wouldn't be able to keep up in this alternate meta when all ships do so well in standard play.

Ok, that was snarky. Objectives don't solve balance issues that exist in the game. It does provide an alternate play experience where standard format lists are not as well suited to compete at the same level though, which is the intent.

I agree with 150/6 and adding armada style missions.

On 8/24/2017 at 2:15 PM, Otacon said:

Yeah, as you and others have pointed out, it's not like Dengar, Nym, Miranda, Dash, and the like get any worse just because the point limit went up. You just end up with situations where Dash+Miranda becomes Dash+Miranda+Corran/Nym. If anything it probably weakens arc dodgers even more(more ships on the table = more arcs to dodge) and increases the power of alpha strike, bombs, Attani...

If your opponent is dead they can't score any objectives.

Dengar is scary when you are flying 2-3 ships against him. Bring 6'ish hard hitters and he gets 1 revenge shot and then melted in one round. Ships with "once per round" abilities, like Dengar, are distinctly worse in larger point games. Lowrick giving someone 1 evade is effective when you are only getting 2-3 shots on target per round, but not when you are getting more. Same with Rex debuffing one of your ships. That's cute, the other 5 will kill whatever you were shooting at anyways. Its also why Old Palp was powerful in 100 pts games, but only "Ok" in 300pts Epic.

It makes a huge difference.

As far as objectives, you should read up on some of the existing ones, such as the ones where the enemy gets reinforcements when they lose ships and you lose if you do not accomplish your objective (ex. capture 5 satellites) by turn 8. Trying to turn everything into a "kill the enemy" can result in losing every time.

A local store here is holding a "De-escalation" tournament in September. Rules are no more than 8 of the same small ship, no more than 2 large ships and no swapping of upgrades between ships between rounds. Lists start at 120 points. After each round you must subtract 30 points of ships/upgrades for the next round. So round 2 is 90 points, round 3 is 60 and the 4th and final round is 30. I'm really looking forward to this.