Has anyone tried playing a game on 4x4? If so how did it compare to 3x6? I bought a 4x4 for another game and it seems like it would be fairly suitable.

On 3' deep table combat usually occurs on turn 2 or 3. If you start even further away you tend to just delay the combat by another turn or possibly 2 turns if you decide to move slowly. Tarkin will love this able to completely fill up his fleet. Garm will hate it as even non Tarkin opponents will be able to mostly fill up on tokens while Garm adds nothing until turn 5.

You could play on a 4' deep table but have deeper deployment zones so the fleets begin roughly the same distance as usually. Then you just have an extra 6" run off space after the battle passes to give more space to avoid the table edge.

I've just played my first game on a 3x3 and it played fine. Nobody flew off the edge, though a CR90 came close to it on turn 5.

Turn 1 and 2 was all manoeuvring. Turn 3 and 4 were action packed. Turn 5 had a few long distance rear arc shots but nothing much else. Turn 6 everyone was out of range of each other.

I've ordered myself a 6x4, but I am planning on getting more ships and playing bigger than 400 point games so I probably need the extra space.

You could, as has been mentioned above, make the deployment zones deeper, or you could add a turn to the game. The second option would allow for more maneuvering prior to combat, which would possibly allow someone to reposition a bit to recover from a bad deployment.

1 hour ago, Mad Cat said:

... you tend to just delay the combat by another turn or possibly 2 turns...

This. You can add another round or two to make up for this, but you would be better off just going with 3x4 instead if you can't manage 3x6. Maybe get a 4x4 mat and tape off the play area or something.

3 hours ago, Mad Cat said:

On 3' deep table combat usually occurs on turn 2 or 3. If you start even further away you tend to just delay the combat by another turn or possibly 2 turns if you decide to move slowly. Tarkin will love this able to completely fill up his fleet. Garm will hate it as even non Tarkin opponents will be able to mostly fill up on tokens while Garm adds nothing until turn 5.

You could play on a 4' deep table but have deeper deployment zones so the fleets begin roughly the same distance as usually. Then you just have an extra 6" run off space after the battle passes to give more space to avoid the table edge.

I beg to differ about Garm. His ships can go full on Navigate command dial spam, in the 1-3 turns and can optain a better attack position, without bumping into each other.

And not waste valuable Command dials saving up tokens