Discussion started in another thread, probably could use its own to focus discussion on the idea.

Basic concepts I was aiming for are as follows:

1. Firstly, do not change any rules of the game. This is still Armada, played using the full set of Armada rules, list building, etc.
2. Standard format for list building, even - 400 pts, one commander, 3 objectives, etc
3. Given points 1-2, lists you learn to do well with in this tournament format will take you far in 'regular' tournaments...anything built for this format will be legal for the standard format, and if it works here it will work there, so there is no feeling of 'wasting time' playing a non-standard format...it's just quicker to play by being more focused
4. The 6-turn structure of Armada is critical to the flow, and value, of the game. Besides even the nature of how a list may work to be optimized for certain turn numbers, there are upgrades in the game that require this number of turns to work - just adjusting the time down without some other change, resulting in games going to time before all 6 turns can be completed, is extremely undesirable. "Every match always completes all 6 turns" is a key criteria for success.
5. Factoring in all of the above, the goal is to add certain restrictions to speed up play and reduce a tournament match time to 90 minutes.

So the thing to do is review what slows down play. Generally, from personal experience and comments in other threads discussing this idea (recently and in the past), that seems to amount to a few things:

• Excessive number of 'things on the board' making usage of the maneuver tool, and positioning of squadrons, overly time consuming
• Compounding unique abilities resulting in increased demand for precision in even minor placement of ships and (notably) squadrons

An idea to solve this would be to cap the number of 'things on the board' and 'variety of unique abilities', while retaining various list flavors and allowing the full range of what you can do in Armada. As follows:

• Besides the standard 400 pt + 1/3 of your list squadron limits already in the tournament rules, we'd add a cap on the number of units. Specifically, with three list 'types' you could choose from:
  • 'Balanced': max 4 ships + max 6 squadrons
  • 'Ship focus': max 5 ships + max 2 squadrons
  • 'Squadron focus': max 3 ships + max 10 squadrons
    (the net-net being that you are looking at a limit of 6 to 8 deployments and activations assuming using the squadron phase for squadron activations...obviously fewer activations if you use ships to activate squadrons, ergo the larger number of 'potential' activations the more the 'list type' favors squadron counts)
• Limit on number of unique squadrons - a list can only take 1 unique squadron unless it's a 'squadron focus' list, which can take 2 unique squadrons.
• Limit on number of unique upgrades - a list can only take 2 unique upgrades (not counting the commander) unless it's a 'ship focus' list, which can take 4 unique upgrades.

Curious on thoughts, here. Do the restrictions break the game to the point it no longer looks like Armada? Would they even be enough to make 90-minute matches easy to get through all 6 turns with, for any list that qualifies for the format?

Very detailed analysis, I dig it, but hard pass on the suggestions.

It would no longer be Armada at this point to me. I'd rather go with other suggestions. Like the far simpler "activation pass token" at this point would be better. For deployment I think in hind sight more deployment based on the objective would have been better. Like Corona, super position, both ambush ones, and even conflict Canon all have some rule for deployment and I feel like they function smoother for the players enjoyment. Probably not something they would have noticed in pre-release development when there want allot of experience with it. While I wouldn't say that the current activation and deployment rules can't be troublesome, and potentially limiting to the player, I'm not of the opinion that they need fixing either. I wouldn't go so far as to call them a feature either. To me it's almost a balancing factor at this point as I can expect about 5 activations and around 7 deployments. I believe future releases and upgrades will continue to alleviate the perceived flaws.

Could some kind of activation clock work in Armada? Is there a balanced method to constrain the time alllowed for each activation without heavily skewing the game against swarms?

59 minutes ago, ForceSensitive said:

Very detailed analysis, I dig it, but hard pass on the suggestions.

It would no longer be Armada at this point to me.

FWIW, take a look at the sort of lists that make it to top tables, and/or your favorite lists - I think you'd be surprised how many fit the typing. I mean, certainly, if you are commonly finishing Armada games in under 90 minutes regularly (as many seem to do), you'll probably find the lists being run fit these limitations actually pretty well...or with very minor tweaks.

Really, the goal is to curb the extremes. If 75% of lists "legal" in a standard tournament can finish a game in 90-or-so minutes, including all the 'top table' sort of lists, but 25% of them need the full 2.5 hrs...then everyone ends up playing 2.5 hr rounds needlessly. Figuring out the pattern for what makes the '75% of lists that easily play in 90-ish minutes', which seems to include almost all the top-table sort of lists...and then focusing the tournament format to REQUIRE that pattern, seems like a win-win for everyone. Overall "better" lists get played, rounds get shorter, more matches get played...it's just a big improvement in general. (And obviously player skill is a big part of this, which needs to be factored in, and...complicates analysis quite a lot).

Quote

I'd rather go with other suggestions. Like the far simpler "activation pass token" at this point would be better.

I think I have an idea what that might be in reference to, but what did you have in mind, specifically?

Really just trying to kick around ideas, here, for how we could speed up tournaments without impacting everything that makes this game great - without impacting the nuance of it...any suggestions or discussion welcome, keeping in mind (for this thread) the first 5 points that I think make sense as key goals.

I’ll be blunt. I would much rather Armada enjoy a healthy meta than have four round Regionals that don’t exhaust me. This will not help either element. These restrictions are extremely tight, and slam several successful, engaging archetypes hard. I have complete faith in FFG to build the game they set out to build, and I see no reason to abdicate that faith in them now.

Not a fan. Vastly restricts list options especially generic squadrons and MSU.

I have to believe that it will seriously cause tournaments to be a negative experience for new players.

I honestly don't see an issue with speed of play, and I'm not sure the X-wing fast play style is conducive to Armada.

5 minutes ago, cynanbloodbane said:

I honestly don't see an issue with speed of play, and I know that X-wing fast play style is conducive to Armada.

FTFY

I do think that reducing the number of unique squadrons would radically cut down the time investment of the game. Many of the current squadron focused lists are designed around multiple overlapping game effects that make every attack a slog and prolong engagements by making unique squads very difficult to kill.

For example, reducing your maximum number of unique squads to 1/3rd of your total available squadron points (134 for a full game) would give you 45 points. Enough to play 2-3 unique characters, but you'd have to fill the remainder with generics which would be easier to remove from the board and contribute fewer overlapping effects to the fleet. Yet you'd still have enough effects that accounting for them would be crucial to winning or stopping the enemy fleet.

It'll never happen, but tournament play would definitely benefit from a chess clock. We used it for our CC final assault, and it really helped things move along. No need for extra rules -- just divide the time (plus some buffer time for command phase) and the slow play will pretty quickly disappear.

20 minutes ago, CyborgNinja said:

It'll never happen, but tournament play would definitely benefit from a chess clock. We used it for our CC final assault, and it really helped things move along. No need for extra rules -- just divide the time (plus some buffer time for command phase) and the slow play will pretty quickly disappear.

I can say with complete confidence that large squadron balls add tremendous amounts of time to the game. A no squads game can be finished in an hour or less, but if both players have 60+ points in squads that time can double. Squadrons are easily the biggest time sink in the game.

An easier option is just force folks to play faster.

2 hour matches are super easy to get in. I’d say 1.5 hours can be done but you just have to move your stuff and not ponder every single mm of everything.

I think it’d have to be evened out by a chess clock or something though.

I don’t like limiting any kind of fleets at all.

Most of the time sink in Armada is spent thinking.

That's also why it's such a good game.

I've never had a game last longer than an hour, hour and a half at most. I play lightning fast. The thing delays play the most is players wayyyyy overthinking what they're doing, and trying to place things down with micro metric precision, even tough that's patently impossible. Put the doggone squadron down, make sure you tell me the intent is to be out of distance one from my ship, and we will take it from there. Don't spend twenty minutes measuring and re measuring, Emperors sake.

I discussed a similar concept with one of our local organizers and TO's. He recommended we keep all the rules the same except that you need to deploy beyond R3 of each player's board-edge.

1 hour ago, Darth Lupine said:

I've never had a game last longer than an hour, hour and a half at most. I play lightning fast. The thing delays play the most is players wayyyyy overthinking what they're doing, and trying to place things down with micro metric precision, even tough that's patently impossible. Put the doggone squadron down, make sure you tell me the intent is to be out of distance one from my ship, and we will take it from there. Don't spend twenty minutes measuring and re measuring, Emperors sake.

I wish people would do this more. My group tends to be pretty good with that, but some people are just so finicky about it.

11 hours ago, jmswood said:

Could some kind of activation clock work in Armada? Is there a balanced method to constrain the time alllowed for each activation without heavily skewing the game against swarms?

Unfortunately for every person who comes up with this idea, the short answer is no. Clocks work for a game when there's a simple physical manipulation of the games components, like picking up a Chess piece and moving it, or a checker, or a go stone, or shogi pawn. But when you have complex pieces and tools to maneuver them and multiple pieces to manipulate with your hands, the clock starts measuring manipulation of the components more than the thought process put into planning and decision making. To move a Chess piece is pretty marginal of a physical motion compared to plotting two arcs targets, collecting the dice for the first shot or flak, dealing damage, spending tokens, adjusting dials for Shields, dealing and resolving damage cards, changing the second target, measuring it's range, getting it's dice together... You get the idea. This is further complicated by the fact that while during my resolution of let's say an attack, I go through the steps to resolve it, but then do I hit the clock when I pass priority to you to make a decision on defense tokens? What happens when it goes to a counter trigger for a squad? Who's activation is it really, and how do we measure it? If there's a clock is it not better to just broadside with Ackbar, resolve only one attack, and move one click with the MC 80 so that my activation is simply shorter by virtue of just not having many things to manipulate or do? It's been thought of since the beginning, for X-wing too, and still nobody uses them in tournaments. Where they try, many players leave because speed is not what they desire from the game. These games just don't take clocks very well. It's a deep strategy game and it takes time to think through the cascade of events that each decision could lead to. Some folk don't and they play off impulse and that's fine. Some folk think a whole lot and analyze everything, and that's fine too. Realize that that's just the way people are and is not a game based issue. Especially when components of the game don't have equivalent time to complete actions for. In a game like this, clocks favor certain components and strategies. That's just a fact.

Now, side note to that, if you all agree and have some strange time constraint like someone mentioned earlier with the CC final assault, maybe that's a time you can use a clock. But I'll be blunt, there's a reason the game has rules for scoring before the full six turns, and if your not planning/playing to or for that and banking on a turn that you may not get to play, that's a problem with your strategy and understanding of the game flow. There is nothing in the game, NOTHING, that says that the full six turns must be played. That is entirely a subjective belief with nothing to support it. Most games are decided by turn four, which is part of where your getting your 90 minutes from. And as the OP even stated, that's at the top tables where player skill complicates analysis. And I guarantee you those top tables players are very familiar with their fleets, and have a ton of experience, so of course they play faster. And to be perfectly honest 90 minutes for a game this deep is completely unreasonable as an expectation, and should only ever be seen as a incredibly quick game. ****, the box says 2 hours to play on the cover. To aim for anything less than that is cheating the player of what the designers clearly had in mind for the game to take, let alone what the player was told they would have from the product they purchased. The extra half hour allotted beyond that is to not cheat the player at that level of play from having an intense game that needs a little more time to resolve, take a smoke break, go to bathroom, whatever. Every organized play game I can think of grants time limits that are higher than the time it is considered required to play, and all for very good reasons such as these.

As for "pass tokens", it's not even something I specifically came up with. Many many many people on this forum have made the suggestion in one form or another. Interestingly, it could almost be said that the wave 7 card Strategic Advisor, which is one of the iterations of the suggested change, was in fact a community designed card, as iterations of it were discussed ad nauseum in these forums. I'd go so far as to say that the card is only one fleet point off of where these forums had guessed it even, so good job us. As well as in Imperial Assault, where a pass mechanic was introduced later in the expanding game, and mostly similar to what had been discussed on its forums. Basic premise is you get to pass an activation if your opponent had more than you left, and same for deployment. Truly though, if getting activations back in line is the goal, give the Empire a 18-20 point flottila. And I wager they will get one soon, and it will be a cargo container hauler from Rebels.

7 hours ago, draco193 said:

I wish people would do this more. My group tends to be pretty good with that, but some people are just so finicky about it.

It's definitely the best and quickest way to play squads, just declaring intent, but you do end up running into the (rare) player that will still measure and not allow for "correcting" despite declaring intent and even agreeing that the intended move was possible...

Those can turn into some excruciating games..

3 hours ago, MandalorianMoose said:

It's definitely the best and quickest way to play squads, just declaring intent, but you do end up running into the (rare) player that will still measure and not allow for "correcting" despite declaring intent and even agreeing that the intended move was possible...

Those can turn into some excruciating games..

From the other side, as someone who values precision in squadron play, I can't stand sloppy squadron play because of the huge ramifications it can have. Unfortunately, I think the weird distances involved in squadron play cause a lot of this problem.

For example, in an E-wing vs Interceptor matchup, precise play is really important because distance 5+1 is slightly longer than distance 4+2, which means the Interceptor's threat range is larger than the E-wing's--but only by like 1/4"/.5cm or so. So if you're hovering your distance ruler over the top of your ships and eyeballing your movement when moving your E-wings into combat, you might be negating the advantage that I was counting on. Similarly, with B-wings (and probably YV-666's, I guess...) a big part of their balance is the drawback of speed 2, which is really small. So if you're fudging that by a half-inch or so--which I've seen happen a lot by "declare your intent and just do it" players--you're getting quite a bit of added value out of those B-wings.

It's unfortunate that squadron play is so tedious, and yeah it can be slow during rounds 2-3 during the initial clash. If you and your opponent are both fine with rushing through the squadron play, that's fine--but you really need to make sure they are okay with it before you start picking up your TIE fighters by the handful and putting them down wherever because "they could totally have gotten there"*.

*not hyperbole, happened to me at a tournament two weeks ago, after I'd asked the player not to do it.

21 hours ago, jmswood said:

Could some kind of activation clock work in Armada? Is there a balanced method to constrain the time alllowed for each activation without heavily skewing the game against swarms?

gawd a kill clock for this game would be amazing but I have no real idea how to effectively implement it. Punishments like "you lose" if you hit 1 hour 10 mins seem pretty harsh and how bad the X/X score would be idk.

27 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

From the other side, as someone who values precision in squadron play, I can't stand sloppy squadron play because of the huge ramifications it can have. Unfortunately, I think the weird distances involved in squadron play cause a lot of this problem.

For example, in an E-wing vs Interceptor matchup, precise play is really important because distance 5+1 is slightly longer than distance 4+2, which means the Interceptor's threat range is larger than the E-wing's--but only by like 1/4"/.5cm or so. So if you're hovering your distance ruler over the top of your ships and eyeballing your movement when moving your E-wings into combat, you might be negating the advantage that I was counting on. Similarly, with B-wings (and probably YV-666's, I guess...) a big part of their balance is the drawback of speed 2, which is really small. So if you're fudging that by a half-inch or so--which I've seen happen a lot by "declare your intent and just do it" players--you're getting quite a bit of added value out of those B-wings.

It's unfortunate that squadron play is so tedious, and yeah it can be slow during rounds 2-3 during the initial clash. If you and your opponent are both fine with rushing through the squadron play, that's fine--but you really need to make sure they are okay with it before you start picking up your TIE fighters by the handful and putting them down wherever because "they could totally have gotten there"*.

*not hyperbole, happened to me at a tournament two weeks ago, after I'd asked the player not to do it.

When I play that way I tend to lay the ruler on the table against the squad, say something to the effect of “we agree he can reach this spot and stay unengaged from this squad over here right?”- agree with opponent and then move to intended spot.

It allows for precise measurement without “usually” having to fret on the exact mm of placement for overlapping effects which can speed things up

2 hours ago, MandalorianMoose said:

When I play that way I tend to lay the ruler on the table against the squad, say something to the effect of “we agree he can reach this spot and stay unengaged from this squad over here right?”- agree with opponent and then move to intended spot.

It allows for precise measurement without “usually” having to fret on the exact mm of placement for overlapping effects which can speed things up

I started miniature gaming from a different set of roles, one of which was "no premeasuring." I find that with all the premeasure options in Armada, your placement should be exact in every instance where misplacement would affect either of or strategies. You've had the ability to triangulate the exact measurement of your final position from every point of interest on the board, so why do you need to further fudge your movement after placing it in the exact location you thought would make you safe?

If you're going to play like that, you may as well leave markers all over the board so you're never wrong.

21 minutes ago, thecactusman17 said:

I started miniature gaming from a different set of roles, one of which was "no premeasuring." I find that with all the premeasure options in Armada, your placement should be exact in every instance where misplacement would affect either of or strategies. You've had the ability to triangulate the exact measurement of your final position from every point of interest on the board, so why do you need to further fudge your movement after placing it in the exact location you thought would make you safe?

If you're going to play like that, you may as well leave markers all over the board so you're never wrong.

I also started with "no premeasuring!" But it wasn't premeasuring if you were "checking your Warcaster or Warlock's Control Area" (wink) to "see what spells you could cast" (wink wink) and CERTAINLY NOT measure charge ranges, no sirree!

(winks so hard i pop out a contact)

I hear Mark 3 was better. I got out before then.

1 hour ago, thecactusman17 said:

I find that with all the premeasure options in Armada, your placement should be exact in every instance where misplacement would affect either of or strategies. You've had the ability to triangulate the exact measurement of your final position from every point of interest on the board, so why do you need to further fudge your movement after placing it in the exact location you thought would make you safe?

Because doing it my way reduces the several minutes you will have to take(per squad) with one hand on the squadron and the other moving range ruler through a scrum to check in/out ranges of like 5 different units you will need to adjust to to a simple “hey this move is kosher yea?” And then get onto the important part of rolling dice

Also, I always found “no premeasuring” kinda dumb...

This should be a game of tactics, not “How accurately can you judge distances and measurements”

2 minutes ago, MandalorianMoose said:

Also, I always found “no premeasuring” kinda dumb...

This should be a game of tactics, not “How accurately can you judge distances and measurements”

We don't roll dice, we just move one space at a time. Daddy says it's less fun that way!