1 minute ago, JJ48 said:

That's a possibility, and it would be interesting to hear why they didn't do that. One reason I can see, though, is that in many games (at least casually), it becomes necessary to remove the ship from the base, either because it won't stay on or because ship models are colliding past the bases. Putting the name on the base helps players keep track of ships even when the model is removed. Similarly, ships that use the same model but have different names can be distinguished this way.

Generic templates may have been able to work too, but here are two reasons (there may well be more) for printing names on bases beyond simply printing for the sake of printing. 

According to the tournament rules, you have to put an ID token on each base.

As for seeing the pilot name, the people I play with and myself never can read the pilot name. The text is simply too small and often times the ships are not oriented for reading anyways. This is where the ID token comes in.

The fortressing rules are quite interestingly formulated:

„Due to the maneuvers that a player has selected, all of that player’s ships have overlapped one another in such a manner that none have changed positions on the board for two or more consecutive rounds.“

ALL ships?!?

So, if i fortress only 2 ships and merrily fly around with a Tie or Z-95, there is no problem?

Just now, Lace Jetstreamer said:

According to the tournament rules, you have to put an ID token on each base.

As for seeing the pilot name, the people I play with and myself never can read the pilot name. The text is simply too small and often times the ships are not oriented for reading anyways. This is where the ID token comes in.

Hypothetically, suppose someone is flying a TIE swarm with a named pilot. Last turn, the 5 token was on the unique card, and number 5 was using the unique ability. This turn, number 3 uses it and the unique card has a 3 token on it. Will a tournament judge accept this story as proof that a player cheated?

1 minute ago, ForceM said:

The fortressing rules are quite interestingly formulated:

„Due to the maneuvers that a player has selected, all of that player’s ships have overlapped one another in such a manner that none have changed positions on the board for two or more consecutive rounds.“

ALL ships?!?

So, if i fortress only 2 ships and merrily fly around with a Tie or Z-95, there is no problem?

Or even worse, you could dock a ship and undock a ship turn after turn.

I think FFG made a huge mistake with the fotressing rules. The rules requires a TO to make a decision if someone is fotressing or not. Both sides can be penalised for calling over a TO depending on the results of the TO. Its simply terrible game design requiring a TO to make rulings on this.

1 minute ago, JJ48 said:

Hypothetically, suppose someone is flying a TIE swarm with a named pilot. Last turn, the 5 token was on the unique card, and number 5 was using the unique ability. This turn, number 3 uses it and the unique card has a 3 token on it. Will a tournament judge accept this story as proof that a player cheated?

What about the scenario that can happen RIGHT NOW. 2 generics, 1 is full health and the other has 1 hull. All guns are pointed at the 1 hull. The player simply swaps the tokens on the player card. Now the full health generic is running away and the 1 hull generic has shots on the enemy (and no arcs pointed back). Do you think the tournament judge will accept this story as proof that a player cheated?

5 minutes ago, Lace Jetstreamer said:

What about the scenario that can happen RIGHT NOW. 2 generics, 1 is full health and the other has 1 hull. All guns are pointed at the 1 hull. The player simply swaps the tokens on the player card. Now the full health generic is running away and the 1 hull generic has shots on the enemy (and no arcs pointed back). Do you think the tournament judge will accept this story as proof that a player cheated?

I don't know anything about tournaments, but I imagine not.

The primary difference between the two scenarios being that the former can be prevented by printing names on the bases. The latter can't, unless every single generic gets its own base (which actually could have been doable, simply by printing a unique symbol or character onto each generic base, after the name. Hm...)

2 minutes ago, Lace Jetstreamer said:

Or even worse, you could dock a ship and undock a ship turn after turn.

I think FFG made a huge mistake with the fotressing rules. The rules requires a TO to make a decision if someone is fotressing or not. Both sides can be penalised for calling over a TO depending on the results of the TO. Its simply terrible game design requiring a TO to make rulings on this.

I think it’s not per se bad to try and prevent Fortressing, but the formulation, and like you say, the way they want to enforce it, really seems like the thought process is a bit unfinished.

Just now, ForceM said:

I think it’s not per se bad to try and prevent Fortressing, but the formulation, and like you say, the way they want to enforce it, really seems like the thought process is a bit unfinished.

I agree that Fotressing needs to be addressed. However, I don't think a rule that 'bans' it is good game design. The game itself should make it undesirable to fotress.

For instance spawn camping in video gaming. That is a problem right? You could have a TO moderating the game and anytime a player spawn camps, you DQ them. That is hard to police and takes the fun out of the game. Instead, you could be smart and create conditions that makes spawn camping simply not work. Like:

• Multiple exit points from the spawn (that are protected - TF2)
• Multiple RANDOM spawn points (like Quake Arena)
• Limited Invulnerability (so that those that spawn have time to react to the spawn camper)

How can fotressing be handled within the game? I personally think ships that crash should get stress tokens. I know many people disagree and think that low PS generics will become over powered. But anyways, that is my solution to it. I am sure professional game designers could come up with something more elegant than me.

4 minutes ago, Lace Jetstreamer said:

I agree that Fotressing needs to be addressed. However, I don't think a rule that 'bans' it is good game design. The game itself should make it undesirable to fotress.

For instance spawn camping in video gaming. That is a problem right? You could have a TO moderating the game and anytime a player spawn camps, you DQ them. That is hard to police and takes the fun out of the game. Instead, you could be smart and create conditions that makes spawn camping simply not work. Like:

• Multiple exit points from the spawn (that are protected - TF2)
• Multiple RANDOM spawn points (like Quake Arena)
• Limited Invulnerability (so that those that spawn have time to react to the spawn camper)

How can fotressing be handled within the game? I personally think ships that crash should get stress tokens. I know many people disagree and think that low PS generics will become over powered. But anyways, that is my solution to it. I am sure professional game designers could come up with something more elegant than me.

How about: “If you overlap a friendly ship, both ships gain a stress token and skip the Check Difficulty step.”

That way, not only do both ships that are fortressing get stressed, they can’t get rid of the stress by doing blue actions. That would discourage them. ?

6 minutes ago, Graeme Lyon said:

How about: “If you overlap a friendly ship, both ships gain a stress token and skip the Check Difficulty step.”

That way, not only do both ships that are fortressing get stressed, they can’t get rid of the stress by doing blue actions. That would discourage them. ?

That would however make formation flying even less desirable, since a bump would screw your entire squad even more.

I thought we wanted to encourage people to fly more ships, not less

24 minutes ago, LordBlades said:

That would however make formation flying even less desirable, since a bump would screw your entire squad even more.

I thought we wanted to encourage people to fly more ships, not less

A very fair point. And a great example of why I just write about games rather than writing games.

I don’t know how exactly they could remedy fortressing either.

How they did it, with protest, marshall and draconian punishment and all, it seems really clunky, and the wording as it stands does not even really prevent you from fortressing, except if you do it with all ships for two turns or more. That gives you ample room to circumvent being dq’ed, for example by just doing some minor move every 2nd turn, or just have a very cheap ship not turtle all the time like the rest of your squad.

I don’t know if stressing or otherwise punishing your own ships if you bump is a good idea either. Often you just can’t prevent it from happening, for ecample if your first ship gets blocked by the enemy, and gets bumped by another of your ships. On topof that, if you plan on fortressing all game long, you probably either have advanced sensors on these ships, then stressing would maybe work, or you plan for not getting an action anyway, in which case the stress makes no difference.

The question i really ask myself is, if fortressing really was that common that they felt they had to do something about it.

Anybody saved it? Looks like FFG took down the link.