I actually don't mind the time limits because it allows for several games in a day vs. that one match-up that gets dragged out due to high agility, high health, etc.

I'd say the "does it matter" question lies on what makes the game go to time. If it's because the rules are bloated and the time is spent figure out how the text of different cards interact with each other, then that's a problem, because it means games are going to time due to factors other than truly playing the game.

If it's a matter of playing a strong opponent where every move needs to be carefully thought out and executed, and you and your opponent are denying strong attacks against each other's valuable ships, it's not a problem. That's part of the game. Not every battle or war ends with one side entirely getting killed or blown up.

I've struggled up until recently about how tournaments require a different approach. Sure, it's my advantage to destroy my opponent's ships, but sometimes I know that's not going to be possible. So I have to plan accordingly.

Some cards and interactions can be complicated and it can take a lot of game time to ensure triggers are happening properly. But I've found most of my games that go to time have been because of excellent flying on both sides.

That all being said, I played in a hyperspace trial last weekend that was 5 rounds. Only one game got completed. Only one of the other four got remotely close to being "completed." I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, but just wanted to share the real-world experience.

Anyway. There's my two cents.

I think planning phase needs to have a timer, 90 seconds max

I fly plenty of 4-6 ship lists and have no issues getting my dials down in that time, and a game ending at time 6 rounds deep is super frustrating and greatly increases the influence of variance on the outcome

2 hours ago, RampancyTW said:

I think planning phase needs to have a timer, 90 seconds max

I fly plenty of 4-6 ship lists and have no issues getting my dials down in that time, and a game ending at time 6 rounds deep is super frustrating and greatly increases the influence of variance on the outcome

Yeah, well. That’s just like, your opinion, man.

Also, more ships doesn’t necessarily mean it should take longer to set maneuvers. Typically 4-6 ships are going to be flying in a formation which limits your options and means you can make decisions faster.

When you’re flying aces spread across the table, it requires way more thought as the options across the dial are pretty wide open.

I dunno, I wouldn't go to a Hyperspace Trial being too afraid to ask my opponent to hurry up.

On 7/25/2019 at 11:40 AM, ThinkingB said:

Absolutely because the game is about blowing up spaceships, not a bunch of spaceships shifting in space, turning around a few times, then winning or losing based on who lost their shields or not. The root cause is ship count compounded with a lack of negative incentives for playing said high ship count lists. Besides being so-called "hard to fly" * citation needed there are essentially no downsides in any way for a player that brings six ship tie swarm. They are incentivized to make the game go as slow as humanly possible because their list is an early game list with no late game plan besides "cri every time".

.....

I'm sure there are some good Tie swarm players out there, but thanks to all of my last hyperspace experiences, I just assume that TIE swarm players only win because of slow play.

Good. Good. Let the hate flow through you.

Your experiences don't track with mine. Swarms bleed MOV. I always had to press the attack lest my opponent pop one TIE and run for the hills. Now with partial points it seems more urgent to do damage quickly than to play for time. Most of my tournament games in 1.0 would go to time and I would always have to hurry to get to the next table.

2 hours ago, kempokid said:

Yeah, well. That’s just like, your opinion, man.

Also, more ships doesn’t necessarily mean it should take longer to set maneuvers. Typically 4-6 ships are going to be flying in a formation which limits your options and means you can make decisions faster.

When you’re flying aces spread across the table, it requires way more thought as the options across the dial are pretty wide open.

I don't formation fly

I fly plenty of 2-3 ship lists also

90 seconds is plenty

Edit to add: Time spent agonizing over a decision is not the same as time spent making a decision, it's an avoidance mechanism.

21 minutes ago, RampancyTW said:

I don't formation fly

I fly plenty of 2-3 ship lists also

90 seconds is plenty

Edit to add: Time spent agonizing over a decision is not the same as time spent making a decision, it's an avoidance mechanism.

I for one don't want to have to start and restart a timer every freaking round to ensure we're on schedule. Honestly that sounds more annoying than an opponent who may or may not take a long time to set dials.

5 minutes ago, kempokid said:

I for one don't want to have to start and restart a timer every freaking round to ensure we're on schedule. Honestly that sounds more annoying than an opponent who may or may not take a long time to set dials.

That's a fair concern

I'd be completely happy with a middle ground where play is by default untimed but either player can invoke the timer if desired, because for the majority of games it isn't an issue

1 minute ago, RampancyTW said:

That's a fair concern

I'd be completely happy with a middle ground where play is by default untimed but either player can invoke the timer if desired, because for the majority of games it isn't an issue

Yeah, seems like fair middle-ground. There's only one player in my local community I fear employs stall tactics. The others are just trying to make proper decisions. I could see a timer upon request in a tournament setting preventing some intentional stalling.

7 minutes ago, kempokid said:

Yeah, seems like fair middle-ground. There's only one player in my local community I fear employs stall tactics. The others are just trying to make proper decisions. I could see a timer upon request in a tournament setting preventing some intentional stalling.

Yeah. I'm a fan of mechanisms that remove subjectivity and allows decisions to be made quickly and easily by players and judges.

So, this is actually a good game design topic. Teachable moment it is:

Timed Games

It can feel somewhat dissatisfying for a game to get called on time, like it's somehow unresolved...and realistically that's because it is. With countless miniatures games played, I can honestly say that I've never seen a core rulebook that had a time limit for a normal game. Time limits are not a core game element, but rather a component added to all games to allow tournaments to resolve in a timely fashion. In fact, if you ask pretty much any miniatures game developer, they don't consider timed games to be a core part of their experience and would much rather seem the game reach resolution (rather that be a set turn limit or a win condition met).

Warmachine is one of the more interesting examples, since Warmachine has been struggling with how to manage time since the beginning. The original system was just a "dice down" as we're all familiar with. Time gets called and if a game is unresolved, we start working down a list of tiebreakers, but the tiebreakers just felt arbitrary. For example, number of control points scored is pretty straightforward and makes sense because control points is a win condition and should theoretically reflect progress towards victory i.e. the player with more should in theory be further ahead. If VPs are tied, you started getting really weird tiebreakers like the point costs of models in zones and around flags which is really weird because that has nothing to do with actually winning and can also fluctuate mid-turn by a lot resulting in situations where dice down called now means player A wins and dice down in 20 seconds means player B wins.

The second phase was timed turns with an extension to encourage people to not just mess around and burn clock because your turn automatically ended when your time ran out regardless of board state. The problem with this, like the previous method was that they both favored grindy forces that burned the clock, not necessarily resolving the game itself.

The last and current iteration is Death Clock where a chess clock is used and both players have an hour for the game. When the time runs out, you lose regardless of board state. This was the first timing method that genuinely didn't favor an indefinite stalling type of play. You see, even with timed turns, there wasn't really anything stopping someone from taking all 5 minutes to activate 4 dudes, so you could basically stall, there was just a cap to how long you could stall at any point. With deathclock, if you want to burn all of your hour going to your hotel room and taking a nap, knock yourself out, your opponent will just take the W. It's a timing method that is really hard to do for non-warmachine games (especially something like X-Wing where you'd have to pass the clock a lot for each dice modifications step), but works well for that game and usually results in games actually resolving to completion.

Even if you look at FFG games, there's a reason why the last round has a longer round timer than normal and that's because the designers want to allow enough time for proper resolution of the game. It's also the reason why ships destroyed (and eventually half points) was the tiebreaker because the only win condition in X-Wing is destroying the enemy, so theoretically killing more of their list than they did of yours represents greater progress towards winning and means you would have a higher probability of overall victory (theoretically).

Asking the Wrong Question

This also brings us to another interesting point that "whether or not more games are going to time" is not that important. What we really want to know is "are more games being decided by time?". That is to say, is the fact that the game is going to time changing who wins too often? This is a much bigger concern because if your tie breaker is not consistently giving the person who would win given infinite time the win, you actually have a bit of a problem in that players going to tournaments are just playing a completely different game at that point. They're just on a completely different win condition scale.

It is basically impossible to determine how many games are being decided by vs. just going to time and being awarded to the person who would've won anyways. For example, complaining that the regenerating fat Han won on time is really stupid because even with infinite time he'd still kill you, we'd just be here all night watching something inevitable. Or 2 regenerating ships from 1.0 like Poe and Norra. Yes, time was technically called, but let's be serious, that was not resolving any time this year anyways.

Then you have those "aww, if I had 1 more turn" complaints that basically boil down to "I want time to be called only when I will win on points". Again, also a pretty garbage argument, if you want 1 more turn to get points, why would your opponent not be entitled to more turns after that also to get points and so on. At that point, you're just resolving the game, so why does the time limit even exist?

At the end of the day, the goal of a timing system is not to create it's own game, but rather to allow sufficient time to complete a game and reach a resolution with a tiebreaker if one hasn't been arrived at. If most games are going to time, that goal has failed. If the tiebreaker is creating different results than if the game were played to resolution, that goal has also failed. So our real questions here for consideration are:

-Are too many games being decided by time? And if so,

-Are current time limits too short?

On 7/25/2019 at 1:04 PM, SabineKey said:

So, instead of creating a welcoming environment, you are suggesting an elitist way of play that actively pushes people away? And this wouldn’t be just “slow players”, but players who are low on mental energy, had a bad day, and the like. If you are going to be further punished for things you don’t have control over, why devote more time to it?

Your suggestion seems likely to lose us more than just those you think shouldn’t be there (who also paid money) and creates a very unfriendly atmosphere. I’ll pass.

I agree with this statement. I have been playing with my friend and brother for a while, but we don’t play often. I was excited about going to my first tournament in 1.0, but was worried about not moving fast enough. Our games at home took a while and we practiced trying to speed up. My worries were foolish in the end as everyone I played against was awesome and I finished every game I was in a tournament with. Granted I was only flying 2 ships in each of the tournaments I played in. I’d be careful with treating new players with disdain for going to slow. This is an amazing and welcoming community. Let’s keep it that way.

4 hours ago, Dpro said:

I agree with this statement. I have been playing with my friend and brother for a while, but we don’t play often. I was excited about going to my first tournament in 1.0, but was worried about not moving fast enough. Our games at home took a while and we practiced trying to speed up. My worries were foolish in the end as everyone I played against was awesome and I finished every game I was in a tournament with. Granted I was only flying 2 ships in each of the tournaments I played in. I’d be careful with treating new players with disdain for going to slow. This is an amazing and welcoming community. Let’s keep it that way.

Agreed. All this negativity and hatred over “slow” players is not healthy for the game. It’s an obvious problem with the game, not the players and we shouldn’t be looking to discourage players from playing.

23 hours ago, MasterShake2 said:

So, this is actually a good game design topic. Teachable moment it is:

Thank you for the long and well-thought-out post. We need more posts like this when such a topic comes up.

Sometimes problems are due to lazy design, but most of the time, especially in successful games that we like (like this one) the deeper issues stem from deeper problems that are quite difficult or impossible to solve.