1 hour ago, Hujoe Bigs said:

Kinda the part where it says standard ship , that would be an epic ship. So it is quite literally in the rules.

I don't have the rule book yet and the pic of the Ace's High rules I have seen doesn't have that that restriction. It just says "Restriction's: 1 ship per player".

16 hours ago, Tvboy said:

So we played a 10 player Aces High game at the the shop at the end of the night last night. I suggested splitting up into 2 groups of 5, but the majority voted to have 1 large group instead because it would be more fun to have everyone playing together, which was fair. Pilots used were Wedge, Luke, Vader, Whisper, Kylo, Wulfwarro, Vynder, Wolffe, Latts Razi and Heff Tober. We played on a single 3x3 mat, which worked out well and kept the engagement level consistently high.

We handled the initiative issue by basically having all the matching pilots high roll to determine what order they activated in, and then writing everyone's ship down in order. Ships would then activate according to the normal rules, so low I pilots move first, matching I pilots move according to the predetermined order, and same thing for shooting but with higher initiative shooting first and "first player" within an initiative bracket shooting first. Personally I think this is the way to go because otherwise choosing your maneuver during the planning phase will be very annoying when the order in which ships are activating is constantly changing from turn to turn. When I was setting my dial as Wolffe, I knew that Wulfwarro and all the I3s and I2s would be moving before me and everyone else was moving after me and thus I could setup my activations to block or avoid blocks with confidence. We had one player volunteer to call out activations and keep score and that helped a lot with keeping up the pace of play and reducing the amount of downtime each player had to wait through.

The game was quite fun, although I think the players that were flying the more maneuverable and higher initiative ships were having more fun than the rest of us. Nobody had bombs, Deadman's switch or Carge chutes so we didn't have to deal with anything crazy like that. The only ship present that was able to self-damage to deny points was Wulfwarro with Saw Gerrara, but that meant the I5s and I6s could still take the first blood point off of him before he attacked. A lot of people started resorting to flying over asteroids after they respawned to deny other players points, which I thought was interesting. Because there were 10 of us around the table, we all had to deploy fairly close together which created some awkward turn 1 maneuvers and combats where people were already getting flanked and attacked from the get-go. There was some politicing that went on with the Latts Razi player and 000, but other than that people were just kind of playing their own game and not making any deals or anything.

Wedge with Outmaneuver afterburners and torpedoes was very strong and ended up winning the game. Being able to shoot first each combat is super powerful in this format because that player gets first crack at whatever ships are going to actually give up points when you attack them, and moving after other ships is also quite powerful, not so much because you get to arc-dodge but because you get to position yourself to have an attack on a ship that's actually worth attacking. Wolffe and Wulfwarro also did quite well because we were throwing heavily modified attacks out of multiple/wide arcs. Wolffe had 3po, ahsoka, lone wolf and R4-P17, and Wulfwarro had Saw, Magva, Hull and Trick Shot.

And that gets me into the main problem I had with the format, which was the disincentive to attack otherwise healthy ships that are only slightly damaged. Once the I6s and I5s have activated and gotten all the first-blood points available on the table, the mid to low initiative pilots basically only get to shoot at ships that are slightly damaged but not damaged enough to be taken out in one shot. But the problem is that if you do decide to just take a shot at somebody that doesn't kill them, you're just helping the I5 and I6 players kill that ship on the next round and score 2 points. This creates 2 problems. First is a balance problem where getting to shoot first is a huge advantage. But more importantly is a fun factor problem, where players are discouraged from performing an action that they otherwise want to do and is fun to do, which is attacking. Playing an I4 pilot on a table with 6 other ships shooting before me, I felt like got harshly punished for attacking a ship and not killing it when another player got to reap my reward, and realized for the rest of the game that if I couldn't attack a ship that was at full health or 3 health, I just shouldn't attack at all, which kind of sucked when you're in a target rich environment and everyone else is attacking and scoring points.

I realize that some of this might just be because we had so many players in our pod and maybe the average pod won't have so many I6s and I5s, but I still feel that the current rules disencentivize attacking and are too rewarding to I6s (and Heightened Perception) that can shoot first. I heard a lot of people saying that that is the reason to not follow printed initiative on the ships but do some kind of rotating initiative, but I think for one thing that makes it really hard to keep track of which ships are activating in which order when you are trying to set your dial and will lead to feel bad moments when you get blocked by a ship that you thought was going after you, and that also doesn't fix the problem where the people who are shooting last in the turn feel like they are going to get punished if they shoot at someone that they can't actually destroy.

I think the much easier solution is to just add a rule that says you also score a point if a ship is at half or more health after you attack it. Everyone has already been using the half-points system for over a year now, it just feels natural to score something after you take a ship over the half-damage threshold. Also I think its stupid that you don't get points from dealing damage with bombs, since it's easy to say "that's my bomb, so my point", makes them kind of pointless except to damage yourself, which I don't like, but that was a secondary issue.

We've got a tournament coming up where we used the randomized initiative system posted earlier in this thread each game. It should be simpler than rotating initiative, but still more fair than a bunch of I6s taking bids. I am bringing at least one I4 because with this system I have exactly the same opportunity to move last or shoot first than a Soontir with a 15 point bid.

12 hours ago, Hiemfire said:

I don't have the rule book yet and the pic of the Ace's High rules I have seen doesn't have that that restriction. It just says "Restriction's: 1 ship per player".

Well, based on the points limits stated, you wouldn't be fielding a CR-90 or Imperial Raider. Those are around 150 points without any upgrades. Something like a GR-75 might work though, provided the agreed point total is high enough. Although, I suppose if everyone agreed the point total could be high enough for everyone to be fielding Huge capital ships like the CR-90, with upgrades. I'd imagine that would be quite the slog though.