Hi!

My friends and I have had a great fun with these rules. Giving the Epic games more action and faster speed. Epic game tends to take much time and suffers sometimes from the large battlefield. My concerns are mostly in adding more strategic maneouvers found in larger battles. In my experimentations I have tried to take advantage of the possibilities in the large playarea. Trying to flank or surrounding the enemy is hard with standard rules. You can always read the opponents big movement, no surprises. With rules adding speed in the initial phase it could result in more unexpected movement. We have had great fun with the rule ”Epic maneouver” explained below. It works. It really gives the line-up another dimension and it makes the game more interesting when you get the ships faster to the action. Try! What do you think?

Activation phase

Rule "Epic Maneuver", this is how it goes:

Epic manoeuvres resolves as the first thing of the activation phase for the first TWO rounds of play. As an option for the regular maneuvers on dial, all small and large ships can use the Epic maneuver rule.

To show that you want to move Epic style, the player flips the dial or dials for the ship or ships the player wants to move. The face-up dials marks the ships waiting for the manoeuvre. It doesn’t matter what manoeuvre the dial is showing. When everybody is ready the movement starts with player with initiative and pilot skill as normal.

To do a epic manoeuvre, you must use three manouvers combined as one chained movement. Must be straights or banks, no turns. The sum of speeds must be equal to eight or more. Choose your three desired maneuvres and pick them up. Hold them in the right order. Place them in a confident way and move your ship to the end of the last template. No measuring or trying different combinations of the three manouvers of course. Assign the ship a weapons disabled token. Due to insane speed you get an evade token, and also therefore, you can’t do any actions.

"Huge ship jump"

A simple rule for adjusting a too defensive line-up or to give the huge ships a chance to catch up with the small and fast ones.

If any enemy ships is further than range five, a huge ship may jump. To do so, name two straight manoeuvres by speed. Execute the manoeuvres as normal. The sum of speeds must be equal to six or more. Due to temporary exhausted energy levels, assign that ship a weapons disabled token.

An intriguing idea. I like the notion of having a way to reposition ships that are just too far away from "the real action".

Two things come to mind. First, I'd make both of them conditional upon all ships being further than range 5, just as you stated for Huge ships. Again, I see this as a way to being stray ships back into the action, rather than zipping through the middle of a big dogfight.

Secondly, if it ends up being too powerful, I'd say make a way to limit its use to a certain number of times per game. I feel like this could be a good space for some kind of "Command" or "Strategy" cards to be added.

You need to watch out as some ships can fire the first turn after moving (depending on things). Also, some ships, such as B-wings, move at a snail's pace and can't really redeploy from where they start well enough.

Now, if you are thinking of some system of getting a much bigger table and having a few turns of moving around strategically, then that's a different story. It makes me think there is a different system to make it happen. I recall a WW2 game that used a system to determine where the fights actually happened. Each side had 2-3 markers that represents a part of their force. You moved x many inches around until you were within x inches if an enemy token, then you couldn't move anymore. You kept moving the tokens around until they were locked into a conflict. At that point, you deployed your forces on the table. You could do something like use Armada minis to move around to represent the overall position of forces and once the conflict started, you deploy based on that. Maybe one force is delayed for 2 rounds, but will arrive on a flank?

Overall, though, I do like Tie Interceptors in Wings as they are incredibly fast and maneuverable on big tables.