here's pretty much what I do every single night before I sleep: get out the ships, and make them fly around.

the board I use is a Carrom board, which is roughly 2.5 x 2.5, and range 1 is just behind the black lines. In this case, I'm flying around with the Slave I because I have yet to fully master its maneuvers. There are 5 tracking tokens (I will have to land on them), 10 critical hit tokens, red = range 3, yellow = range 2, green = range 1 (i will have to do an attack against them at that specific range, and it only counts if i manage to get in 2 hits in a single attack without focus nor target lock, also no range bonuses applied, and shooting through a rock = i need all 3 hits for it to count), and the proofofpurchase token, on which I need to drop a seismic charge that overlaps it. It's game over if i spend 2 consecutive turns without getting any tokens too for one of the runs, so that i can sharpen my planning and prediction skills

quick overview of the board before mission start. Everything is randomized, i simply threw the stuff onto the board and spread them out a little. a D6 was used to determine the range that i need to hit it for each token.

just missed the range 1 token there on the left, overestimated my approach a little

nailed it!

abusing the rear firing arc of the Slave I to get that range 2 token

Apart from these, i'd switch the difficulty depending on what I'd want to do, eg. I'd lay out shield tokens on specific spots, and get a 4 TIE square to land on each one of them at the exact same time for it to count as a success, I'd tape narrow strips for the TIEs to fly through without hitting, making them break formation then get back into formation then break it again, etcetc until flying becomes simple. It's also a good chance to retract your maneuvers, eg. suppose you were thinking of doing a hard turn 3, but you estimated wrongly and hit a rock instead, so you'd retract that and see what is the "correct answer". no pictures for these, since im fully confident I have mastered it completely and have no need to practice it for some time. Right now I'm concentrating on the Slave I alone, then maybe next week I can start to pair it with TIEs and then TIEadv for squad level maneuvers, if my progress is good enough.

no matter how you put it, maneuvering is one of the key elements of the game, and there is only one way about it: insane amounts of practice. The pictures here are from the first run i had with the Slave I for tonite, and I'm off to fly it a bit more. Every night, before you sleep, just set it up and go for like maybe 3-5 rounds of flying this, and you will get better for sure, especially once you introduce your own stuff to further ramp the difficulty up a few notches. This is very different from having a combat round with another opponent (or your left hand for that matter), as it lets you master the basics of movement first without any distractions. afterwards, when you think you are ready, you can start to have a controlled opponent (ie. you know exactly where he is going), then slowly switch over to a normal game where the dials are concealed, then finally playing with your opponent not using any dials (ie. when it comes to his turn, he may pick any maneuver he wants, and he can measure too). you can choose to either bugger your best friend to be your sparring partner, or you could actually fight against yourself too, not too much of a difference either way, and when playing with yourself you could further adjust the "difficulty level" or even cheat on the dice rolls and critical effects a little to fully test out what you wanted to test.

That sounds like an awesome idea, sure help with learning to master those larger ships they are putting out.

Very impressive indeed. If I had a table large enough I would definitely try something similar.

I'd hate to tell you the last thing I do before I go to bed.

This is a cool training idea. I might add a second ship, and see if I can stay at range 1 from it the whole time. I might try this with the Falcon, and a X-Wing.

I'm going to give this a shot with some TIE fighters. I really need to master barrel rolls.

This is a pretty good idea.

The last game I played I made some pretty bad range judgements and slammed a few TIEs into some astaroids that actially made some damage rolls. Without getting that damage I would of probably won the game. Nohing like free damage to tip the advantage in a battle.

Thanks for the idea. I've set my son up with this basic idea to help him practice his maneuvers and options with different ships and pilots. I also included some gates to fly through using the sat tokens. Thanks for sharing.

Hashik said:

when playing with him, instead of having him use the maneuver dial, you can have him pick whichever maneuver he wanted to do when it's his ship's turn.

basic rookie pilot training….great idea

I tried a much simplified version of this a couple of weeks ago. Basically, I threw the asteroids out there, then spaced the satellite tokens out. The idea was to land on each satellite token and then return to my starting edge in as few turns as possible. I only did it once, and never missed any of the tokens, so I thought maybe it was too simple to share with others. I really like the stationary targets with ranges that you've included. Gonna have to give that one a try, too.

Very cool idea!

The other night I threw at least a dozen asteroids out on the table and then ran a 6 ship IMP build through the field as practice. I'm still a bit of a noob so I was happy that I only hit an asteroid twice and was able to come out the other side in an extremely tight formation.

Love the idea of targets. I will definitely have to incorporate that into my maneuvering practice!

Lately I've been needing to practice running around with Firesprays. So I took this idea and tweaked it a little.

What I do is get a map out and throw out some asteroid tokens. Then I set up 2 Firesprays and make them fly around the board with these restrictions:

1. I set up every maneuver template that they Firespray can run in a line. I have 1 line per firespray.
2. The Firesprays must then use all of their templates, one at a time, until they are all gone.
3. No hitting asteroids
4. No running off of the board
5. No hitting each other

I try to do these things:
1. Use different maneuvers for each Firespray
2. Have each ship cover the blind spots of the other one. Doesn't always happen, but I try.
3. Never use the same template twice.
4. I try to keep the 3 and 4 maneuvers for the moves after move 2 (simulating a game where my opponent is either based with me or close to me, necessititing me using the longer moves in order to avoid collisions.)
5. After executing a red maneuver, I must then immediately execute a green maneuver.

It doesn't take long, and it's fun and good practice.

Well, after playing today I learned 2 things:

1. The practicing with 2 Firesprays definitely helped

2. I need more practice.

I played 3 games today, all of them were against variants of a YT and 2 Xwings. I won 2 of the games, and I feel my practice did me a lot of good. But I also lost one game because I made at least 3 maneuvering errors. So, I definitely need more practice before Regionals in a few weeks…

hothie said:

one advice that really worked for me would be to avoid going slow with the Firespray. You should avoid using the speed 1 and 2 straights/banks and make use of its rear firing arc to hit targets

Oh, I did use the rear arc a lot. Running stock firesprays meant that I wasn't as dependent upon the forward arc. I'll keep it in mind, though. Thanks.

I don't use all of your well thought out training agendas but I do something similar on Vassal. I set up a board per tournament rules and then maneuver two squadrons around each other. I like your navigational points and practice targets at various ranges. Thank you for sharing and great pics!

Another training tool that came to me tonight:

Ziggy has a laser level, which is great for determining if a ship has a line on another ship or not. Well, I went out and bought one ($15) so that I could have one at tourneys.

Well, I'm practicing flying around tonight, and I decided to put the level even with the front of the ship to give me a better idea of where the ship ends in relation to its starting point. I did the same thing for the sides as well. That was very enlightening. If I can "see" that line when I'm flying, I'll have a better idea of which maneuver to choose to get me where I want to go.

Just thought I'd share that little tidbit.

hothie said:

well, that is a little bit extreme. Normally I'd use my other blank ship bases to keep track of my previous maneuvers or maneuvers that i could have done.

For the Firespray, one additional thing to keep track of would be its firing arcs before and after maneuvers. You will be surprised at how large the gaps actually are.