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afternoon Dakkanauts,

has anyone played some really big games of epic scale (ie 300pts+ each side) and have any suggestions on how they would improve the game, playing wise?

cheers

They look really cool.

I've played a few, and have some suggestions:

1) Allow a lot longer to play the game. There's just so much more to deal with and you'll need several hours to have any hope of finishing. It's easy to think of X-Wing as a quick casual game if you only play 100 point games, but the bigger games are more of an all-evening kind of thing.

2) Bring the epic ships. They're fun to play with and they put a lot of points into a relatively small number of die rolls and special rules to remember. A CR90/raider and support on each side will be a lot faster than a swarm of small ships.

3) Bring ships you're comfortable with. The middle of a long game is not the time to be trying to figure out the right strategy for your new toy, to keep things moving you want to be able to set your dials and execute your plans without taking much time to think about it.

4) Bring generic and straightforward ships. This is another simplicity factor (it's much easier to fly some TLT y-wings than a squad of aces), but it's also a lot harder to make maneuvering-dependent aces work on a cluttered table. You can bring your favorite Corran/Fel/Vader/whatever, but you should also try to spend most of your points on more straightforward options.

5) Don't take it too seriously. The game is balanced around 100 points, and you'll probably encounter some issues with a table full of ships. For example, assault missiles start to become really scary when there's no room to spread out your blob of ships. You might be able to crush your opponent in the list-building phase, but why do you want to? Take some fun stuff, don't worry too much about optimization, and expect random dice luck to be a huge factor and wreck everyone's plans.

Peregrine:

thank-you for the suggestions.

I figured that time would be a big thing given I've played a few apoc 40k games.

yeah my play was that everyone bring the epics plus fighters to round out points.

I thought that most people would play "squads" (ie ace with a flight of generics). have the fighters duke it out and the frigates take each other on.

 captain bloody fists wrote:
have the fighters duke it out and the frigates take each other on.

Don't start off with a plan of how the game is going to go. Sometimes you'll want to let your fighters handle the big ship while your own big ship sits back and snipes fighters, sometimes you might even ignore one or the other for a while, etc. In fact, one of the worst things you can do with an epic game is letting it break down into a bunch of separate sub-games happening on the same table. If you're trying to set up fighters vs. fighters in parallel with capital vs. capital then why have both sub-games on the same table? You want all players and ship types interacting with each other, not ignoring each other to focus on their designated target.

actually Peregrine I had a similar idea but involving a combination of Armada and x-wing. have two tables set up, one with the armada capital ships fighting each other and on the other have the fighters dancing around each other. hadn't thought about the actual mechanics of it but hey just and idea.

 captain bloody fists wrote:
actually Peregrine I had a similar idea but involving a combination of Armada and x-wing. have two tables set up, one with the armada capital ships fighting each other and on the other have the fighters dancing around each other. hadn't thought about the actual mechanics of it but hey just and idea.

Expect to spend a whole week or more playing the game of Armada. Ideas for linked games like this have been proposed a lot of times in the past (including in other game systems) and the problem is always that it sounds fun in theory, but it's an awkward and time-consuming mess to actually do it on the table.

A game of Armada takes, what, an hour to 90 minutes? So does a 1oo-point game of X-Wing. Now in your game of Armada, every time you resolve a Fighter-vs-Fighter attack, you replace a single die roll with a 90-minute game. Assuming you play four turns and in each turn there's two fighter-on-fighter combats, your game of Armada has gone from 1-1.5 hours to 9-14 hours, and you've lost any sense of the flow of time.