lol, thanks for the slow clap.

side note - Sith are competitive.

Quoting Echo24 from the NZ tournament thread. My comments are more appropriate here, I think, to avoid hijacking that thread.



The problem I see with the meta is not the presence of the swarm squads but the absence of scissors squads. They are available, but people don't seem to want to play them.

Consider these 6 squads:
Extreme Rock (e.g. GOWK/Mace)
Balanced Rock (e.g. many NR builds with 4 or 5 mid-level threats)
Extreme Scissors (e.g. Double Lancer)
Balanced Scissors (e.g. Cad BH with several other attackers)
Extreme Paper (e.g. Daala, 20 Snowtroopers)
Balanced Paper (e.g. 8 troopers plus a couple of mid-level threats)

Extreme Paper should beat Extreme Rock and Balanced Rock 65% of the time or more. Similarly, Extreme Rock should beat Extreme Scissors and Balanced Scissors 65% of the time or more. Extreme Scissors should beat Extreme Paper and Balanced Paper 65% of the time or more.

I think we have that, but the numbers are a bit higher for Paper right now. The bigger issue is that if you look at all the squads people typically play, they don't break down evenly at all. Something more like this (just a guess, obviously):

10% Extreme Rock (e.g. GOWK/Mace)
40% Balanced Rock (e.g. many NR builds with 4 or 5 mid-level threats)
10% Extreme Scissors (e.g. Double Lancer)
10% Balanced Scissors (e.g. Cad BH with several other attackers)
20% Extreme Paper (e.g. 20 Snowtroopers)
10% Balanced Paper (e.g. 8 troopers plus a couple of mid-level threats)

Extreme Paper has become popular recently, but traditionally, Balanced Rock squads have been the most popular - and they still are the most popular. But Extreme Paper beats them handily. The same thing happened with Rock/Scissors when Mace came along and became popular. Mace (Extreme Rock) beats Yobuck (Scissors). (Although Yobuck did make it all the way to the Gencon finals in Mace's heyday.)

For years, there have been two Extreme Scissors squads (Lancer/Yobuck) that would beat most Extreme Paper squad not just 75% of the time, but more like 90/95% of the time. Plus they were strong enough to hold their own against the Rock squads, even if they didn't have an advantage there. So those squads were Tier 1 and their presence prevented Paper squads from making any sort of appearance. Now with Talon Karrde/Daala, Extreme Paper is viable. They may still face a disadvantage against Scissors, but it's no longer an auto-loss. Just as importantly, they are able to crush Rock the way Scissors has always crushed Paper. So as long as the meta is balanced among the 3, Paper is now viable. But it's not balanced... people still seem to prefer the Balanced Rock. And as long as that's the case, Paper has the advantage.

Scissors just doesn't seem to be popular. Probably partly because the top Extreme Scissors squads (Lancer/Yobuck) are so old - people want to play something new. And the Balanced Scissors options are still pretty limited.

Yeah, if people don't want to play the counters, then that's not a design issue, that's just a matter of the meta working that way. Basically, assuming FlyingArrow's analysis is correct, there is a meta game and it's an easy one to solve: play scissors, and play it well. If nobody is gonna play scissors, paper is gonna dominate.

I think i would like a hard limit of 3 points per fig.

I know i missed something at first I though he said 3 figures per squad and I was starting to wonder what I missed in this discussion

Activation limits and banning tempo won't fix it.

Remember, I made activation control famous (I think I may have even coined the term activation control) years ago with Black and Blue. The whole point was to have more acts, swap in late, kill something, and get away free.

The game system benefits going last. There's nothing you can do about that with rule changes.

Also, there's a key point here about time of play. It's hard for many judges to do this, but ideally, someone playing a 20 activation squad needs to play their squad the same speed that they play a 10. That doesn't mean same speed per piece, that means same total speed. In essence, if I'm judging and you bring 25 acts, you better be going fast. The honus is on the many act player to take their turns quickly.

I see that mistake all the time. People fear making the "critical" mistake, so instead the pull the game down to a drawl. You need to always think, I need to play 8-10 rounds, how fast do I need to move my figures to get in 8-10 rounds in an hour. You can actually figure out your average time that way, per piece. It helps, it really does.

I think we need to consider something in this debate. People aren't playing Scissor squads because we have had so many counters to it that are available to every faction. This is what is really leading to the rise of paper squads dominating the meta, because any good rock squad is prepared to fight scissor squads, but they don't have many counters to paper squads. So maybe we need to ask ourselves. With the increase in counters we have had against strafe/gallop shouldn't we be making an equal amount of counters to swarms that are available to all factions? If you give rock squads a decent chance to fight off swarms, then i think we will have more balance in the meta. We need more counters to swarms, and it doesn't need to be strafe/gallop. I think the neo-crusader officer that the mandos is a good idea of making a new counter to swarms. Maybe we need a fringe piece that does quad attack that does 10 dmg per shot, but has a new special ability that is the reverse of Bravado. So just like Bravado gives an attack/dmg boost against higher cost figures, this new SA would give an attack/dmg boost against lower cost figures. The figure would need to be not very affective against higher cost figures (maybe taking a attack penalty against highercost figures) otherwise quad attack could be highly abused. Or how about this, we have a new CE/SA available to pieces that grants a defense bonus to being attack by figures costing less than they are.

"In a surprising turn of events, every single player at GenCon has brought a solid Rock squad in anticipation of a large number of scissors squads. Surprisingly, TimmerB showed up with the only Daala squad and won the tournament easily."

I've said this before, but I might as well repeat it: Yobuck is great vs swarms...and very disadvantaged vs so many other things. Yobuck needs to keep killing pieces every round or else he can't keep up (because he runs out of swap fodder). He also needs to escape after galloping, so a well-played Disruptive squad can destroy him as well. Furthermore, it costs 91pts for "the Yobuck engine" to work (Panaka, R2, Mas, Yobuck), so it's difficult to diversify the squad's focus. Lastly, 20dmg AoOs back in the day was one thing...40dmg AoOs today is another.

A quick game of "Green-Light, Red-Light":
Daala
Talon
Naboo Deathshots
Any decent Rock squad
Double-Lancer (at least 50/50 in favor of the Lancer).
...and I'll stop there for now.

I'd love to say that Yobuck will show up...but unless everyone plays Daala, Yobuck cannot win it all, so I'm not sure it will be worth it. I won't speak for Bill, but I'm not planning to play Yobuck, because I'm still not even sure Yobuck can really compete.

It would seam like a klat swarm would be a rough mathup...