Changes that we made were these:
1) Ranged attacks were no longer limitless, but considered to have a range of 12 if a character had cover from the attack.

2) Characters that did not have cover could be attacked by ranged characters without the range restriction of Rule #1.

For example: If Greedo sees Luke, Jedi Knight from across the board and Luke, Jedi Knight has no cover, then Greedo can attack Luke. But if Greedo has LOS on Luke, Jedi Knight but Luke has cover then Greedo must be within 12 squares of Luke in order to attack him. (Still counting diagonal squares as 2 squares).

3) Special Abilities with the Sight specification (Override) were given the same range restrictions.

Override was a little tricky to work out, but this is what we came up with:
For purposes of override, Doors are targetted the same as targetting an enemy character for an attack. You must have an clear LOS to all points of the door when measuring from a point of the square the targeting character occupies, otherwise the 12 square range restriction applies (same rules as determining whether you have clear LOS on an enemy character for an attack). However, for doors that occupy more than 1 square, the character with override must only have a clear LOS to 1 complete square that the door occupies.

For example: Artoo can see a door which is 3 squares wide, and located 15 squares away. Darth Vader and a stormtrooper are standing in front of the door like this:

DDD
VS




A
Artoo can close the door in this case, because he has clear LOS to 1 square the door occupies on the right.

However in this instance:
DDD
SV



A

Artoo could not override the door as he is more than 12 squares away and does not have clear LOS on the door. The rule for override in general isn't too restrictive, but we found that it forces a player to potentially expose R2 at times and is applicable mostly when you are trying to override around corners without fear of reprisal.

4) The missiles ability was changed from sight to Range 18. Most missiles characters like the shocktrooper and vanguard have low HP and forcing them into putting themselves that close to melee characters completely nerfed them in a few of the playtests we did.

5) Force Powers with the Sight Restriction (Force Push 4, Lightsaber Throw 4) were given the same Range Restriction (12 squares) as ranged characters.

6) Other targeting rules were left unchanged. You may only target characters who either a) do not have cover or b) are the closest character if they have cover.

7) The sniper ability was changed completely. Instead of it negating cover from another character, it grants the character Range 18 for attacks, as long as they haven't moved that round (like the movement restriction for use of Double Attack). This makes the sniper ability more like an actual sniper (sit back and shoot with precision from a distance). Also, due to the limited proliferation of this ability in the game, it won't overpower a wide class of characters. Instead, it will give more use to characters who had this ability but weren't used often in the past (Jango BH, Nikto Soldier, Whipid tracker, Battle Droid Sniper, Clone Commander Cody).

After Playtesting and tweaking these rule changes we found that some positive things came about:

1) The early game didn't take as long to get out of the way, because players no longer looked for the LOS across the board for the quick shot or needing to avoid it, they simply looked for the best positioning possible that had access to cover to avoid the across the board shot. The first 1-2 rounds were used mainly to position characters for the attack, while the middle and end game were more emphasized for the attack phase.

2) In the middle and end game there was more movement, due to the range restrictions.

3) Melee characters were able to close the distance to ranged characters faster. While ranged characters still had the advantage over melee characters, in that they were able to get off one round of shots before the melee characters were able to attack, melee characters were more viable than they had previously been. Being able to close the distance more quickly also made it easier for players to counter evade and greater mobile heavy squads.

4) They were more attempts at flanking manuevers, repositioning pieces to increase survivability. In short the games functioned alot more like chess or an actual skirmish, with melee beats becoming the point men, ranged characters setting up to support the said beat sticks by "covering" them. Players trying to flank the support characters to isolate them, etc.

5) Door control via override required more strategic placement, and slightly more risk to achieve, but became more important as players built their squads allocating fewer points to the ugnaught demo and being able to direct an opposing player's movements became more integral to winning.

6) A slightly inferior squad could solidly beat a "meta squad" even using pieces that were not generally considered top tier, because it was much harder to pull off the "out activate, unleash a barrage from across the board, and mobile to safety" strategy that has proliferated the game for some time.

7) Games finished faster and within the 50 minute time limit.

Now here's the part where I am asking for help. While, this is going to be a long term project for my group, there are more combinations and pieces out there than we can possibly attempt to test, especially considering our small size. I would like to open the door to anyone and everyone who wants to test this rule variation out in their own group and post their playtest results here.

Also, we need ideas on any and all squad builds that you think could grossly abuse and exploit these rules, so that we can playtest them within our group. The whole point of our variation is to even the playing field among factions and between melee and ranged characters. In order to test this, we need people to try and come up with ways in which our variation is lacking in order to see if it accomplishes our goals across the board. If there are ways in which to grossly exploit this variation, then we either need to tweak it or start back from scratch. While our initial tests have been positive, we need more ideas on powerful combos to test. If there is a particular combo that is overwhelmingly powerful then, we might need to rethink our approach.

So, if you are interested, post ideas for builds or if you're interested in trying this out in your group, your playtest results. I'd really like to log them and see what other people come up with.

Thanks! I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with.

yeah, the sight for SA came about in an odd way.....but we noticed that most abilities do have some sort of range restriction to them. After playing competitively for awhile, the override ability seemed sort of broken..... and considering r2 and lobot were the only two characters forever to seem to have the ability it just gave the rebel and republic factions such a huge boost, especially since the ability could be activated across the entire map. Then, came along the ERC commando which boosted the rebels even further, so if you were playing a faction other than rebels or republic and didn't use Lobot you were having to counter it with lots of uggos. Then, with the R7, being a nonunique 8 pt character, there was alot of overriding an override (similar to the kind of bog down that came to pass after dodonna was unleashed).

Basically, we noticed that override in its current form just slowed the game down, by stalling engagements, and allowing the player with the most override too much control over map movement. After some limited playtesting, what I've noticed is that after our change to, override is still incredibly useful and more than worth the cost it takes to incorporate it into your squad in that you can use it to stall an opponent long enough to make an escape from a dangerous situation, or isolate a single figure in order to "gank" it, or use it to creat a "safe zone" for yourself for a round in order to position other pieces properly. The biggest change I noticed was that R2 became a piece that came out only when needed, because he had to be somewhat exposed in order to use override.

This allowed players to engage faster, and open doors more easily, contributing to increasing the overall pace of the game. It also increased the importance of strategy and movement. One of our goals was to make the game somewhat shorter ranged and limiting the range of override was just a natural extension of that goal.

Its something we're still going to work on and tweak, but so far we've noticed more positives than negatives with it.

We're also trying to limit errating abilities as much as possible in order to keep as many of the original game mechanics the same. We're really just trying to speed it up and reclaim some of the joy we had in the game when we first started playing.

Tweaking Sniper was mostly done just so we could have more fun with some of the lesser used characters and to make the ability more true to its name. Its an ability that many community members have complained about for some time, so we thought we'd try to fix it. And we modified missiles so that the pieces that have this ability are still useful and remain true to their intended purpose and design but overall we're trying our best to avoid modifying abilities carelessly so as to keep things as simple as possible.

If your group does some playtesting, please feel free to either post results and comments/ideas here or pm them to me, as I would love to hear your thoughts. Over the next couple of days, I'm going to try to update the thread with the (limited) results of the playtesting that we've done so far.

I just don't play with people who always stick with Han cannon, GGDC/Lancer, etc squads. If they are just playing to get the win, it's boring. Mix it up. Here's what we've started. Roll a 20 sided dice
1-2 Old Rep
3-4 Sith
5-6 Mando
7-8 Republic
9-10 Seps
11-12 Rebel
13-14 Imperial
15-16 New Rep
17-18 Vong
19-20 Fringe.

We roll, pick our squads that way, and play. Nice to make the guy who always goes GGDC have to play mandos. Takes them out of their element. Makes them think, "Outside the box"

I like how you are using the lesser abilities like Sniper. Have you talked to Fool about this?

I haven't talked to Fool yet. If you think he'd be interested in what we're doing I'll definitely shoot him a pm either here or on the Wizards boards.

We're working on concepts for alot of ideas right now: jedi door control being one of them (either spending force points to open doors from a distance or giving them an ability like satchel charge) but we're trying to create a solid foundation first and then build on it from there without having to change too much of the original mechanics. If the current attack changes remain positive throughout our testing then we might tweak some other mechanics as well.

Alot of our focus at the moment is on speeding up the game and making it more compact.

The General Grievous-Lancer Droid combo is actually the next squad that we will be playtesting. It is looking as though movement breakers are going to be the biggest abilities to be concerned with, because with the attack range restrictions, swapping pieces in and out is going to be huge, and characters with movement more than 12 are going to be even more powerful than their Speed 6 Counterparts. The encouraging thing however is that most movement breakers have weaknesses of some sort built right in. With the Lancer droid its the relatively low defense and low hit points.

We tested a Yobuck swap/Rex Squad that performed well, but wasn't nearly as overpowered as we had expected. It went up against a han cannon at 150 with the Djem So Luke to try and nerf yobuck a little. Out of 3 playtests, the Rex squad won two. One of the wins was pretty solid, the second win and its only loss was close however.

When we playtest, we usually play 3 games, one player controlling each team and both players looking for optimal moves and warning the opponent if they have made a gross error (stupid mistake) and don't concern ourselves with who wins and who loses.

Haven't tested it, but counting 12 squares all the time seems like it would be just as annoying or more annoying than checking long LOS angles.

I understand your position huk, but our group's experience was that under the current rules, the game WASN'T simple for us and WASN'T fun. Initially, some people would think that counting the 12 squares would get bulky and bogged down. What we found was this:

Trying to get LOS in the first few rounds and position yourself to mobile away to safety which is the way the game goes, in my experience in the competitive game is the part that bogs the game down. When I went to the regionals in dallas last year, no games went to completion (except the finals) and several games didn't get past the 3rd-4th round, because everyone was looking for that across the board shot and afraid of getting shot the same way. I think I explained how our variation shortened games in posts that I've made above, so I won't get into that in depth here.

I understand the origins of the skirmish game and what it was intended to accomplish, but if the old SWM skirmish mechanics had been working to make games shorter and simpler, why had there been so much controversy in the past and even now about making rule changes so that competitive games ended in the alotted 50 min time constraint?

The simple answer is that it wasn't and there were/are parts of the basic mechanics lacking at least for the competitive players. There are lots of people that enjoy the game as is, and that's fine....I would never want to change the game for those people. Our group just consists of people that don't like to lose and so even if people were "trying" to make fun squads, someone would always make that one "meta" squad which ruined it for everyone else.

I had also known that from some of the posts I've seen amongst community members that the problems I had outlined that were occurring in our group were problems other groups had been having, so I wanted to post our current solution so that if anyone wanted to try ours out they could. And I've been very happy with all of the suggestions and comments that have been posted so far. Its a testament to how awesome the community is here.

Our group is also thinking of trying out the RPG, because we just found out that one of the guys in our group actually has all of the books, but hadn't gotten around to cracking them open yet! All that being said, our group is back to having fun with the game again and that's really all that matters.

I like the ideas! huck has a good point about keeping it simple - i introduce nubes to the game and have a few that have surpassed me (which i am ok with!).

However, i will give these a try with my more experienced players and see if there is an easy way to introduce it. Thanks for the ideas!