#1 - I think the "Open format" is pretty much what most stores do anyway right now, DCI or not, correct? I'm sure that most tournament players have played DCI games on maps that weren't technically legal (ie: JC's maps). With that being the case, I'm not sure how this is going to encourage more "casual" play. People wanting to take their strongest, most abusive squad to win will still do so. This change isn't wouldn't actually affect what happens at my LGS, I know that.

#2 - I still don't like 200pts, but that's just me. As a primarily 150pt player, I do like being able to follow the championships/discussions that pertain to the 150pt game.

#3 - Seems to me that having written guidelines on stalling/slow play only benefits those players looking to abuse the smallest advantage they can. The casual player who is playing for fun and to actually kill everything probably isn't going to be aware of these written guidelines. The kind of person who previously would have stalled for a win, is the sort of person who will use these guidelines as additional arsenal when opportunity strikes. I don't think this is a positive outcome.

#4 - Why not make Reinforcements score victory points when defeated? You can still use Lobot to bring in those Gambit grabbing Ugnaughts, and you'd still end up with that 5-3pt margin when the Ugnaught is killed (only Lobot + Reinforcement is a potential 47pts for your opponent to score). Plus, it reconciles the point scoring rules between Reinforcements and Reserves. You kill it, you score it.

In the "150pts is Rebels only" thread, another suggestion I had was to not allow Fringe piece to score Gambit. Gambit grabbers are usually Ugnaughts, Mouse Droids, or Caamasi. Why not make people think about which pieces in their squad can score gambit? It'd also stop the same issues with Lobot bringing in free gambit grabbers, plus it would probably add more diversity to squad building when it comes to picking out your filler pieces.

#5 - Fine with that, so long as it can bring GOWK back into tournament play.

#6 - Like it.

#7 - How often does that even happen, in actual games?

I like this suggestion a lot. I was thinking of something along these lines a bit ago... (I've been spending way too much time tonight reading through some of these threads and thinking about SW minis... Time I could have spent playing.)

Is there any way we can get an actual draw into the DCI software for SWM? I know MTG has a draw but SWM only has the double loss (I'm not even sure when you would use that). Then you could award draws if there was no winner (I know it is abusable at end of clock manipulations) but there would have to be some guidelines as to when it was a draw and when someone actually won (maybe either must score some number of pts to be eligible for a win (like in baseball the starting pitcher has to pitch at least 5 innings) or maybe a certain margin would grant victory not exactly sure. Allowing draws could change things around as people don't want draws (better than losses but takes 3 of them to equal a win) so would build squads and play them with actually winning in mind instead of getting a points lead and stalling out.

I also do not like setting any "number" of rounds that should be completed. During the champs I played 1 match that went to time. We only completed 5 rds. The score was 49-45 (he missed a shot on the last activation to win it). I feel we both played at a decent pace as it was a cat and mouse game the whole time. I don't feel my opponent played slow nor do I feel that I played slow as it was just a flat out tough game. Would the outcome have been different with 1(or 2 or 3) more rounds? Not sure. This is where I feel a draw would be appropriate as neither of us hit the magical point level for a win and our margin was too close to announce a definate winner.



In relation to the other thread about rebels being too powerful (and also with regards to the maps? I think that no matter what maps are legal there will always be a best squad/map combo and by restricting maps it restricts squad building to an extent. I would support a more selective map list for GenCon Champs (or other high level events) but for the most part as long as there is more than 1 map to choose from I am not sure if we will not always have an abusive map situation. I think more than the maps if Dodonna was taken care of (ie rebels lost the tempo contorl) I don't see the maps as nearly the same issue. Just out of curiosity does anyone (Jim or Dean?) have the squad lists still? I think besides Ugnaught or Mouse droid Dodonna was probably the most played miniature. I proposed in another thread that an easy fix might be to make it choose at the start of the game and that is how many you activate each phase for the entire game. Basically turn him into San/Ozzel or have him have no effect. Still a powerful piece but not nearly as dominant and certainly not in every squad IMO. Does Snowspeed still dominate if it has to move 2 each phase?

I agree with the concept, and really don't have much to say about the implementation... so support for the most part.




As I have said before, I do not support any endeavor to create a fixed definition for slow play or stalling. IMO that is a bad way to look at the situation.



Support.



I don't feel that this is a flavorful solution and don't really feel that it's the place of a player to attempt to push such a drastic alteration. Do not support.



I would reword this to "Each player scores half points (rounded down) for an enemy character that has less than half of its total hit points at the end of the game," but definitely support... oddly, I was just thinking about this one the other day.



I don't see why this is necessary, but I'm not really opposed to it, either. No opinion.



I don't really know enough about this one to say either way... no opinion.

First I'd like to say I got through about 3 pages so if I say something already said my apologies

#2) I like the idea of a larger point value. Since GMLS has been introduced 150 is too low to even consider him. Also, in my opinion, a larger point value means that you will have to be more strategic. The higher the value the more it means you will be needing to score points to win instead of trying to wipe out their entire squad. That means picking and choosing which ways to score your points. I think it will also open up the squad builds more because there will be more options.

#3) I saw this briefly mentioned at one point awhile back when people were complaining about stalled games. For regionals and GenCon how about having each match timed by chess clocks. If a player takes too long it will be recorded by the time piece and at the end of the match a judge will have something to decide if the match was stalled. I don't know the cost of these things, but the first year of using them will be the only major expense. SWM is basically an advanced form of chess so why not dip into chess protocol when trying to make match rules?

#4) I don't see why this is not allowed. If you build them into your squad then they should be part of your squad.

#5) I don't know all the proposed changes to make GOWK legal but I would be in favor of changing the success from an 11 to a 16. I think the least intrusive changes to the actual card are best because I hate to pull out errata. Dropping the success rate from an 11 to a 16 keeps the card intact, keeps the skill usable, and will drop the success enough that more force will be used to make it worth while depleting him of force earlier.

#6) I do no like the half damage idea. I have no reason other than I personally feel you should have to kill a piece to score your points for it.

The rest of the points I really have no formed opinions.

@ Wedge's comment on reinforcements: Lobot is currently the only piece with Reinforcements that sees regular play. He's not worth 27 points if the Reinforcements count for points too. Making that kind of change would mean that no one would ever play him anymore. Besides, that would be changing a core rule book mechanic, and we can't do that with the floor rules.


For the 1/2 HP thing: I agree with some of the other comments, I think it should be worded such that characters with half their HP or above score no victory points, only characters below half HP. That would solve the problem of things like Snowtroopers getting hit for 10, being left with 10, and scoring 3 points. Pieces would have to have at least 30 HP to be possible for scoring 1/2 points at the end of the game.


As for the stalling/slow play stuff....


What if you just added a line like this to the floor rules: "The intent of the SWM game is to defeat your entire opponent's squad within the time limit. Players who do not reach this goal may be due to slow play or stalling. However, every situation is unique, and not all scenarios require warnings. For more info, guidelines, or help on how to determine if players are playing slow, please visit www.swmrac.org/slowplayguidelines, or ask questions in the forums of that website."

Then, we put together an article on the RAC site with some of this info. It's still just GUIDELINES, no hard/fast rules. Each judge will be allowed to interpret the situations on their own.

@ urbanjedi: having a game only go 5 rounds and end with a 49 - 45 score still means you both played too slow. That's the point some of us have been getting across. You may not feel like you played too slow, but the simple fact is, you obviously weren't playing to try and finish the game within the 1 hour time limit, especially if you say that you don't think 1 more round would have made a difference.

That's the point that some of us are trying to make. There's a 'world-view' shift that needs to occur in how players view the time limit of their games. If you aren't playing with the mindset to finish within an hour, then you're playing too slow.

Alot of the stalling arguments I see are coming from experienced players who know all their pieces inside and out and their opponents as well. There are players out there that are naturally slow but are also players out there that do not study the figures to know them all. I'm not one and often find myself fidgeting when an opponent takes so long figuring out what to do. I agree with Chuck when he said there should not be limits to reach in the game for turns played. There can be any number of legitimate reasons to not reach a turn limit.

I also do not think a 200 pt match should be expected to kill all the pieces. A 100 pt match that is certainly possible. Unless you raise the amount of time for a match for higher point limits you can only expect the game to be decided on points scored. I think that all considerations on rules should be toward the goal of deciding matches based upon points scored.

What about deducting points any round you do not score a point. Something like an anti-gambit. That prevents people from hiding and retaining their lead without taking risks to gain more points. Give an exception to the first round.

Oddly enough, the only victory conditions present in the DCI floor rules for Star Wars Miniatures are scoring more victory points than your opponent. There's nothing in there that says you have to defeat your entire opponents squad and, in rare circumstances (through betrayal), a person can defeat their opponent's entire squad and still lose due to the "10 rounds with no action" rule.

An excellent point which, I believe, would keep new players from competing were we to create a set of guidelines for the minimum number of rounds played.

It's like when I tried (and failed) at playing the Star Wars CCG. The players in my local group know all of those damned cards like the back of their hands. I don't. My games always took a little longer because I had to do a lot of reading and decision making by the seat of my pants. There are, what, ~800 figures available in this game? I certainly don't know them all (though I know people who can spout off stats of some of the most obscure minis with pretty good accuracy).

Funny, my FLGS is very strick with the rules. We are very piticullar about them. If we are doing an event that isn't tourny standard then we might deviate a little, but for hte most part. I think that's part of what makes our store so good to play at, and our players so good. Because they learn the rules and play by them, they don't make up there own. Even with maps.



I think this is a commonally shared point of view. Which is why a lot of us want more clairification on the issue.



First Lobot is not worth 27 points without the 20 he brings in. His base stats and override are barely worth 7 points. As for your second suggestion, hands down no way. That's part of fillers job. They are not always combattants. And all 3 of the pieces you mentioned do a lot more then just snag gambit. But if they don't score poitns for you for killign them, then I don't score gambit points with them. That seems fair and reasonable to me.

Just my thoughts on yoru remarks

I agree and disagree, and here's why...



I agree with this. I had the same thought but went a different way with it, score one point for every 10 damage dealt, that way every action could potentially score points that might make the difference in the end. See my post a page or just up the page for my full remarks.



Guidlines are valuable, afterall principles are the foundations of law. But I think this is a bit too extreme. THe goal is to score more points then your opponenet. Kill'em all is the overall goal but not the printed goal. Stalling and determining stalling is really the most challenging issue here. I have played agaisnt stallers and wanted to punch them in the face, worse, the judge didn't think they were stalling (darn parker store). And the end of the game soemtimes is the worst time to evaluate stalling. Another thing, we experinced players can recognize stalling, but someothers might not. Especially the kid just learning the game himself.



I do like the direction of this idea, but as it is I think it goes too far. I also think all the open gambit is leading to a lot of this issue again. If gambit wasn't a killing field on a lot of the newer maps it might be different, but as it is, it's a mess. And time limits are just a part of it. I know S1AL and I almost always go to time, and we play slow agaisnt each other, but thats not because we're stalling.

Yes Jason and I discussed this quirky interaction and the fact it says nothing in the floor rules. This will be addressed for sure next floor tules update.

Yes. That was a complete suprise to me when it was brought up recently. Chuck found it I think. It must be fixed.

Yeah, we have had a player defeat his opponent's entire squad and still lose the game. Here's what happened (as best as I can remember, it was a long time ago):

Player 1 had a 148 point squad. Player 2 had a 150 point squad. Player 1 collected bonus Gambit almost every round, and was taking down enemy figs at a steady pace. Player 2 was NOT collecting bonus gambit, didn't collect bonus Gambit at all the entire game, and in the final round, killed Player 1's last piece. Player 2 was not close enough to Gambit to collect the 5 point bonus that round, either. Player 1's score at the end of the game, thanks to getting in a kill just before his last piece was defeated, was something like 170. Player 2 had - you guessed it - 148.

The only reason we knew that Player 1 was the winner was because when he killed the piece that put him over the build total, he said, "That's the build total, I win." Player 2 said, "Don't we play until the end of the round?" (He was thinking he could win by defeating Player 1's last piece.)

I looked it up and said, "You're both right. You play to the end of the round, and then the player with the highest score wins."

Not a good day for those guys.

It is interesting our LGS played a 300pt capture the flag last night. Main rules are capture the flag and get it back to your flag to win. You now have an incentive to go and attack your opponent and still had to have a way to protect your flag. If their is a way to implement this in some way that would be great but have to be careful on how it goes becasue then it requires you to have disruptive or a lot of nobles to stop the abuse of swap squads and high movement pieces.

On a side note it was a flipping blast and had a great time doing it becasue their was engagement and we were trying to get the flag as well as trying to take out the opponent

I've always been curious if a good/simple CTF type ruleset could be made. When you watch pro CTF paintball you see that they've minmaxed it and almost never really play CTF. It's just a shootout until one team is all dead, then the team sends over a player at the end to formalize it by grabbing the flag. Lame. The rules need to make sure the objective is actually the objective. But this is all off topic. Put up your rules in the general forum if you have a chance. I'm interested in reading them.

I found the suggestion about adding the chess game clock to major tournaments like Regionals and Champions to be a good one. It adds an additional feel of professional play to SWM, and is a relatively easy way to see if one player is playing at a significantly slower pace than the other player.

I don't like implementing a fixed number of rounds to be played, even at the major tournaments as defeating your oppenents squad isn't even a victory condition, it scoring victory points. If both players are playing at the same speed and neither feels their oppenent was stalling, then I don't see how they should be penalized for playing at their own pace when defeating the opponents squad is not a victory condition. If defeat of the opponent's squad was added as a victory condition, then I could see how adding that guideline for judges would be reasonable.

Yea very true seeing i was only able to get the flag once, the second game was called to time (Lacky and me had 23 activations and we were really moving too but he got me by points and only had 3 rounds) and the last game i basically killed the entire team to be able to make my way to the flag but it was over before i got their.

But it really made the people go becasue they had an objective but you had to get through a wall of people to get their

I think most of us would agree with the ideal, the problem is it isn't practical. Chess clocks are about $30 a piece, and asking any TO, WotC, or players to provide such just won't work. We've been down that road before, and that is where my idea for guidelines comes out of, "what can we do".

You are both right and wrong. "Defeating your opponent's squad" is the underlying intent of the game. It is currently an implicit part of the rules, and regardless of the rest, this will be made explicit in the next floor rules update. I won't bore you all with requiring you to read the three sections of the SWMs floor rules, and the one in the Universal Floor Rules to "prove it". Its also the intent of game design, that it be played this way. If you noticed, my first line actually added the explicit rule.

Again, I am not surprised some of you are taking the position that you are. We have been accepting as a community for a long time that scoring more victory points is the goal, not defeating the opposing squad. That has to change. And for those of you raising the concern of the newer players, and so on, think about this for a second. The newer players are the ones who are victimized by this stuff more than anyone, and it is those who are just entering competitive play that complain on the forums the most about point wins. That is the reality. While I understand that newer players are slower, there is no harm in setting the expectations right from the start that they try to finish games in time. The will learn it that way, and be better off in the long run. Also, any TO or Judge giving out repeated warnings to new players for slow play is simply wrong, and i think we all agree on that. Hence why I say again, these are "Guidelines". In the end, just like it is now, it is up to the individual judge to determine what is right and wrong in a given case. I trust you can all use your best judgment and this won't be an issue.

I also understand this is a culture shift. 49-41pt wins should not be the norm. It isn't about whether you think someone is going to slow or not. If you are consistently playing these kinds of games, then you are. That kind of a game is not fair to others. I could site example after example, but I don't think it's worth it. The purpose of the game has always been to defeat the opposing squad, not 20-35% of it in the time limit. Time limit games are a necessity of tournament play, but there really is no reason that people cannot learn to play fast enough to make it happen. I've seen plenty of slow players over the years, and there are a lot of reasons why someone does it, I do agree with you all there. But it doesn't have to be that way. Think about this for a second. I've had 1 hour timed games where I played a grand total of 10 minutes of the hour. That is not fair to me, any way you slice it. I've listened to countless people complain about Gencon the first time they went, because at their local store, they almost always finish games, and then they show up, play the way you would if you think you will get to play a normal amount of rounds, only to watch someone out point them, play slow, and beat them on time. They then show up on the forums saying things like, "I will never go again if that's how it is". That is not fair to them in anyway.

Timed games are a biproduct, not the original intent of the design team. Its time we as a community stop accepting it, and dealing with it.

I agree 100% with Bill's post above.

The RULES of the SWM game are what's in the rule book. The ONLY way to win a game, according to the Rule Book, is to defeat an opponent's entire team. That's it.


The DCI Floor Rules were invented to try and provide a competitive atmosphere which to play the game in. As a courtesy to other players, things like time limits must be imposed in a competitive atmosphere. Honestly, the most simple way to impose the time limit would be to say that anyone who doesn't finish their game within an hour gets a draw. Technically, that's what it is. According to the rule book, if the score is 140-135 in a 150 point game when time is called, then neither player won. The DCI Floor Rules came up with some new ways to provide a means to award wins to players, so that tournaments wouldn't be largely consisted of draws. The idea of granting the win to whoever has the most points makes sense to me, because whoever has the most points is typically a good indication of who was going to win anyways.

But regardless of how the Floor Rules are currently written, the intent of the game is this: KILL THEM ALL. Always has been. As a competitive community, we've become too lax in letting games go to time, and playing in such a way to win by small margins instead of out-right defeating the opponent.

And that's all that we're trying to suggest here. Nobody is saying that you HAVE to play 8 rounds in a game. Heck, I'm perfectly fine if people only play 4 rounds. If they were honestly trying to play the game to it's rightful conclusion, and it was a super tight game with a lot of crazy LOS (Train Station comes to mind), then there are times where I understand only 4 rounds in an hour.

It's not about enforcing a round limit, or coming up with a rule that tells judges to add more rounds after time is called. It's about finding a way to get people back to playing the game AS IT WAS DESIGNED. Not as a time-based points match. But as a skirmish to see who is the last man standing.