I'm not suggesting we abandon gambit. I'm suggesting that rather than simply throw up our hands and remove maps from the field, we find a new way to deal with the issue. So far I have heard at least three really good suggestions, and have a couple of my own:

1. Change the way Override works. I am less excited about this one than some of the others, but someone made the suggestion that Override only work until the end of the current round. This gives a chance for players to win initiative and open the door.

2. Add to the Force power section of the rulebook, "A character may spend a Force point to open or close a door on its turn." This is canon with the movies.

3. Change the 10-round rule to state that at the end of 10-rounds, if no winner has been determined and all the other stated conditions have occurred (no attacks, damage, etc.), the player with the character who used Override the most times during the game loses.

4. Create new victory areas. Obviously the center of the map is not the best place for it, especially on these newer maps.

5. Rather than a single 5-point bonus, a player scores gambit bonus points when a character he or she controls enters a square in the middle of the map. This would solve some other issues that are impacting the game, beyond just getting gambit bonuses.

There's more problems to these maps than just open gambit. They also have doors on the sides of the map, and ugnaughts will rarely make it across the waste land to get there in a game. So override becomes more powerful, especially on Taris and Teth. Combined with activation control, and an opponent has very little ability to even attack you ever.

Furthermore, the complete lack of any safe movement zones, with any decent squad, especially melee that have to cross it, but also shooters as well, makes them nigh unplayable. Most of the time, if you haven't built a squad for Taris or Teth, and your opponent wins map, you have already lost.

I certainly agree with you on this. Maybe I didn't say that as well as I was trying. Unless you have Rieekan, Wedge, or Lando HOT to give your Ugos Mobile, you will have trouble getting them across the map on ANY map, IMO, against an opponent with Override. The open maps are that much tougher. Teth and Taris are particularly bad this way. Muunlist isn't quite as bad, IMO, as there are some ways to advance pieces through the rooms without getting totally slaughtered, though it can still be tough.

I'm all for new ideas, but unless its something as similarly simple as Gambit, I won't be supporting the idea. Let's look at your ideas then.

I'm not sure that this will work. You only get one activation when you win init. So opening the door is all you would get to do.

I would be fine with this one, but it doesn't really solve the problems. To do this, the figure is going to have to waste it's turn dealing with the door. It's still gonna get shot to pieces that round.

I suppose this would stop the obviously abusive lock out scenario, but to be perfectly honest, this isn't the issue of the game right now. Lock outs are not the primary problems of top tier play (I understand how they are in lower levels, without easy access to ugnaughts). So I agree, to prevent the big fish from trouncing the newbie, this would be ok, but it does almost nothing to competitive play, and would not make Taris/Teth any better in the competitive game.

I view this as overly complex, and it doesn't solve Taris and Teth anyway. The problem isn't singularly open gambit, it also has to do with the placement of doors near the edges of the maps, and 0 reasonably safe places to cross it for squads not built to run on them.

I am not sure I follow you here, but are you saying, that I get 5 points every time I have a figure enter the center? The abusive squad designs for these maps, generally have high activations anyway, so I am not sure it's a huge help. I also forsee using Gha Naght to bring in 10 mouse droids with lobot to flood gambit, or in a less competitive setting, using Gha Naght and Kazdan Paratus to do so. But perhaps I am not understanding your idea here.

I knew you would point out flaws in the ideas even before I finished reading your post. Eh, I might have done the same thing if our roles were reversed. Obviously, any idea would need LOTS of playtesting before it could be implemented. We've got about six months...



Let me flesh this one out more fully, with the understanding that it's not really an idea I support right now. At the end of the current round, all Override conditions are removed, and the door statuses are checked before rolling initiative for the new round. A more accurate way for me to have presented this would have been to say that at the end of the last character's turn, before the turn ends, all doors return to normal status. Doors with characters adjacent to them become open, so you aren't necessarily wasting a turn. It's also important to note this idea was suggested long before the 1-activation rule went into effect.



This one needs more fleshing out, too. How long the door remains open or closed would be open to revision.



I think when the LOS rules change, IF they change, then Teth will have to go anyway. It will actually become possible to get a stalling victory without locking a door closed after that occurs.



It worked for DDM for years (and yes I know that game tanked, but the victory conditions had nothing to do with it). If done correctly, and carefully, its not as complex as it sounds. What if the victory area for each player included the opponent's 4-square starting area, or extended from the center to 8 squares instead of 4? There are lots of options worth considering, and IMO nothing that would be any more complex than learning the game as it currently exists.



Yeah I am not fond of this idea, either. That said, I infer from your posts that you do recognize that Gambit as it is today doesn't work the way it was meant to originally, and I am tossing out the suggestions that I have either heard from others or came up with on my own. If none of these are good enough, well then hopefully someone else can think of something better. Aside from just "throwing the baby out with the bath water," do you have a suggestion (and by that I mean something other than just taking out Taris)?

I would say, that if you spent a Force Point for it, then working just like Satchel Charge would be perfectly acceptable, IMO. Could even word the rule book something like the way Move Faster works. "Spend 1 FP and gain the Satchel Charge ability till the end of this character's turn."



Huh? What do you mean by LOS rules change? Are you referring to the beveled corners, or is this something to do with the whole "shoot from my back corner to give your stealth piece cover" bit?

The beveled corners. Nivuahc (or however you spell it) demonstrated how a player can hide safely without being attacked if characters can't "see" each other around beveled corners.

The only solution to it is to state that characters ignore beveled corners when determing LOS to adjacent enemies.

Ahh....in those 4 squares all the way to the right end of the map? Interesting. Well, if that ever happened in a tournament though, I would absolutely call over a judge and complain about stalling. There's no way, with or without gambit, that anyone would get away with that, IMO.

Assuming the change goes into effect: this unassailable "bunker" is going to be an interesting point of discussion in both regards to fair play and also in the tactical value of bringing Monastery and giving up side choice to someone who can benefit from its availability.

That would be me. The cannon dominance was as clear as day and everyone should have seen it coming. NOTHING has changed since gencon last year despite all the maps and new figs. Teth may have been an added bonus, but it would have been the same even without it.

GOWK and cannons are both problems, but all that happened was that a bunch of people said that they would rather have a cannon dominated meta vs a GOWK dominated meta. TO be honest, I saw more diversity in the GOWK builds than i have seen in the cannon builds.

The only way changing maps works to ANY effect on the meta will be if you only allow maps like the trains, ruined base, and every other totally melee friendly map. Otherwise cannons will always have too much of an advantage.

Right now there is a major flaw in game design, and 150 was made to exploit that. There really is no way to change it either without rewriting a bunch of rules.

To return to the original topic of the thread, I think that now that gencon is over, we can sit back and take stock. I played in the champs, and during my bye second round, I counted 18 speeders on tables. That does not include other rebel squads as well. Factoring those in as well, my best guess is around 30 of the 84 participants ran rebels in some form. The more telling argument is that 6 or 7 of the top 8 ran rebels. The finals was rebel on rebel. Perhaps it has more to do w/player skill and open maps, but I beleive that the rebel faction is almost too good for its own good. I makes the competitive game in my eyes very stale and boring. Playing the same squad game after game gets old quick....

On a side note, I had a great time talking to all of you there this weekend!

I agree with this. This was the argument to ban GOWK, but anyone want to take bets that the same argument will not hold equally against the rebels?

I argue this not to bring back GOWK, but to show the hypocrisy of what got him banned and how we still have the same problems even without him and even more so.

Other alternatives that I have seen suggested are:
a) only kill-point pieces count towards gambit scoring.
b) only the highest cost piece closest to the center gains gambit points (similar to the first tie breaker in game scoring)

LOL @ "hypocrisy"

You clearly have no real understanding of why GOWK was actually banned. You seem to have latched onto one of the weaker arguments in favor of the decision as the reason it WAS banned, but that is not the case.

And no, I'm not going to post a long explanation as to why it really was banned so that you or someone else can find a random comment in such an explanation and pick the whole thing apart with a semantics argument.

Thanks for diminishing the enjoyment of the GenCon weekend with this crap.

I really have to totally agree with Dennis here. Either you chose to ignore the reason for the ban for whatever reason like you didnt read the supporting evidence or maybe you just think we are lying to you. Of course the fact that wizards backed the decision and realized there was a problem (see they approved the ban) means nothing..... it must be hypocrisy.... and let me guess the Ninny Hypocrite is the one at fault.

i agree with Dennis about raining on the Gencon parade of fun but I will address the issue.

I knew before Gencon the Snowspeeder would be a problem..... there was a thread on bloomilk that said i was hoping this would nto be exposed till Gencon. Any competitive player could see it coming. That is why it has become a gatekeeper. Because the existing conditions have brought this type build into play. What are those existing conditions????

THE MAPS!!!!!

You can ask around to folks who talk to me a lot. There are more maps I wanted to ban and some I did not want to be legal. But after the name calling and uproar over a piece being banned that Wizards thought needed to be banned I went with what you guys asked for.

I called the fact out to others that as soon as Gencon was over there would be this exact type of response about how restrictive the Meta is and it is all Gowks fault. No one will remember that folks were saying that the Teth monastary was a terrific map for DCI play. I disagreed with most of you and thought it was horrible but with everything else happening I was not going to start a riot by banning them too (even thought they needed it and still do.) I think this was a case of folks lusts for new maps effected how good for DCI a map is or isnt. I had some very interesting conversations with Chris West this weekend and really the design problem of the maps are no more his fault than banning Gowk was mine. Go to the source people!!!! Rob made a bad design..... the guys over Chris made bad decisions. We just are the dummies that have to deal with those decisions.

I can tell you now that if I had left Teth off and banned Taris is the same floor rule update as Banning gowk you would have been screaming for my head!!!

We have plans and are working on solutions..... Stay tuned!! We are working to make the game better but istead of calling hypocrisy give some help with some solutions and less complaints.

@Dean. the pressure for new maps is why i think changing the meta through maps is going to be a problem. People are going to want new maps and unless they are totally melee friendly, they are going to cause a problem. It only takes one bad map to slip through as untested to screw everything up again, and the only way to really test it is to make it legal in the first place. Even then i dont think maps get fully tested in local settings. Otherwise problems would show up sooner and louder than they have been.

Thanks for quoting that part dennis. Note how i call the argument hypocritical and not the people. people can whine about what they want but in the end one thing stands - I was right.

Can anyone expand on the rumor that Rob is no longer with Wizards? If not does the game end or do we get a new designer.

After hearing about the top squads at GC I would think the answer is obvious. The national meta is clearly rebel. The smaller Local metas are still more diverse as there is a greater player field. At least that is my understanding.




I have not heard this, is this a GenCon thing?

As Shinja said on the WotC boards:

"I heard that Rob was out and Peter Lee (from DDM) was overseeing SWM now. I won't reveal my source, because I don't know if he/she was supposed to talk about it."

I would wait for further reports before making any assumptions. 150pts with the current map list, and the type of play that was being employed was mostly about Rebels. But at 100 and 200, we saw a huge diversity. Also, I think it's a mistake to say "Rebels" as if that was just one thing. Deri's squad was nothing like mine. Philip's squad was similar in tech, but plays completely different with the Landspeeder. I will probably explain a lot more of what the situation is when I have the time to sit down and do so. But I think a lot of people who weren't there are jumping to conclusions about what happened out of ignorance. Republic did quite well, with I think 3 Yodabuck squads (one swap, one Gungan, and I don't remember what Wedge had exactly) that all went 4-3 or better. Obviously only Frank made the top 8, but Grand Admiral also ran it and I played him round 6. I beat him because he made a mistake, not because his squad was weaker.

I guess if I try to sum up my feelings on why it came out like this, I will just say what my practices told me. I can beat the Snowspeeder with a great number of things, if I win map. It's still tough, but there are some nice pieces that can deal with it well (Deri's squad was just once example, but plenty of other speeder squads went down to stuff you might never think about as well). On it's own map (I believe Teth, Taris and Chancellor's Starship were the main three being used, the latter when the guy had double door control), most other good squads were at a serious disadvantage. So, I might have a great San Hill squad in mind, that is probably 70-30 on Bespin, but it's 10-90 on Teth. Or I might have a great Imperial squad in mind, where it's perhaps 60-40 on it's own map, but 30-70 on Teth. Fact of the matter is, when you are dealing with those odds, you finally come to the conclusion that you just have to play the Speeder, or a direct counter, because of the current map list.

Take away some of the maps, and the odds of speeder dominance is not as connected to map rolls as it currently was, instead it's back to the skill of the players involved. And even then, it wasn't nearly as it's being made out to be anyways. A good number of the top players were running Speeder variants, so it makes sense that the speeder would factor highly. That much is obvious, and it is similar to what was said about GOWK. If you ask Dean, I tried for weeks to talk myself into playing something else, and only decided to run the Speeder on Friday night for certain. The risk of having to deal with playing against it (or a number of other squads that also were abusing Teth in other ways mind you) all day with a melee squad was just too daunting of a task, if you were in it to win it.

I suspect most of the other top players felt similar.

Yes he is no longer with the company. I have no other details to share at this time, other than it appears Peter Lee of D&D has taken over in SWs R&D.

My question is has the meta possibilities changed enough that no Teth or Taris will make a difference?

If you look at last year you won with Snowspeeder Bill and that was without Train Station (obviously anti-Speeder), Teth and Taris are pro-Speeder for obvious reasons.

Do the other squads have the mobility to pull it out if the Speeder is left with Throne Room (not ideal obviously), Hoth (Obviously good for Speeder), Starship, and new Muun Commerce Plaza (not a great map but not terrible with the reinforcements snagging Gambit).

Hard to predict. Squads with Rex, YoBuck, and swaps with Lightsabers in general do get a boost if Teth and Taris are gone because it shortens the engagement area significantly.

Essentially can the new Speeder versions win almost as much without Taris/Teth? I would say so simply because of the Gambit grabbing with free garbage.