NickName wrote:
Another thing is spending time on insignificant moves. Pick your battles. You should know going into a round if you're moving attackers or scrubs first. If it's scrubs, then you should be moving them almost instantly. Slow player spend way too much time recounting and checking LOSes for Ugos.
This is something that I see a lot of and definitely slows a game waaaay down.
Also, if you have an obvious good move, take it. Don't be TOO eager (if you do, you'll easily be baited by your opponent), but if I make a big mistake or if you pretty much have to do something, go ahead and do it. I hate when my opponent has a really obvious move that I know both he and I see but he spends 5 minutes making sure he does it exactly right.
For example, in a game recently I had a 30 HP Republic Commando adjacent to my opponent's Ferus Olin, who had activated. It was my opponent's turn, and he had a Mouse Droid within 6 squares of Ferus and Leia un-activated. It was very late in the game so there wasn't much left on the board, and late in the round so I think Leia was actually the only un-activated piece left (maybe a couple of scrubs left); using Leia to give Ferus an attack to kill the Commando was very obviously the best move (Leia couldn't give the shot to anyone else significant). He then spent multiple minutes trying to figure out how he could get LoS to kill one of my diplomats with Leia who wasn't really doing anything, and wasn't even worth victory points because I brought him in with Lobot. There was only a few minutes left on the clock so we would only get one more round in, and he was up by a pretty large number of points. That was NOT the time to burn time trying to get an insignificant kill when he already knew exactly what he was going to do.
It was pretty blatant slow playing. It was also very frustrating for me as a player because I knew he was going to kill the Commando, HE knew he was going to kill the Commando, and we also both knew that it really didn't matter much what Leia did, because neither her positioning nor the presence of that diplomat had any bearing on the outcome of the game. He was going for the best move, but like NickName pointed out, you're not supposed to be playing your best necessarily, you're supposed to be playing the best that you can
within the time limit. Oh, and he didn't even get the shot on the diplomat; he figured out there was no way to do it, and just ran Leia around a corner and didn't shoot with her, then gave her CE to Ferus and killed the Commando.
But if it's an important move, feel free to spend a few minutes thinking about it, as long as you can keep up the pace for the rest of the game. Here's another example: I was playing a game against an opponent playing Double Lancer. Round 1 went by very quickly (just positioning), but Round 2 he started looking at how to attack me. He spent a few minutes figuring out his attack strategy, using one of his "time outs" as NickName put it (I really like that analogy). His strategy actually surprised me, so I immediately used one of my own "time outs" to figure out how to react. All in all, Round 2 of that game probably took 10-15 minutes (WAY longer than an average round should). However, we both got back to our regular speed after that, and played the game to completion in about 45 minutes total. Neither of us really considered the other to be abusively slow playing, because we only played slowly for that one round, while we played relatively quickly after that.
The real key is playing the game to completion. If you play 4 or 5 really slow rounds, but finish the game under the time limit, so be it. If you play 10-15 rounds and complete the game under the time limit, that's fine, too. If you play 4 or 5 slow rounds and don't finish in the time limit, someone was probably slow playing. If you play 10-15 rounds and don't finish in the time limit, someone was probably stalling, which is a slightly different issue than slow playing.