Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27029853-20170703223814/@comment-454133-20180218182105

Choosing Factions:

First match is determined by combined initiative bid. I had both my fleets at 98 points, and so my bid of 4 beat my opponent's 0 (he had spend all his points). Thus I got to choose my faction (I chose Empire because I'd never flown the fleet and was interested to try it out, and figured I'd get to try Rebels later). Had we been equal on initiative bid, we would have rolled a die to determine who got to choose their faction.

Faction choice is not well-informed. You had to choose immediately without studying your opponent's fleets, so that players can't go around choosing the hard counter to their opponent every game. Toward the end of the day people had a slightly better idea of what everyone was flying if they had walked around, so they might have a small amount of info. But as soon as your name was announced with pairing, the TO would look at the MOVs and say which of us got to pick, and we had to say "Rebel" or "Empire" immediately, no pondering. Any time MOV is equal, it's determined by die roll again.

The reason I played Empire in most of my games was my high MOV from my first two games. I gave 16 points in my first game, nothing in my second, and got all 100 from my opponent on both games. Thus my opponents always got to choose, and by fluke they wanted to play Rebel so I had to play Empire.

Essentially it was a standard tournament in terms of matching players by wins and such, but adding the separate factions. I assume this was to avoid having a player with 1 win paired with someone with 3 wins and huge MOV in the final round, simply because of which factions they'd played so far. But there may be better ways to manage that if you're doing the matchups by hand.

Overall I really liked the format. In addition to the advantages of a regular OT tournament, the restrictions let everyone play ships and strategies that are normally not viable in our harpoon-, Rey-, TLT-, and Emperor-infested world. ;)  Our TO explained that if he hadn't removed Harpoons, that's all we'd see on the table, and a couple players spoke up and said that's exactly what they would have fielded for Empire.  In the past TLT has always been Unique so that it wouldn't dominate and drive certain ships out of the mta.  Rey is in the top meta in standard play, so excluding her opens up the meta again.  And removing the Emperor means Empire will play a variety of things instead of only iterations of Palp Aces.

Also if you're always facing the opposite faction, there's never any miror matches so you can build your fleet differently (no Fat Han vs Fat Han -- now you can build without that matchup in mind).