Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27029853-20170129150901/@comment-454133-20170610070543

Today I played a 300 point Epic game and it was terrible. I was playing against the slowest, most ponderous player at my Friday game store, and Epic is not the time for that. We started extremely late; other players were in the thick of combat before we placed our ships. Every single round took forever. He had 6 ships and I had 11, but I still landed my dials far faster. Likewise with attacks, when those finally started. And he slow-rolled the whole way to the center of the map; I actually discarded all strategy and full-charged into the center just so we'd get to roll some dice before time was called.

I don't want to be too hard on the guy (he's very nice), but the slowness of Epic is exactly why I hate it, and today that was amped up to 11. We only got in only 2 rounds of combat after 5 hours. Agony. I needed another round to really deliver on my fleet's abilities, and there just wasn't time. It was very unsatisfying.

I flew:

Zeta Specialist with FCS + title + Primed Thrusters

Zeta Specialist with FCS + title + Targeting Synchronizer

2x Imperial Trainee with title

"Deathfire" + Extra Munitions + Ion Torpedoes + Cluster Mines + LRS

Captain Jonus + Extra Munitons + Ion Torpedoes + XX-23 S-Thread Tracers + VI

4x Royal Guard Pilot with Crack Shot + Autothrusters + TIE Mk. II + title

Captain Oicunn + Wired + Darth Vader (Crew) + Fleet Officer

(Jonus feels like a possible waste since he only affects one pilot, who never fired any ordnance anyway, but Jonus and the TIE Interceptors were actually the only ships that landed any solid attacks.  I do feel Howlrunner would have been way better though)

He flew:

C-ROC with the turret, 2 of the cargo that you can discard for extra dice, and a bunch of other upgrades, plus Jabba

Dengar, Boba Fett , Bossk , IG-88B with "Mangler" Cannon , 4-LOM

All his ships (except C-ROC) had Glitterstim, and lots of other upgrades. I figured I'd do well here; I was pitting 11 lean, mean, 3-dice ships against his heavily-upgraded, expensive pilots. Yea, then Epic happened, meaning not much.

After 5 hours, he'd done half damage to my decimator, and killed Jonus and a TIE Striker. I killed only Dengar, so I lost by 20 points or so. I was doing well at positioning, blocking, etc, and I was set up for a great next round... but time was called mid-way through that round. For those two combat rounds I couldn't land hits against anyone but Dengar, thanks to the dice not cooperating. His ships shed nearly all the damage I threw at them. (but he spend nearly all his glitterstim on those 2 rounds, so a 3rd round should have turned my way). Thankfully Dengar didn't experience amazing defense rolls and I managed to soundly kill him with my 4 TIE Interceptors, which were the heroes of my other recent Epic game too.

I really needed another round though; I felt primed to just sweep through his fleet and exterminate those large ships one by one, but we were cut off at an awkward moment. Deathfire never even got his missiles or bombs off, for example. But that's all we could pull off after 5 hours.

And I'm feeling worn down... I fear I'd feel worn down even if I'd won an amazing victory, because it would have taken 8 or 9 hours to play it out.

sigh... I get that people like Epic for its awesome scale, different strategy, etc, but in practice most of my games have convinced me it's actually not able to deliver on that promise, because of its awful pace and timescale. And today, 5 hours and 2 rounds of combat later, I'm not softening my position. I've had a couple Epic games that were... kinda fun, but not today. It's not even fully my opponent's fault... 300 points is just not going to be a smooth game that reaches a satisfying conclusion, even against a faster opponent. In that time I could have played 4 or 5 normal battles and had a blast. Epic games tend to just grind me down and leave me feeling empty.

I think I need to just stay home on Fridays that they do Epic games or other large-scale messes (like the 12-player Furball game that took all night for almost nothing to happen). X-Wing functions very effectively at a certain scale, and if you add too many points or too many players, IMO it crumbles into a sloppy mess.