Now that we are completing our Season 9 playtesting period (don’t forget to vote in the S9 Community Vote by March 15th!) we are going to be restructuring how we run our online Organized Play events, based on what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.
What has worked: League-style tournaments where pairings are posted weekly and players have a week to schedule and complete their games against their assigned opponent for each round.
What hasn’t worked: Single-day online tournaments, even when run twice a week at the same time each week. We never got more than 4 players to show up for these multi-hour affairs, with more commonly 2-3 players willing to play (and often 0).
So here is what we will be offering players for online Organized Play during Season 9’s 4 month competitive period before Season 10 public playtesting begins again in July. As a reminder, Vassal is the default program we use for Imperial Assault online skirmish play, which you can download and play for free using the following links. Players can use Tabletop Simulator to play skirmish online as well if both players agree, but be aware that because TTS is not a free program and has higher system requirements than Vassal, it is not considered the default program to use for online play.
https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Star_Wars:_Imperial_Assault
Temporary Download Location for IACP Season 9 v9.2 Module: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AlCd5BRrzxGCiMdQ00qIrUHT5cwJJw?e=oKpKnV
Monthly Online Vassal Tournaments with Weekly Pairings
These will be 3 week long tournaments, starting on the 2nd week of each month. There will be 3 rounds of Swiss, 75 minute games, with pairings posted each week much like the old competitive leagues. The difference is you will have to submit a list ahead of time and play the same 40 points for all 3 rounds, just like in a real tournament, with ONE exception. You can request to change your Command deck BEFORE pairings are posted for the next round, to avoid the frustration of being stuck with a bad Command card choice for 3 weeks, but to prevent players from trying to metagame against their opponent’s list after the pairings have been posted. Each round a specific map and mission will be announced and all players will play that mission for that round, just like in a normal tournament.
With 3 weeks of Swiss pairings (players with the same w/l record are paired together each week), the 1st week of the following month will be used to complete top cut playoffs to determine a winner. For 9-16 players there will be a cut to the top 2, and for 17+ players we’ll do a cut to Top 4 to determine the winner. This will also give players the first week of the month to register for and work on their list for the next month’s tournament. You can sign up for the March tournament RIGHT NOW. This will start on March 11th and complete on March 31st. You can also check the “Upcoming Play Events” section of the IACP homepage for links to register for upcoming monthly tournaments.
ALSO THESE WILL HAVE PRIZES! Everyone who plays will get a small Imperial Assault gift in the mail, sent out on week 1 after round 1 pairings are posted, so it should arrive to you by the time the tournament finishes. The winner of each monthly tournament will receive a partial set (one of each: blue, red, green, yellow, black) of custommeeple translucent dice for Imperial Assault! There will be 4 of these tournaments for the Season, so you will have 4 chances to win. You can also buy a full set from them for like $35, or you can use your skills to win them for FREE. That’s right, there will be no cost to enter, this is free stuff.
Competitive Asynchronous Vassal League
For those who enjoyed the freedom of playing competitive games with a different list every week in the 8 week long competitive League, we have a new form of League play for you. The IACP Asynchronous League will allow players to make their pick-up games in the LFG channel of the IACP Discord server a bit more competitive. When announcing you are LFG (looking-for-game) in the lfg-skirmish channel, you can now ping the @iacp-league-lfg role to let other members know that you’re looking for a competitive league game. This role will be automatically added to new members when they join the server, but if you want to receive notifications when this role is pinged, be sure to contact one of our IACP administrators in the Discord. You can also post you are LFG as normal and you and your opponent can agree before playing your game to make it count as a league game. All Async League Games should use a 75 minute timer just like in a tournament game, and players should only play League games on one of the current tournament rotation maps.
After you’ve played your league game, you’ll report your results in the async-league-reporting channel, using the format below. Your name, your faction emoji, your opponent’s name and their faction emoji. Then both players will emoji that post with the winner’s faction, or with 
(left player) or 
(right player) in the case of a faction mirror match.
You can’t play a league match against the same opponent more than once in a calendar week (Monday-Sunday), so make sure to seek out lots of different opponents to play against! I will scrape the results from this channel each week and update a leaderboard on the main site, which will reset every month and show the top player overall as well as the leader for each faction, both for a given month and all time. There won’t be any prizes given out for this, this will be purely for fun and bragging rights.
Multiplayer Weekends
And finally something just for fun that will replace weekend single-day Vassal tournaments: Multiplayer weekends! We were consistently getting 3-4 players only for our weekend tournaments, which is not great for a traditionally tournament but is the perfect number of players for a multiplayer game. With both 3 and 4 player map options available in Vassal, let us know if this is something you’d be interested in, a scheduled multiplayer pod on vassal every Saturday morning at a set time that would probably take about 2 hours.
To load the multiplayer maps in Vassal, you can either choose 1 of the following Vassal Map Names (File>Load a Mission>Choose Your Own Skirmish Mission), or you can download the pre-built map save files from this drive folder and simply File>Load Game-or-Log with the save file of the mission you’ll be playing.
Pre-built Vassal Save Files:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vsMnGL1R4h9S-bBVunB5KA1ywToVUbB4?usp=sharing
3-player maps:
Subterranean Passageways
Imperial Hotel
4-player maps:
Hoth Battlefield
Nal Hutta Borderlands
Temple Gardens
You can find the link to sign up for the upcoming Multiplayer weekend event under the Upcoming Play Events section at https://ia-continuityproject.com/.
