Wizkids Approved Play Rule 5.10b DELAY OF BATTLE
- Players must take their turns in a timely fashion. Taking a reasonable amount of time to think through game strategy is acceptable: excessively slow play or stalling for time is not. If a judge determines that a player is delaying the battle by engaging in these activities, the player will be subject to penalties at the discretion of the head envoy.

My question is if a player is avoiding attacks from the opponent by phasing away for 50 minutes and wins due to a lower point build; did they cheat? Similarly, if a player is passing their turn in a timely manner and the opponent is advancing, is the passing player delaying the battle? Are they within the rules? Even if they just pass until the enemy is close, and then phase away?

Rather frustarting isnt it. As far as the rules technically they are within them but ethically they are abusers. Stalling merely deals with the fact that you cant take 15 misn to make a move but just duckinga dn running is acceptable
That s why we have a rule instuted for these guys where constantly duck and phse lose the adavntage of low point build win

If someone keeps running away from me I'll just sit and wait for them to come to me rather than trying to chase them all over the board. And if they don't come for me I'll complain to the judge and let him decide.
If both players havn't lost anything and the other player just keeps running then he obviously doesn't want to play. The game is about combat, not running like a schoolgirl.
There is a strategy in letting the opponent come to you, but constantly running instead of fighting isn't within the spirit of the game IMHO.

Stalling, to me, is the most frustrating thing about playing the game. I really hate it when my opponent gets ahead on points and starts taking a long time making decisions. How ever, it can be pretty subjective. What seems like a long time to me when I'm down on points may actually be a reasonable amount of time.

As far as "running away"...a perfectly legal tactic...I guess I need to be educated by someone as to how this works. As you close to the center of the board and into your opponent's territory, it becomes less and less possible for them to phase/run far enough away from your team. I'm not getting how a "Holy Grail team" can stay out of attack range given Charge, RS, HSS, pushing to attack, and TK bullets. I know pushing to attack is risky, but pushing to run away is suicide.

Were in the rules does it say they have to come for you .........?

Sounds like you are a staller yourself and wait for the other team to advance towards you before you do anything...

If your judge rules that since they are not advancing towards you and attacking while you sit there and do nothing, that they are at fault and are in dnager of a DQ or whatever penalty he decides then he is a fool and needs to be removed as a judge..

In all fairness, you quoted the second sentence of his post and left out in the first where he stated he "waits for them to come to him" after he has moved up.

However, you make a good point. Barring house rules, there is still nothing a Judge should do except smile, roll your eyes, and watch for stalling when two players refuse to engage.

This reminds me of a time I was facing a U Thor and my opponent and I were both 2-0. Whoever won was going to take the tournament since there were no finals. I was playing that old R GL/R IG with ES/D figures team, so Thor would need to hit a 20 against my front rank. But he had Perplex and PC, so I was forced to take the offensive and my opponent knew it. If I had burned down the clock with my 299 team, he would have waited till our low time warning, TK'd Thor out and killed (well, more than likely) one of my figures like R Taskmaster.

Tactically or strategically, I have no faith in the "running away/avoiding combat" option.

Yeah i know i left out the first part..


But he just struck me as a player who whines when he plays a person that uses that tactic to either run away or not make any offensive actions....which i do no think is illeagal, it might be annoying to play against, but to call your judge over to make the player attack you is just stupid.

If your opppnenet is running away, chase after tham at some point you will be able to catch them, they cant run to far...

Yeah, I love running someone down...

There's an old squadron motto back when the U.S. had Interceptor squadrons in the 50s and 60s...I think the squadron was called the Black Widows...

"Don't bother to run, you'll only die tired." The patch had a bomber in crosshairs...sweet, in a warmonger sorta way!

A player would have to have a pretty fragile team to consider the "Avoidance Option."

In those rare instanced where you get ahead on points and it would only hurt you to continue to attack I suppose you could spend the time trying to avoid direct confrontation. But even in those instances you probably have the ability to finish the job.

I just don't see it as a viable option. Too little room to run on the new maps and too much time for the opponent to close in on your.

Now turtling is a whole other matter...(and a separate discussion.)

When does this issue come up? At my venue, the player with the most victory points is the winner. i suppose it's possible to have the most victory points without KOing any fig but it doesn't seem very probable.

Does this seem fair...of course this would only happen under EXTREME situations.

The stalling player loses his next turn. Unable to make any action OR clear any of his pieces for that lost turn.

The best strategy against someone who builds low and avoids combat is --

ALWAYS put Lian Harper on your team. Then as long as you are at least 3 points higher in build points, push her to KO on your last turn. Since there IS a KO and there ISN'T a tie, you win with the higher amount of victory points.

Your team is 300 pts and his is 297. You push Lian to KO, leaving you with 299 pts and giving him 298 pts. You win.

That seems harsh.

What i have done is when i notice a player stalling or taking 5 minutes to go, when say they have 6 figures with 4 already pushed and the other 2 have 1 token each and that player tkeas that long to decide if he is going to push the 2 or clear, then i will let them know it does no good to stall, cause at the end of the round there will be at lease 1 more turn per player and could be 2 depending on how bad the players is doing this...

Actually my problem usually is that I charge right in and basically give my opponent a free attack on my guys instead of waiting for him to come into my range. But hey, I'm impaitent.

But what I was thinking about in my post (when I wrote it) was a recent game I had played where my opponent and I were both down to 1 fig and were very close on points. I forget who our figs were but mine had a very short range and movement and my opponent's fig had long range and running shot, so as I was moving into range so I could attack him he could of attacked me twice.
So I was chasing him around (we were on the new Collateral Damage Junkyard map) and instead of attacking me, he just kept running away. I would move from one side of the map to the other, about 5 turns, and he kept running. There was no way I could ever catch him. So I went inside the car crusher (so he couldn't snipe me from out of my range) and waited for him to come to me.
Eventually he did, after he destroyed all the objects so I couldn't nanobots them.
Like I said earlier, we were very close on points and neither of us knew who was ahead, so if the time had run out we didn't know who would win. And there was more than 30 min remaining on the clock so it would have been a long wait.

Now I understand it is a good tactic to destroy the objects so your opponent can't nanobots them, but he didn't start doing that until after I went inside the car crusher. He was just running before then.
So it might not have been illegal but it was annoying.

Anyway, the result was that I won the game but if he hadn't missed an attack, he probably would have won.

Lian Harper is indeed excellent insurance against this kind of thing.

I wouldn't use this strategy against someone playing in a sportsman-like way, though!