I am GMing a large and tough group in combat and I thought I would share a few ways I deal with it.

First, be generous with setback dice. Any rival or nemisis with a group of cannon fodder, er, minions will have some sort of plan to win a fight. A few of my favorites are:

Grenades

1. Smoke, 1 setback for everyone without special detection gear, a ubese tactic.

2. Tear Gas. 1 setback each for smoke, burning eyes, and breathing problems, the later two last 4 rounds after exiting the gas.

3. Glop. Found in a supplement. Immobility.

4. Stun. Not setback but still a great start.

Cover. Every enemy group should have it unless they were ambushed.

Ambush. Any enemy on their home turf should use this early and often. Start with a grenade, stun is the most feared by my group. An explosive charge or a mine works well too. The group should never get too cocky about how tough they are.

Squad rules. Give the minions a single light repeating blaster. The leader takes the hits on the others first. Devide the minions differently each round to keep them off balance.

Take every advantage. Everyone knows wookies hate stun, stun them. Minions on rooftops at the best range for their weapons. Drop grenades from above. Add a long range sniper when you get them in the open. Shoot the roof over their heads, the bridge under their feet, the fire hydrent or steam pipe next to them. Lead them into a room with turrets. Use comms to coordinate a hit from all sides like Lando in Empire Strikes Back.

Use one or two each fight except stun, use it often, even bad guys have use for prisoners.

Hope this makes more sense.

Please post your ideas here as well.

I like the old post.

Good advice though!

If a target is strong, attack them with low Crit stuff, otherwise straight Damage is usually enough.

If a target is using Dodge or other Talents that burn Strain, use Stun. (Is this too meta? You should have a good in-character reason for using Stun - the characters don't know their universe is governed by game mechanics, after all.)

Melee guy's get Entangled or Knocked Down.

Guys in cover get targeted with Blast weapons (even if you don't hit you can still activate Blast).

Make good use of Advantages. Two is enough to get an extra manoeuvre - like getting out of line of sight!

If a target is using Dodge or other Talents that burn Strain, use Stun. (Is this too meta? You should have a good in-character reason for using Stun - the characters don't know their universe is governed by game mechanics, after all.)

If the aim is to scare the PCs into crapping themselves have two minion groups, group one starts with a Stun Grenade, the second tosses in a frag.

Then they proceed to light the group up with Blasters on Stun. I don;t care who they're shooting at, the combat monsters will fall quickly leaving the more cerebral/high Willpowered PCs to try to salvage the situation.

The problem with trying "advanced" tactics (like smoke) is the PCs will quickly adapt to them. This then becomes little more than an arm's race and antagonistic GMing/PCing. Just roll out HARD when hard is called for and medium when you want the UberPCs to win.

I have a group with some super heavy combat PCs and some who are very much not (pilots, mechanics, etc). Since they will often be fighting the same enemies or big baddie, one neat trick I have found is to give Dodge 1-3 to the Nemeses (plus 1-3 ranks in Adversary). This way, it isn't super hard for everyone to hit them (meaning the lower combat PCs have a chance), but you can activate Dodge vs the tougher combat PCs to give them a challenge (and stop them from murdering your baddie in single hits. Those 2 Dodge upgrades really limits the crits and successes and brings the damage down to manageable levels. Thematically, a nemesis would likely be able to pick out the biggest threats before combat starts or very soon afterward.