Hi.

This thread is about a mission Babaganoosh wrote. I was going to comment on it in Mission Control, but thought it might turn into a lengthy discussion you'd rather wanna have in a ... discussion board. Also it might get a bit more exposure here.

Link to the Mission:

http://tools.fantasyflightgames.com/xwing/home/3516/

Overview:

Rebels attack an Imperial installation, that can only be damaged by missiles, torpedoes and bombs, aiming to destroy it. Meanwhile the Scum faction has to take out marked pilots of both the Imperials and Rebels.

Missing special rules?

"The Hardened Installation is treated as an immobile Huge ship with the Coordinate and Reinforce action."

I might have overread these actions, but what do Coordinate and Reinforce do? Sounds like you imported this from another scenario, without an explanation for this particular mission...

Excuse my ignorance!

Text reduction

By saying that only missiles, bombs and torpedoes will be effective (= can cause damage), any further information on primary weapons and possible modifications becomes unnecessary.

"Hit results from attacks made with primary weapons and cannon secondary weapons are canceled automatically.

Critical hit results from primary and cannon weapons become hit results before they are resolved.

[...]

Any other type of attack or other source of damage, such as the 'Hot-shot blaster', is subject to the rules modifying damage from primary weapons and cannons."

Cutting this passage out saves space, which we so desperately need in Mission Control (although maybe not in this case). Maybe rephrase to "nothing but the unmodified damage rolls from missiles, torpedoes or bombs can cause damage to the installation" or "Damage from a source, ability or effect other than an attack with torpedo, missile or bomb type secondary weapons is immediately canceled".

If Scum goes for the Rebels first, that might leave said Rebels unable to finish their mission (keeping surviving Rebels and Scum on the table which might lead to either destruction of Scum (4), or (3)). The Rebel would have to stick around, despite having already lost, might not be that fun, since their only viable option is to destroy scum, before they can destroy the imperials.

I'll definitely test this mission some time and provide more specific feedback!

Coordinate and reinforce are both actions used by epic ships. Check out the epic ship rules for details

Good call putting the discussion here; Mission Control comments are still quite clunky, and I probably wouldn't have even seen this for a while!

Missing special rules?

"The Hardened Installation is treated as an immobile Huge ship with the Coordinate and Reinforce action."

I might have overread these actions, but what do Coordinate and Reinforce do? Sounds like you imported this from another scenario, without an explanation for this particular mission...

Coordinate and Reinforce are huge ship actions; I assumed everyone would be familiar with them, but I should probably explicitly say so.

Text reduction

By saying that only missiles, bombs and torpedoes will be effective (= can cause damage), any further information on primary weapons and possible modifications becomes unnecessary.

"Hit results from attacks made with primary weapons and cannon secondary weapons are canceled automatically.

Critical hit results from primary and cannon weapons become hit results before they are resolved.

[...]

Any other type of attack or other source of damage, such as the 'Hot-shot blaster', is subject to the rules modifying damage from primary weapons and cannons."

Cutting this passage out saves space, which we so desperately need in Mission Control (although maybe not in this case). Maybe rephrase to "nothing but the unmodified damage rolls from missiles, torpedoes or bombs can cause damage to the installation" or "Damage from a source, ability or effect other than an attack with torpedo, missile or bomb type secondary weapons is immediately canceled".

This section is pretty wordy, and could use some reworking for clarity. It's actually supposed to allow damage from primaries, cannons, and other weapons, but only if they started out as a crit. Hits should become blanks, crits should become hits and be resolved as such. Perhaps I should just remove the text about converting crits to hits, explicitly note that crits still go through, and leave it there. Either way this should be cleaned up; good catch.

Balance

The biggest danger for Scum I see, is both other factions realizing this and teaming up in the beginning, leading to (4) or circumventing/ionizing/ignoring Scum leading to (1).

Good point here. There's nothing to stop Imperials/Rebels from ganging up on the Scum, except mutual paranoia. It's the age-old problem with 3-ways.

I imagine that Rebels and Imperials would be too mistrustful of each other to concentrate on scum, especially the Imperials - if they leave the installation open to attack it could go down pretty quickly I think. In fact I think that how rapidly the installation can be taken out is probably going to be the biggest problem to consider for balance. Usually I like to layer defenses around targets like this to slow down attackers and make sure the scenario lasts more than a few turns, but that might be a bit much for this scenario. It might get changed to a supply dump, made up of a few different containers at some point.

I'd only want to consider something like an artificial target restriction if a ganging-up problem shows up in play-testing; but yeah, that sounds like a viable option.

baba why you so good to us

So, the first round of revisions on this mission are up, and the wording changes for the hardened installation have been copied over to their original source, 'Attack Run'.

Hopefully I can get some sort of rough playtest in for this scenario in the next week or so. If anyone wants to try this with me on vassal, feel free to PM me... Normally I playtest scenarios with a few runs by myself and call it a day, but the psychological aspect of this mission is a little difficult to replicate in my own brains.

Had a sort-of playtest yesterday. Unplanned as it sometimes happens we had 3 players (for STAW though, not XW) and spontaneously decided to give this mission setup a try. Of course some factors were a bit off: We played klinks (rebels), klinks (scum), mirror (imps), forgot about the "coordinate" and "reinforce" actions and gave scum a bit too many points.

Still, the most important aspect, the balance, worked rather well. At first both Imp and Rebel contemplated shooting down Scum first, but since their victory conditions are directly opposed (whereas Scum just benefits of the mess, either way), they decided to battle each other, while the Scum player picked off his bounties.

Unfortunately we had to stop early, because the hall was needed for another event (and no one told us beforehand...), so we had to pack up and leave before anyone had achieved victory, but it looked good for the Rebels, due to some poor maneuvering by the Imp.

Can't wait to play it again some time. You could also mix things up with "generic" roles: Attacker, Defender and Intruder. Just as likely, the Rebels could leak info about a S&V asteroid base to the local authorities, to do exactly the same thing: kill off certain pilots. Or the Imperials assault a Rebel outpost. Or Scum assaults a Rebel base, during which some Imperial aces go for "propaganda kills"...

I'll keep testing when I get the chance.

Had a sort-of playtest yesterday. Unplanned as it sometimes happens we had 3 players (for STAW though, not XW) and spontaneously decided to give this mission setup a try. Of course some factors were a bit off: We played klinks (rebels), klinks (scum), mirror (imps), forgot about the "coordinate" and "reinforce" actions and gave scum a bit too many points.

Still, the most important aspect, the balance, worked rather well. At first both Imp and Rebel contemplated shooting down Scum first, but since their victory conditions are directly opposed (whereas Scum just benefits of the mess, either way), they decided to battle each other, while the Scum player picked off his bounties.

Unfortunately we had to stop early, because the hall was needed for another event (and no one told us beforehand...), so we had to pack up and leave before anyone had achieved victory, but it looked good for the Rebels, due to some poor maneuvering by the Imp.

Can't wait to play it again some time. You could also mix things up with "generic" roles: Attacker, Defender and Intruder. Just as likely, the Rebels could leak info about a S&V asteroid base to the local authorities, to do exactly the same thing: kill off certain pilots. Or the Imperials assault a Rebel outpost. Or Scum assaults a Rebel base, during which some Imperial aces go for "propaganda kills"...

I'll keep testing when I get the chance.

Cool! The psychological aspect of the balance is probably the most tricky part out of all of this. There'll be some points-related balance issues probably, but the 3-way aspect is the most important thing to maintain.

Another playtest.

This time I played with two players, that usually play boardgames and MtG. Although they have played both XWM and STAW before, they have not much experience. Since there are no scum ships yet (and we didn't have a Firespray available), the S&V player went with Keyan Farlander and Horton Salm. The chosen targets were Tycho Celchu and an Obsidian Sqn. Pilot.

Lists (as far as I remember):

S&V:

Keyan Farlander (Proton Torpedoes, Push The Limit, Hull Upgrade, Advanced Targeting Computer)

Horton Salm (Proton Torpedoes)

Rebels:

Wedge Antilles (Proton Torpedoes, Marksmanship)

Luke Skywalker (Proton Torpedoes, R2-D2, Marksmanship)

Tycho Celchu (Concussion Missiles, Marksmanship)

Imperials:

Howlrunner (Swarmtactics)

Night Beast

Obsidian Sqn. Pilot

Scimitar Sqn. Pilot (Assault Missiles, Proton Bomb)

Scimitar Sqn. Pilot (Assault Missiles, Proton Bomb)

We placed 6 Asteroids in the play area as well, which might have been a mistake.

The Imperial player concentrated on taking out the Rebels, which in turn tried to get into range of the station. Scum simply moved down the center. With the OSP out of range, Scum first went after Tycho. Unfortunately for the Rebel player, he miscalculated an Imperial movement step and crashed both Wedge and Tycho into a tight formation of TIE Fighters and bombers, that made short work of Wedge. Tycho escaped, but hit an asteroid later on. Scum got a bit distracted by the TIE bombers, whcih used their bombs to great effect against the slow B-Wing, while Luke fired at the station. The torps made four hits, but after that it was almost impossible for him to win, so we changed the rule, so that 2 (or 3?) normal hits counted as a critical hit. In the final turn Horton shot down the OSP, Keyan destroyed the Hardened Installation and after that was taken out by Scimitar-1's Assault Missiles.

=> Rebel/Scum Victory

The Rebels had it rather tough. Since the Imperial bounty was out of range most of the time, the Scum player (as Scum would!) went with shooting the next best thing, which happened to be the attacking Rebel with a price on his head. This allowed the Imperials to quickly wipe out two of three attacking Rebel craft, which basically would have ended the game for them, if we hadn't changed the rule to cause damage to the station.

Scum used every opportunity to cause trouble, just as they should. The Imperials had a bit of a problem deciding who to shoot: If Luke had no longer been a real threat to the station (if only crits counted), Scum probably would have felt the full wrath of the Imperial Navy and would not have caused as much damage as they did.

Based on this game (although it was played with odd forces and asteroids), I'd suggest giving the Rebels an option to damage the station even if all munitions are expended.

Other than that, the mission worked well and the tension between the three sides was very entertaining.

Great write-up; thanks for the playtest!

Looks like a couple of rules were interpreted wrong; the scum player should have had to kill 30 points of pilots from each other faction, and I should explicitly state that no asteroids should be placed. Looking over those rules again, they're not very clear, and I should fix that. Also, the rebels' list should have been 120 points with the extra upgrades, although you may just not be remembering a few cards.

Strangely, my instinct would be to strengthen the imperials. It sounds like they did everything right and couldn't pull out a win. On the other hand the rebels did manage to win (with help from scum - not sure why), even though they had a really rough game. The imperials also should not have been able to afford to send their bounty-pilot(s) completely away from the fight, since that should be 30+ points worth of ships.

I'm also pondering potentially game-breaking builds, such as 5 prototypes with proton rockets, and hull upgrades. Even if 3/5 made it to the installation, chances are it would go down quite quickly. A-wings would then also be quick enough to fly off the table without much chance from the other players to engage. When I get time to run my own tests I'll probably try that. Builds like that make me very leery of strengthening the rebel situation.

This playtest also demonstrates a need for a mechanism for the scum player to leave the board once their kills have been made, so they aren't helping one side or the other once their objectives are complete.

The three-way tension mechanism is still my main concern; everything else can be fixed by points adjustments and minor tweaks, so I'm really glad to see that it was working for you. The scenario's bones seem to be in good shape!

Oh okay, my bad.

I thought 30 points was the combined limit, but 30 points per side seems a lot more of a challenge for Scum, I like that. The asteroids weren't mentioned, but also not explicitly forbidden, so we put them in. Leaving them out would have eased up movement a lot. I'll leave them out of the next test, of course.

The Imps only got into trouble, because we changed the rules; with crits only, lonestar luke never would have destroyed the station.

It's true however that with the current setup, Scum is inclined to help the Rebels, because they need the station destroyed in order to leave. Letting Scum leave whether or not the station is destroyed would make more sense storywise and break the connection to the Rebels.

Maybe the Rebel force should be designated a "strike force" and as such should include at least 1 or 2 real strike craft: Y-Wings or B-Wings. In addition it may contain Z-95, A-Wings and X-Wings as escort craft?

Still I also think the basic "divided attention" setup is solid.

Any misunderstood rules are probably my fault for lack of clarity, so don't worry about that. It's just good that I know what is not clear - it's not always obvious to me, because I always know what I mean when I write a rule!

restricting squad choices for the rebels might be a way to avoid game breaking lists like a prototype rush, but I don't generally like to restrict squad building choices. A lot of people have a good portion of their fun just building squads for their games, and I don't like to step on their feet if I can avoid it.

One thing I may end up doing is changing the hardened installation damage rules so that only torpedoes and bombs damage the station normally. That would rule out an A-Wing rush with less overt squad restriction. I'd only do that if the A-Wings really turned out to be an auto-win list, though.

The need for torpedoes would automatically enforce Y-, X- and B-wings though.

The need for torpedoes would automatically enforce Y-, X- and B-wings though.

and E-wings!

But yes it would; a backdoor squad restriction, if you will. Not an ideal situation. Hopefully the A-Wings won't be such a serious problem.