Immaterium Press recently published this mission to Mission Control.

I thought that this mission might be interesting to a number of people who, unlike me, don't spend all day waiting for new missions to pop up on MC, so instead of commenting on the mission on its MC page I thought I would post here.

Interestingly, the mission is specifically designed for use in tournaments. Got something planned, Immaterium? In any case, objective-based competitive play is an interest of mine.

First off, the premise of the mission is pretty solid. It's a grabbing game for satellites, which can be quite deadly if you roll badly. It takes an action at range one to get a roll. On a hit, the satellite detonates like a seismic bomb. On a crit, like a proton bomb. Blanks get you nothing, but can be rerolled if enemies aren't close. If you roll a focus, you get a token worth 15 points, which are added to your MoV, and nobody else can get anything from the satellite.

So like I said, the underlying concept is good, but I think the mechanism could use a little refining. I think right now what will happen most games is that one side is going to get an early slight advantage that is determined largely by luck. Here's my notes:

The scoring mechanism of taking objective tokens from the satellites is great - it works seamlessly with MoV, which makes it an easy fit into the current tournament system.

Half of the satellites are going to explode. This could introduce some random imbalance to the game; say one player gets 3 hits/crits and loses a bunch of hull or even a ship to satellites, while the other gets 3 focus results: can the unlucky guy make a comeback after that? An element of luck is definitely good, but this current setup feels a little too capricious. I'd change it to dial back the chance for explosions.

Pretty much any ship with high agi/low hull hates this mission. That puts a damper on anyone with an arc-dodgy list. An upside, depending on your point of view, is that it discourages deployment of phantoms. But it also makes me want to leave my interceptors at home.

The satellites will be gone/used up fairly quick. I figure one or two rounds is all it will take for the satellites to be exploded or mined under most circumstances. They're easy points that could quickly go to the enemy if you don't get them first, so I think most players will scan them first chance they get. Then you'll probably have one player with a small lead, and probably some damaged ships on the table, but at that point the game will be a standard dogfight.

To make sure the satellites remain important for more than 1-2 turns, I'd make it more difficult to mine the sats. Here's some specific ideas on how to do that to play around with:

• Spread the satellites out more. R1 from the table edge and R2 from each other ought to do it.
• Make the data mining a multi-step process. One turn you break the encryption, next turn you mine the data
• Make the data mining interruptable via enemy action. Maybe enemy ships can jam your download, or destroy your ship before it completes
• Allow satellites to be mined more than once.

That's all i have for now. Good luck with the mission!

Why not have one team "defend" the satellites by rolling agility dice instead of attack dice and remove the bomb effect from them completely?

Like this;

Rebel ship at range 1 of a satellite rolls an attack die attempting to score a hit result to download the data from the satellite.

Imperial ship at range one of a satellite rolls an agility die, on an evade result, the data is "encrypted", forcing the rebels to get two successful results before the data is stolen.

Victory Conditions:

Rebels steal data from 4 of 5 satellites.

Imperials destroy Rebels before data can be stolen from 4 of 5 satellites.

Satellites that have been successfully hacked can be removed from play.

This was just some spitballing, but without play testing there is no way to tell if this is 100% balanced, but it makes the satellites a bit more relevant.

I'd have the satellite be collected pointswise even if it blows.

Why not have one team "defend" the satellites by rolling agility dice instead of attack dice and remove the bomb effect from them completely?

I'd say he probably wants it to be a mirror match to keep the game inherently balanced. Both sides have the same mission, so there's no chance that one side is going to have an advantage baked into the scenario.

That isn't to say that making an attack/defend version is impossible, or a bad idea, but the mirror setup is a surefire way of eliminating bias in the scenario.

The real trick would be making a scenario that doesn't care what archetype of build you brought (swarm, 4 ship rebel, 2-ship, arc dodgers, etc.). That's one real nice thing about regular skirmish rules.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone

One thing I've been dying for is a set of scenarios that can work in a friendly tournament setting (similar to the Attack Wing OP events, which can be insanely unbalanced or confusing sometimes but usually are reasonably novel/fun). More serious tournaments have their place, and I do frequent the store championships, regionals, etc. but something like this would be a fun way to try some lists that you might not bring to a standard dogfight.

One concept that I would probably implement for a tournament like that would be allowing players to bring two lists from the same faction, with no uniques repeated among the lists. So you could pick from a few different list archetypes depending on what the mission is each round.

Other thoughts I had considered for the mission included having 3 satellites and 3 asteroids (but then you get the problem of asymmetrical deployment, unless the satellites are set up in a predetermined location... maybe that is still the way to go). Another thought was to place a debris cloud when the satellite explodes, but then you get issue of potentially dropping it on a nearby enemy ship, which isn't particularly fair either. There's definitely some room to change things up!

As for mining satellites more than once, this was intended to force someone to cover more ground and not just work one section repeatedly. It also places a cap on how many points you can mine, so one player doesn't end up with like 500 MOV

I'm not against attacker/defender scenarios on principle, I just prefer to have both players working at the same objectives most of the time. With more info coming out on objectives for Armada, there's some good ideas to steal there as well. I like how the player who picks the objectives often gets a slightly weaker version of the scenario special rule. Seems like a good balancing trick.

Open to any other suggestions

I LOVE mission control.

Me? I don't care as much for mirror matches. The Rebel/Empire sides it what make it star wars.

A request... Whenever possible if the authors can include suggested pre-built squads this will accomplish a few things.

A) You can have your scenario balanced by it's very design. See Point C

B) Since you define the ships you can add a level of diversity. See Point C

C) Since you define the ships can add a layer of mission flavor where some players might miss that. Falcons without C3PO, naked HWK as a freighter only, no falcon at all, etc...

D) It is much easier for the players to grab a mission and just play.

E) We don't have to use your suggestion if we don't want.

Thanks for sharing! I think that x-wing has to have the option of competitive scenario play. Kill them all in an asteroid field is getting boring.

I have been working on a similar mission where you have to hit the communication relays at range 1, but when you destroy the 6th one an asteroid, chosen at random, has a hidden communication post that was used to control the com-relays and you can destroy that too for extra points.

I am still working on refining the mission though.

I had written some Rebel/Imperial scenarios before, but recently I was like "Oh yeah, S&V are now a thing for scenarios" ... fine for narrative gaming but an extra wrinkle for making a viable tournament scenario

I guess you could allow folks to bring one list for each faction, then the scenario will dictate what they use... but I don't know if I like that. I wonder if they'll let us tag missions as casual, narrative or tournament friendly in the Mission Control browser. That might be helpful.

I wonder if they'll let us tag missions as casual, narrative or tournament friendly in the Mission Control browser. That might be helpful.

Yeah; they really need to do something to make MC more browse-able. Right now it's pretty hopeless if you don't know exactly what scenario you're looking for by name or author. There's too many scenarios to just browse through if you're looking for a particular kind of game.

One more thing to think about for Data Mining; players are probably going to place satellites close to their deployment zones so that they can grab the points as quickly as possible.

So that's another factor leading to the satellites being exhausted very quickly, which I don't think is good. I think that in order to make the scenario feel different from a standard dogfight, the satellites should remain strongly relevant into the mid-late game, and players should be able to interfere with each other as they try to grab the sats.

One source you may want to look at for ideas is my own satellite mission. It's not set up for MoV play, but it is compatible with competitive play in general.