In our campaign, me as the Imp, had tech superiority; a weak choice I might add.

heroes were Gideon, garkhaan, Jyn, and Mak.

Wounded Jyn, then Gar (a huge problem when wounded), Gideon, and never got close enough to Mak.

Things ended painfully for Darth Vader when Garkhaan maxed a focused red, red, yellow attack while wounded and DV rolled a pair of single block. Basically cleaved Vader in half.

Mak and Gideon are an truly evil combo; together they cancel the best tricks of the tech superiority class deck.

Rebels have won this 3 out of 3 times in my experience. But has been very close each time. The last one especially, The Rebels won by 1 hp.

How does this compare with Desperate Hour?

Desperate Hour is heavily imperial favored. But they key is to not lose Story Mission 4. Both versions are rebel favored.

I am sorry, but this quest is extremely favorable to the rebels.. How can you wound a rebel during this mission in 1st round is beyond me.

I had played this against Mac, Diala and Fenn, imperial had subversive tactics (this class seems extremely too weak for this finale — maybe this is how they balanced it). It simply goes like this:

1) Fenn activates (gets 2movements points and uses them— a must skill in Fenn list) double shoots with blast focusing troopers and moves with strain back to the spawn point. 2 Stormtroopers 100% dead — even with military class)

2) You are left with royal guards who cannot reach anyone without being dead instantly, e-web engineer who can't move and attack and one Stormtrooper) — literally no impact on what you do.

3) Mac activates, moves with two strain and double shot anything he sees, preferably e-web or a royal guard, if that did not kill it, uses his 4xp skill to attack again while being focused.

4) Now again you are without any options as if you still have royal guards and try to reach Mac, he will use strain and move 3spaces back to spawn point (it is important to have 1strain left in any case during 1st Mac activation), if you have e-web you cannot see Mac as he is 4spaces away, if you have one Stormtrooper — well 1 is a useless thing and it just tickles rebels.

5) Hereby you use your last activation as rebels have killed at least one group anyway (if they did not, they have played it wrong) — again no impact on what you do.

6) Diala uses double movement and stands in front of the door (or 1 space in front of the door if you have blocked with royal guards).

To conclude imperial player has no more activations and one of the heroes still have the second one — if it's Mac or Diala you probably lose another figure on the board. From this point there is just two ways — try to reinforce every round and hold them off or hold up the threat and try to deploy everything in the last room. Nevertheless Vader was shot down within 4 activations — Mac -> Diala ->Fenn -> Mac. (They were all focused, as Diala just rested to test and give all of them a focus token) He did a lot of damage, but you can't catch all rebels in time with Vader at this point if Mac positions right and uses move away when enemy enters within 3 spaces. [i wounded Mac, but Diala rolled evade and evaded 10dmg ]

My group is a win at all costs and have a huge experience in dungeon crawling games. Especially that they know that it is 12rounds; they assumed, they will have to kill someone at the end (they even guessed that Vader, of course I did not confirm that), so they decided not to rush and move slowly. Move and kill everything and rest is a stomp strategy here. I am happy that Rebels won this campaign as they struggled a lot in other missions; however I made a huge mistake in previous mission and had to take this finale. I had all agenda cards ready for the finale but that did not help.

I have to admit I really did not enjoy this finale. Especially the last room deployment of regular Stormptroopers + regular probe droid and a regular imperial officer was simply a joke and rebel players just laughed that off . Of course we played the finale with the new errata rules of royal guards, and I feel that protect just not guardian stuff is a bad one for the campaign. You just stand here with royal guards — one gets killed and you don't get focused and no movement point to move away from rebel LOS.

These are my thoughts for the finale, you can ask or suggest anything I missed or you think that I missed. But the way I see it, you can win this just if rebels move too quick to open the doors or get free attacks from e-web engineer — which should never happen from a low hp trooper.

There are several ways for the Imp Player to cheese the bejeezus out of this mission, especially since he knows from the beginning of the Campaign what comes at the end. I'm pretty sure the designers didn't consider the possibility of an Imp Player simply having Vader go fully evasive to run out the clock. That's just cheesy. Also, an Imp Player who saves all Agenda cards for the final mission is pretty much guaranteed to win.

I'm playing the Imps right now, and I'm spending my Influence throughout the campaign. I'm playing to win within each scenario, but I view my role as more of a DM than a player. And we know that if the DM wants to, the DM always wins (until nobody will play his games anymore). If I wanted to truly play-to-win, I'd play Skirmish.

With all the it's favoring X going back and forth--- it sounds pretty balanced.

The Empire wins this mission 70% of the time, according to the only poll I've seen ( https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1331517/how-balanced-each-scenario ).

The Rebels won when I played it, but that was mainly due to some questionable decisions by the Imperial player.

This mission seems insanely hard for the rebels. My mate was rebels and had won most games and was well tooled up ( and better at tactics than me), but the Imps get SO much in this finale and Darth on steroids. I won, he lost but we were both left unsatisfied.

Is the Imperial victory condition for this final battle "Wound all Heroes"?

Empire also wins at round 12. Heroes get to the last room at round 8-9 if they care to clean the way, maybe earlier but with a load of enemied behind.

while being able to heal 20+ per round

How can they consistently heal 20+ per round?

he attacked 3 times dealing 16 damage (Diala giving rerolls is a pain) to Vader in one activation

Considering Vader throws 2 black, imperial player can give him +2 defence at the cost of 2 threats and he has 1 rethrow, do you consider this a lucky feat or just the norm? I am evaluating Mak's strengths in this mission.

but by that point in the campaign, the heroes can dish out so much damage it doesn't matter. Vader only got two actions, he was killed before he could take a third... game over with two turns to spare. When players are dishing out 6+ damage (after blocks) per attack and can potentially attack twice each, 24 health really doesn't last very long.

Hi, can you please list the heroes you used, their powers and equip? We managed just to do 0-3 damages per attack to Vader. I'm curious to see how you can consistently pull 6+ damage to him considering 2 black dice, one reroll, +2 defence for 2 threats.

Also consider that if the Empire does not deploy for a few round, may have 24 threats for pulling out double trandoshans and some troopers to deal with.

The threat dial does not go over 20, so the imperial cannot have 24 threat at any time.

I barely won Last Stand with Military Might against Diala, Gideon, Fenn and Mak. The key was to get Mak, their high-single-target-damage-dealer to withdraw. But it was close and required a few well-timed agenda cards and slightly inexperienced rebels. Had Diala been able to deal two more damage, the rebels would've won.

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/21166717#21166717