How about a thread to discuss objectives.
I've given some initial thoughts to the objectives. My test games have just been deathmatches so far, so I have not tried out the objectives let alone tried out all 12 as first or second player, or had to puzzle through deciding which card to pick vs which matchup. Here are the objectives:
Most Wanted favors lots of smaller ships. A rebel fleet with 4-5+ ships benefits greatly from this objective. Nothing too tricky here, your opponent chooses a ship to double the cost of for winning fleet points. Not amazing to pick if the enemy's largest ship is a Corvette and your largest is a Victory, but that shouldn't happen too often.
Precision Strike gives everybody a concentrate fire token to start and gives you tons of victory points for each face up card you flip or deal. It also lets you spend a hit to flip a card, for any of your attacking ships. Great for lists with tons of black dice and Admiral Screed, rebels with Dodonna's Pride to send crits automatically right through enemy shields, or most significantly bomber heavy lists. If you are running a bunch of bombers whether they are TIE bombers, x-wings, y-wings, or the dreaded 2 dice b-wings, this is the objective for you. Dream scenario here is pounding a capital ship with your capitals, and then firing as many bombers or even fighters at it as possible for the sole purpose of spending the hit to flip a card rather than do damage. 6 damage spent to flip cards is the same minimum firepower it would take you to destroy a ~45 point Corvette, but if you spend those hits from many sources flipping cards on one enemy capital, you could be making 90 points rather than 45.
Opening Salvo is somewhat similar to Most Wanted in that it benefits the player with the most ships the greatest amount. Currently this means it is probably best for a Rebel player, as the Imperials won't have the Raider for quite some time. A rebel player with, again, 4-5+ ships will have a devastating opening salvo at red dice range. Each Nebulon B will be throwing 5 dice and each normally unimposing Corvette will be throwing 4 red dice. Ouch.
Advanced Gunnery benefits each player's ship with the strongest fire arc, such as an Assault Frigate mkII or a Victory Star Destroyer. The ability to use your big dice fire arc twice is huge and lets you attack straight on often instead of having to approach at an angle to bring both dorsal and broadside weapons to bear. On the other hand this objective doubles the victory points value of said large ship if killed by the enemy, so you have to watch out for that especially if your best choice of firepower is an expensive Victory and they go with something smaller like a Nebulon or Gladiator. The flip side of this flip side is that if they take a small ship and you take a bigger one as objective, keeping yours alive and killing theirs is a huge win for you. Note that upgrades don't have their costs doubled in this way, but you might not want to pile them on too much as your objective ship is a big target even if only the base cost gets doubled.
Superior Positions as with most of these objectives a bonus for the second player. The first player has to deploy all ships AND squadrons first, which lets you choose to do an extreme refused flank, go right at them head on, whatever suits your strategy. You also importantly gain 15 victory points for every time you do at least one damage to a rear hull zone, so this objective is amazing for far around flanking with Corvettes, Gladiators, and like Precision Strikes any sort of bombers. Without a bonus incentive like this, 6 hits attacks from bombers in a rear arc taking down a Gladiator or almost a Nebulon B will get you around 60 or 70 points. If you use these same spread out attacks to kill such a ship wit the Superior Positions objective however, you are getting 150 points instead of 60. This is huge huge huge for bomber and Corvette based lists.
Minefields is great if you want to funnel the battle into a tighter area, such as Victories taking on a Nebulon and a bunch of Corvettes that would want to flank. The second player here gets to place all 6 mines, which can be used to close off easy flanking routes. This objective is also alright to use vs enemy big ships if you can place them so as to split their ships up as they fear bumping into each other.
Intel Sweep is a very particular objective. There are 5 objective tokens that get placed alternately by the players, with the second player placing the first third and last objectives and the first player placing the other two. This means obviously that if you get 3 of the objectives you are all set and guaranteed 75 points. The catch here is that only one of your ships can pick up these objectives, and you want that ship to be paradoxically maneuverable enough to run around collecting objectives, and tough enough to survive the enemy taking it out. If you lose your objective ship and are down on objectives, tough. Forget about them, you are now 75 points behind. If you lose your objective ship and are up on them, prevent the enemy from overtaking you by any means. You have to balance how likely you think it is you can get the more objectives than the other guy vs how much fighting strength you might lose by sending one particular capital ship all around the board collecting easter eggs. Good mission if you have a Corvette to send around, bad if you have a low number of ships like Victories.
Dangerous Territory rewards you for crashing into asteroids. Each asteroid objective is worth 15 points, and while the first player has to pay the 1 damage bump price for it, the second player is total immunity to asteroids, regardless if they are going for an objective or just flying through an emptied one. If you are the second player and have a bunch of small ships, this is a solid objective for you as you can ****** them up without repercussions. If you are the first player and have a lot of small ships they may still be worth the minor damage you'll take. If you have a bunch of big ships you won't care as much about being first or second here, but you will have a harder time getting more than a couple objectives.
Hyperspace Assault does nothing at all for the first player, aka the person you as a second player are picking this objective from. For the second player he must reserve exactly one capital ship and up to 3 squadrons. For these reserves the second player places 3 objectives to be his hyperspace arrival points. These squadrons can come in automatically at the start of any turn from the 2nd turn on, within 1 range of any one of the objectives, facing whatever direction and presumably as this is the ships deployment, at any legal speed. Any turn you don't choose to come in you can instead adjust your arrival objective points by 1 range each in any direction. As not being on the board on turn 1 does not matter that much as it is basically always out of range, this is a solid advantage for the second player and does nothing good for the first. Good if you want a big ship to come in at close range flanking the enemy fleet, though you must be mindful of the first player knowing your 3 possibly arrival points. Note that these points do not have to be any distance from each other, so after deploying debris you could choose to give yourself a very wide bubble between the 3 to come in at a crucial choke point at a whim. No rolling to see if you arrive, no scatter. Good to take if you think your opponent won't end up being the second player. If you think they might outbid you and pick this from your objectives, you will have put yourself at a distinct disadvantage. If you are the first player and your opponent has this, it's not a great one for you to pick as it is purely one sided, but I guess that's the whole point of the objective system.
Fleet Ambush forces the first player to deploy every other ship starting with the first in the "ambush zone" which is everywhere outside 5 range of the standard deployment zones. The objective also forces all fighters to be deployed last, after the player is done placing all capital ships. This objective can be either good or bad for the first player, depending on if it means deploying some big hitters closer to the enemy, or being forced to place weak elements of a more Corvette or other flimsy ship more forward near the enemy. The first player can mitigate this by placing his ambush zone ships on a flank, though the second player will of course know this when his first deployment comes and could deploy right up on that flank with you. This objective could go either way and I don't have a strong opinion about what type of list this is good or bad for.
Fire Lanes has setup as normal followed by the second player placing 3 objectives that both players are going to be trying to get their guns pointed at. The wording seems to suggest that they are placed 4 distance away from the table edge, though they may be meaning to say deployment zone edge. After the second player places them in whatever positions he thinks are good for him, the first player gets to ameliorate this by moving each to within 1-2 of where the second player put them. This objective is worth up to 270 (huge) points, 15 for each objective each turn going to whichever player has the most dice of attacks both in range and firing arc of that objective. This rewards having many ships that you can spread out to get long range forward red dice pointed at the objectives in the early game, followed by whoever has the beefiest total broadsides/front/read shots around it once ships get closer. It's important to note that if one of either player's ships or squadrons overlaps the token, the token control goes to the opponent that turn: the player not overlapping the token. If you want this objective be sure to have lots of long range firepower to snag the objectives on the first turns, and enough staying power to control the tokens if your opponent's 4 black dice broadsides or full 6 dice forward batteries show up in range on a later turn. If you have mostly black dice, book it to these objectives as fast as possible and camp them. Fighter squadrons do nothing for capturing objectives except to mess up their controller if they overlap an objective.
Contested Outpost is normal deployment but without the station being placed; it is placed after the debris and asteroids by the second player. For this mission, the station no longer functions as normal and doesn't obstruct attacks or heal anything. It's effectively a big fancy objective. Similarly to Fire Lanes, the player controlling the station gets the bonus points of 20 per turn, making this objective potentially worth 120 over the game. Control is determined by whoever has the most total Command within range 1 of the station. This means a Corvette may well take control for the first couple turns until something bigger comes along. This objective is worth a good amount of points but it is nowhere near as crucial as Fire Lanes.
These are my first impressions as I try to figure out what the significance of objectives is. I hope this is as useful to others as it was to me for getting my thoughts together in one place, and any comments or first hand experience would be great!
Edited by dmgcontrol