I'm new to being a GM and was curious about how you all go about handling minion stats in combat. I almost never have any of the book stats in front of me, as I'd like to avoid game stoppage as much as I can to keep things moving as opposed to flipping through ten source books for the right page. Until now I've just been "eyeballing" how tough/strong the minions I'm throwing at the PCs are, just briefly flipping through the books for a vague point of reference when things inevitably go off the rails. Am I breaking/ruining the game like this? I don't change what I've decided on once fighting starts in an effort to keep things fair, but should I invest more effort into learning the real stats behind minions and elites? Or is it considered acceptable form to make a ballpark estimate on their strength/abilities? Regardless, I've ordered the card packs for our next session this week to make things easier.

The cards are a nice utility. I know a few custom sheets exist for filling out your own adversary pieces if there doesn't exist a card you need.

Generally, minions and low-level rivals only have ranks in characteristics/skills and talents you intend them to use regularly. So street gangsters that only try to bash the players faces in with a pipe only need Brawn 2-3 and Melee. You might throw in a rank or so of Fearsome or Intimidating, or Adversary if needed.

So if the party is confronted with two minion groups of three and a rival or two with only the intention of killing the party, they only need weapons, the weapon skill, and the characteristic. The rival might be slightly better than the minions (a point higher of Agility, or similar) and some talents if needed.

So what you're doing sounds fine if you need a quick a enemy group. A lot of the adversaries in the books (like stormies) offer a selection of different weapons and gear for a GM to use (like stormies using rifles, or repeating blasters, or grenades).

Personally, I'm bad with coming up with most things off the top of my head (or at least I think I am), so I pre-stat out everything the players might encounter. I use obsidian portal's GM-only section to track it all, so all I need to do when pulling out a character or minion group is reference the page I've made for them on there. Obviously, that takes a lot of prep and isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, it's just how I like to do it and there is a little OCD part of my brain that likes doing it . I can provide some examples if that would be helpful.

I have a deck of cards I found on this forums with all NPCs from the core books. Before a session or chapter, I make a custom deck of stuff that fits the adventure plus additional NPCs they may found on the context of the adventure, and use that.

If I need something else, I use the card that looks most like what I had in mind and play with the numbers/equipment a little bit on my mind.

If I really can't find anything similar to what I'm looking for, I use OggDude's GM Tools to make a custom template.

I use Oggdudes GM tools to print out stat blocks for my own made Minions, Rivals or Nemeses very helpful.

On the fly is fine! Saves on session prep time. If they take a particular liking to an NPC you can always expand on them after the session.

If the NPC's are planed and intended to have skills/talents that take advantage of the environment then obviously pre-planing is much easier.

The Edge of the Empire Adversary Decks are great as mentioned.

I always have stats for the various NPCs the players are going to encounter on a separate piece of paper. Makes it much easier to reference things when I need to. For convenience's sake I've also started keeping all the "iconic" NPC stats (for the more generic NPCs, not the named ones) in a single document on my computer so that whenever I need stats for a specific type of NPC I can look it up there and just copy/paste it to the current adventure's NPC sheet with a few adjustments as needed.

When I'm "eyeballing" minions, it works like this: starting characteristics for their species, +1 to one for experienced or thoroughly selected ones, up to three times +1 for real crème de la crème minions, NEVER +2 to any one characteristic. Wounds: +2, really tough guys +3. Skills: about four. No talents but necessary racial ones. To scale the difficulty just vary the numbers.

My experience: Two yellows more than the defensive capabilities (i.e. Dodge, Sidestep etc.) of the PCs is really challenging.

I pull details like this out of my unmentionables. I'm a grognard and live by "rulings not rules" when reasonable to do so. That said, I second that the adversary decks are a great resource for time strapped GMs.