Help with winning anything...

By Yakito, in Imperial Assault Campaign

Hello

I have now played 3 missions as an Imp and 2 missions as a Rebel.

I have lost every single one of those.

I have played Aftermath against 3 players and lost. It was my first mission as an imp and their first mission in Star Wars as well.

Then I played first mission of Twin Shadows as a rebel with other 3 rebels and lost that.

We also got absolutely DESTROYED on our second twin shadows mission as imp had boba fett and we couldn't even get 1 objective done (out of 4).

And now I started playing Return to Hoth with just 1 friend playing Diala and Jyn.

I lost both missions I lead so far in that expansion.

So... All I want at this point is one freaking win. I am becoming frustrated over a silly game that I got super excited about.

I can't win a single mission when I am brainstorming with a team, and I cannot win it when I am just against 1 person.

Tell me, are these missions simply hard or I am just a complete and utter moron that shouldn't even touch these type of games. If I lose another mission I may just give up at this point. I dont mind losing but I DO MIND losing all the time.

Edited by Yakito

If you just started playing, you may not have a full grasp of the rules quite yet, so give it time. There are subtleties and nuance to the game that are only learned with experience.That said, your rebels playing with the "Heroic" or "Legendary" cards and that makes them exceedingly difficult to wound, which is generally the victory condition for the imperials (that and end of round X). We recommend that when you are short players, that you always use 4 heroes, even if that means someone has to control an extra hero.

Give us a break down of Aftermath, and let us know what happened, maybe we can find some obvious mistakes you made?

Edited by Fizz

That one boils down on me not focusing a hero. I know that mistake.

Second mission I lead, I managed to focus Diala and wound her but Jyn was running away cos the map on Return to hoth (1st mission) was big and I couldn't catch her without being killed. I lost.

Third mission - (Homecoming) I am not sure if it was my choice of units, cos I pulled out HKs, or was it the fact that I did not really focus Luke. Not sure.

As players, we were playing around killing imps for too long cos my team would not really listen that we had to go for the objective and when we finally got there half of our team was still in the previous room unable to reach us quickly enough.

Second mission in Twin Shadows was lost because we needed to clear 2 objectives so that there was nobody next to them (4 tiles away). Since my Imp won Boba Fett in previous mission he pulled it out and it was game over for us. He was running away from us, and when he wasn't he was almost impossible to kill. We did everything we could to murder him and we did it in the last round I think but there was too many troops to kill anyway so it was game over.

So now... I am slowly giving up.

Why are you playing the first and second missions of random campaigns? Which side mission was after Aftermath? Was that Homecoming? What about A New Threat? Which Imperial Class desk are you using?

Don't get disheartened, they way the campaigns work, win/loss isnt that big of a deal. You're always getting XP to upgrade the rebels/imperials each mission. Sometimes the rebels get some extra credits to spend, sometimes you get influence to spend.

Edited by Fizz

My rebel team can only play once a month so we chose a shorter campaign and also I already read the main campaign so we chose not to use that one.

And because my first team disbanded after Aftermath and only one player remained we chose to start fresh together with Return to Hoth.

I dont think my lack of knowledge of rules is the issue. I check these forums a lot and I google the grey area rules.

Maybe I am just too stupid for this game or maybe these missions are challenging?

My imp player seems to know a lot about the game, he's lead a few campaigns already so that's a big factor there already.

I think because you've played bits and pieces of the different campaigns, and have been switching between Rebel and Imperial player, you've had a streak of difficult to win missions. I always play Imperial, and I've won maybe 20% of the time. For example the first mission in the Core Campaign is weighted to the Imperials to win. And my group was in tears in the second Twin Shadows map, they lost so badly. Whereas the first couple Return to Hoth maps they ran circles around me.

Victory can be decided by the right imperial class for the campaign, and the Imperial Player's play style (I've had a lot of luck with Military Might since my play style tends to be pretty blunt), or the combination of Heroes and their skills, lucky upgrades from the shop, or just knowing when to move or when to rest...

Personally I would say enjoy the experience and don't stress too much about whether you're winning or losing. I would also suggest going back to the core campaign and getting experience there to improve your play style, Return to Hoth is full of weird triggers and traps and is, I think, not the best first experience.

Also if the OP's group is jumping around missions and not upgrading characters appropriately (or as appropriately as you could given the circumstances I suppose), some missions are going to go from challenging for one side to borderline impossible.

What it sounds like to me (and obviously I'm not at your table so this is only based on what I can read here and may be entirely wrong) is that you haven't gotten into the right mentality of focusing on what you need to do to win. Aftermath, Hunted Down and and Homecoming you all mention a failure to do this, In Shady Dealings Boba shouldn't really be too much of an obstacle to you completing the objectives if you just pretend he's not there.

Battle of Hoth is, in my limited experience, a pretty easy mission for the rebels but otherwise I think it's just a matter of learning from losses and not getting disheartened.

In my experience with the campaign, if the rebels are focused on clearing the objectives and are remembering to use their strain movement, abilities and upgrades every turn, there is not much the imperial player can do to stop them from winning, barring obscenely terrible dice rolls.

It sounds like you've been on the receiving end of this as the imperials and your other rebel players are refusing to play to the objectives, which is the only way the rebels lose in this game aside from neglecting to use their abilities and upgrades or terrible dice. I've seen experienced gamers lose to the clock as reels because they treated it like a war game and were too focused on the body count on each side, and I've seen non gamers demolish as rebels because they treated it like any other board game and they payed close attention to their objectives and what they needed to do to avoid defeat and didn't approach it with a war gamers mentality.

I'm playing Imperials and just won my first game the other night. That mission was Dark Obsession, a mission that is probably fairly well tilted towards the Imps as it's the mission to get Vader. The first half of the game, I was cleaning up like a boss. But the second half, my opponent suddenly realized that Vader couldn't be stopped by the Rebels by damage, but he **** sure could prevent him from getting to his destination by the end of turn 6. Vader managed to pull out the win just barely, with the very last Imperial activations of turn 6 being an Imperial Officer telling him to smash the door down and then him walking through and interacting with the mission objective.

I'm playing Imperials and just won my first game the other night. That mission was Dark Obsession, a mission that is probably fairly well tilted towards the Imps as it's the mission to get Vader. The first half of the game, I was cleaning up like a boss. But the second half, my opponent suddenly realized that Vader couldn't be stopped by the Rebels by damage, but he **** sure could prevent him from getting to his destination by the end of turn 6. Vader managed to pull out the win just barely, with the very last Imperial activations of turn 6 being an Imperial Officer telling him to smash the door down and then him walking through and interacting with the mission objective.

This mission is actually very hard for Imperial if the rebels are thinking at least a little bit about tactics. You need to wound all heroes first and then you can interact with the token - many Imp. players that say this mission is easy usually ignore the wound all heroes condition. Also you cannot use officer (or anything else) to move Vader. Rebels closed the doors and Diala used attack combo on Vader every turn to remove one of my black dice and stun with her staff. You need to use at least one movment per turn to get to the token with vader. Stunned several rounds + all doors closed = I did not get past the terminal with Vader (rebels quickly ran to the terminal, closed doors one by one and were blocking the corridor). I managed to wound only 2 heroes when I ran out of time.

I'm playing Imperials and just won my first game the other night. That mission was Dark Obsession, a mission that is probably fairly well tilted towards the Imps as it's the mission to get Vader. The first half of the game, I was cleaning up like a boss. But the second half, my opponent suddenly realized that Vader couldn't be stopped by the Rebels by damage, but he **** sure could prevent him from getting to his destination by the end of turn 6. Vader managed to pull out the win just barely, with the very last Imperial activations of turn 6 being an Imperial Officer telling him to smash the door down and then him walking through and interacting with the mission objective.

This mission is actually very hard for Imperial if the rebels are thinking at least a little bit about tactics. You need to wound all heroes first and then you can interact with the token - many Imp. players that say this mission is easy usually ignore the wound all heroes condition. Also you cannot use officer (or anything else) to move Vader. Rebels closed the doors and Diala used attack combo on Vader every turn to remove one of my black dice and stun with her staff. You need to use at least one movment per turn to get to the token with vader. Stunned several rounds + all doors closed = I did not get past the terminal with Vader (rebels quickly ran to the terminal, closed doors one by one and were blocking the corridor). I managed to wound only 2 heroes when I ran out of time.

I agree. The only thing Rebels need to do is block doors and rest. They dont even need to do damage. I did this early on (played Dark Obsession thinking theyd go for Luke rather than prevent me Vader) and I think that was an issue too. You need to be able to generate high threat quickly to keep the pressure on the rebels. I also think changing this to 8 rds instead of 6 would be better.

~D

Vader didn't get moved, he was ordered to attack which is not forbidden. He then moved and interacted once the doors were down.

I am in my first campaign, playing as Imperials (who wouldn't want to "crush their insignificant rebellion"?? :D), and I am NOT a very good tactician. That being said, though, I've won at least half the scenarios. I'm using the Subversive Tactics class deck, which has a lot of good little tricks, buffs, and debuffs to throw a bit of a wrench into Rebel plans. My housemate is a very good tactician, and is playing all 4 Rebels at once, so they're not Legendary or anything. By this point, though, he has some Item Card combos that make a couple of his Heroes downright ICKY... I started the campaign with winning most of the scenarios, but now it's getting harder and harder to do that with his Heroes' nasty combos.

We are gearing up to play Dark Obsession, and I am HELL-BENT to win and grab Vader for my stack of Deployment options. Yes, he costs 18 Threat to bring out, but in the last couple scenarios, I'm getting 6 Threat per round. He's a nice late-game home run...! I can see the Rebels getting sure of themselves after finishing most of their objectives for a scenario, then Vader steps in... and they all wet themselves... :P That being said, I need to win the scenario to get him, first. It's good to see some input on tactics for Imperials to win Dark Obsessions, so I'm definitely gonna try those. I am a fan of bringing as much firepower to bear on a target and systematically eliminating the Heroes. But with a 6-turn limit, I'm not sure if I'll be able to wound each one of them before I run out of time to locate Luke...

sounds your experience has going better than what mine did. i found it difficult to win as a rebel. maybe after some skirmish i will play again. the skirmish taught us some about the hero characters and the empire. good luck!