If skills only reach up to 5, does it mean that minion groups are caped in 5 dice?

They are capped at minion skill 5, but their dice pool can grow past this with gear, upgrades from destiny points and/or upgrades to the pool from advantages/triumphs, etc

And you can have more than 5 in a group. It just means they stay at 5 skill till they drop below 6 minions. It is one way to make them more dangerous.

Just now, Daeglan said:

And you can have more than 5 in a group. It just means they stay at 5 skill till they drop below 6 minions. It is one way to make them more dangerous.

Í would consider it even essential to have more than 5 minions in most minion groups to keep those groups not decaying into harmless kitten before they even had a shot. Player initiative is usually rather good

I've had minion groups as large as 8 dealing with my 500+XP characters. It was an easy way to scale up the difficulty without breaking out the slide rule.

I like 4 minions in a group just to make the math easier, but I'll usually have 3 or 4 groups of em' at one time.

All are valid ways. And that is what make minions awesome. You can scale them in different ways and get different feel.

Another aspect of minion groups and scaling is that you can scale the size of the minion group to match the number of PCs in an encounter. I generally use 1 minion per PC, for low-XP PCs. Once the PCs reach 50-60 XP I'll double the number of minions. And double it again once they pass the hundred XP mark. Depending on how good the PCs' weapons and armor have gotten the scaling may happen a bit sooner or a bit later.

That's the thing that a lot of new people don't get - minions can be CRAZY deadly even to high powered characters. Just last game, I had 5 groups of four minions spread out through a sizeable hanger bay against three 600+ XP Jedi - and it was a very close thing. The players, their tactics were mostly "Get to da choppah ship" and avoided engaging with the Stormtroopers.

Range and distance, cover, heavy weapons, reinforcements with Despairs and numbers - all of these can make Minions a real ***** to deal with.

Yeah, multiple minion groups of 4+ minions are dangerous as hell. All those yellow dice have a nasty tendency to pop out Triumphs and advantages, seriously complicating life for PCs. Throw in the odd rival NPC (stormtrooper sergeant or lieutenant) with a heavy rifle and the Adversary talent and matters can get ugly for even experienced PCs. Grenades are a PC's best friend in such circumstances. Want to make things even uglier? Give the Impies grenades too. That usually teaches overly aggressive player groups the value of tactical retreat.

Still just minon groups, our GM basically refuse to use them anymore, last session she downright upgraded all minions to rivals to protect them from dropping like flies … except for that group of two dozen stormtroopers which our jedi insisted on not killing AND engaging alone …

5 groups of 4 minions mean you need ~5 hits, each with a crit to make them harmless before they can act, just don't screw up your initiative and even if you do … that Verpine Pilot got used to stim patches *grumble*, 4 groups are not wiping a complete group in one turn, so patching up afterwards and you are ready to go. . Trivial because of their usual complete lack of defensive tools. Grenades for sure make things even easier, but autofire, linked or just dual-wielding makes things easy enough.

What really is dangerous as hell are low initiative skills/rolls, but that is a core mechanic of the combat system.

1 hour ago, ShadoWarrior said:

Want to make things even uglier? Give the Impies grenades too. That usually teaches overly aggressive player groups the value of tactical retreat.

If one is willing to go off book slightly with a house rule, I have found that adding Linked to Minions is also a devastating addition. It's random enough to not make things a total curb stomp battle, but frequent enough to keep things exciting.

That's nasty and evil. I like it! It also makes sense that you should be able to score multiple hits when multiple shooters are firing. The net effect is similar to a weapon on autofire, just at a slower ROF (since humans can't pull a trigger on semi-auto as quickly as the weapon can cycle on its own).

Linked is brilliant and nasty. Though don't have a lot of minions autofire rifles and grenades as part of their regular gear?! So, I guess it not that big of an upgrade for some minion types and can achieved by just giving them a HH-50 for others.

I actively try to avoid giving the players easy access to restricted and/or extra-lethal weapons, and putting them in the hands of opponents that I expect the PCs to defeat and then loot is tantamount to a giveaway. It's one of the reasons, besides avoiding TPKs, that I also don't give most groups of stormtroopers grenades. If the party (somehow) manages to survive the encounter then they're going to pick up those sweet boomers and give me a headache later on. I usually find it better, certainly less problematic, to challenge PCs with superior numbers than to do so with superior weaponry.

Nothing is off book when it comes to NPCs.

We tend to burn everything down to the ground with loot or without, we are the type of party who brings a tank to a bar fight. And grenades are anyway rather trivial to make and trivial to avoid as well. So from my perspective there is no problem with stormtroopers having grenades, we can build them ourselves faster than we can loot them anyway.

And the official adventures shower you in credits too, so it would kinda silly to try keep the PCs a low-life group anyway once they reach a certain level of XP within the AoR line. Edge is different in this regard, making bad life decisions is backed into the system there ^-^

I don't sweat gear. Minions can be added, Rivals created, environmental headaches conjured, it's all good. The offense of PCs spools up quickly, but given how many weapon effects ignore Soak PCs are always vulnerable.

If you have Rival 'stormtrooper medics' or medic droids that can keep slapping stimpacks on those 8-man minion group of stormtroopers, they can last quite a while. If you can draw from the stock used in Beyond the Rim, then minion groups of WT 8 guys last quite a bit longer too. Combine both for a long battle of attrition or when you want to make it obvious that the PCs should retreat.

I hadn't thought of that: minions with stims. That's truly inspired. It makes the minions that much more dangerous because it extends their staying power, and when finally defeated and the PCs loot the bodies they find something useful that isn't unbalancing at all: replacement stims for the ones they've used themselves to get through the battle. I love it.

Plus there's the added bonus of conflict. "Well, you could take that medic out and keep him from getting those Stormtroopers back on their feet, but you are targeting a non-combatant. How you doing to deal with that, Mister Jedi?"

Psh, I've even added Adversary 1 to minion groups when it suited me, it's all about being able to scale threats rapidly.

14 minutes ago, Desslok said:

Plus there's the added bonus of conflict. "Well, you could take that medic out and keep him from getting those Stormtroopers back on their feet, but you are targeting a non-combatant. How you doing to deal with that, Mister Jedi?"

He's only a "non-combatant" if he's carrying no weapons. Also, arguably, he's a combatant because he's in a combat zone assisting combatants. If the medic is treating the wounded in place so that they can continue to fight, he's a valid target. If the medic is evacuating the wounded, that's entirely different.

18 minutes ago, Desslok said:

Plus there's the added bonus of conflict. "Well, you could take that medic out and keep him from getting those Stormtroopers back on their feet, but you are targeting a non-combatant. How you doing to deal with that, Mister Jedi?"

That is good, but it becomes gold when Mr. Hotshot-Verpine is rather pragmatic about such things and snipes away the medic first … every time. Because now you have not only conflict for Mr. Jedi, but as well within the group on how to handle war.
And no, Mr. Verpine is certainly not waiting to see if Mr. Medic is evacuating or not.

15 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

He's only a "non-combatant" if he's carrying no weapons. Also, arguably, he's a combatant because he's in a combat zone assisting combatants. If the medic is treating the wounded in place so that they can continue to fight, he's a valid target. If the medic is evacuating the wounded, that's entirely different.

Eh, fair enough - I'll freely admit that my knowledge of the Geneva Convention and the rules of engagement consists solely of endless reruns of MASH and Hogan's Heroes.