5 hours ago, neosmagus said:

I've always found it weird that the boxes contain tokens for uniques that come in expansions. But not the non uniques.

Wouldn't it have sold better if the boxes came with all the unique figures (ie, you have more reason to buy the box, for the maps AND to be able to play with Leia or whoever) and tokens for all the non uniques like troopers. And then sell them all in figure packs so you can buy as many as you want. Now you'd usually never buy more than one copy of a blister pack, but forced to by two copies of a box full of components you don't want additional copies of, just to get an extra Trandoshan or something.

That might be a better sell from a skirmish point of view (maybe?) but it doesn't really work at all for campaign. Although they might be less exciting, the generic troopers are what's on the board 99.9% of the time. Could you imagine playing the core campaign with tokens standing in for stormtroopers and officers? You could barely call it a minis game at that point. Sure it would be nice to see Han Solo in plastic if you happen to play one of the two missions where he shows up, but I think that strictly from a campaign point of view their current model works really well.

6 hours ago, General Zodd said:

The reason the game is driven by the campaign is that the game IA is based on (Descent) is only campaign based. You have to remember that skirmish was the unknown risk for them, would it be popular? They obviously thought it might be, but had no idea, therefore the campaign has always been the driver for product releases (I guess, apart from the stand alone waves like the upcoming droids) because that is the sales model they know worked for Descent.

Don't be dismissive of the campaign as a market, I have found that most of the people playing it near me (London, UK) are either both campaign and skirmish, or predominantly campaign. Just because they don't blog about army lists (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean there aren't that many of them!

That's why some separation would do the skirmish side of things some good. Almost all campaigners play in their homes or away from a public place. I know tons of people who own the campaign, but having extra figures is purely a skirmish problem, unless you are just looking for something Starwars to collect or paint. The components included in the box are designed to be self contained within the box. The side missions for the ally/villain packs don't add that much value to the campaign

17 hours ago, jscott991 said:

Unrelated to this discussion, but aren't the Reaper Bones minis smaller (25mm v. about 30mm) and much less detailed?

I don't own any, but that's always been my impression.

Their quality and size are identical. There may actually be more detail in some Reaper minis, the color is different which masks some of the detail. The reason I brought them up is I think the material is identical

There are Heavy Stormtroopers and Snowtroopers available separately on eBay.

The internet is truly amazing.

You mean the ones from Germany. The shipping alone makes it more worthwhile to rebuy the full boxed sets.

The internet isn't that amazing.

15 hours ago, neosmagus said:

I've always found it weird that the boxes contain tokens for uniques that come in expansions. But not the non uniques.

Wouldn't it have sold better if the boxes came with all the unique figures (ie, you have more reason to buy the box, for the maps AND to be able to play with Leia or whoever) and tokens for all the non uniques like troopers. And then sell them all in figure packs so you can buy as many as you want. Now you'd usually never buy more than one copy of a blister pack, but forced to by two copies of a box full of components you don't want additional copies of, just to get an extra Trandoshan or something.

They probably market tested it and found there was more demand for figure packs when they had the iconic faces on them and were still able to put the iconic character art on the box expansions (like Boba, Bossk and Jabba).

its just as likely that the system got grandfathered in from Descent 2.0 which had box sets with tokens and lieutenant packs with minis just like IA does.