This topic is for suggesting changes to the rules/setup of specific campaign missions. These changes can be directed towards rebalancing missions you think to be unfair, fixing missions that provide a negative play experience, or otherwise altering missions in some way you think would be good or interesting. General discussion about which missions might benefit most from house ruling is also fine.
The How Balanced is Each Scenario Polls can be useful for grounding your personal experience with the community aggregate, but feel free to suggest changes even if your opinions on mission balance don't align with the polls.
I'd like to keep this thread usable for people who want to look up house rule suggestions for specific missions, so please use spoiler tags when discussing mission rules, setup or strategy, and clearly indicate which mission the spoiler is for outside of the tags. The spoiler tag is [ spoiler ] [ /spoiler ] without spaces.
Like this
I'll start things off
Imperial Hospitality
This was the mission that inspired me to make this thread. The scenario balance poll has it at 59% in favour of the Imperials, but this one was the first complete blowout for the Rebels with my group.
The Imperial player starts with only 3 activations, 2 of them weak regular Probe Droids within easy striking distance of the entry point, and no optional deployment. On such a small map with virtually no resistance for the first two rounds, the Rebels were easily able to get the prisoner out before the event trigger on round 4. There's no telling how things might have gone if we had decided to go for the optional terminal first, which was probably the designer's intent, but we still ended up extremely underwhelmed at the end regardless.
Suggestions for changes:
- When reading the mission rules, inform the Rebels of the additional reward for destroying the terminal. A minor change that should give the Rebels a stronger incentive to play the mission as intended. To compensate for the additional information, perhaps change it so that the Rebels only get the reward if they destroy the terminal before the round 4 event.
- The Rebel prisoner can only gain movement points during his activation and can not be pushed. Diala & Gideon's ability to give extra movement to friendly figures is extremely abusable in this mission. The prisoner is already hard enough to defeat in time with the heroes being able to tank shots for him.
- Bolster the Imperial player's starting forces a touch, perhaps upgrade the Probe Droids to elites, or add a regular Stormtrooper group at a deployment point. Might be unnecessary with the other changes.
- Maybe make destroying the terminal a required objective, eg. the mission ends when the prisoner escapes and the terminal is destroyed. Probably an unnecessary change if you don't mind very short missions. Extends the mission and prevents an underwhelming 3-round blowout like the one we had, albeit without really offering the Imperial player much chance for a comeback in the event of a fast prisoner escape. Maybe add a 6 round time limit as well? Would require alterations to some of the story text.
I also had issues with Viper's Den, even though it seems fairly balanced with a 52/48 split on the balance poll.
My group's play of the mission was very tight and action-packed, but also extremely short with a Rebel victory on the first activation of round 3 (although victory seemed almost impossible near the end and required a couple nail-biting rolls). The nature of the mission seems like it has potential for huge fast blowouts on either side, and the best Imperial strategy is just setting up an Officer chain to get the ball carrier out in a few consecutive activations. Not really exemplary of what IA should be about imo. That said, the mission is on such a precarious knife edge that I'm afraid any change I'd make to nerf Officer abuse would severely throw the balance off in favour of the Rebels.
I'm going through the core campaign for the first time right now (Rebel side), so I'll post my house rule ideas for more problematic missions as they come up.
Edited by Jasu Bakuhatsuspoiler tag formatting