Cover blocks one or two attack dice. That is a bad mechanism, because it weakens a central mechanism of tabletop games: the use of cover. Why bother with using cover or outflanking, if the battlefield is swamped with units that either ignore cover or have enough firepower to make cover meaningless. This encourages power lists that take the minimum of rank and file troopers and concentrate on heavy hitters. If each battle is decided by a lightsaber duel between Vader and Luke, why bother with the supporting cast?

No, it blocks 1 or two HITS, not dice. Which is huge.

Take a unit of stormtroopers shooting at Rebel Troopers. For ease, we'll give them 8 people with no upgrades, but they have aimed (i know you can't have 8, its just easier maths...and is STRONGER than the normal max size).

They will score on average 3.75 hits...round it to 4.

Rebels on average will avoid 2 of those, leaving 2 hits. If they are on soft cover, it's down to 1 (which is half damage). In hard cover, they are completely unscathed, even without dodging.

So....a larger than maximum size unit of aiming Stormtroopers potentially did no damage, or 1 in soft cover. Rather than losing a third of their unit (2 damage), the rebels lost a sixth or none depending on the cover.

Now obviously upgrades can change this, but then the Rebels can also dodge, and so on. The amount of cover ignoring stuff isn't huge so far, and is either expensive or comes with drawbacks.

Cover is powerful.

I just realised this might come from somebody mentioning that "Impact" ignores cover...it does not. There's a "Blast" keyword that ignores cover, and we have barely seen that so far.

59 minutes ago, Extropia said:

No, it blocks 1 or two HITS, not dice. Which is huge.

Take a unit of stormtroopers shooting at Rebel Troopers. For ease, we'll give them 8 people with no upgrades, but they have aimed (i know you can't have 8, its just easier maths...and is STRONGER than the normal max size).

They will score on average 3.75 hits...round it to 4.

Rebels on average will avoid 2 of those, leaving 2 hits. If they are on soft cover, it's down to 1 (which is half damage). In hard cover, they are completely unscathed, even without dodging.

So....a larger than maximum size unit of aiming Stormtroopers potentially did no damage, or 1 in soft cover. Rather than losing a third of their unit (2 damage), the rebels lost a sixth or none depending on the cover.

Now obviously upgrades can change this, but then the Rebels can also dodge, and so on. The amount of cover ignoring stuff isn't huge so far, and is either expensive or comes with drawbacks.

Cover is powerful.

I never questioned that cover works against the vanilla troopers of your example. But the more dice you roll, the less the percentage cover will block.

Sure, but you only roll 1 unit at a time. I think the most offensively powerful unit right now is probably Rebel Troopers with a Z-6 (I might be wrong though), so let's do that.

6 normal troopers and a Z-6 Rotary (6 Black and 6 White dice) averages 4.5 hits if they dont aim, 5.25 if they do. Let's say they did aim and scored 5 hits.

Stormtroopers roll a Black die for defence, so will block half. Let's be harsh and say they only block 2, which is under the average. 3 hits go through.

soft cover will reduce damage by 33%, heavy cover by 66%. Against the most dice a single unit can currently roll...which was also aiming.

Honestly, I'm not sure how much stronger you want it to be. If the Stormtroopers had rolled 3 dodges instead they would escape with no damage at all in hard cover.

FWIW a fully maxed unit with an Ion Gun as well as the Z-6 (so 5 troopers, a Z-6 and an Ion) would increase the kills to 3/2/1 for no cover/soft/hard respectively if the Stormtroopers roll average, or 4/3/2 if they still roll only 2 dodges.

So at worst here, with a fully maxed Rebel unit, aiming, against Stormtroopers that roll below average....Hard Cover reduces damage by half.

1 hour ago, Extropia said:

No, it blocks 1 or two HITS, not dice. Which is huge.

Cover is powerful.

2 minutes ago, Extropia said:

Sure, but you only roll 1 unit at a time. I think the most offensively powerful unit right now is probably Rebel Troopers with a Z-6 (I might be wrong though), so let's do that.

6 normal troopers and a Z-6 Rotary (6 Black and 6 White dice) averages 4.5 hits if they dont aim, 5.25 if they do. Let's say they did aim and scored 5 hits.

Stormtroopers roll a Black die for defence, so will block half. Let's be harsh and say they only block 2, which is under the average. 3 hits go through.

soft cover will reduce damage by 33%, heavy cover by 66%. Against the most dice a single unit can currently roll...which was also aiming.

Honestly, I'm not sure how much stronger you want it to be. If the Stormtroopers had rolled 3 dodges instead they would escape with no damage at all in hard cover.

Hate facts.

1 minute ago, Extropia said:

Sure, but you only roll 1 unit at a time. I think the most offensively powerful unit right now is probably Rebel Troopers with a Z-6 (I might be wrong though), so let's do that.

6 normal troopers and a Z-6 Rotary (6 Black and 6 White dice) averages 4.5 hits if they dont aim, 5.25 if they do. Let's say they did aim and scored 5 hits.

Stormtroopers roll a Black die for defence, so will block half. Let's be harsh and say they only block 2, which is under the average. 3 hits go through.

soft cover will reduce damage by 33%, heavy cover by 66%. Against the most dice a single unit can currently roll...which was also aiming.

Honestly, I'm not sure how much stronger you want it to be. If the Stormtroopers had rolled 3 dodges instead they would escape with no damage at all in hard cover.

My problem is that the mechanism doesn't scale. Even if there will be no power creep (and FFG has form), I doubt that we have already seen the heavy hitters.

Maybe, but who knows? Speculating is all well and good, but right now with what currently exists, cover is fantastic.

For all we know there will also be units/upgrades that improve cover....it's as likely as any other speculation.

1 minute ago, Extropia said:

For all we know there will also be units/upgrades that improve cover....it's as likely as any other speculation.

That would be worse, because then cards would be once more more important than position. Don't give them ideas.

Right now position is vital, so I won't worry too much about the future personally.

And it would have been so simple to have a scaleable system: just add symbols for hard and soft cover on your custom defence dice.

10 minutes ago, Rumar said:

That would be worse, because then cards would be once more more important than position. Don't give them ideas.

I understand your concern that the game might not be enough about good positional tactics, but we've only seen one type of terrain so far. There will be many other terrain mechanics in the game (as mentioned by some of the "demoers" at Gen Con).

Let's try to imagine a few examples of possible terrain keywords:

• Sniping: Any building with this keyword allows units shooting from them to convert hits in critical hits.
• Comm-Link: Any structure with this keyword allows a unit in contact with it to be ordered this turn, even if out of range of its army commander.
• Toxic: Any unit in contact with this terrain suffers 1 wound during the End phase.
• Tunnel: Any structure with this keyword allows a unit occupying it to spend one action to instantly get teleported at the structure's twin structure (placed somewhere else on the table).
• EMP Field: A unit shooting from this terrain turns any of their blaster-based weapon hits into blanks (critical hits are untouched).
• etc.

Combine this with objectives on the table that you must capture/defend/destroy, or VIPs that you must escort from one point of the table to another, and suddenly you get a very rich and fun tactical game in my opinion.

3 minutes ago, Xargonaut said:

I understand your concern that the game might not be enough about good positional tactics, but we've only seen one type of terrain so far. There will be many other terrain mechanics in the game (as mentioned by some of the "demoers" at Gen Con).

Let's try to imagine a few examples of possible terrain keywords:

• Sniping: Any building with this keyword allows units shooting from them to convert hits in critical hits.
• Comm-Link: Any structure with this keyword allows a unit in contact with it to be ordered this turn, even if out of range of its army commander.
• Toxic: Any unit in contact with this terrain suffers 1 wound during the End phase.
• Tunnel: Any structure with this keyword allows a unit occupying it to spend one action to instantly get teleported at the structure's twin structure (placed somewhere else on the table).
• EMP Field: A unit shooting from this terrain turns any of their blaster-based weapon hits into blanks (critical hits are untouched).
• etc.

Combine this with objectives on the table that you must capture/defend/destroy, or VIPs that you must escort from one point of the table to another, and suddenly you get a very rich and fun tactical game in my opinion.

Good ideas!

Cancelling two hits is huge when your squadron only has six total wounds.

16 minutes ago, svelok said:

Cancelling two hits is huge when your squadron only has six total wounds.

This. Most individual troopers can obit take one hit. Meaning, not only does it prevent you from taking damage, but it also prevents you from having to roll 2 fewer dice each attack.

So cover is meaningless if they introduce a bunch if stuff to make cover meaningless? That's a non-statement.

Cover does not scale. 3 squads of four are not as good as 2 squads of 6. Doesn't make sense.

3 hours ago, Rumar said:

And it would have been so simple to have a scaleable system: just add symbols for hard and soft cover on your custom defence dice.

I see your point here and agree that it would be neat if it somehow offered the same level of protection for each trooper no matter if its one or six of them. I really like the idea of "cover" symbols on the dice.

But the current system definitely makes cover important and very powerful and is simple to apply.

Cover and armor should give additional defense dice

I only heard about this game a few days ago when it was announced, and I've never designed a game, but I feel very strongly that my gut feeling on a mechanic I haven't used should be considered over the intent of the designers and the experience of playtesters.

1 hour ago, ryolacap said:

Cover and armor should give additional defense dice

That's the worse possible thing you can do. Because that makes cover and armor completely random on how much benefit it provides. There isn't a single worse way to do cover that I can think of.

27 minutes ago, Tvayumat said:

I only heard about this game a few days ago when it was announced, and I've never designed a game, but I feel very strongly that my gut feeling on a mechanic I haven't used should be considered over the intent of the designers and the experience of playtesters.

Amen. And then I understand that there is some fun in extrapolating and debating about an upcoming game that we are excited about, but wow, at some point people have to consider that the designers at FFG know what they are doing. And they have a pretty good track record so far.

Since we are throwing out ideas on how to improve a game we haven't played I am going to combine what @ryolacap and @Rumar said. Special cover dice. These dice would be better than red dice (4 blocks, 1 surge).

Light cover-For every figure in your unit that has cover from the attack upgrade one of the dice in your pool to the [cover] die. If there are more figures in cover than dice in your pool, add 1 white die for each extra figure.The aditional dice cannot be upgraded.

Heavy cover- the additional dice are red instead of white.

This will of course mean that the blast keyword needs changed as well. IMO it would read either:

Blast- negate the effects of cover on this weapon.

Or

Blast- this weapons hits and crits cannot be blocked by [cover] dice. They may however be blocked by any white or red dice added by cover.

This is an odd thing to see at the top of the forum for me. One of the biggest draws for Legion for me is just how much cover does matter.

Simplicity is key.