I do not know if the IA will fall or not with the arrival of the legion. I particularly love AI and find it very cool its skirmish mode and campaign. I confess that I still have little information about the legion and I do not know what to say about it yet.
There is a chance I would play the legion, but in the same way as x-wing and armada. I think there is room for both.
But it's too early to tell. But I really wish AI would not end now.
hum.. thanks for the help guys.. they are different but knowing FFG, they probably will stop making things for this game. They create too many games and after a time they stop caring about some and focus on the new ones.. i miss new things in the SW rpg, eldritch horror, etc.. but u guys are rigth this has much playability for now, i'll wait for the app
Eldritch Horror isn't dead, is it? They got a smallbox like a month or two ago.
Edited by subtrendy23 hours ago, subtrendy2 said:Eldritch Horror isn't dead, is it? They got a smallbox like a month or two ago.
Two releases this year, in fact.
SW rpg (AOR specifically) has two listed as In Dev as well.
On 9/7/2017 at 9:00 AM, a1bert said:From what I gathered during GenCon, there is not that much overlap between Imperial Assault and Legion.
Even the skirmish modes - which the Legion is exclusively - are very different in scope, mechanisms (grid vs template movement, mission-specific map vs. pre-built terrain independent of setup cards), and playtime (1h vs 2+h). (And there may be restrictions, in Legion you need to take at least two Stormtrooper groups if I overheard and remember correctly.)
I would not be surprised if the tides turn and people find IA through Legion as much as people find Legion through IA .
I've actually seen some of this happen locally lately. People that are interested in Legion are starting to ask me to show them how to play Imperial Assault. Have a couple people that never gave skirmish a chance, interested in playing now. We'll see if it keeps up as Legion hits the market. The big selling point I have for IA right now is the smaller skirmish scale, compared with Legion. No longer are they turned off by the fact the minis aren't painted. It also helps that X-Wing has hit the jumping the Shark stage right now.
I'd been curious about Imperial Assault, but I didn't really decide to take the plunge and buy in until recently. (I'd dismissed skirmish out of hand, since I already have TONS of old Wizards of the Coast Star Wars minis, stats and maps that I can have Star Wars skirmishes with, but as I look at it more, I am even finding it has some appeal.)
I bought my core set at the first of the month, just finished painting the minis last Friday, and now I'm running through the campaign using RedJak's Automated Emperor so I can solo it and learn the rules before I inflict it on others. I fully expect I'll be the Imperial Player when I get my regular group going on a campaign, but that's a little ways off.
My point is that I am a new customer that JUST NOW bought into Imperial Assault, primarily for the campaign gameplay (which to me feels more like Star Wars than the massed battles of troops led by Luke and Vader in a Warhammer-esque slaughter), and I doubt I'm the only new player that has jumped into IA. If the game continues to sell, FFG will continue to offer support in some fashion. Eventually, they may stop development, but even that doesn't kill games. Arkham Horror hasn't seen an expansion for years and it continues to see reprints....
Here's the real thing about Imperial Assault in particular, and games in general;
Licensed games will cease being made at some point. It could be a year from now, 10, but at some point, a developer could no longer possess the license their popular game is associated with and thus the game will "die out" because it can no longer be supported.
FFG has jumped in and out of a bunch of licenses over its run. It's still going strongest on their Ice and Fire dealings, but here's a short list of games that they "used to" make;
DOOM
Starcraft
Fury of Dracula (2 different editions)
Death Angel
Warhammer Quest Adventure Card Game
From this list, DOOM has returned in a new game engine to tie in to the most recent release of the game. Their first release of DOOM was themed around DOOM 3, and FFG made an expansion to support the DOOM 3 expansion. While it's a "dead" game, I wouldn't have stopped playing it out of hand because of that. There's a ton of content to get through there, but as it was their first in a still running series of dungeon crawl 1vsMany style game, the system was improved upon greatly, and you'd get more "meat" even out of Descent 1E, which itself is no longer supported but is by no means worthless because of it.
Starcraft and it's Brood War expansion is a hefty game in its own right, and still playable (especially since Forbidden Stars isn't being supported anymore to truly eclipse it with tons of expansion content) if you can get a decent group together.
Dracula isn't the type of game you want or need expansions to, and just flat out rocks for that "hidden movement" style of game. Just because they don't produce it anymore doesn't magically turn the game to ash.
Death Angel and its expansions are a good "Space Hulk Lite" filler card game that's meant to be random and chaotic. A few expansion packs are there for variance and would be all you'd need.
Warhammer Quest is truly the one dead game they've made, in the sense that the license with GW ended before they could properly expand the game. The box they released is meant to be a starter, kind of like the Arkham Horror LCG starter. A fine little game in its own right but not much replayability, and was clearly meant to have a ton of content dumped out for it before the sudden end. For this reason, it's the only game from the list above I would consider "not" investing in, simply because it's incomplete as its follow-up content never came out.
Everything else above would be fun and entertaining for a group of players. Death Angels also works solitaire.
So compare that to IA with it's numerous expansion boxes and you've got more than enough to play with, unless you're strictly speaking looking for a 1v1 skirmish style death match game, and then it's only as good as your ability to find an opponent anyways.
1 hour ago, cleardave said:Here's the real thing about Imperial Assault in particular, and games in general;
Licensed games will cease being made at some point. It could be a year from now, 10, but at some point, a developer could no longer possess the license their popular game is associated with and thus the game will "die out" because it can no longer be supported.
FFG has jumped in and out of a bunch of licenses over its run. It's still going strongest on their Ice and Fire dealings, but here's a short list of games that they "used to" make;
DOOM
Starcraft
Fury of Dracula (2 different editions)
Death Angel
Warhammer Quest Adventure Card Game
From this list, DOOM has returned in a new game engine to tie in to the most recent release of the game. Their first release of DOOM was themed around DOOM 3, and FFG made an expansion to support the DOOM 3 expansion. While it's a "dead" game, I wouldn't have stopped playing it out of hand because of that. There's a ton of content to get through there, but as it was their first in a still running series of dungeon crawl 1vsMany style game, the system was improved upon greatly, and you'd get more "meat" even out of Descent 1E, which itself is no longer supported but is by no means worthless because of it.
Starcraft and it's Brood War expansion is a hefty game in its own right, and still playable (especially since Forbidden Stars isn't being supported anymore to truly eclipse it with tons of expansion content) if you can get a decent group together.
Dracula isn't the type of game you want or need expansions to, and just flat out rocks for that "hidden movement" style of game. Just because they don't produce it anymore doesn't magically turn the game to ash.
Death Angel and its expansions are a good "Space Hulk Lite" filler card game that's meant to be random and chaotic. A few expansion packs are there for variance and would be all you'd need.
Warhammer Quest is truly the one dead game they've made, in the sense that the license with GW ended before they could properly expand the game. The box they released is meant to be a starter, kind of like the Arkham Horror LCG starter. A fine little game in its own right but not much replayability, and was clearly meant to have a ton of content dumped out for it before the sudden end. For this reason, it's the only game from the list above I would consider "not" investing in, simply because it's incomplete as its follow-up content never came out.
Everything else above would be fun and entertaining for a group of players. Death Angels also works solitaire.
So compare that to IA with it's numerous expansion boxes and you've got more than enough to play with, unless you're strictly speaking looking for a 1v1 skirmish style death match game, and then it's only as good as your ability to find an opponent anyways.
I think your analysis is spot on for the Campaign version of IA. *If* Heart of the Empire is the last ever IA expansion (and I really don't think that's likely, btw) there is a load of great content for Campaign, and loads of replayability to keep people playing for years to come. I think the people who are most worried are the Skirmish players, something I've only just started dipping my toe into after playing campaign since it came out. With any competitive game with this type of release model you get metas forming, as people figure out what the the optimal handful of lists are. If you have no new releases, that meta grows stale and the game starts to become predictable. So while there are still some brave souls playing old war games (which is a moderately good analogy) like GW's Epic 40k, unless they start using house rules and tinkering with new ideas themselves that can become quite dull without new stuff to freshen up the game. LCGs are arguably even more prone to it. When the 40k LCG game got canned due to the ending of the FFG/GW license (along with Fury of Dracula and Death Angel, etc) there was a pretty massive scene among my friends, and nobody plays anymore now, as they know that the best 2-3 decks will always be the best 2-3 decks for ever now. I think the way IA Skirmish is structured it's almost like a halfway house between a LCG and a wargame which is why it would probably suffer more from being no longer supported, even if it wouldn't fall off a cliff in the way the 40k LCG did.
That's a very longwinded way of saying that, even if you accept that IA is seeing its last (which I don't), the Campaign players really have little to worry about, but Skirmish would definitely suffer.
Edited by General ZoddEven without new releases it would be possible to have an evolving meta through "valid tournament product" rotation. The biggest issue would be gradually losing FFG organized play support due to they having no income to compensate for it.
So, a steady pace would be preferable to no new releases.
As for the campaign: I have played 100+ missions, and not even played all core box missions yet (although several missions twice or even three times - mainly due to running two Bespin Gambit extended minicampaigns). So, one box with a campaign per year would be ideal for me.
I have wanted to play campaign for a while and recently picked up a second hand collection when I heard the rumor of the app. I play X-Wing and Armada and I was hoping Legion was going to be the same "scales", but when I saw that Legion is slightly larger than IA, I am not interested. I would play it if it was smaller scale and allowed for larger armies similar to Armada vs X-Wing. If IA is finished after HotE, I still have the collection, hopefully an app soon and can play forever. I do not see FFG ending any of their SW games, the license is so important and/or the LCG (also one of my favorites) would be the first candidate to be dropped since it seems to have the smallest player base and seems to be the FFG SW redheaded stepchild.
5 hours ago, General Zodd said:If you have no new releases, that meta grows stale and the game starts to become predictable. So while there are still some brave souls playing old war games (which is a moderately good analogy) like GW's Epic 40k, unless they start using house rules and tinkering with new ideas themselves that can become quite dull without new stuff to freshen up the game.
Generally at that point in the game's life cycle, which is the user-generated content community stuff you see on Boardgamegeek for instance, you're essentially looking to take it away from "optimal list building" where you'd play the same handful of things in perpetuity and gravitate towards a different way to approach the game, not unlike some sort of campaign, which is what we already have.
Skirmish will end at some point, in terms of Organized Play support, as we know it, and that's just the lifecycle of games, and licensed games in particular.
So knowing that, the question would be "should I buy into a game that I feel is 'on its way out'?" I don't think IA is on its way out in any kind of official way, but if it were, and assuming they make good on that app before the end arrives, then there's plenty of game left to play.
Tournament games will come and go like this, and Star Wars is a crowded place if you want to go to "all the events" and still manage a reasonable professional and personal life outside of that, so people will make choices. You'll have to be your own advocate for IA if you're sitting around desperate to get your Skirmish on and not having any takers locally.
yeah i will wait for a price drop of it
On 9/17/2017 at 10:40 PM, MarekMandalore said:I'd been curious about Imperial Assault, but I didn't really decide to take the plunge and buy in until recently. (I'd dismissed skirmish out of hand, since I already have TONS of old Wizards of the Coast Star Wars minis, stats and maps that I can have Star Wars skirmishes with, but as I look at it more, I am even finding it has some appeal.)
Welcome!
Thats fairly similar to my group. We started with one guy getting a core set for campaign play. We'd play a casual skirmish when some guys weren't able to make it to campaign night and then we just really got into skirmish. Tournaments are fun and are usually pretty well attended in our home city.
If you do ever start getting serious into skirmish, there's a ton of threads on here for making a competitive list on a budget. There are some other great resources for building skirmish lists like http://ia-armies.com/ or http://tabletopadmiral.com/imperialassault/ . Also, Vassal is a great resource for trying out some content before you buy it.