So I picked up the CC boxed set as sort of an impulse buy, and now I'm wondering what are the good and bad parts of the campaign?

It seems to have a nice, simple way of keeping permanence with scars and veteran status, but overall I'm just not sure about it. Can I get the thoughts of some folks who've been through it once or twice? I'd do a forum search but for some reason it's throwing up "request cannot be satisfied" errors, whatever that means.

Basically - its basic.

Its a nice quick easy framework. It provides a little tricky choice in building, and certainly a sense of impending doom when things go really wrong.

I think with the FAQ and Changes, it feels a lot better... But I'll be satisfied when the Rebels get their Experimental Retrofit slot and I can stop ISDs from Running Away.

3 things:

1: There must be an odd number of fleets above 1 for both sides. 3v3, 5v5, whatever. Without this, it is not physically possible to regain a lead in VPs or in critical resources without the opposing team effectively conceding.

2: Whenever possible, teams should be sorted based on skill more than on fleet collection. Two friends can swap fleets for a few days and have fun, but 3 casual players vs 3 competitive players is going to be a frustrating mess for the first team.

3: Encourage players on both sides to hyperspace out, especially for large ships. One of the most common ways players are forced to retire a fleet is because they weren't willing to jump a large ship out when they could and it was inevitably destroyed. Jumping out of a bad situation is how you keep a bad game from becoming an un-fun campaign.

4*: No assaults on bases or presences during turn 1. A loss of a base or presence on the first turn can effectively lose the campaign immediately. No fun for anyone in this situation.

5*: Consider a hard cap on saved points. It's possible to save points between rounds, which allows players to save points to buy a new ship or repair squadrons after losing a space station on the map. A player who is already outclassing their opponents will become unstoppable once they are unable to permanently lose ships and squadrons.

I found it fun, but my group never finished... I advise after getting a group to have a set time to play matches like once a week or month etc.

It would be nice to have those big balance fixes that were community driven come back to the forefront. Things that make it so that the campaign doesn't snowball. Sadly, as many have noticed, often (not ALL the time dangit) teams are mismatched in skill. Also, think about this. Its pretty horrible to spend 2 hours losing. Imagine spending 6-8 hours losing, and then not finishing the campaign at all cuz its obvious who's losing.

Yeah, we found it fun to try out, but ultimately shelved it because of all the reasons listed above.

Snowball effect is the worst. We were playing 2 player, so 2 fleets each. If one player won the first two rounds, this was effectively game over. The losing player had a mountain to climb and subsequent battles were simply not that fun with scarred ships.

Scarring, whilst a neat idea, simply didn't work for us. We had battles where we actively tried to avoid each other to avoid the risk of losing scarred ships. Gaming nights are precious and who wants to play armada where there's no fighting?

We have this going currently, with some more changes next go-round (no large ships turn 1, no large ships for inducement, can only build on territory if attacker (due to new win conditions), and we are going to tweak ion base defense to put it in line with the other 2... either only usable on +2 systems, or at least have them placed before fleet deployments.

CConflict_rules-current.rtf

We failed twice due to snowballing. Taking corellia turn1 in the first try, winning all the ressource missions turn 1 and 2 in the second try. I would not allow base assault turn1. And ressource missions maybe as well. A team can still mess up by not realising the importance of repair yerds and picking none, giving the other team 5 or 6 from turn one (we had that too).

I would try the following next time:

Scarred ships are not destroyed, they just stay scarred (so they lose a defense token). Maybe allow double scarring (lose 2 def tokens, lose an attack die for squadrons, something like that). But no destruction. Maybe remove veteran if scarred.

The veterans are really fun, but we had beginners that never got veterans. Let the losers in turn 1 have a veteran if nothing became veteran. Roll a die or pick the squadron/ship that dealt the most damage no matter if it survived or something like that. Or the flagship.

This keeps players in the game, getting goodies, and still punishes losing ships, but not to the point that a player wants to drop out. Hyperspacing out is mute though, but it was just creating stale games anyway.

The original rules are "hard mode". For dark souls players or other masochists.

Some things we've been tossing around for the next Corellian Conflict campaign:

start at 300 instead of 400 points, you don't need an admiral until you reach 400.

Unique squadrons require spending a veteran token or a diplomat token.

A fleet can only be retired if a set percentage (we were going to try 50%) of the fleet is lost in one match. At that point, the player returns with the average of the other player's fleet points.

Imperials can only attack planets adjacent to ones they have control of. Might create a new "controlled" token or something to indicate they won battles there and can use that planet to go further out to attack. This helps to balance the ease of "Show of Force".

Just a few ideas we've been tossing around.

9 hours ago, thecactusman17 said:

1: There must be an odd number of fleets above 1 for both sides. 3v3, 5v5, whatever. Without this, it is not physically possible to regain a lead in VPs or in critical resources without the opposing team effectively conceding.

2: Whenever possible, teams should be sorted based on skill more than on fleet collection. Two friends can swap fleets for a few days and have fun, but 3 casual players vs 3 competitive players is going to be a frustrating mess for the first team.

3: Encourage players on both sides to hyperspace out, especially for large ships. One of the most common ways players are forced to retire a fleet is because they weren't willing to jump a large ship out when they could and it was inevitably destroyed. Jumping out of a bad situation is how you keep a bad game from becoming an un-fun campaign.

I highly recommend these.