Suggested mechanic for the next expansion

By machfalcon, in Imperial Assault Campaign

Posted at

This has probably been suggested by someone else already but after playing through a mission last night for the sixth time, I was thinking about one of the drawbacks of the way Imperial Assault campaigns are designed and balanced. Primarily, what I was thinking about was the use of hidden information. There are some great positives to the way the triggers and events occur and the look on your Rebel players faces the first time they see certain reserved groups get dropped onto the board, however, replayability of such missions is somewhat lacking. Granted, there are certain missions that allow the IP to choose from a set of options which can help alleviate this but only to a point (and yes, different IP class decks and different heroes can greatly change the way a mission is played from one time to the next).

Suggested mechanic for the next big box campaign: Add an event deck or multiple event decks.

There are a few ways this can work:

  • Replace the events that happen when triggers occur with an event deck that can add a random element to the mission. Instead of deploying group X or some other effect, draw from the deck and either put the card into play (ongoing effect) and/or deploy a group based on the drawn event card.
  • Have a mission level event deck where an effect is drawn at the beginning of each story mission and is in effect for that mission.
  • Have a Rebel and Imperial deck (similar to boons and banes from RTH) that can be drawn from either per mission or as a result of a mission trigger.

Of course this can be mixed with the use of hidden information but some increased level of randomness in IA campaign missions would certainly increase the replay value of a given campaign. Who knows, maybe this is what is planned for the IA app missions already? I guess we'll have to wait to find out!

Would appreciate any thoughts or comments regarding this idea. For the creative folks out there who like creating custom campaigns, it would be an interesting twist to consider.

Posted at
2 minutes ago, machfalcon said:

This has probably been suggested by someone else already but after playing through a mission last night for the sixth time, I was thinking about one of the drawbacks of the way Imperial Assault campaigns are designed and balanced. Primarily, what I was thinking about was the use of hidden information. There are some great positives to the way the triggers and events occur and the look on your Rebel players faces the first time they see certain reserved groups get dropped onto the board, however, replayability of such missions is somewhat lacking. Granted, there are certain missions that allow the IP to choose from a set of options which can help alleviate this but only to a point (and yes, different IP class decks and different heroes can greatly change the way a mission is played from one time to the next).

Suggested mechanic for the next big box campaign: Add an event deck or multiple event decks.

There are a few ways this can work:

  • Replace the events that happen when triggers occur with an event deck that can add a random element to the mission. Instead of deploying group X or some other effect, draw from the deck and either put the card into play (ongoing effect) and/or deploy a group based on the drawn event card.
  • Have a mission level event deck where an effect is drawn at the beginning of each story mission and is in effect for that mission.
  • Have a Rebel and Imperial deck (similar to boons and banes from RTH) that can be drawn from either per mission or as a result of a mission trigger.

Of course this can be mixed with the use of hidden information but some increased level of randomness in IA campaign missions would certainly increase the replay value of a given campaign. Who knows, maybe this is what is planned for the IA app missions already? I guess we'll have to wait to find out!

Would appreciate any thoughts or comments regarding this idea. For the creative folks out there who like creating custom campaigns, it would be an interesting twist to consider.

I'd always assumed this is exactly what the app would do. I think the Descent app functions in a very similar way.

Posted at

Slightly related, but there is one mission in RtH that, rather than being totally random or completely scripted, grants the Imp player a little more creative freedom for mission triggers.

In The Last Line, the Imperial player organizes the three reinforcement groups out of any number of deployment cards into three different groups- each between 6 and 10 threat for a total of no more than 24 threat.

This allows the Imp player to bring in almost whatever they'd like, tailored to the specific mission, and the Rebels at least won't know entirely what is coming in.

It also doesn't sacrifice any balance- well, at least as much as the existence of open groups themselves already do.

So yeah, I guess the only issue I might see is with randomness and balance. Maybe we can do something like the Objective cards in Rebellion, or the Mythos cards in Eldritch Horror- make tiers. Each tier could represent a severity or type of outcome. That way, if a tier III event is triggered, the Rebels can expect something relatively bad will happen, but they don't know exactly what.

The other potential issue I see is flavor. In the current campaigns, we see flavor text pretty often. For instance, we might read "An explosion rattles the hallway as more troopers pour inside, reinforcing the Imperial ranks". Then, we'd be instructed to deploy a rStormtrooper point to the blue point.

With random stuff, what could the flavor be? If the events range from "Imperial player chooses one door to re-close" to "Imperial player deploys deployment groups equal to 8 threat to the blue point" and everything in between, we can only read "You look up and notice that something bad has happened to the Rebels" so many times before it becomes a bit redundant.

Not to be overly negative- I love the idea of random events making for a more replayable campaign, and I see this issues as obstacles to be overcome rather than hard stops.

Posted at
10 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

In The Last Line, the Imperial player organizes the three reinforcement groups out of any number of deployment cards into three different groups- each between 6 and 10 threat for a total of no more than 24 threat.

This allows the Imp player to bring in almost whatever they'd like, tailored to the specific mission, and the Rebels at least won't know entirely what is coming in.

Ok, that sounds awesome. I've played RTH twice but I've only played that mission from the side of the Rebels and when I played RTH last time as the IP, we played Disaster instead (I think that's the other mission). I am currently playing through a RTH campaign... I need to make this mission happen!!

Edited by machfalcon
spoiler tags making my life difficult today
Posted at
18 minutes ago, machfalcon said:

Ok, that sounds awesome. I've played RTH twice but I've only played that mission from the side of the Rebels and when I played RTH last time as the IP, we played Disaster instead (I think that's the other mission). I am currently playing through a RTH campaign... I need to make this mission happen!!

It's definitely a fun one. In fact, the last two missions of our campaign are, I think, my group's definitive favorite two missions we've ever played.