What do you guys like to put in your open groups? I’ve just been putting storm troopers in.

I like officers but they’re too squishy. Any thoughts on elite officers?

Im running military might BTW.

It does depend quite a bit on the specific mission, threat level, and what heroes you're facing. If you're only using the core and no expansions or figure packs, some of the open groups I like to include are:

• Regular officers should not be undervalued - yes they are squishy but they are cheap which can help give you the activation advantage. Also cower can be pretty frustrating and increase your chance of the elusive Dodge.
• Regular and elite Stormtroopers - depending on what heroes you're against it can be good to have lots of small, cheap units if the heroes are good against high health targets.
• Regular Nexu - good for blocking small passageways, bleed, cunning makes them a bit more durable than normal white die figures.
• Regular probe droids - cheap and good against black dice, can help with activation advantage
• Regular Trandoshan hunters - Relentless, Scattergun, and good surge abilities make these guys pretty scary, also decent health to threat ratio.

I usually avoid:

• E-web engineers - too much threat and usually taken down easily
• Elite officers - unless I have a very hard hitting unit on the board where I can take advantage of Executive Order, they are often too expensive to justify
• AT-ST - too expensive, you have to wait too long to save up that much threat
• Core villains - also too expensive unless you're applying some house rule (I usually avoid house rules)

Situationally useful:

• Royal Guards - good health to threat ratio, good move speed, stun, and Sentinel is good for keeping things alive. Not an auto-include after the errata though (granted they were brokenly strong before)

Some rules of thumb:

• Against heroes who can deal with lots of small figures (Fenn, Verena, Vinto, heroes with decent Cleave, etc) high health figures are good
• Against heroes who can deal with high health figures (Mak, Loku, Biv, etc) swarm with low health figures.
• Attacking black dice heroes better with heavy hitters (probe droid, e-web, Focused figures, etc) to get through the higher number of block results you will probably see. Also, deployments with good surge abilities (+2 dmg, pierce 2) are effective.
• Attacking white dice heroes better off using multiple smaller attacks. Minimizes the impact of a Dodge roll. Also red dice are quite effective vs the white die which has a lot more evades on it but fewer blocks.

With Military Might, you'll always want to have some type of Stormtroopers. Assault Armor + Combat Vets is an extremely strong combination and makes your deployments very threat efficient.

Man, @machfalcon really pretty much covered it. Lots of good advice in there.

I'd just reiterate a few things-

Never underestimate how good the Nexu can be. It's cheap, big (for blocking), fast, and has a good attack and surges.

As Mach said, Elite O's are pretty situational. They're really expensive for what they are (literally only a single threat less than an entire stormtrooper group) but Executive Order can be pretty powerful.

Basically, if you're gonna take one, make it count- use ExO on a big unit like an AT-ST or Vader every single activation the Elite Officer is out. Don't squander that action on something like a Stormtrooper or anything. Also, ideally use it against a black defense die hero. As Mach said, you're not going to want to use your hard hitters on White defense die (instead, chip away with grunts), and you're definitely gonna want ExO on a hard hitter.

Also, considering how expensive the ExO can be, I generally have a rule of thumb that I don't include both him and an expensive hard hitter in open groups. I only bring him in if the hard hitter is in Initial or Reserved groups, so I get it for free.

Wow fantastic advice!

The Rebels are: Mak, Dialla, Garkaan, and Jyn

Since this is my and my group’s first campaign, we’re constantly finding out that we are missing important rules.

Today I caught this nugget in the Rules Reference:

“During a campaign, when the last Imperial figure in a non- unique group is defeated, the Deployment card is returned to the Imperial player’s hand and can be optionally deployed later in the mission.”

My officers keep getting whacked early on and I’m left without that very helpful order action. But as I read it, once he’s dead he gets recycled to my hand and I can deploy him using only 2 threat.

That’s awesome.

12 minutes ago, BlodVargarna said:

Since this is my and my group’s first campaign, we’re constantly finding out that we are missing important rules.

I would be remiss if I did not mention this thread:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1319188/what-are-some-crazy-or-common-rule-breaking-mistak

For me, the biggest mistakes I made in early campaign play were:

• When the rules say to apply threat at the end of a round, that threat is not available for the deploy/reinforce step of the status phase of that round. It's important to be aware of the order of the status phase because it can make a big difference.
• You cannot use a surge to gain a beneficial condition if the target does not suffer damage (e.g. Imperial Officer cannot use the surge to gain Focus if it does 0 damage).

First off, I agree with everything that machfalcon and subtrendy said . Machfalcon briefly mentioned the threat level, and it's probably worth expanding on that a bit.

It can be tempting to look at a great unit like the Trandoshan Hunters and think "man those look awesome, I'll bring them along to every mission!". But if you're playing one of the early missions with threat level 2 or 3 then chances are that you're not going to be able to save up the seven threat to bring them out, and even if you do it probably means that you didn't deploy much in the turns while you were saving up. You're probably better off bringing something like the 4 point regular Nexu, which is pretty cheap and can be really hard for the heroes to get rid of with their starting weapons.

On the other hand, it's probably not as good an idea to bring that Nexu near the end of the game when the threat level is 5 or 6. By that point most of the heroes will probably be strong enough to take it down in one shot, meaning that your entire 4 threat was just wasted in half an activation. In these cases you would probably be better off bringing something more beefy like the Royal Guards or bringing a bunch of regular stormtroopers that, while pretty weak individually, will take multiple actions to clear out (unless they have Fenn, Verena, etc. as mentioned above).

A good rule of thumb that I've heard is to never bring in any groups that cost more than twice the mission's threat level.

Read the mission triggers BEFORE you pick your open groups. You might realize that the mission is going to dump threat on you and if you don't have good units to deploy with it, then you might as well not have that threat.

As someone else mentioned, know the steps of the status phase. You can spawn a probe droid and immediately blow it up (I have had this win a mission for me).

Have a game plan on how you want to spend your xp. Realize that if you are saving for a 4xp, you are going to have a period of time where you are noticeably weaker. Plan on getting 11-13 xp depending on how you are doing in the missions.

21 minutes ago, MadFuhrer said:

Read the mission triggers BEFORE you pick your open groups. You might realize that the mission is going to dump threat on you and if you don't have good units to deploy with it, then you might as well not have that threat.

Agreed with this, too.

Activation advantage is always good, so putting some littler guys out there isn't always a bad strategy, but it's a silly strategy to just throw out a bunch of small stuff. You're gonna want some beefier units out there, too.

Think of it like MTG, if you're familiar. In Magic, you want to be in a position where the cards you have in your hand can scale with the amount of land that you have. A lack of mana means that you can't play your bigger cards, and a flood of it is no use if you don't have anything to spend it on.

If you are open to adding an expansion pack, I had a lot of joy with Hired Guns - they are cheap to deploy and even though they die easy, they get to attack with "parting shot", which is not to be underestimated, particularly with the +green die Military Might skill.

I can't bring in hired guns in my campaign :/ . The rebels see it as me being a super tryhard and that it is unfun to play against.

The rebels won't be taking Fenn or Diala then?

(Being tryhards themselves.)

That seems unenlightened of them. Our group thinks they are annoying but hilarious. The fact that they have -dodge is thematically great as well. They are probably the figures that have caused the most laughs on our table. R2 and one got into a feud in one game and spent several turns zapping and shooting each other while the rest of the mission continued elsewhere on the map.

1 minute ago, a1bert said:

The rebels won't be taking Fenn or Diala then?

(Being tryhards themselves.)

Sometimes they do. I respond appropriately.

Just now, udat said:

That seems unenlightened of them. Our group thinks they are annoying but hilarious. The fact that they have -dodge is thematically great as well. They are probably the figures that have caused the most laughs on our table. R2 and one got into a feud in one game and spent several turns zapping and shooting each other while the rest of the mission continued elsewhere on the map.

Hired guns can't dodge. see the ability disposable.

That's what i said "-dodge" meaning dodge is taken away from any result they roll...

woops, my bad, misread!

1 hour ago, udat said:

If you are open to adding an expansion pack, I had a lot of joy with Hired Guns - they are cheap to deploy and even though they die easy, they get to attack with "parting shot", which is not to be underestimated, particularly with the +green die Military Might skill.

Wait isn't that for Imperial figures only?

1 minute ago, TallGiraffe said:

Wait isn't that for Imperial figures only?

Any figure controlled by the Imperial Player is considered to be an Imperial Figure, even if it is a creature or bounty hunter/mercenary/etc.

Yep. In the campaign the imperial player controls both U (imperial affiliation) figures, and W (mercenary affiliation) figures, and both are imperial figures (spelled as imperial figures, not using the affiliation symbols). If an ability wants to make a difference between the affiliations, it uses the affiliation symbols.

See RRG, Imperial figures.

51 minutes ago, udat said:

Any figure controlled by the Imperial Player is considered to be an Imperial Figure, even if it is a creature or bounty hunter/mercenary/etc.

Well my HKs got a whole lot more dangerous.

41 minutes ago, TallGiraffe said:

Well my HKs got a whole lot more dangerous.

Huh, a four dice attack for a 4 threat figure. Not bad at all.

19 hours ago, udat said:

That seems unenlightened of them. Our group thinks they are annoying but hilarious. The fact that they have -dodge is thematically great as well. They are probably the figures that have caused the most laughs on our table. R2 and one got into a feud in one game and spent several turns zapping and shooting each other while the rest of the mission continued elsewhere on the map.

Agreed. I used them in Diala's side mission as one of my Open Groups (alongside Trandos and ISB Infiltrators). Each of the Open Groups had a back story to go with the mission description of "past foes": Hired Guns were a pair of brothers who tried to collect on a bounty Fenn had out on him. The ISB Infiltrators had a run in with Gideon in the past and the Trandos were a slaver team who had run afoul of Garkhaan.

I deployed the Hired Guns right away. The back story evidently was pretty accurate because they had no problems with the rest of the Rebel party but every time they tried to attack Fenn it was a debacle: not enough range, not enough damage, whatever. Every single attack was fruitless against him. It's almost like they remembered getting taken out by him and psyched themselves out when trying to attack him.

@FSD Are EISB worth it?

18 minutes ago, TallGiraffe said:

@FSD Are EISB worth it?

Dunno yet. In that mission, I never got them out and have not included them in another mission yet.

The Rebels had such a fit with the eNexu during that mission that I found it too tempting to use my threat to toss it back out again right after it was killed rather than deploy the ISB group. I told them it was completely thematic since "past foes" were rising from the mists. This was just a very recent past foe...

1 hour ago, TallGiraffe said:

@FSD Are EISB worth it?

If your white die Rebs are getting smug with multiple dodge results, bringing in something that can negate a dodge result will wipe the grin right off their faces.

58 minutes ago, juice man said:

If your white die Rebs are getting smug with multiple dodge results, bringing in something that can negate a dodge result will wipe the grin right off their faces.

That was one other reason I packed them. Diala cannot seem to roll anything but Dodge.