After playing one full campaign for Corellian Conflict, I took notes on things and tried to inject a little more fun into the game. Here's what I developed with some explanations on things if I feel I need to add some in. We're currently playing with 5 players a side in case you're wondering. Enjoy, @Mikael Hasselstein

1. Initial fleet composition is 300 points

a. Each ship may have a single upgrade.

b. No unique squadrons or upgrades.

c. Admirals are not mandatory at the 300point fleet phase. By the time 400 points has been reached, an admiral must be included in the fleet.

Thoughts: In the original Corellian Conflict, the game shot up from 400 to 500 far too quickly. I wanted to promote more of an escalation to the game and allow people to not have 4/5 of their fleet essentially locked in prior to the start of the game. It does make round 1 fleets mostly big ships and 3-5 squadrons.

2. Setup

a. Base and outpost selection is as follows:

i. Imperials – Corellia

ii. Imperials – Base 1

iii. Rebels – select two places to have presence (combination of base or outpost)

iv. Imperials – Base 2

v. Rebels – two more places to have presence

vi. Imperials – Base 3

vii. Rebels – Two more places to have presence

3. Round 1 rules

a. Base and outpost assaults are not allowed round 1

Thoughts: This one might just change to "Corellia cannot be attacked round 1.

4. Bases

a. In games beyond 3v3 players, the number of bases and outposts shall be as follows:

i. Imperials may have up to 7 bases

ii. Rebels may have up to 6 outposts and 4 bases.

Thoughts: Following the CC rules, a 5 player game would take up every space on the map. The 3 player version seems sufficient and helped to foster the slow burn I wanted in the CC.

5. Management Phase

a. Fleets may use resource points to add upgrades or new ships. If a ship/squadron has earned a veteran token, it may be exchanged for the opportunity to upgrade a squadron to a unique squadron of the same type. A ship may exchange the veteran token for a unique upgrade such as a title for that ship.

i. Ex: After the first round, Jimmy’s CR90 Corvette A has earned a veteran token. During the refit phase, he decides to spend points to add the “Leia Organa” Officer upgrade to his ship. The veteran token is then discarded and he may add the card to his list.

b. Ships may not be removed from fleets, but they may be refit if needed. The point cost difference between the two must be paid if the resource costs more and points are lost if the ship resource costs less.

i. Ex: Bryan decides he wants to upgrade his GR-75 Medium Transport to a GR-75 Combat Refit. The Medium Transport costs 18 points and the Combat Refit costs 24 points. Bryan must pay 6 points to remove the medium transport from his list and add the combat refit. Dan, however, decides he does not like his Imperial Star Destroyer II and decides to field an Imperial Star Destroyer I instead. The ISD II costs 120 points and the ISD I costs 110. He does not need to pay any point cost, but he does lose the 10 points from his fleet point total for other purchases.

c. Squadron totals are tiered

i. Total <= 300: you may deploy 100 points worth of squadrons

ii. 300 < Total <= 400: you may deploy 134 points worth of squadrons

iii. 400 < Total <= 500: you may deploy 167 points worth of squadrons

6. Fleet retirement

a. In the event a player chooses to retire a fleet, they have two options. First, any player may retire a fleet at any time. All unique upgrades and squadrons used in that fleet are now unavailable to other players for the rest of the campaign. The player may build a new fleet with the initial list building rules.

b. If a player loses over 50% of the total fleet cost in one battle, they may instead use the average fleet cost of all other players to rebuild a fleet utilizing the initial fleet composition rules for the next round. Average fleet total is always rounded down.

i. Ex: Matt decides to go down in a blaze of glory and attacks Steve with a fleet of scarred ships. During the battle, his 400 point fleet loses 230 points of ships and upgrades, leaving him with a very crippled fleet for the next round. He decides to retire the fleet and takes the average fleet totals instead (400, 440, 390, 375, and 398) and builds a new fleet at 400 points.

Thoughts: The goal is to prevent list retirement abuse, but also to allow a player who got hit hard to jump back into the game. It also makes the option of spending all the refit points on upgrades and ships, then attack as aggressively as possible to do damage to the opponent. This was not something we saw in the original CC.

7. Scenario specific rules

a. During the Hyperlane Raid scenario, Imperial fleets must leave the deployment zone. Any Imperial ship that does not do so is considered destroyed when determining the victor for point totals. These ships are not scarred, however.

8. Retreating

a. Players may elect to retreat the remains of their fleet starting at round 4 of a battle. At the beginning of the round, the player discards their command dial and declares they will be jumping into hyperspace. Squadrons engaged with enemy squadrons will not be able to flee and are considered destroyed and scarred. All unengaged squadrons are able to flee as normal.

b. A ship or squadron under the effect of Rieekan’s ability are still considered scarred if they would be destroyed at the end of the round, even if the ship is declared to be retreating into hyperspace.

9. Some of the resources available on planets have the following rules:

Thoughts: In the Original CC, the only planet resource anyone cared about was the shipyards. I decided that giving the other bonuses a secondary effect might make people consider using them. Surprisingly, people have gone out of their way to gather these other bonuses this game rather than just go for high resource and shipyard locations.

a. Diplomat

i. You may spend a diplomat token to designate locations as “off limits” to attacks.

ii. You may spend a diplomat token to gather support, allowing a single player to earn one unique upgrade for a ship or change a generic squadron into a unique squadron.

b. Spynet

i. Discarding a spynet token allows a player to redeploy one ship or two squadrons after fleets have been deployed.

ii. A spynet token can also be used to remove one of the three base assault options from a defending player.

1. Ex: Stuart declares an assault on Corellia. The defender, Jay, may select one of three special scenarios. Stuart uses a spynet token to remove the Armed Station from the objectives Jay may use so he must pick either Fighter Wing or Ion Cannon.

c. Skilled Spacer

i. As a second player in a conflict, you may discard a skilled spacer token to exchange one objective of the three available objectives

ii. After deployment, discarding a skilled spacer token allows the player to move one objective token on the battlefield distance 1-2 from the current location.

10. Victory Conditions

a. At the end of each round, points are awarded for victories and the first team to reach 16 points will be declared the victor.

b. After a team has won 10 victory points, either team may declare a “tactical assault” (read: All-out Assault). There will be two battles, a 3v3 battle and a 2v2 battle.

i. The winner of the 3v3 battle will earn 4 victory points.

ii. The winner of the 2v2 battle will earn 2 victory points.

Thoughts: The All-out-Assault in CC made the entire rest of the campaign largely worthless. Instead, you could boil down the game into one massive 3v3 game and call it. So instead, I thought giving the games point values means it's not always the inevitable conclusion to a CC campaign. Again, we have 5 players, I have 3 kids at home, and didn't want to play for 30 hours, so I split it from a 5v5 to a 3v3 and 2v2. Do what works for you.

11. Additional Rules

a. Hondo Onaka is unique for both factions. Only one Rebel OR one Imperial player may use that upgrade card.

I'm sure more will be added as I refine the rules. CC is a great way to play Star Wars Armada. I'm more than happy to clarify anything.

Additional Considerations:

I've been thinking about adding in that fleets may only have squadrons equal to the total squadron value of all ships. This wouldn't change too much, but it would be a lot harder to go with a 16 TIE Fighter list. It promotes quality over quantity. Might try it for CC3.

Interesting... I have been having thoughts about similar small tweaks since the preview articles for CC came out. Lately, I've been considering the idea of using the "Task Force" format to add players beyond 3 per side, or as a "prologue" mode...

We found starting at 300 resulted in blowouts. It was too easy for individuals to pull too far ahead. Once a player gets up early, they get set against the weakest fleets and run them into the ground.

We settled on setting them to 400 at the start but reducing the amount of resources gained.

7 minutes ago, Church14 said:

We found starting at 300 resulted in blowouts. It was too easy for individuals to pull too far ahead. Once a player gets up early, they get set against the weakest fleets and run them into the ground.

We settled on setting them to 400 at the start but reducing the amount of resources gained.

I could see that. Did you have the "return to the battle with the average fleet cost" incorporated in your rules? Having 5 players also helps to reduce the amount of resource points each round. I'll be surprised if anyone makes it to 500 before the last two rounds of the campaign.

I've played in a 300-point campaign and now I'm in a 250-point campaign. They've worked well and it was fun to see our fleets really change over time. Here's what I used to prevent the match-up problem when playing with smaller starting fleets:

To minimize "blow outs" vs a larger fleet, limit the maximum fleet size on any given turn.

For example, if you start at 300 points on turn 1, then on turn 2 fleets can be a maximum of 350 points (regardless of how many resources a player has available to spend — all extra points are automatically banked). On turn 3, fleets can go up to 400 points. You can also alter the number of points a player receives when rebuilding a retired fleet so you can maintain a constant 50-100 point discrepancy (or whatever you wish) between existing fleets and newly created ones.

This keeps your match-ups relatively balanced. And while it may seem like it favors teams that aren't making as many resources, the forced banking of resources does give that team's fleets more long-term resilience as they'll have cash on hand to repair their ships (or a little something extra saved up in case 1 of their bases/outposts is destroyed).

I would also suggest removing special assault from your campaign entirely, or at least prohibiting them on turn 1 (along with all base and/or outpost assaults). This has really improved my second campaign experience.

A quick follow-up regarding Commanders with smaller fleets:

I think you should have players start with their Commanders.

Why? Because it makes for better storytelling and creates memorable rivalries right off the bat. No one cares about beating a faceless villain, but everybody loves to hate (and fear) a charismatic bad guy!

In addition, A good campaign will quickly take on a narrative life of its own that makes it greater than the sum of its parts. When each player's fleet has a name and face behind it — represented by their chosen Commander — it makes your battles and the unfolding story so much more personal.

Looking back on the Star Wars movies, if we hadn't seen Admiral Ackbar swiveling around in his command chair leading the Rebel fleet at the Battle of Endor, or Admiral Raddus charging into Scarif, would we really care as much about what happens to those faceless Rebel ships? Probably not. Star Wars isn't just about the cool-looking ships and fighters, it's about the characters, their bravery and the actions they choose during epic battles that make for great storytelling.

In this way, a CC Campaign is far different than playing standalone games. Fleets don't have to be optimized or perfectly balanced like you might find in a tournament, especially at the beginning of a campaign, in order to be fun.

I know it seems like it would be difficult to include a Commander at 300 points, but it's definitely doable, and not just the cheap Commanders either. In my 300-point campaign we had Vader, Motti and Screed vs Ackbar, Sato and Mon Mothma, which are some of the more expensive Commanders you can take. Our Fleet builds weren't crippled by any means (it just meant you had to make some tough choices at the start), and we had some real slugfests even on turn 1.

For my 250-point campaign, I ruled that you couldn't take any large ships. For this campaign we have Vader, Motti and Ozzel vs Leia, Ackbar and Dodonna. That's right, we've got Vader, Ackbar and Leia with 250-point fleets! Not allowing the big ships has made for some really interesting fleet builds. I also restricted our turn-1 squadron choices to X-Wings (with Luke) and TIE Fighters (with Howlrunner). Each turn more squadrons become available — similar to how the movies reveal new fighters — as we build up to our 400-point fleet maximum.

In other words, feel free to mess around with the fleet-building rules for your campaign to help break your players out of their one-off game mindsets. You may be surprised by what people take, which in turn keeps the game fresh and exciting.

And speaking of building a campaign narrative with your Commanders and the results of your match-ups, here's a good example:

By starting with both Vader and Leia in my 250-point campaign, I decided that they would be the focus of this "Corellian Conflict". Lord Vader has been tasked by the Emperor to turn Leia to the Dark Side. He seeks to capture her alive and bring her back to Coruscant where she can be turned. For Leia's part, she's trying to free political prisoners from the scores of forced labor camps located in the Corellian sector while at the same time evading her father. It was only fitting, then, that our very first battle was Vader vs Leia and it ended up in a draw (156-154) with every ship on the table destroyed but the 2 flagships!

13 hours ago, Yipe said:

For example, if you start at 300 points on turn 1, then on turn 2 fleets can be a maximum of 350 points (regardless of how many resources a player has available to spend — all extra points are automatically banked). On turn 3, fleets can go up to 400 points. You can also alter the number of points a player receives when rebuilding a retired fleet so you can maintain a constant 50-100 point discrepancy (or whatever you wish) between existing fleets and newly created ones.

I'll be surprised if anyone's getting to 350 on round 2. I think we ran the numbers and if you get a perfect "Show of Force" you're still looking at about 45 points per player at 5 players.

As for the required commanders, it was a concession I made with some of the players who felt it was too difficult to build a workable fleet at 300 points. I was able to fly Vader, 2 ISDs and 3 TIE Fighters no problem in my 300 point fleet, so I might make it a requirement for CC3.

I'll take the time to review this more thoroughly later. At first blush, I really like these amendments.

Regarding the 300->500 point growth scheme (instead of 400->500), I agree that it allows more of that fun development stage. Does it create a slippery slope, however? Do people have an early edge, gain a nearly undefeatable edge?

8 minutes ago, Mikael Hasselstein said:

I'll take the time to review this more thoroughly later. At first blush, I really like these amendments.

Regarding the 300->500 point growth scheme (instead of 400->500), I agree that it allows more of that fun development stage. Does it create a slippery slope, however? Do people have an early edge, gain a nearly undefeatable edge?

I've not had time to test it for 2v2 or 3v3. In a 5v5 match, you're only gaining about 30 points a round so it's quite likely people will never make it to 500 points.

I did create the pressure relief valve where if someone has been utterly crushed (we had a guy get tabled) so he has the option of taking the average fleet value next round if he retires the fleet so long as he loses 50% or more of his fleet in the next battle. The goal is for that player to go into the next round having bought as many ships and upgrades as possible to go for a suicide run then return to the battle with a fleet that's point value is right in the middle of what everyone else is having. We'll see how this works.

Edit: We had a situation in the original CC where a player was tabled in round 2 or 3 and never was able to recover. He eventually retired his fleet and went into the final round having barely over 400 points worth of stuff against all 500 point fleets.

Thanks for all the feedback. Feel free to test these out and keep it coming in. I am pretty busy so I can't playtest every scenario, so any insight helps to refine the rules to work for everyone.

5 hours ago, ricefrisbeetreats said:

I'll be surprised if anyone's getting to 350 on round 2. I think we ran the numbers and if you get a perfect "Show of Force" you're still looking at about 45 points per player at 5 players.

Interesting. Checking my numbers from my first campaign (300-point fleets, 3v3), on turn 1 the Imperials earned 81 resources each and the Rebels 41. That was after a perfect Show of Force. On turn 2 the Imperials ran Show of Force again, but it wasn't perfect this time. They had built a base on the first turn though, so still earned a respectable 80 resource points per player. The Rebels gained 51.

For my second campaign (250-point fleets, 3v3, no special assaults allowed), on turn 1 Team Empire brought in 53 resources to the Rebels' 58 (with each team earning 45 refit points). I capped our turn-2 fleets at 300 points which, as you can see, everyone can hit (barring money spent on scarred units).

To answer Mikael's question about the slippery slope, I think if you allow fleets to grow unfettered from 300 to 500 points, then yes you may run into problems. However, putting a fleet cap per turn prevents this from happening. On the downside, it does restrict making a big ship purchase. I used 50-point increments, but I could see 75 if you wanted your players to be able to afford a VSD or AFMK II all in a single turn.

Of course, keeping it at a 50-point max does add another layer of strategy that forces your players to decider whether they should make small purchases now or hold off for 1 turn in order to make a much larger purchase later. And in my book, anything that creates choice is a good thing for a campaign.

We are playing CC, with 4x guys on each team. This means that the resource points the team earns, in every round is divided by four instead of three, making it a bit harder for players to reach 500 points.

We still play 3 games per round. Which allows one player on each team to recover a bit from very bad losses, but as the Resource points is divided by four and he cannot skip a round twice, its not overpowered alot he gets, before he has to play another game round.

The experience I have with this system is, that I'm speculating that a 5x man team on each side, could work. And that it opens up the posibility to play with 5x games per round, so the side with fewest Campaign points still have the advantage of attacking 3 systems, while the opposing side can only attack 2 systems.

But as the number of bases and and outposts from the begining of the Campaign is the same as a three man per team Campaign, the resorce points, will be even fewer to around with, when its divided by 5, this will by large prevent anyone from having a +450 point fleet in the beginning of round 2.

2 hours ago, Kiwi Rat said:

We are playing CC, with 4x guys on each team. This means that the resource points the team earns, in every round is divided by four instead of three, making it a bit harder for players to reach 500 points.

We still play 3 games per round. Which allows one player on each team to recover a bit from very bad losses, but as the Resource points is divided by four and he cannot skip a round twice, its not overpowered alot he gets, before he has to play another game round.

If I was playing another CC this is probably how I would do it.

I really like your 4x4 team idea, Kiwi Rat. The forced player rotation each round adds yet another layer of long-term strategic complexity to the campaign. I also had this idea for a 4x4 campaign's All Out Offensive:

Instead of all 8 players battling simultaneously, you have 2 matches of 2x2 each. If 1 team wins both matches, they win the campaign. If the results are split, the winning pairs from each game then face each other for a winner-take-all battle.

This acts similar to a cut in a tournament, and gives a down-and-out team another chance to make a comeback. The biggest benefit, however, is to make the AOO a reasonable game to play. I've yet to play an AOO, but I here they take an entire day to finish which can be difficult to schedule. Breaking up the AOO into 2 games of 4 players each makes it more manageable while still feeling epic.

In this case, I might even start teams at 400 points and put the fleet cap at 600 points!

17 hours ago, Kiwi Rat said:

We are playing CC, with 4x guys on each team. This means that the resource points the team earns, in every round is divided by four instead of three, making it a bit harder for players to reach 500 points.

We still play 3 games per round. Which allows one player on each team to recover a bit from very bad losses, but as the Resource points is divided by four and he cannot skip a round twice, its not overpowered alot he gets, before he has to play another game round.

The experience I have with this system is, that I'm speculating that a 5x man team on each side, could work. And that it opens up the posibility to play with 5x games per round, so the side with fewest Campaign points still have the advantage of attacking 3 systems, while the opposing side can only attack 2 systems.

But as the number of bases and and outposts from the begining of the Campaign is the same as a three man per team Campaign, the resorce points, will be even fewer to around with, when its divided by 5, this will by large prevent anyone from having a +450 point fleet in the beginning of round 2.

Yeah, I think the game works best when there's an odd number of players on each side. I'll have to consider the idea of only 3 attacks a round. The big focus for this campaign I'm running now was to bring in people who haven't played much. I wanted to get as many people playing as often as possible.

In the second brief installment of my review, I have to say that I really like the no unique squadrons and upgrades rule. It allows for a slow growth into special-ness, rather than creating inflation/devaluation of special/unique items and persons. Of course, that also means that the uniques have a target on their back (or forehead) from the moment they enter the game.

But I'm okay with that. :-)

4 hours ago, Mikael Hasselstein said:

In the second brief installment of my review, I have to say that I really like the no unique squadrons and upgrades rule. It allows for a slow growth into special-ness, rather than creating inflation/devaluation of special/unique items and persons. Of course, that also means that the uniques have a target on their back (or forehead) from the moment they enter the game.

But I'm okay with that. :-)

What I like about the no unique idea was that it allows for more story progession. Who was that X-Wing that took out the ISD? Oh, why that's Wedge Antilles.

"We've decided to use our diplomatic connections to aid us in our fight against the Empire. Toryn Farr will be helping us in this conflict."

It's still pretty easy to get uniques with the diplomat space, but that means reducing the resources available to you. I like the idea of unnamed pilots making a name for themselves before they become the heroes we know.

22 hours ago, ricefrisbeetreats said:

What I like about the no unique idea was that it allows for more story progession. Who was that X-Wing that took out the ISD? Oh, why that's Wedge Antilles.

"We've decided to use our diplomatic connections to aid us in our fight against the Empire. Toryn Farr will be helping us in this conflict."

It's still pretty easy to get uniques with the diplomat space, but that means reducing the resources available to you. I like the idea of unnamed pilots making a name for themselves before they become the heroes we know.

Taking inspiration from the old PC Rebellion game, one could make event cards (Or use the unique Sqd cards themselves), that is drawn at the end of each round, where one could say, "You have Recruited Wedge Antilles"

Thereby you can unlock Unique sqds progressively.

And event/Unique squad cards could be drawn, based on how many Campaign points one side has earned per round.

In the third brief installment of my review, I also like what you've done with the diplomats, spynets, and skilled spacers. I agree that they are underwhelming compared to shipyards. Adding a power to each of them sounds about right.

Regarding the 'All-out' option, that seems to be wise. My first campaign ended in an All-Out Offensive, in which we - the Empire - nearly won by points, even though we were coming from very far behind. But, we were at the store from open 'till close (10 hours) and were able to get through 5 out of the 7 turns. While it was an awesome game, it was just too much. 5v5 would be a nightmare.

On 31/10/2017 at 6:09 PM, ricefrisbeetreats said:

b. Ships may not be removed from fleets, but they may be refit if needed. The point cost difference between the two must be paid if the resource costs more and points are lost if the ship resource costs less.

i. Ex: Bryan decides he wants to upgrade his GR-75 Medium Transport to a GR-75 Combat Refit. The Medium Transport costs 18 points and the Combat Refit costs 24 points. Bryan must pay 6 points to remove the medium transport from his list and add the combat refit. Dan, however, decides he does not like his Imperial Star Destroyer II and decides to field an Imperial Star Destroyer I instead. The ISD II costs 120 points and the ISD I costs 110. He does not need to pay any point cost, but he does lose the 10 points from his fleet point total for other purchases.

Just finished our first round and we’ve been discussing whether we could do this. How have you found it? Any pitfalls?

1 minute ago, Sasajak said:

Just finished our first round and we’ve been discussing whether we could do this. How have you found it? Any pitfalls?

This rule or the entire set of rules? I’m still planning on a post-mortem, but I like it so far.

This rule came up once to go ISD1 to ISD2. It really helps when you’re starting at 300pts.

Just now, ricefrisbeetreats said:

This rule or the entire set of rules? I’m still planning on a post-mortem, but I like it so far.

This rule came up once to go ISD1 to ISD2. It really helps when you’re starting at 300pts.

Just that rule in particular. We’d been discussing refits to different versions of ship as a way making our fleets more flexible. I’m glad we’re not the only ones thinking that way!

Most of my group had their end fleet already planned out, but it’s nice to be able to make small changes on the fly.