So, every droid a person builds has two steps: build the body, build the brain. If I was building a Mouse Droid Milion Army (okay, an army of 5 we'll say), build a body, increase the minion group by one - that makes sense. But when it comes time to install the brain, in theory for each minion I wind up building (assuming the roll comes out with the right number of advantages), I could install another general skill. Roll enough times, and I'd wind up with bunch of minions with every skill under the sun.

That seems a bit unbalancing.

Or is it when you increase the minion group, would you go with just adding the body and skip the programming step assuming it's just part of a hive mind?

Minions are supposed to be deployed in groups of minions that share the same stats.

Yeah, but can you buy Broad Utility on the new minion when adding him to the current group, increasing their available skills by one?

I do not think that this is how it works.

For one, you have one minion with that skill... it would really not matter how many minions you add without that skill, the pool would not change.

...and that is, for second, part of why you only add minions to groups that share the same stats.

Minion groups are ment to make things easier to manage (and in most cases for the GM), not to optimise the pools or resources of anyone. If you want to have every minion in a group to use different stats, then sorry, it would appear, that you are not quite getting the concept of minion groups.

1 hour ago, Desslok said:

Yeah, but can you buy Broad Utility on the new minion when adding him to the current group, increasing their available skills by one?

They dont have the same stats then.

The answer any time there is a hole in the rules you can exploit, the proper answer is 'No you cant do that'

I do think it's a bit of a weird spot in the rules; as written, you'd need to get identical rolls on each minion droid you get to be able to group them; if there's any difference in stats, they're not viable minion groups. That makes building minion droid groups pretty tough.

2 hours ago, Desslok said:

So, every droid a person builds has two steps: build the body, build the brain. If I was building a Mouse Droid Milion Army (okay, an army of 5 we'll say), build a body, increase the minion group by one - that makes sense. But when it comes time to install the brain, in theory for each minion I wind up building (assuming the roll comes out with the right number of advantages), I could install another general skill. Roll enough times, and I'd wind up with bunch of minions with every skill under the sun.

That seems a bit unbalancing.

Or is it when you increase the minion group, would you go with just adding the body and skip the programming step assuming it's just part of a hive mind?

All of them would need to have the same Skill installed in order to group up be able to upgrade the roll on a particular Skill.

13 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

I do think it's a bit of a weird spot in the rules; as written, you'd need to get identical rolls on each minion droid you get to be able to group them; if there's any difference in stats, they're not viable minion groups. That makes building minion droid groups pretty tough.

Isnt one of the options for advantage basically you made a schematic that makes the next try at building a simple roll? Plus, there is not law saying you have to spend advantage.

I would think that if for the first minion you roll 8 advantage and then spend it all, making all the rest of the minions the same would be pretty tough. There are EotE minions, not Despicable Me Minions

On 12.11.2017 at 3:46 AM, Desslok said:

Yeah, but can you buy Broad Utility on the new minion when adding him to the current group, increasing their available skills by one?

No, they would need all the same broad utility to count as the same minon group. Now you could (imho) certainly have a for example a mono-task group of 6 wack-repair droids, with 3 of them having broad utility for something and three others for something else. And thus allowing to split the minion group on occasions into two groups with different skill sets. That would fit imho still the theme of minions. What you can not do is use skills which are not part of the skill set of every member of the group. And if we are pedantic, you could not even form a minion group with non-identical minions, but imho that would be just pedantic and annoying. ;-)

edit:

Furthermore, you are building a proper droid army if you are using assassination directives on mono-task chassis and hide them in your army of utility droids. Hidden weapons for best for that, and if you give them the leadership skill, they could even form a squad out of the repair droids and use them as meat-shields AND additional attacks. Cheap, efficient, diabolic. And part of our ships crew, because our astromech is meaner than "C1-1OP". ;-)

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking - the way I initially thought was clearly too game breaking. Again, let common sense rule the day.

It might be easiest if we just build Mouse Droid Prime, give him all the perks and bennies and then just handwave away the construction rolls for the MSE Bravo, MSE Charlie and MSE Delta. I'll talk to the others of the group and show 'em your guys' thoughts.