So my group decided to try out Imperial Assault with the release of the app, not having played any other IA mode or similar FFG game before. Despite a lot of mistakes, we made it through the first two campaign missions only to lose missions 3 & 4 while just 1 activation from victory in each case because the final Imperial activation caused the last healthy hero's card to be flipped to the wounded side, triggering the app to end the mission in an immediate failure. This feels really arbitrary and has resulted in a hugely negative play experience. Yes, the party was beaten up after a hard hour+ of play, but we were still making progress, and, like I said before, victory was imminent. This probably means that we won't continue on with this game past the finale of this campaign (if that), which is disappointing. I really don't understand this design decision. Why give the heroes a double health bar if they are not allowed to use it?

@AdmiralMG

The rules for ending the mission when all heroes are wounded is a design carry-over from the standard multiplayer campaign. In 90% of missions, the imperial player's win condition is to wound all enemies.

I can see, though, how this would definitely be a negative play experience if you weren't expecting it. Thinking that you're almost done the mission only for it to be suddenly ended on you would be really, really frustrating.

With that said, though, now that you do know how it works you might find that it's a little more fun than you'd previously thought. This is what adds tension to the game, and part of the strategy is learning to play around it. If you're almost done the mission but you only have one healthy hero left, you've got to hide that hero behind others and away from the imperials to try to keep them from being targeted. Or maybe use some of your medpacks to keep them alive. Since there's now a chance for you to lose, winning a mission at the last possible second with one wounded hero can feel really exciting.

Also, to answer your last question about having a double-health bar, I think the idea for that one was actually to avoid negative play experiences. The bad guys' goal is to kill all of the heroes, and a common implementation in this sort of game is for the hero to be knocked out of the game once they're dead. This wounding system allows the hero to keep playing after they've been "killed" so that they can keep on enjoying the game. And since the imperials' goal is to wound all four heroes, there's incentive for the imps to try to go after the other people once you're killed instead of knocking you down a second time and eliminating you.

It could be made more clear in the app, but at least it's said in the LotA rulebook under Wining and Losing.

To win a mission, the heroes must complete the mission's objectives. A mission may have numerous objectives, but the players are only shown the current objective. The players can review the current objective at the bottom of the Log window, which is accessed by selecting the Log button.

The players lose a mission if each hero is wounded. When a hero becomes wounded (and again if it withdraws), players need to inform the app by selecting that hero's portrait and selecting the icon to the left of the portrait.

It is also mentioned in the intro / learn to play mission.

Ah, I read that line in the rulebook, but the "wounded" vs. "withdrawn" terminology hadn't quite solidified at that point. I did a search last night but didn't find it again. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I'm still not convinced that this is an interesting design choice. The app seems to directly target the last healthy hero with most/all of its activations late in the game so the best choice is to have the last healthy character run and hide, which isn't particularly fun for the person playing that character. Also, that player gets effectively half the HP of their teamates, which makes them feel like they are contributing less to the mission.

3 hours ago, AdmiralMG said:

Ah, I read that line in the rulebook, but the "wounded" vs. "withdrawn" terminology hadn't quite solidified at that point. I did a search last night but didn't find it again. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I'm still not convinced that this is an interesting design choice. The app seems to directly target the last healthy hero with most/all of its activations late in the game so the best choice is to have the last healthy character run and hide, which isn't particularly fun for the person playing that character. Also, that player gets effectively half the HP of their teamates, which makes them feel like they are contributing less to the mission.

It's a very important design choice for the 1 vs. many style of play. In any game, you gain a significant advantage by taking out each piece of your opposition rather than dividing your damage among different enemies. For the Imperial Player, that means you have an incentive to force heroes to withdraw, which means a player is sitting out and doing nothing for the remainder of that mission. To give the Imperial player an incentive to not eliminate players, they instituted a win condition for wounding all heroes. This way, a player can still participate after his/her hero is wounded because the Imperial player is less likely to focus on that hero anymore.

With the app (which I still haven't had a chance to try out yet), that choice means nobody is sitting out during your co-op game experience.