The Corellian Conflict.

Great fun, but a lot of us have found the same issue with it after a few rounds; the winners get fed and the losers get starved, resulting in more wins for winners and more losses for losers. The campaign concept is fantastic and thematic, but some campaigns have been resolved as early as 3 rounds in when the writing is on the wall.

Brainstorm:

• Your best ideas to balance the campaign.
• The simplest way to keep it thematic and rewarding while both opponents always have the same points available at the fleet building stage.

I'd like to run another campaign soon, but this time not have our best players heading into combat with 500 pts against newer people with 380 points worth of scarred scared screed Squalls and squadrons

Limit games to 400 points, but have up to a 100 point “pool” of ships and fighters. So if you have a damaged ship you can swap it out while the other waits to get repaired. Or choose different ships if you’re on offense/defense. Then each game is balanced, but you still have a reward for winning.

Alternatively, look at Mordheim, an old GW game. You received bonuses for fighting against war bands that had a higher ranking than yours. So maybe someone good with maths can think of a fair way to increase rewards for fighting as the underdog.

CC has a lot of interesting components, but what I'd really be super keen to do is try to re-work it into a truly asymmetrical campaign to better reflect the Empire vs Rebel differences.

Kicked around a few ideas now and then, but usually end up stalling out. The challenge is really that objectives are such a core part of the game, but even with the new CC objectives, they remain assuming equal fleets. So you either have to dump the objectives (an idea I don't like), or create an entirely new set of them appropriate for wildly different fleet sizes - and that gets difficult to balance.

I just posted some of this in the other CC thread, but it's probably more appropriate here:

SNOWBALLING

This is a major concern for me as the Corellian Conflict campaign organizer for my Armada community. If people aren't having fun because they're feeling hopeless, they'll likely quit the campaign and then sour on Armada. Nothing is worse than showing up to a play a 2 hour game you know you have no chance of winning. Who wants to waste their free time dong that? Therefore, I've put a lot of thought into how to prevent the dreaded "snowball effect":

1. Balance Those Teams!

There's a lot of psychology that goes into running and playing a campaign that doesn't exist in casual one-off games or tournaments. Most importantly, this affects how players react to falling behind. I've found some people are more resilient than others and can grit it out regardless of the score while others fold at the slightest setback. If you know your players well enough then these personality traits need to be taken into account when building teams.

I've read a lot about teams needing to be equal in skill. This is true, but I'll take it one step further — teams need to be equal in both skill AND commitment to the campaign. Winning a campaign doesn't just take being a good player, it takes teamwork. If you're team isn't constantly communicating, building their fleets in tandem, plotting and practicing, you aren't going to do as well as the other team that is working together. This means the snowball can happen even before the first dice are rolled because 1 team built fleets that compliment each other, strategized their opening moves and got their preferred match-ups while the other guys just showed up to throw down.

As the organizer, I spend a lot of time before a new campaign begins matching up players of equal skill as well as players with the right personalities/passion for the game. I treat the other team's Grand Admiral like a co-organizer so I make sure it's someone I know and can lean on to keep up morale if their team is falling behind.

2. No Turn 1 Base Assaults

Other than team composition, this may be the biggest difference in preventing a snowball. Depending on planet selection, the Rebel and Imperial teams should be within 5-10 resources per fleet of each other — if they don't lose a base on the opener.

3. Limit Special Assaults

I've toyed with no special assaults, 1 special assault per campaign and for my upcoming campaign, 3 special assaults per team but the same player can't launch a special assault more than once (this was a concession to the Imperial Grand Admiral who feared not making enough resources to hit 500 points without multiple Shows of Force, a fear that is unfounded given my data).

The reason to limit special assaults is due to Show of Force. It's painfully easy to rack up 120 bonus points from this objective, especially with a Gunnery Team ISD and a Grav-Shift Interdictor. Note that limiting a campaign to 1 Show of Force (special assault) will likely net the Imperials between 27-40 extra points per fleet for the campaign.

4. No Base Building After Special Assaults

This speaks for itself, but only the defender can build a base/place a presence marker after winning a special assault. This prevents the Empire from running Show of Force at Xyquine II or Vagran, gaining a ton of extra resources and then grabbing a top planet to boot. If this is done turn 1, it's even harder for the Rebels to catch up.

5. Fleet Caps

Cap fleets at certain point levels each turn (or at least on turn 2). For example, if you're starting at 400 points, fleets can only be 450 points maximum on turn 2 and possibly 475 for turn 3 (or 433 and then 466). This still benefits the winners as they can bank those extra resources for the future, but it means there won't be as much of a points discrepancy for at least the first 2 battles. And if those games go well, your players are more likely to come back for a third match.

I find this is a bit easier to do when starting fleets at lower point values (250 and 300) while still keeping the 500-point ceiling. You have longer to go before hitting that maximum, so you can restrict fleets heavily on turns 2-3 and then open up the floodgates after that.

6. Free Bonus Points (More for the Losing Team)

Another option is to give everyone a bump in points between turns 3 and 4. If you're limiting special assaults to 1 (or none), you can base this on an 80-point Show of Force (roughly 27 points per player). The team with the stronger fleets + more resources generated that turn earns 20 bonus resources per fleet while the weaker team earns 30-35 (or can repair 1 ship for free, etc...).

7. Limit Planet Selections

To keep things fresh in subsequent campaigns, I've restricted players to 1 starting Repair Yard planet (automatically Corellia for the Imperials). This has the added benefit of teams finding creative ways to use the other strategic effects. In addition, teams aren't allowed to assault an unoccupied Repair Yards planet on turn 1. These are the very best planets so by taking most of their resources off the table until post turn 2, it helps keep each team close in points.

Could you adjust the victory conditions to be similar to the handicap mechanic in golf? IE the more you win, the more you have to win by?

You can't build bases after a Special Assault. It doesn't work like a normal assault at the post-mission phase of the campaign.

Random thoughts:

Bases other than those placed at the start of the game don’t get free base defenses, those must be bought seperately. This way, a winning team must spend more resources to protect what they have. The losing team might find it hard to scrape up the cash for a base defense, too, though, so it shouldn’t be too steep. Price them differently, perhaps?

If one team is losing by a certain amount, they can lose 1 CP to gain X resources. One time only?

The losing team can retire a fleet with no penalty.

Once a fleet hits 500 points (or 475?), it no longer gets “free” refit points, only those from Repair Yards.

ADDENDUM

8. Start Small

I've found that starting with lower point fleets (300 has been good) gives players more room to adapt their fleets to what the other team is doing, and players are less likely to feel locked into a certain build that has no hope against what their opponents are fielding. While this doesn't specifically address the snowball, it does give players a chance to counter the enemy and perhaps not fold as quickly.

This also gives you more flexibility to stagger the rebuild amount a player receives for retiring a fleet. Instead of starting back at the base fleet level, you can increase the rebuild allotment incrementally turn-by-turn. This means a player may be able to scrap a fleet and actually go up in points if they time it right. While this may seem unfair to the other team, it practice it's not. The 1 upgrade card per ship restriction on all new fleets really hurts when facing fleets that don't have that same restriction, even if they are at equal or slightly fewer points.

EDIT: By starting with smaller fleets, it forces players get out of the tournament/meta mindset and try new lists that wouldn't work at 400 points.

18 minutes ago, thecactusman17 said:

You can't build bases after a Special Assault. It doesn't work like a normal assault at the post-mission phase of the campaign.

Where in the campaign booklet are you seeing this rule? I couldn't find anything referencing this rule on page 20 (Quick Reference of the Campaign Turn) or under the Management Phase section on pages 10-11.

From everything I've read, a special assault is a battle like any other. Page 20 under Step 3: Management Phase even states "winning a battle may earn additional campaign points for the team or resources to repair or improve fleets" (the latter part being the sole purpose of special assaults), then goes on to say "players who won a battle at a location have an opportunity to construct a new base or outpost at that location."

The campaign rules are a little wonky so I likely missed it. Can you point me to the right section, por favor?

I don't have it in front of me, but I believe it is in the section detailing Special Assaults themselves.

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Just now, thecactusman17 said:

I don't have it in front of me, but I believe it is in the section detailing Special Assaults themselves.

There is no restriction on building bases after a special assault. Perhaps you are mis-remembering the rule that special assaults cannot target a location that has a base, outpost, or presence sticker?

I'll have to look at it. I'm fairly certain that we determind bases cannot be built on planets that are attacked as Special Assaults due to some specific wording that prevented you from "capturing" the location.

I re-read all of the rules on special assaults and there's no restriction on building a base after a successful attack. As ShadowKite stated, the only prohibition is selecting an occupied location and then where that location is on the map depending on the type of special assault declared. There's also nothing I can find about "capturing a location", only about destroying an existing base/outpost. A player only has to win the battle to build a base/outpost.

That being said, not allowing base/outpost construction after winning a special assault is a great house rule to prevent snowballs!

2 hours ago, reegsk said:

Alternatively, look at Mordheim, an old GW game. You received bonuses for fighting against war bands that had a higher ranking than yours. So maybe someone good with maths can think of a fair way to increase rewards for fighting as the underdog.

As an old Mordehim player, the underdog rule is something I've been hoping to incorporate into Armada. My friend wants to run a campaign where you have 3 different fleet types/sizes per player, and we've been trying to figure out how to balance a match between widely asymmetrical forces.

One option is to give the weaker fleet a VP bonus = to 25% (or even 50%) of the difference between the 2 fleets, rounded up.

For example, a rebuilt fleet starts at 400 points and squares off against a 500-point existing fleet. The player with the lower point-value fleet gets 25 (or 50) VPs to start as a bonus. This means the stronger fleet needs to do more damage to overcome that initial point bonus, which is how it should be. The stronger fleet is expected to win by the top brass and the populace of the local systems. If a weaker, rag-tag group of ships is able stand up to a full-fledged Armada and either inflicts some damage or escapes without being annihilated it would be a PR disaster (or a rallying cry for the underdog).

The above example is a bit extreme. For most of my campaign games the biggest discrepancy I've seen is 70 points. This would give the weaker player between 18-35 bonus points depending on the percentage used. It's not a lot, but perhaps that little something extra will help a player feel like they have a chance. Plus, it becomes another element to consider when matching up fleets in the Strategy Phase.

This rule is fairly straightforward to implement in regular campaign battles, but it becomes a bit tougher for base assaults. Do you count the 40 bonus points from Base Defense: Fighter Wing as part of a fleet's value when determining the bonus VPs? What about Armed Station and Ion Cannons? Should they be valued at 40 points as well?

On the opposite side, there's the Base Defense: Planetary Ion Cannon objective which is pretty brutal and could make it especially hard to crack a planet defended by a weaker fleet if the attacker starts 35-50 points in the hole. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing and gives the player with the newly rebuilt fleet a clear sense of purpose?

I started a campaign a while back with everyone starting at 250 points. My thinking was to help make your fleet more flexible with a point cap. I even thought of throwing in side missions to gain resources and/or upgrades playing around with the "Take the Station" scenario ruleset. Hondo for example is a unique that's not a faction specific. Make a scenario based on catching him. Next battle the fleet that him can use him then he flees(by discarding him of end of the match) like in the show. I like the idea of a fleet "pool" tbh I actually thought was how the campaign would play out. 400 point fleets with 100 points in reserve for each player.

Our local experience was definitely a snowball.

I think if there is a mix of skill levels some sort of agreement for the best players to keep their fleet a bit 'friendly' and not go straight to their full lethal mode is important. Otherwise even if the teams are 'balanced' the newer players are still going to have a bad time.

The Campaign much like the game is balanced through potential equality and balance but because we list build in isolation and actually intentionally create list that would unbalance a match in our favor, in any given match the equality and balance can (and usually is) way off. Its just the nature of the game, the campaign effectively emphasis that by dragging out that initial inequality over several consecutive matches, making it worse by punishing the loser of any match and empowering the winner ensuring the next match is even more out of wack.

While not logical per say the obvious fix is that if you lose you gain the benefits and if you win you take the penalties, but the campaign itself being a thematic (story-mode) it doesn't actually make sense to do that. When you win you expect to be rewarded and when you lose you expect to be penalized.

The premise we are talking about here is of course that you want to have balanced matches in our campaign, but just like a standard game, there is no such thing as a balanced match. The game is balanced, in that any list you build can be countered with a build, but again because we do it in isolation and because the purpose of list building is very specifically to try to throw the balance in your favor, the end result is very commonly an unbalanced match in which one player has the upper hand over another just based on the lists they put together.

I think to fix that in a campaign you would need to fix that in the standard game as well, another words, how do you ensure a standard match where two players are list building in isolation end up with 2 lists that are balanced and a good match for each other? The difficulty of that in the campaign is compiled because you need to make sure that despite any rewards and penalties that balance is maintained over several matches.

I don't think its possible to create a rule-set that forces match balance in a game of list building, from the ground up the game is very specifically designed to do the exact opposite. I think in order to really create some equality you would need a lot of data on what elements of the game are actually throwing the balance of matches off. This would have to include player skill, ship and ship/upgrade combination and all sorts of stuff to get some baseline understanding of how these things impact the "balance" of matches. I think that is a fairly unreasonable approach and time consuming thing and while I'm confident with sufficient data you could probably find a sufficient way to create an equilibrium, something akeen to a handicap, throwing a campaign with bonuses and penalties based on match results to the mix would make this a staggering and painful process.

My assessment of the campaign mode is that you have to embrace it for what it is. Your creating a story mode for Star Wars Armada which means you have to approach it from a "we are doing it for fun" and not a "we are doing it to win". Its not a tournament and it's not designed to be used for tournament play, its very specifically designed to give you a back story to your matches, to create memorable moments in the campaign and give purpose to the battles. Simply embrace the fact that its not going to be balanced and you may very well play from a losing hand and get crushed and that will be the story of that campaign.

I think one thing players should do is help each other, stepping out the conditioning of competitive play. Another words, list build then compare lists and help each other balance the lists out so that there are clear plans and counter to plans built into the list, intentionally creating a sort of combined effort on both sides to create balanced matches. I think that can go a long way.

I think the issue most people are having is that they are trying to play the campaign as a competition and in that regard, matches are never going to be balanced because everyone is specifically doing everything in their power via list building and planning to crush their opponent and the result will inevitably that one side will succeed and one side will fail.

Use special assaults as a comeback opportunity:

General rule: A team can merely declare a special assault, if its total fleet points are at least 75 behind the opposing team (scarred units count half). Special Assaults give a team the normal amount of victory points.

Of course this needs special assaults to be easier than normal assaults:

Show of Force: The stations have merely 6 hull each.

Hyperlane Raid: Setup is as printed on the card. Special rule is replaced by: Before deploying fleets, the first player choses 2 enemy ships. If he can choose merely less, he gets one victory token per ship less. The chosen ships are marked with an objective token. End of game is replaced by: The second player gains 1 victory token per objective ship in the deployment zone of the first player. The first player gains 1 victory token and his team in addition 40 resource points per objective ship destroyed or outside his deployment zone. The winner's team also gets 40 resource points. Victory points per Victory token is: 20.

That means that a team that falls behind can recover by getting cheap resources - but still has to do something for it. However, this approach has its limitations. If a team is really badly behind the other one they won't achieve a victory here either.

Another nice advantage of this rule is that there are not the boring mandatory special assaults in round 2.

A lot of good points in this thread.

I'll add some observations of mine:

1. Skill level: already mentioned, but it's the most important factor. And not just balanced teams, but maybe a willingness to later on avoid the "worst" match-ups in term of relative skill. But sometimes the best player of 1 team will meet the least skilled player of the other team.
2. A willingness to play, to win surely, but not to murderize everything. Be content with a win, a good win, but don't build fleets or play to wreck everything. It will mean no fun for the opponent later on, and the campaign dies.
3. The "reverse" is also true: players must be willing to retreat, to play the long game, rather than duke it out to the bitter end. If a battle is lost, flee as soon as you can no longer afford the refit cost.

In our CC campaign we adopted a house rule that someone posted on these forums last year (but alas I forget who).

• When two fleets of different points face each other take half the difference in points and grant the smaller fleet a single unit of that points or fewer as "local defence forces". So 400 points faces 430 points and so the smaller Rebel player can add an X-Wing or E-Wing to his forces for that game. At the end of the mission that unit is removed from the player's fleet. In a larger point difference game the Rebels could get a Flotilla or a CR90B for example. We ban unique units or any upgrades on these forces. Also probably wise to stop them being objective ships in missions like Most Wanted or Blockade Run.
• I like the idea of giving 50% of the difference in point values as victory points to the smaller fleet but would add the requirement for the smaller fleet to actually kill something to get them. This stops them skirting around knowing they are 40 VPs up. They would get nothing unless they kill a TIE Fighter for example when their VPs immediately jumps to 48.
• Another option to stop fleets expanding too quickly is to limit each ship to one upgrade per round and make all upgrades and extra forces double cost in the first 2-3 campaign rounds. So a player with 30 free repair points and 30 economic points could make 60 points of repair or 30 repair and 15 points on upgrades or 50 repair and 5 points on upgrades etc. This helps out loosing fleets with large repair bills more than winning fleets with few repairs who want to go shopping. Sales Tax!

You probably don't want to include all three of these rules in a campaign. One is probably enough to moderate excessive snowballing. Two could be useful if you find things still begin to accelerate away. Use all three and it may get a bit bland and not reward aggressive play.

1) No longer go to 500. The latest wave balances pretty great at 400. It messed badly (in our experience) with balance at 500. Imperials gained too much that Rebels didn’t. So maybe start at 250-300 and go to 400. The reserve idea is interesting.

2) Add 10 (or at least 5) more hull to the stations in Show or force. I watched a Raider one-shot a station the last SoF I played. That should not be possible. I guess an alternative would be to have crits and crit effects not count against the station

3) Make it so the larger fleet must beat the spread. We had a few games where the larger fleet did much worse point for point but still won. A spread would help the smaller fleet out. An example is my last CC match. I brought 450 against 540 (he had the squadron base defense) and ended up losing 72-75. With any form of spread, that would have been a win. We had multiple lopsided matchups like that that would have radically changed the outcome. It makes it so players who fall behind in points don’t feel useless

4) Only one ship of a class per fleet. That doesn’t mean you can have ISDk, ISDc and ISD2. It would mean a max hull Imp list would be an ISD, INT, VSD. Rebels can’t spam TR90s. No fleet with more than one transport. I really like the premise. It sounds like it would prevent some serious Jank.

5) Every ship MUST have a title? Not sure about this one.

1 hour ago, Church14 said:

3) Make it so the larger fleet must beat the spread.

4) Only one ship of a class per fleet.

I like #3, when the bigger fleet is attacking. Not as much when defending. 450 v 540 would mean that if I don't kill 90 pts of your stuff, my base explodes.

#4: Imps only have 1 large ship class, and 2 fewer total ship classes. Maybe limit it to 2 of any small class, and either 1 large per fleet, or lift the restriction on ISDs.

4 hours ago, Baltanok said:

I like #3, when the bigger fleet is attacking. Not as much when defending. 450 v 540 would mean that if I don't kill 90 pts of your stuff, my base explodes.

#4: Imps only have 1 large ship class, and 2 fewer total ship classes. Maybe limit it to 2 of any small class, and either 1 large per fleet, or lift the restriction on ISDs.

Both are fair comments. Maybe don’t have the spread when larger force is defending or reduce the spread. If keeping some form of spread on defense I would not include the 40 from the squadron base defense in the spread. Including those 40 punishes that choice when it is already a typically weak one.

I haven’t tested either idea so I may not have balanced them, but I don’t see an issue with two of any small base ship. I tried using a single of each to build an Imp swarm and it got really awkward. Even two of each small would prevent the single class of ship spam that was our Imperial forces last CC. A triple ISD fleet, a four Arquitens fleet (+ISD), a four Gozanti fleet (+ISD).

EDIT: Just realized a single ship per class would make Hammerheads terrible as neither task force could trigger

Always the problem with campaigns. There has to be an incentive to win those battles and that incentive usually is more ships larger fleets or some thing special to really pull in those points.

What there needs to be is some sort of "raid" system, not talking of raid tokens but in which the player with more ground has more ground to cover and that leaves them vulnerable. Usually the down player could simply attack a unoccupied controlled site, doesn't get any rewards so leader has no reason to raid but it does deny some of those hard earned victory bonuses that usually tip the scales in favor of the leader. If you can't win then even the playing field a little until you can take over the lead.