Is anyone else super frustrated with the Rebel's defense dice? I'm enjoying the game so far, but even in hard cover my Rebels seem to drop like flies. We just completed a game during which I rolled 22 white defense dice (including several for Clambering, and 3 for rallying). The results were 3 Blocks, 1 Surge and 18 blanks. That was the first white defensive Surge I'd ever seen. In our previous game my results were about the same. So as far as Clambering goes, these dice are great! For defense rolls? Not so much. I know I'm just having bad luck, and the Rebel's defensive Surge means they have a 1/3 chance of blocking, but that hasn't been working out for me.

So my question is, what do other Rebel players do to mitigate their lousy luck/lousy defense dice? I've been very good about keeping my units in cover or out of sight as much as possible and having Dodge tokens. What else can I be doing?

My rebel lists start with 6 troops and 3 AT-RTs, every time.

That is the only way to keep pace with the casualties. Even losing a unit a turn you are still at three or four units by the games resolution.

To be honest the only reason it is six troops and not more is the unit cap. FFG has done a fantastic job of making vehicles completely irrelevent in this game. Aside from the AT-ST anyway.

On 4/21/2018 at 11:44 PM, Jake the Hutt said:

Is anyone else super frustrated with the Rebel's defense dice? I'm enjoying the game so far, but even in hard cover my Rebels seem to drop like flies. We just completed a game during which I rolled 22 white defense dice (including several for Clambering, and 3 for rallying). The results were 3 Blocks, 1 Surge and 18 blanks. That was the first white defensive Surge I'd ever seen. In our previous game my results were about the same. So as far as Clambering goes, these dice are great! For defense rolls? Not so much. I know I'm just having bad luck, and the Rebel's defensive Surge means they have a 1/3 chance of blocking, but that hasn't been working out for me.

So my question is, what do other Rebel players do to mitigate their lousy luck/lousy defense dice? I've been very good about keeping my units in cover or out of sight as much as possible and having Dodge tokens. What else can I be doing?

You should almost always be dodging, maybe timing your non-dodge activations with the command cards that give dodge. The Nimble keyword is your friend.

Also if your troops are always getting shot at, that means other units aren't. Aim and shoot with those so fewer attack dice are rolled against you.

Dodge+heavy cover is 3 hits cancelled every attack. Then you have a 1/3 chance of blocking each other hit or crit that goes through.

Rebellions are built on hope.

I don’t find it to be much of an issue, just a trade-off. Rebels have crap defense dice but they’re good at offense; stormies are the opposite. Both can use an action to make up for their weakness. Behind cover and particularly with a dodge token, Rebel troopers really shouldn’t be dropping that quick unless they’re taking a BUNCH of fire, at least in my experience.

It may also be a bit psychological. I mean, with white dice, if I roll anything, I’m happy. With red dice, if I DONT roll something, I’m mad. But if you’re getting tilted at blanks on white dice, it’s gonna be a rough game.

17 minutes ago, Big Easy said:

You should almost always be dodging, maybe timing your non-dodge activations with the command cards that give dodge. The Nimble keyword is your friend.

Also if your troops are always getting shot at, that means other units aren't. Aim and shoot with those so fewer attack dice are rolled against you.

Dodge+heavy cover is 3 hits cancelled every attack. Then you have a 1/3 chance of blocking each other hit or crit that goes through.

Rebellions are built on hope.

+1 on the dodge. I played a four player 1600 point game over the weekend and the rebel players only took dodge on troopers they knew were probably not going to get shot (way in the back camping objectives. Aim with stormies dodge with rebels. Of course it is not a hard rule but nimble is a powerful ability that I don't see come into play very often because rebel players are not dodging very much.

23 minutes ago, Darkfine said:

My rebel lists start with 6 troops and 3 AT-RTs, every time.

That is the only way to keep pace with the casualties. Even losing a unit a turn you are still at three or four units by the games resolution.

To be honest the only reason it is six troops and not more is the unit cap. FFG has done a fantastic job of making vehicles completely irrelevent in this game. Aside from the AT-ST anyway.

I just disagree so much with all of this. I’ve just been playing with 4 troops, 2 RTs, Luke, and a T-47, and at least in my experience it’s worked out real well, I think I’ve only lost two games with that setup. Airspeeder is the highlight of the list, and I don’t really ever feel like I’m losing the damage race...different experiences, I guess.

(Also, what do you mean by saying that all vehicles are irrelevant? You’re taking 3 RTs; you just saying that the heavies are irrelevant? Except the ST? So actually you just don’t like the airspeeder? Am confused, pls explain).

4 minutes ago, Gorthaur25 said:

+1 on the dodge. I played a four player 1600 point game over the weekend and the rebel players only took dodge on troopers they knew were probably not going to get shot (way in the back camping objectives. Aim with stormies dodge with rebels. Of course it is not a hard rule but nimble is a powerful ability that I don't see come into play very often because rebel players are not dodging very much.

off topic but what ruleset did you use? Did you sub in Leia/Veers?

No, two players just promoted a corp leader. Allies still benefited from the courage bubble but you could not issue orders to a teammates unit. Also we all selected a command card at the beginning of a round and that is what dictated turn order. You were not allowed to discuss command card selection with your teammate.

It all worked pretty well but honestly not sure I would do it again. We could have played 2 800 point games amongst the four of us in a lot less time.

My friend and i are under the assumption the white def die is actually not balanced right.

Its a D6, so its easy to sub for any D6. A 5+ on a D6 is equal to a white def die with surge, and of course the white def die rolls its 5+ significantly less when compared.

The other dice dont seem to have this problem, not even the white attack dice. But i have gone almost entire games without any block/surge results, even on suppression rally tests, and i can attest by playing a lot of Orks in 40k that 5+ results are not that rare of an occurrence.
Yes statistically if 10 hits fly at both stormtroopers and rebeltroopers, rebels get hammered harder almost every time. When literally the only defense you've gotten is cover + dodge, you start to suspect things.

After thinking this we just started rolling 6 white def dice over and over, and sure enough they almost never rolled any results.
Flipside, awesome for clambering lol. Thats how you know the die is messed up when things you DONT want to see the normally good results for suddenly start showing up now that you dont want them.

20 minutes ago, Ailowynn said:

I just disagree so much with all of this. I’ve just been playing with 4 troops, 2 RTs, Luke, and a T-47, and at least in my experience it’s worked out real well, I think I’ve only lost two games with that setup. Airspeeder is the highlight of the list, and I don’t really ever feel like I’m losing the damage race...different experiences, I guess.

(Also, what do you mean by saying that all vehicles are irrelevant? You’re taking 3 RTs; you just saying that the heavies are irrelevant? Except the ST? So actually you just don’t like the airspeeder? Am confused, pls explain).

You disagree with maxing troops with rebels? Who have point for point the cheapest black dice in the game?

You disagree with troops being the main objective unit?

Again, I take naked AT-RTs because you can’t take more than six troop corps units and we don’t have spec ops yet. You disagree that you can take more?

If it is the bit about not being able to keep pace with hits taken then that is a difference of metas I guess. My point was you can’t expect rebels to soak fire all day long. Which again I am struggling to see how you could disagree with that.

My dice are all still in the bag, but this would be terribly disappointing (as well as a bit surprising). It seems more likely that people are overreacting to poor luck here but this is pretty easily testable. Roll the die and record it 100 times.

7 minutes ago, BigBadAndy said:

My dice are all still in the bag, but this would be terribly disappointing (as well as a bit surprising). It seems more likely that people are overreacting to poor luck here but this is pretty easily testable. Roll the die and record it 100 times.

Well the OP started with a very out of balance 22 rolls.

Look, all you got to do is go play against stormtroopers throwing those white attack dice at you. Then you don't have to worry about trying to dodge all those misses.

33% chance. Try playing Orks in 40k who have a save of 6+, not 5+ like the Rebels do. Paper shirt armor. Gotta either get some luck on the dice or throw men or dodges at the rolls. That's about it. But I do not think the d6's are as balanced rolling-wise as the d8's are.

31 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Well the OP started with a very out of balance 22 rolls.

It’s not really that far out of balance. He rolled 22 times and got 4 rolls of 5+. You would expect 7. Plus, I’m assuming he was rolling at least three dice most of the time and not keeping track of which if his dice he used each time. If you want to demonstrate that they don’t produce thenexpected results you will need to roll each one seperately and record it a large number of times.

2 minutes ago, BigBadAndy said:

It’s not really that far out of balance. He rolled 22 times and got 4 rolls of 5+. You would expect 7. Plus, I’m assuming he was rolling at least three dice most of the time and not keeping track of which if his dice he used each time. If you want to demonstrate that they don’t produce thenexpected results you will need to roll each one seperately and record it a large number of times.

Providing those numbers is still more useful than not.

They are out of balance.

They have non even gouged/ embossed sides vs flat blanks.

the question is wether such imbalance is an intended discrepancy or not.

This thread; except about Stormtroopers shooting.

1 minute ago, svelok said:

This thread; except about Stormtroopers shooting.

D8's roll better IMO. Sharper edges and all that. Can also add targeting scopes and if you're worried aim. I have had far less issue with ST shooting than white die defending.

Probability doesn't work the way some people are describing in this thread. Roll the die 100 times and you will never see a perfect distribution. 1 block/1 surge 1/3 of the time is the expected probability. You expect to roll a block or a surge 1 out of every 3 rolls, so if you roll it twice with blanks you expect the third one to hit ink. But in reality when you roll the third time it's still a 1/3 chance.

It will be easy to blame the dice, but the human brain is not wired to believe even the slightest deviations from the mean.

5+ has always been bad for a D6. It definitely "feels" worse in batches smaller than like 4 where you can very reasonably expect blanks too. Expecting them to keep you alive will always be frustrating, but honestly, Rebel troopers are pretty amazingly cost efficient without any defense dice at all.

I had a game with my Imperials recently where I didn't roll a single white success.... which wasn't at all true. I actually had a good amount of White on the table; double speeders and an AT-ST. The thing was, my opponent got 6 successes against a speeder that had 1 health left and I rolled 5 successes. Realistically, that's probably enough on its own to get near a reasonable probability of 5+s for the game, but it sure didn't "feel" like they did anything all game.

14 minutes ago, Big Easy said:

Probability doesn't work the way some people are describing in this thread. Roll the die 100 times and you will never see a perfect distribution. 1 block/1 surge 1/3 of the time is the expected probability. You expect to roll a block or a surge 1 out of every 3 rolls, so if you roll it twice with blanks you expect the third one to hit ink. But in reality when you roll the third time it's still a 1/3 chance.

It will be easy to blame the dice, but the human brain is not wired to believe even the slightest deviations from the mean.

There's also this. 1/3 chance means 1/3 chance each time you roll the dice into infinity. Sure there's a statistical norm that arises over time, but reality and statistics don't always gel. 1/3 means 2/3 each time you roll it won't happen...every single time.

1 hour ago, Mep said:

Look, all you got to do is go play against stormtroopers throwing those white attack dice at you. Then you don't have to worry about trying to dodge all those misses.

That will be a good point.... if it wasn't for the obvious fact that attack and defense dice are not the same dice

44 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Providing those numbers is still more useful than not.

They are out of balance.

They have non even gouged/ embossed sides vs flat blanks.

the question is wether such imbalance is an intended discrepancy or not.

The numbers provided are useful only in so far as they tell me I can’t learn anything from the data.

And I meant the numbers when I referred to “out of balance.” If the faces of dice themselves mattered you would expect to roll a lot more of the etched sides up since they are lighter.

On 4/22/2018 at 12:44 AM, Jake the Hutt said:

I rolled 22 white defense dice (including several for Clambering, and 3 for rallying). The results were 3 Blocks, 1 Surge and 18 blanks

Your block numbers look accurate.

1/6 = 16.666 for a block

3/22 = 13.636 for a block

For your blocks to be at 16.666%, you'd have to roll 3.666 blocks. So it's working there.

Your surge is low, at 4.55%. You just rolled poorly. In a perfect world, you are 15.15% below average for saving on damage. But if you were to roll 2 more dice and they were surges, you would be 8.3% below average. So it's not like you are rolling at the bottom of the bell curve because a small amount of target values pull you closer to the norm.

If you want your troopers to stay alive longer, you should give your opponent something else to shoot, like an AT-RT. Moving from cover to cover, you can plink away at enemy troops. Or play with more LOS blocking terrain. You'd be surprised how much longer troopers survive when an AT-ST can't shoot them.

IS this a complaint about the dice not working? I've rolled several sets of 5 black dice on attack (RT and troopers) and always miss at least 3 of them being blanks, sometimes 4. even with rerolls.

Dice are dice.

some suck no matter what.