TL;DR - give a tactical trade-off advantage for using partial cover to encourage re-positioning in fire fights.
p.s. I'm asking here since I enjoy this community far more than other forums Any rate, your feedback would be super welcome

Observed problem: the instances where you can position your character to shoot from cover and reap a benefit of immunity is EXTREMELY fringe in practice. We've noticed it usually comes up less than 5 times per campaign. More usually what's the case is if you see troops coming down a 2-tile-wide hallway, your allies will make better cover than the door frames. The core strategy does tend to evolve into Han Solo's "charge at everyone screaming" that he used on the first Death Star (as far as positioning is evolved). It's functional and balanced ... but it does lose a slight portion of thematic magic.

Goal for this rule : provide balanced way to at least make you consider not constantly advancing forward (or at least tempt you to using structural cover instead). Also you get a touch of XCOM, yay.

Part 1 - what constitutes partial cover.
- First figure what the nearest corner of the target figure's tile to your own figure, then verify that it shares a point with a wall edge. (as rules state, if you can only see 1 corner, you do not have line of sight)
- If you CAN draw an unobstructed line (not including the target figure itself) to the furthest corner, it does not count as partial cover (no benefit)
- if you CANNOT, the figure has "partial cover" and receives the benefit listed below.
- layman's terms - the angle of fire has to be LESS than 45 degrees

Part 2 - what does partial cover give you (please note this is the weakest part of the house rule)
- 1 evade result (the little partial-circle symbol)
- ... that's all

Simple clarifiers
- obviously this only works on ranged attacks. Weapons with reach ignore partial cover.
- also, no partial cover for hiding behind your friends. it has to be a wall corner.
- also also, campaign only. We have no idea how this would affect skirmish, and we kinda don't want to fiddle with that for now.

here's some of the other discarded benefits options, and why we opted away from them
- One option briefly on the table was given the defender the ability to switch block and evade results. For one thing this would not be easy to track at all. Plus it also cheapens other upgrades and hero abilities.
- Giving the option to add either/or felt wonky as well (also hard to efficiently calculate with all the other upgrades going on)
- And adding a block just felt like it would draw out the battles too much (especially trying to shoot Imperial forces, since they predominantly roll black armor, and giving them a chance for 4 blocks seems broken)

As far as thematic reasoning is concerned (this is largely thanks to my brother, whom I've been working on this house rule with)
- This does affect attacking units that are more reliant on surges than it does heavy hitters. We are aware of this.
- This surge v damage balance does tend to make more sense when considering the types of weapons they're assigned to. Even on the low end of the spectrum, Gideon's starting blue/yellow pistol would be more adversely affected by cover than would Fenn's blue/green rifle. And on the more extreme end, partial cover isn't going to help much against an AT-ST cannon
- ... also Leia got hit in the shoulder during RotJ while behind partial cover. So there's that in film canon arguing against damage reduction. lol
- Canceling the surge abilities also work thematically. You're less likely to get stunned by a stray shot, or get a wound that causes bleeding.
- It also works for the more generic surge abilities ... like cancelling the additional accuracy or flat damage boosts.
- we're still a little unclear exactly how it affects the different defensive dice rolls. Evades do feel like the result that black-armor rollers need more than not, and evades for dodgey types seem always useful.


So yeah, I'm curious what your feedback on this house rule. Please let me know. ?

So if they see a corner with terrain and an empty corner they get an evade? Sounds good, but a bit powerful aganist some units. I find evade often a lot more useful than a block with pierces and +2dmg surges on half of the figures. A -2 accuracy/+1 evade/+1block of the attackers choice seems more balanced to me.

Maybe would be simpler rule if you needed sight to three of someone 's corners, but that would let figures protect each other too. Not like it was a problem if for example you don't see jyn odan because garkhaan. Just have to make sure it doesn't work the other way around.

If playing against Jyn with Peacemaker, non-reciprocal line of sight is what the imperial player works for and it certainly happens more than 5 times per campaign. Positioning is a skill.

An evade is really, really powerful for the rebels as playing against Shyla with Deadly Grace will tell you. In addition to severely nerfing groups that have +2dmg surge abilities, it makes attacks much less consistent.

Why not just give the figure in "partial cover" the option of a defensive reroll instead of blocks/evades? Other houses use a rule requiring additional accuracy to hit in "partial cover".

6 hours ago, Tzarph said:

Why not just give the figure in "partial cover" the option of a defensive reroll instead of blocks/evades? Other houses use a rule requiring additional accuracy to hit in "partial cover".

This I like. It's simple and easy to implement. Although what happens if the character already gets a defensive re-roll due to some ability or card? You could house rule a second re-roll? It seems like the easiest thing. I never quite understood the need to limit die re-rolling to once anyways.

If having partial cover grants a bonus, there should be a way to mitigate that. "If a figure is attacking another figure with partial cover, the attacker may re-roll one die if they haven't moved this round."

This creates a risk-reward option. Move into a better position and hope for the best. Or take an aimed shot at a figure in cover and see what re-rolls can do.

8 hours ago, Tzarph said:

Why not just give the figure in "partial cover" the option of a defensive reroll instead of blocks/evades? Other houses use a rule requiring additional accuracy to hit in "partial cover".

win. that dice reroll is way easier to implement. we'll also test the accuracy reduction and see how that goes. Thanks for the tip!

8 hours ago, a1bert said:

If playing against Jyn with Peacemaker, non-reciprocal line of sight is what the imperial player works for and it certainly happens more than 5 times per campaign. Positioning is a skill.

An evade is really, really powerful for the rebels as playing against Shyla with Deadly Grace will tell you. In addition to severely nerfing groups that have +2dmg surge abilities, it makes attacks much less consistent.

When I said "positioning without line of sight doesn't happen" I should have clarified ENVIRONMENTAL positioning. Using team mates as bullet-sponge meat shield is the name of the game in every standard campaign mission. lol

That's actually good to know about Shyla, we're still working off the core set at the moment (and we're also surprised at how much we're enjoying constantly replaying it).

I'd agree that the cover rules aren't all that intuitive and this can result in some campaigns seeing cover as a very rare (and sometimes even accidental) boon.

But as @a1bert says, it's a skill. The simplest and most balanced fix for this issue would be just to educate players and encourage them to be on the lookout for when they can take advantage of cover.

minor update - we tested a few versions of this. the -2 accuracy penalty for environmental cover seemed to be what worked best. It's not game breaking, but it was enough incentive for both rebel and imperial players to actually use wall corners instead relying strictly on phalanx formation friendly figure meat shields for cover.