Any ideas?

what are troops good at?

what are vehicles good at?

What is the likelyhood of FFG doing anything about this themselves.

What will we do if cmon offers an actual job to Alex Davey and FFG loses yet another talent because they treat creatives like changeable light bulbs and their products continue to suffer for the brain drain and work of intern rookie designers.

Mine's for the the state my ex-wife left me in. Such as "I've reached my minds end."

Maybe a convoy mission where a vehicle must get grin one side of the board to the other?

Isn’t Breakthrough already OK for vehicles? Vehicles are fast and survivable - what you need for Beeakthrough.

The challenge is for most current missions vehicles cannot complete the objective.

More “inclusive” missions could be good (ie as current except nearby non-trooper units can also “claim”). Possibly 3/5 missions should allow vehicles to claim (if all could allow vehicles I wonder if double ATST would then be too good) ??

Any mission that means you “have” to have a vehicle in list is bad for ‘competitive’ games (although fine for playing at home/ the club etc).

Re “creatives” I have no idea what you’re on about - but I really like a few of FFGs games (Legion, Xwing, GoT), so they can’t be doing too bad :-).

I think the real problem with vehicles is that ffg overestemated the armor keyword.

There is so many weapons with impact, surge to crit and natural crits that make armor way less off a protection.

I haven't seen anything in this game that would be deemed original or creative to a point that anyone with relatively mild gaming experience couldn't take over and run with

Vehicles are good at surviving and good at damage output - you need a commander/operative to deal out the same level of damage.

Breakthrough is liked by vehicle lists because they often can make it alive, and they can help reduce the number of opposition minis around to reduce their total possible score.

They are OK at key positions, because that doesn’t require a trooper. However, they aren’t dealing as much damage because it’s easier for corps to move around/avoid them than it is in breakthrough (where if you set it up right, they HAVE to go past your vehicle).

They are situationally good in the OP campaigns, mission dependent of course (and even which side of the mission dependent). I’ve had times it was a huge let down to have the ATST along. I’ve had times it was raw awesome.

How about giving vehicles the ability to claim anyway, but they can claim more.

For example, shoving an AT-RT onto a crate, picking it up, then going to the next crate and taking that as well.

2 minutes ago, Indy_com said:

How about giving vehicles the ability to claim anyway, but they can claim more.

For example, shoving an AT-RT onto a crate, picking it up, then going to the next crate and taking that as well.

Trooper units can already hold more than one crate.

1 minute ago, arnoldrew said:

Trooper units can already hold more than one crate.

Ok, didn't catch that rule.

Thanks for the correction.

Attrition would help a lot. Said this already in a few different posts, but if you can’t kill the big AT-ST in your face, there’s ~240ish points you don’t get. Meanwhile he’s blasting away at all your troops getting a ton of points eliminated. Intercept the transmissions should’ve been any unit leader as well. Then an AT sitting at the middle objective would be something you’d have to really deal with.

17 hours ago, TylerTT said:

What will we do if cmon offers an actual job to Alex Davey and FFG loses yet another talent because they treat creatives like changeable light bulbs and their products continue to suffer for the brain drain and work of intern rookie designers.

It can't get any worse than it is, that's the way I see it. But it's little toy Star Wars people so I'm in all the way.

I came up with an objective called "Take it down!" or something like that. It would go like this:

After setup, starting with the Blue player, place 1 Objective token on one of your units. Whenever that unit eliminates an enemy unit, it gains 1 Objective token. At the end of the game, you score 1 VP for each token on your unit.

So the point of this would be to value units that deal tons of damage and kill things, but don't die, like an ATST. If you kill your opponent's 'Killdozer', then they lose all of their objective gain. You do start with 1 Objective, so you could try to hide it and kill your opponent's, I suppose. I feel this objective would favor squads with things like Vader or an ATST, and help balance out 'trooper spam' lists.

I like that idea sir cormac.

Well I like the idea of having to paint a target on one of your own units and it gives you points for their action through out the game.

Scoring points for kills is interesting as it punishes the many small units spam.

I think exactly half the cards should be horribly painfully unfair to troops and the other half horribly painfully unfair vehicles. Better take some of each cause you don't know what will happen. Also, steps should be taken to prevent the game turning into just rigging the cards to favor your list.

5 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

I think exactly half the cards should be horribly painfully unfair to troops and the other half horribly painfully unfair vehicles. Better take some of each cause you don't know what will happen. Also, steps should be taken to prevent the game turning into just rigging the cards to favor your list.

It's also becoming clear to me that "Key Positions" is slowly destroying the game, by accident. I think FFG needs to errata the card to read:

"Starting with the Blue Player, he places an objective token as close to the center of the board as possible (6 from long edge, 3 from short edge). Then the red player seletcs a piece of terrain and places an objective token on it. Finally, the Blue player does likewise."

This would allow both players to chose an objective close to them, but would need to fight over the middle. Would eliminate the crazy bidding just to win Key Positions.

13 hours ago, SirCormac said:

It's also becoming clear to me that "Key Positions" is slowly destroying the game, by accident. I think FFG needs to errata the card to read:

"Starting with the Blue Player, he places an objective token as close to the center of the board as possible (6 from long edge, 3 from short edge). Then the red player seletcs a piece of terrain and places an objective token on it. Finally, the Blue player does likewise."

This would allow both players to chose an objective close to them, but would need to fight over the middle. Would eliminate the crazy bidding just to win Key Positions.

If you aren’t blue, why wouldn’t you just eliminate key positions?

6 minutes ago, Derrault said:

If you aren’t blue, why wouldn’t you just eliminate key positions?

Obviously, but 1/4 of the time that's not an option, and other times you need to desperately drop it while ignoring the other cards it's just turned out to be a bad card, and competitively, bids are getting bigger and bigger just to control this card.

2 hours ago, SirCormac said:

Obviously, but 1/4 of the time that's not an option, and other times you need to desperately drop it while ignoring the other cards it's just turned out to be a bad card, and competitively, bids are getting bigger and bigger just to control this card.

Let the bids reach 799 points, though the heavens may fall.

As mentioned above, the issue is that vehicles do not deal or absorb enough damage to be worth their point costs. Armor is too weak for how much it is costed simply because there is so much impact, and fishing for crits isn't inefficient either.

If I were to rework Armor, I would turn it into a leveled skill.

Armor X: When defending, during the "Roll defense dice" step, you may change up to X blank results to a Block result.

This would give vehicles much more resistance to random potshots, meaning you'd need to get multiple crit effects through to actually guarantee damage.

For reference, I would give the T-47 Armor 1 and the AT-ST Armor 2.

This would mean that you would really need multiple crit results, IE: high levels of impact and/or pierce, to really mow down a vehicle.

No need to change the objective rules IMO, just make vehicles more appropriately costed/have appropriate durability for their cost.

On 10/26/2018 at 11:48 PM, SirCormac said:

It's also becoming clear to me that "Key Positions" is slowly destroying the game, by accident. I think FFG needs to errata the card to read:

Errata for hardcopies is a bad road to go down for a game. Makes the game opaque to new people. Just ban the card from tournaments, or tweak the nature of blue and red in the Rules Reference.

I think we're mixing our arguments a bit. And there is now conveniently a "key positions killing the game" thread to hash that one out.

But let's be honest that the current vehicles are a mixed bag. AT-RTs and Bikes are useful, valuable, and often played. T-47s and AT-STs are weak, albeit for totally different reasons. T-47s are easily taken down without specialty anti-vehicle weapons. They just don't last. Oddly, AT-STs are weak because they are too strong. I will make the controversial argument that they would be more valuable with nine wounds. Then they might actually take some fire, and divert fire from troops. We all know by now that the dominant strategy against AT-STs is to avoid them and to not waste fire. One might also argue that both would be fine at lower points, as I have, but that's another thread as well.

There is an option and a hope that we get additional and better vehicles, and I hope that is the solution. Neither side has a hover tank, tracked vehicle, or APC. All of these exist in (at least semi)canon. They could be well costed and survivable. They could persuade players to take Ion, or HH-12s, which would diversify the game in other ways. For example making Z-6s and DLTs less mandatory. That could put more things on the board that would damage an AT-ST enough to make it worth trying to take down, or split fire to allow T-47s to live longer.

The vehicle game hasn't been decided, as nothing since Wave 1 has been a vehicle, but a lot rides on the next vehicle releases.

On 10/27/2018 at 1:11 PM, SirCormac said:

Obviously, but 1/4 of the time that's not an option, and other times you need to desperately drop it while ignoring the other cards it's just turned out to be a bad card, and competitively, bids are getting bigger and bigger just to control this card.

Even if this were a true problem (do we have any statistics to back this claim, or is this just a perception problem by some vocal players?) it seems like we’ve already established at least one obvious remedy:

1) Forego a sufficient number of points that you believe you can still win despite having fewer points.

other options:

2) Build an army around being the red player and taking ground.

3) When laying out terrain, place some to give a safe approach to the probable positions that an opponent might choose.

4) In the very rare situation where an opponent is blue and forces the objective, you have a freer hand to choose the setup and the conditions. Making hay of that is easy.

To the original question, the utility of vehicles is that they are generally tougher and more mobile than most every trooper, the utility of troopers is they’re cheaper and useful for almost every objective.

On the other hand vehicles do have an advantage for the breakthrough objective and the hostile environment condition and repulsors have the advantage for the minefield condition. So, there’s that side of the coin too.