So I've played about 15-20 games of the base game of Star Wars Rebellion now, and after the most recent game my friend and I packed the game away and swore we would never play it again. It's a game we both we really want to like (and we're generally big fans of FFG games), but we have a couple of big problems with the base game. Then I remembered that the game has an expansion, and I was wondering if it might fix those problems?

The biggest problem we have with the base game is that the Rebels ALWAYS win. The games generally feel quite tense and well-balanced for the first six turns, but in the late game the Rebels always win comfortably. Our experience has been that a skilled Rebel player has too many options available for the Empire to shut them down, so they are able to knock off Objectives at a reasonable rate and usually can end the game by about turn 8 - and that's assuming the Rebels don't pull a card like One in a Million, which means five rebel fighters are virtually guaranteed to be able to destroy the Death Star and shorten the game by two turns no matter how well defended it might be. Discussing things after the game, we rarely seem to be able to identify anything the Empire player should have done differently that would have given them a better chance of winning.

In particular, the movement rules where you can't move a fleet if you've placed a leader in to defend in a combat or oppose an enemy mission seems rather punitive to the Imperials given the Rebels always get to act first. Because of the setup rules it's hard to stop the Rebel player getting at least one Mon Calamari cruiser and three or four Airspeeders throughout the game, meaning you need a pretty beefy fleet to be able to survive the Rebels attacking OUT of the base at the start of their turn (when you can't afford to put a leader in) given if they win either the space or the ground combat then you can't take their base and you lose the game. Maybe we're playing the Empire wrong but they just don't seem to have enough time to do what they need to do, even when the dice rolls seem to be going their way.

It does seem like there's been a few specific changes that do make things more balanced, like those shield bunkers that make that specific Death Star Plans / One in a Million combo less viable, and new setup rules that mean the Rebels can't easily take and hold Mon Calamari / Utapau for several turns just because the Empire didn't start with a nearby planet ... but I've not had a chance to look at the new cards and units etc as a whole. Is the general feeling that the new rules buff the Empire or the Rebels? The upgraded combat looks much better but if the Rebels are still going to win every game I'm not sure we'll get much use out of an expansion!

The new rules generally buff the Empire more than the Rebels. However the new combat system makes stockpiling shield generators and airspeeders in your base a very powerful strategy.

Thanks for the reply. Could you tell me why it's so much more powerful than before? I assume shield generators do something different now you don't draw tactics cards in the same way as you did in the base game?

53 minutes ago, chris421 said:

Thanks for the reply. Could you tell me why it's so much more powerful than before? I assume shield generators do something different now you don't draw tactics cards in the same way as you did in the base game?

With the expansion there is a whole new system for how tactic cards and leader's tactic values work. You can read the rules for the expansion here:

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/1b/be/1bbe8fa2-c4af-47dd-8b61-1bcb63f9b94c/sw04_rulebook_web.pdf

It's the same sheet you get with the expansion explaining the new rules.

On a side note, at least in all my games both with the core and the expansion, the games were always balanced in victorys for both sides.

I really enjoy the expansion, but cannot tell how much it balances it out, because of only one playthrough. I personally think it does based on different things:

- Rebels does not have the same objective cards every match and cannot be sure what objectives come up.
- The objective cards themselves are a bit more tricky to accomplish.
- The death star is more powerful.
- Empire has more options to become more evil against rebel leaders (eliminate and more).
- New startup makes empire more powerful (I think), with the only downtime for empire is the Death star under construction.

There are more reasons but these are what I could think of right now.

...I do really enjoy the EXPANSION...more balanced in some aspects...