I am about to start Tyrants of Lothal as the IP. The rebel players of course want to invest on the small boxes to enable the expanded campaign.

I have a concen regarding balance when using the expanded option. I guess some may see this as a spoiler.

I haven't played the campaign yet - neither with average nor good rebel players.

It should be easy to adjust when you first see how the first missions go. (You can reduce the XP/credit rewards in the epilogues of the preceding missions.)

I've played expanded version... never again. Completely unbalanced! We've crushed Imperial player like ****. I'm still hearing screams of his troops... since October.

Hmmm. I'm 2 for 2 at this point. In fact on the Hondo mission, I actually wounded all four of them by Round 5! But I've been there before with my group in other campaigns. So if I go by that, it won't last. They often save XP early to get better class upgrade cards sooner. I will say that so far, Overwhelming Oppression seems like a nasty class deck. :-) We're only playing every other week, so it'll be a couple months before I know how it goes. Honestly, though, I'm happy if the wins they get are squeakers. It's fun when it's close.

I think I am going to follow a1bert advice (which is what I was thinking about doing in the first place) and tone down the reward on the core missions so that the total amount of rewards stays more or less (maybe a little more) the same. They don't need to know

🤗

Will report back after a few games. I'm sure future IP will want to know.

I think the Lothal campaign is completely unbalanced in favor of the Empire if the heroes aren't using something broken like CT's Pin Them Down or Gideon's Masterstroke. Reduced Rebel XP to start, Threat level that increases too quickly, multiple maps where all the heroes have to get from one end to the other but the map is bisected by a single 2-space choke point.

But that's just my experience so far as the Imperial player 5 missions in. It might be true that the increased rewards eventually catch up to the campaign's initial difficulty, but it's not fun for a campaign to be impossibly hard at the start and then easy at the end.

On 2/4/2019 at 11:40 AM, Tvboy said:

I think the Lothal campaign is completely unbalanced in favor of the Empire if the heroes aren't using something broken like CT's Pin Them Down or Gideon's Masterstroke. Reduced Rebel XP to start, Threat level that increases too quickly, multiple maps where all the heroes have to get from one end to the other but the map is bisected by a single 2-space choke point.

But that's just my experience so far as the Imperial player 5 missions in. It might be true that the increased rewards eventually catch up to the campaign's initial difficulty, but it's not fun for a campaign to be impossibly hard at the start and then easy at the end.

Well... finally got to play the first mission, and it was an easy win for the rebels. CT did make optimal use of pin them down, and maybe that was the game winning factor. We did try to play against it, with Nemeses (Jabba+Terro) and Nexu with Dewback rider to minimize the stun impact, but it wasn't enough.

Can't wait for the official FAQ update. Maybe someone will realize that PTD is supposed to cost 2 strain or something. Bah, enough threads discussing PTD already. Maybe we will have better luck with Hondo mission.

In my experience with Lothal the heroes were definitely to powerful towards the end, more so than usual. I also didn't really enjoy the Imp class in that box, so that might have been part of it.

Generally I am bending rules or pulling punches to keep them competitive to give you an idea of where the balance usually stands.

Hm... I myself enjoyed the Lothal Imp Class Deck; I thought it worked quite well indeed. And, while I didn't win too many missions in our expanded 14-mission Lothal campaign, I did manage to win the finale rather easily (and I was playing against CT, Tress, Diala, & Drokkatta). Now, as I mentioned we did play a very non-standard, home-adapted version of the Lothal campaign, which undoubtedly influenced the outcome, but in the end I guess it comes down to individual games and luck.

We, at least, loved Tyrants of Lothal (Although I struggled with figuring out how to play Thrawn well)

In the second mission (Hondo) we managed to defeat (retreat) 3 heroes before wounding the last one. It was brutal. Now I am starting to believe that these missions are very swingy, one way or another, and any attempt by the IP to "fix/houserule" perceived unbalance will result in unforseen collapse of either rebels or imperials. Just play the game as is and enjoy the experience!

Now speaking of Thrawn, how do I play prediction? Openly declare the prediction and let the rebels decide how to work around it, or make a secret prediction and let them guess? My assumption is open, but secret feels more fun (and evil) 😈

It's an open prediction. You are as much trying to force another hero to activate as discourage the chosen hero from activating.

there should probably be a separate faq for Thrawn. One more question: how does the stun interact with the bacta thingy item that lets you remove a negative condition at the start of your activation? I am assuming that since both stun and removal of stun trigger in the same window, and that it is in the rebel player's turn, then the rebel player decides the order?

1 hour ago, Mr Licorice said:

there should probably be a separate faq for Thrawn. One more question: how does the stun interact with the bacta thingy item that lets you remove a negative condition at the start of your activation

Use the timing conflict resolution rules (non-attack, in campaign): Prediction is an imperial ability, so it happens before rebel abilities. Bacta Pump can thus be used to remove the stunned gained from Prediction.

We have played the first 3 missions of Tyrants of Lothal (doing the 7-mission mini campaign) and have so far found it unbalanced in favor of the rebels. Especially for the last mission (Duel on Devaron). Here we also wondered:

I'm destroying my rebels in extended campaign. However we house ruled that ToL components are mandatory. We can use components of other boxes only in case something is missing. In example Imperial class in the one in ToL with no chance of taking a different one. CT and Tress are mandatory (they've also chosen Drok and Onar). Also part of my agenda is from ToL and I can't avoid that.

I hate that ToL missions reserve so many DTs. That almost totally invalidates one of their ability that ideally would allow me to bring a lot of them in my open groups. Because of CT, I'm using Nexu and Dewback a lot.

On 2/26/2019 at 10:02 AM, Trevize84 said:

I'm destroying my rebels in extended campaign. However we house ruled that ToL components are mandatory. We can use components of other boxes only in case something is missing. In example Imperial class in the one in ToL with no chance of taking a different one. CT and Tress are mandatory (they've also chosen Drok and Onar). Also part of my agenda is from ToL and I can't avoid that.

Very nice, my group does something similar. We include everything in our campaigns IF we have played that campaign before (I owned everything when we played Lothal, but we hadn’t played HotE, so I didn’t include anything from HotE).

We also make the class decks and the heroes included in the current campaign that we are on mandatory. If we replay the campaign, it is fair game to use any heroes or class decks as long as all of us agree on it.

Playing this way makes things just feel a little more fresh.

1 hour ago, Funky_4LOM said:

Playing this way makes things just feel a little more fresh.

Right, it's a way to explore the whole content without using always same combos and strategies.