So in the first Seperatists wave we're basically getting all their main characters from the films. Given that they don't have that many to pick from even with the cartoons, could this indicate they don't expect to have many more opportunities to release them?

Huh, I also just had a thought - we'll do doubt get Tarkin for Republic soon. That's cool.

We haven’t seen Asajj or Savage Oppress or Jango Fett yet have we?

34 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

We haven’t seen Asajj or Savage Oppress or Jango Fett yet have we?

And all the Separatist council members/Other commanders. But I am pleasantly surprised to be able to get all three of my favourite villains in one ship pack. And they are all pretty good. Event Grievous crew seems better than his pilot version.

For those like me that grew up watching the original Clone Wars microseries, this would be a pretty cool ship to add to the faction.

40 minutes ago, GILLIES291 said:

And all the Separatist council members/Other commanders. But I am pleasantly surprised to be able to get all three of my favourite villains in one ship pack. And they are all pretty good. Event Grievous crew seems better than his pilot version.

literally, wat tambor, is a pilot for the B22.

28 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

For those like me that grew up watching the original Clone Wars microseries, this would be a pretty cool ship to add to the faction.

If they can scrounge up pilots in addition to Asajj I can see them adding it... Can't help cringing at the design though. A definite case of form trumping function to the point of absurdity.

I noticed this as well, @mazz0.

It seemed strange to release Palp so soon for the Republic in the ARC170....a non-traditional crew carrier, and hardly a diplomatic vehicle of comfort.

I think the Infiltrator would have been perfect for a thematic and exclusive release of fringe-sith crew for seps, like Maul and Ventress.

Instead they gave us... literally all the main villains.

_____

Summary: I think they're pushing on overdrive to get the new factions off the ground and using their core-identity crew and support mechanics.

It's all they can do to keep up with the synergies possible with the other factions at the moment.

There are a lot of characters for Separatist, Republic and Scum faction in this era from the clone wars animation alone.

For a little while it was a "villain of the week" kind of show so bad guys aren't going to be hard to come by: Hondo, Young Boba, Admiral Trench, the Zygerrian slavers, Ziro the Hutt, Sy Snootles, Young Ackbar, Mom Mothma, Captain Tarkin, etc. The list can go on and on.

3 hours ago, Bucknife said:

I noticed this as well, @mazz0.

It seemed strange to release Palp so soon for the Republic in the ARC170....a non-traditional crew carrier, and hardly a diplomatic vehicle of comfort.

I think the Infiltrator would have been perfect for a thematic and exclusive release of fringe-sith crew for seps, like Maul and Ventress.

Instead they gave us... literally all the main villains.

_____

Summary: I think they're pushing on overdrive to get the new factions off the ground and using their core-identity crew and support mechanics.

It's all they can do to keep up with the synergies possible with the other factions at the moment.

Yeah, I think its this.

I think they should have waited on some of these. Like Palpatine. He looks just as domineering as his OT self. Pre-nerf 1.0.

Dooku has other ships too, so we'll likely see more than one version of him.

I think a big part of this (and very possibly part of the reason why this game was OT only for so long) is that the Clone Wars era just doesn't have that many pilots.

It doesn't really have all that many on screen starfighter battles. TPM gave us a handful of pilots in the N-1s, but the only other prequel movie starfighter battle gives us just one more pilot (Odd Ball). Maybe two, with the guy we see blow up, it's really hard to tell when they're all clones. Throw in Jag, the clone who kills Plo Koon, and that is literally your lot for the whole trilogy. The Clone Wars series doesn't help much either. Most of the space battles are presented from the cap ship scale, with very little focus ever given to the starfighters beyond Anakin and Ahsoka, or the Y-Wings in the Malevolence arc. The one exception is the battle of Ryloth, and look where most of our named V-19 pilots came from...

The Separatists have none, by virtue of all their fighters being super disposable droids.

Compare this with ANH (I hate to sound like an old, tired purist but it's still the gold standard for how to do space battes in Star Wars) where we had a raft of X-Wing and Y-Wing pilots named on screen, and many with decent screen time and dialogue. There's a reason the OT spawned a series of hugely successful flight sim games and the PT didn't. There's a reason the OT spawned a hugely popular novel series about pilots and the PT didn't.

I think the reason we're seeing so many named Separatist characters in the first wave is because they're already scraping the bottom of the barrel for pilots to put in these ships. Look no further than Dooku, of all people, being a pilot on the Sith Infiltrator.

8 minutes ago, apoapsis said:

Dooku has other ships too, so we'll likely see more than one version of him.

I just think it's odd we've seen him here at all. I'd have expected him and Palpatine to come for the first time with shuttles of some sort, something more associated with them, and see just Maul and maybe some cartoon characters here.

5 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

I think a big part of this (and very possibly part of the reason why this game was OT only for so long) is that the Clone Wars era just doesn't have that many pilots.

It doesn't really have all that many on screen starfighter battles. TPM gave us a handful of pilots in the N-1s, but the only other prequel movie starfighter battle gives us just one more pilot (Odd Ball). Maybe two, with the guy we see blow up, it's really hard to tell when they're all clones. Throw in Jag, the clone who kills Plo Koon, and that is literally your lot for the whole trilogy. The Clone Wars series doesn't help much either. Most of the space battles are presented from the cap ship scale, with very little focus ever given to the starfighters beyond Anakin and Ahsoka, or the Y-Wings in the Malevolence arc. The one exception is the battle of Ryloth, and look where most of our named V-19 pilots came from...

The Separatists have none, by virtue of all their fighters being super disposable droids.

Compare this with ANH (I hate to sound like an old, tired purist but it's still the gold standard for how to do space battes in Star Wars) where we had a raft of X-Wing and Y-Wing pilots named on screen, and many with decent screen time and dialogue. There's a reason the OT spawned a series of hugely successful flight sim games and the PT didn't. There's a reason the OT spawned a hugely popular novel series about pilots and the PT didn't.

I think the reason we're seeing so many named Separatist characters in the first wave is because they're already scraping the bottom of the barrel for pilots to put in these ships. Look no further than Dooku, of all people, being a pilot on the Sith Infiltrator.

That may not have had much screen time, but the Republic has plenty of names from TCW to use. Lots of Jedi, lots of named Clones, no problem there.

True for the seppies I suppose. But with crew especially, how are they going to sell a seppie shuttle now that the logical people to be crew on it are already available? I suppose we could see Assaj and Opress crew come with a shuttle, but that would seem so much less suited to having them in this pack and Dooku in the shuttle pack.

9 hours ago, Tvboy said:

We haven’t seen Asajj or Savage Oppress or Jango Fett yet have we?

Jango Is Scum! 😛 <points to long thread arguing about the right faction for Jango>

Dual faction Rogue Class starfighter with Scum Cade Bane, CIS Dooku, and various generic and limited Magnaguards. For wave 5.

44 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Dual faction Rogue Class starfighter with Scum Cade Bane, CIS Dooku, and various generic and limited Magnaguards. For wave 5.

I don't know...dual faction cards seem to be getting less, not more, common.

58 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

I think a big part of this (and very possibly part of the reason why this game was OT only for so long) is that the Clone Wars era just doesn't have that many pilots.

It doesn't really have all that many on screen starfighter battles. TPM gave us a handful of pilots in the N-1s, but the only other prequel movie starfighter battle gives us just one more pilot (Odd Ball). Maybe two, with the guy we see blow up, it's really hard to tell when they're all clones. Throw in Jag, the clone who kills Plo Koon, and that is literally your lot for the whole trilogy. The Clone Wars series doesn't help much either. Most of the space battles are presented from the cap ship scale, with very little focus ever given to the starfighters beyond Anakin and Ahsoka, or the Y-Wings in the Malevolence arc. The one exception is the battle of Ryloth, and look where most of our named V-19 pilots came from...

The Separatists have none, by virtue of all their fighters being super disposable droids.

Compare this with ANH (I hate to sound like an old, tired purist but it's still the gold standard for how to do space battes in Star Wars) where we had a raft of X-Wing and Y-Wing pilots named on screen, and many with decent screen time and dialogue. There's a reason the OT spawned a series of hugely successful flight sim games and the PT didn't. There's a reason the OT spawned a hugely popular novel series about pilots and the PT didn't.

I think the reason we're seeing so many named Separatist characters in the first wave is because they're already scraping the bottom of the barrel for pilots to put in these ships. Look no further than Dooku, of all people, being a pilot on the Sith Infiltrator.

I agree that the Death Star battle is the uncontested champion of Star Wars space action, but you are seriously overselling the OT in the quantity department. Three named Y-wing, five X-wing pilots in ANH (if we count Gold Five and Red Leader as named), zero in TESB and zero in RotJ. In PT/TCW for some reason you don't count Jedi at all, and dismiss V-19 and Y-wing pilots because they appeared only in one battle, just like every ANH pilot except for Wedge.

OT is also the Empire, with a grand total of 1 named pilots.

48 minutes ago, mazz0 said:

That may not have had much screen time, but the Republic has plenty of names from TCW to use. Lots of Jedi, lots of named Clones, no problem there.

But that's just it.

There aren't, really. Like I said, the only times pilots really get screen time in TCW is the battle of Ryloth and the Malevolence arc. Ryloth has already given us all the names for the V-19 pilots (except for Odd Ball from the god awful movie), and yeah sure there'll be plenty of names to use for the Republic Y-Wing. But there's not a huge amount beyond that. There's (I think) two named Z-95 pilots and one or two named LAAT/i pilots. I mean, maybe that's enough, depends on how many pilots they want for each ship.

But good luck finding more than one Nu class shuttle pilot. Same with the Theta, if we get that instead. It's just Captain Kagi (again).

And we've basically already got all the Jedi pilots from TCW. The only ones missing from the Delta-7 are Adi Gallia, Kit Fisto and Barriss Offee. And the Eta-2 pilots are basically all the same as the Delta-7 (Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace etc.). The only new addition there would be Aayla Secura and maybe Yoda if they want to take the Battlefront 2 route and pretend (rightly so, IMO) that his stupid little midget version doesn't exist.

I know this doesn't really make them any different from Imperials or especially First Order, where most pilots are just made up anyway. But there's a reason I think Republic will see the same names coming up a lot. Anakin and Obi-Wan will obviously reappear on the Eta-2. Odd Ball is already in two ships and it's only the first wave. Ahsoka will potentially pull double duty as a Y-Wing pilot.

It's not a problem, just my explanation for why both Republic and Separatist have so many big names up front. ****, even Padme gets a look in on the N-1. She has every right to be there, she's a main character and she did actually fly one (briefly, out of combat) in the movies. Though we don't see her in the cockpit, she arguably gets as much screen time in an N-1 as this dude or this gal. And when an important character gets as much association with a ship as a dedicated pilot character, of course they're going to be picked.

1 hour ago, mazz0 said:

True for the seppies I suppose. But with crew especially, how are they going to sell a seppie shuttle now that the logical people to be crew on it are already available? I suppose we could see Assaj and Opress crew come with a shuttle, but that would seem so much less suited to having them in this pack and Dooku in the shuttle pack.

True enough.

I think FFG are a bit less bothered by the theme choices for what upgrades go where, this time around. Probably due to the conversion kits giving players relatively easy access to all the upgrades off the bat for the relevant factions.

eg. Darth Vader crew is coming in the Decimator, not the Lambda where he would make more sense. Obviously it's just because FFG want to get his card out into the hands of those who are new to the game with 2e sooner rather than later.

They want the Seps to get major movie figures with decent upgrade effects on the board as early as possible, to capitalise on name recognition. So they put them in the first Sep ship with a crew slot. And they made the SI that first crew slot ship because it's cooler and more recognisable than the Sheathipede.

I do wonder, given that expansions in 2e have way more upgrade cards than their 1e equivalents, if this means FFG will be less bothered about duplicating unique cards across expansions. Dooku may also come with the shuttle. Palpatine may also come with his shuttle for the Republic.

I would imagine, for now, though that the Sep shuttle will come with Council members like Nute Gunray or San Hill. It'll be their equivalent of a crew card like Admiral Sloane or Minister Tua.

I do agree that Savage Oppress (god I hate that name) would have made way more sense coming in the SI, so that he and Maul could partner up with some synergy. It's also possible that Savage and Asajj will be gunners, (I don't believe Seps have any yet, and they make more sense in that role than Palps or Dooku) and so are waiting for an appropriate ship.

4 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

It's not a problem, just my explanation for why both Republic and Separatist have so many big names up front. ****, even Padme gets a look in on the N-1. She has every right to be there, she's a main character and she did actually fly one (briefly, out of combat) in the movies. Though we don't see her in the cockpit, she arguably gets as much screen time in an N-1 as this dude or this gal. And when an important character gets as much association with a ship as a dedicated pilot character, of course they're going to be picked.

She - and Ashoka - also fly N-1s in a dogfight in a Forces of Destiny episode.

5 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

Odd Ball is already in two ships and it's only the first wave. Ahsoka will potentially pull double duty as a Y-Wing pilot.

I thought she was a gunner in the Malevolance arc - I'm not sure we ever see her fly a Y-wing?

I think what we got is fine. Grievous crew may be a little silly to have in the infiltrator pack, but beyond that it’s fine. The Sith Lords all in one box works for me.

As for named CIS pilots or crew .... Asajj, any council member not Wat Tambor for crew, multiple generals from TCW such as Trench, and I’d still argue for Jango and Zam in CIS rather than scum. I’d also toss into consideration Death Watch, although theirs is a case that could more easily fall into scum.

Sev’rance Tann If we get desperate for folks to fill in the ranks (actually surprised she didn’t hop into the infiltrator to offer a pilot seeing as she’s esoteric Legends territory - like tie punisher esoteric).

4 minutes ago, ScummyRebel said:

Grievous crew may be a little silly to have in the infiltrator pack

51 minutes ago, eMeM said:

I agree that the Death Star battle is the uncontested champion of Star Wars space action, but you are seriously overselling the OT in the quantity department. Three named Y-wing, five X-wing pilots in ANH (if we count Gold Five and Red Leader as named), zero in TESB and zero in RotJ. In PT/TCW for some reason you don't count Jedi at all, and dismiss V-19 and Y-wing pilots because they appeared only in one battle, just like every ANH pilot except for Wedge.

OT is also the Empire, with a grand total of 1 named pilots.

Not a like for like comparison, that was kinda my point.

The OT gave us a stack of named pilots in ANH, gave us more named pilots in ESB (Hobbie and Janson, Dack, Zev Senesca as 'Rogue 2') and put more pilots faces on screen in RotJ. That's already way more than the PT films by themselves, which only name two pilots on screen the entire trilogy (outside of major characters, obvs). Those two are Kagi and Odd Ball. Even Ric Olie isn't named on screen. If we're counting pilots who appeared but weren't named, like the other N-1 pilots and Jag (who shoots down Plo Koon) then we also get to count all the pilots in RotJ like Horton Salm. Jake Farrell, Telsij, Arvel Crynyd and Grizz Frix.

So again the OT comes out way, way on top of the PT.

If you're counting TCW, then I think it's only fair to count extended OT media too. Obviously there's a canon issue now, but that wasn't the case when 1e was released.

There are way more extended media OT pilots than there are in TCW. Even if you limit it to canon, you get pilots like Evaan Verlaine, Thane Kyrell and Norra Wexley crop up (which is why they're in 2e, naturally). Rebels gives us the Ghost crew.

51 minutes ago, eMeM said:

In PT/TCW for some reason you don't count Jedi at all

I'm absolutely counting them, but most of them are Delta-7 pilots. And when wave 1 gives us two releases of the Delta-7, obviously that means most of those pilots appear in wave 1.

The point I'm making is to try and address why wave 1 seems so front loaded in terms of major characters. The answer is to do with how the PT portrayed its space battles - it's almost always focused on the recurring major characters rather than the generic pilots. The Delta-7 is front and centre in the show, so it's front in centre in the release order.

Looking ahead, the other ship the Jedi use is the Eta-2. But there's actually surprisingly few confirmed pilots for it. It's Anakin and Obi-Wan again, and then only one or two more appeared in TCW.

I'm positive that's why the Delta-7 was chosen for wave 1, and not the Eta-2.

51 minutes ago, eMeM said:

and dismiss V-19 and Y-wing pilots because they appeared only in one battle

I'm not dismissing them.

I'm saying that the V-19 is giving us all the V-19 pilots in one go, because all the named pilots were in one battle. That's the same as the X-Wing for Rebels (if you don't count Saw's), and that's totally fine.

But unlike the Rebels, where we also had a stack of A-Wing, B-Wing and freighter pilots to draw upon, the Republic doesn't have the same wealth of pilots across its future ships. The Y-Wing has loads, for sure. TCW had a whole arc largely focusing on those Y-Wings and that'll be great to draw on.

But it never really focused on, say, Z-95 pilots in the same way. There's a whole series of short stories focusing on a squadron of B-Wing pilots for the Rebels. The Clone Wars era doesn't really have anything like that, because starfighters and dogfights aren't given the same spotlight.

There's no real Millennium Falcon equivalent either. TCW has the Twilight, but that's yet another ship Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka pilot. There's nothing with a dynamic crew like the Ghost, or a history of pilots like the Falcon. And Han doesn't show up in an X-Wing.

So Prequel Era wave 1 feels front loaded with content and little in reserve to bring out later (which was the point of the OP) because they've given us 3 out of the 4 ship with a lot of named pilots already.

51 minutes ago, eMeM said:

OT is also the Empire, with a grand total of 1 named pilots.

Again, it depends what you count.

If you only look at names specifically said in the movies, then the Empire's 1 is still dead equal with the Seps' 1 (Maul; we still never actually see Grievous fly that Belbullab, we only know its his because of media outside the movies).

But the Empire at least has a couple of shots of pilots inside the cockpit. Again, that's exactly the same treatment Jag gets in RotS. So if you allow expanded media to give them names, as they did for Jag, Ric Olie and the other N-1 pilots in the PT then we get Backstabber, Mauler and Dark Curse out of ANH; Jendon and Yorr from RotJ.

If you allow expanded media to count for pilots - even limiting to canon - then you get Inferno Squad for the TIEs, Vult Skerris for the TIE Defender and TIE Interceptor, Valen Rudor, Seventh Sister, Fifth Brother and the Grand Inquisitor in the TIE Advanced v1 etc.

It easily ends up beating the Seps, who still only get Grievous, Maul and Asajj Ventress.

30 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

She - and Ashoka - also fly N-1s in a dogfight in a Forces of Destiny episode.

Ah, cool. Okay.

Still, that ties into my point. The PT has way more instances of putting its major named characters in as many ships as possible to make them the focus, rather than the people who normally fly those ships. Which is why all the big characters are in the game so early for the Republic. By contrast, Luke only ever flew an X-Wing. Even (so far) in the comics. Dutch Vander has been in Rebels, Rogue One and ANH and flew a Y-Wing in all three. And so on.

34 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I thought she was a gunner in the Malevolance arc - I'm not sure we ever see her fly a Y-wing?

You're absolutely right, I misremembered.

Guess that means we'll be getting an Ahoska gunner card.

2 hours ago, mazz0 said:

I just think it's odd we've seen him here at all. I'd have expected him and Palpatine to come for the first time with shuttles of some sort, something more associated with them, and see just Maul and maybe some cartoon characters here.

Well, I think it has more to do with the SITH Infiltrator needing mostly, you know, Sith pilots and crew. So might as well drop all the big Dark Side force users here now, especially if they rely on the force-related synergistic abilities of one another.

With the Clones they can really just call them whatever they like. They don't have to make them names used on screen. A running theme of Clone Wars animated was the Clones trying to find a name other than their number. That was a big thing marking General Krell as not caring about his soldiers in the Umbara arc. The Clones were only ever numbers and not their nicknames. In "Clone Cadets" they addressed the names thing. If FFG needs named pilots for ships flown by Clones they can just call them anything. "Duchess" in the Striker for example isn't a screen used name. There is precedent for pulling a name out of a hat as it were.

It seems likely lack of names for pilots is far down the list for causes of how long it took to bring prequels content into the game. I'd blame the prequels-blow reflex first and foremost. Given some of the interactions in these ships thus far release of prequels content feels like a big motivation for creating second edition. It feels like there was stuff they wanted to do with Clones and Clankers and Force users but didn't have the rules structure for it in 1st.

Not that they're as big and iconic as Maul or Sidious, but we can also expect to see some named Geonosian pilots. Maybe Sun Fac and Poggle. Probably one of the more important species in the separatist confederacy, and also distinctive starfighters as well.