So ... here's the lengthy discussion portion of adding new factions, and why that would ultimately require a 2.0 in order to work.
tl;dr there's actually design philosophy challenges that necessitate a change.
If you followed X-Wing, you'll know they went through their 2.0 renovation recently. One of their biggest talking points in this was the issue of faction identity. What that boils down to is having a distinct feel between playing as Rebels, Resistance, First Order, Empire, and Scum ... as well as having multiple archtypes within each faction.
To illustrate that point: The Rebels and Resistance were initially bundled together in the same faction in 1.0 . In 2.0 one of the core defining archtypes that the Rebels embraced was a 'group hug' mentality: flying in squadrons and assisting your teammates through special abilities. The Resistance developed a sort of 'show off flyboy' archtype which rewarded skilled flying (high risk high reward Dependant on lining up your shots).
They also had signature abilites and upgrades for each faction that kinda helped defined them. For scum it was a card "dead man's switch" where your ship would explode damaging all nearby enemies upon defeat (which personified dirty tricks / recklessness).
So heading back into IA (and this is strictly skirmish speaking) ... it's going to get a lot harder to better differentiate the separate factions with the existing rules. A big part of this is that the different groups as is don't have as solid of archtypes within their abilities. And then you'd have to push it out to the other factions. Defining what it is that makes a massive group of various clankers different than various imperial troopers, for example.
It also gets muddied quite a bit for the Rebels and Republic. Rebels have star players and some support troops ... but republic is going to be kinda the same thing, but with key jedi support and loads of clone troopers (Which is oddly going to make them bleed into the empire).
So yeah ... with a 2.0 they could introduce a few more tools to work with. While there's a couple natural ones they could borrow from X-Wing 2.0 (calculate, force tokens), they could also add a couple new ones (off hand: targeted, which would be a debuff-inverse of hidden).
Additionally something I've kinda noticed that has a lot of room for play would be upgrade slots (basically just a cleaner iteration on upgrade cards). For example, paying an extra point to have your jet troopers ignore figures during line of sight checks, similar to the app. This would also allow for re-usuable force powers and whatnot. These upgrades could significantly improve diversification in that regard.
- fringe benefit is that upgrade cards could easily carry over into campaign
There's also the benefit of adding more codified tools to remove word-salad cards.
(personally, dreamland wishing, I'd prefer a rework of strain with deployments so that most common units could have 1 endurance. Being able to strain-forward 1 space, or have a buffer against bleeding, or have that strain be consumable with abilities = loads of room to play with)
Any rate, those tools would allow for an easier time differentiating between factions and making each more satisfying to play separately as.
There's also the campaign play issues (which, admittedly, that's what our group is 100% about).
Time line restrictions would make significant portions of your plastic figures unplayable from one campaign to the next. I mean ... it'd be pretty jarring to be playing a battle for Geonosys republic campaign, when suddenly Kylo and FO troopers storm in. (granted, our group would probably pull that crap anyway for kicks and giggles, but still). Honestly you're kinda looking at a starter-sized big-box for each era (just to provide enough figs for the repub/cis and FO/resisty). While some campaigns could benefit from being in fringe eras (rise of resistance, fall of republic), most players would demand more era-only campaigns than most. Which, really would require a lot of R&D and plastics.
So, yeah ...
I'd love to see a 2.0 ... the rework on all this stuff could benefit and clean it up significantly. But it does come with a lot of issues.
IA just hasn't caught on pure fire enough to merit a rework like this (blister packs aren't hotcakes sellers, for example).
Edited by thinkbomb