Hi there!
Some of us in the german community didn't really like the approach of the IACP, but agreed, that some rebalancing had to be done. Therefore we created the RIAST Rules.
Designer's Commentary: Imperial Assault Skirmish is the miniatures games with the best core rules out there. Sadly, the Skirmish game is (more or less) discontinued and game balance is in a bad state right now. This Rebalanced Imperial Assault Skirmish Tournament Rules (RIAST Rules) document was compiled with the intention to have some more years of Rebalanced Imperial Assault Skirmish and to share this with the community.
Many Deployment cards are either underpowered or overpowered and therefore there is only a small number of Deployment cards played competitively. The plan was to make as many figures playable as possible.
In most cases the Deployment cost is just either too high or too low. In these cases the Deployment cost was changed.
If a Deployment card is too expensive, it will not get played, which would be sad, but not a real problem for the game as a whole. But if a Deployment card is too cheap, it will be the only card that's played (e.g. 4x4 or Spectre Cell), and that would be a catastrophe. To avoid this, Deployment costs have been reduced carefully.
Only Deployment cards that couldn't be rebalanced by changing their costs got new rules. The plan was to make as few changes to cards as possible.
Deployment cards should not get banned (with the exception of Upgrade cards).
FFGʼs game designers said in an interview, that there are reference deployments, used to balance the costs of the other deployments correctly. Elite Stormtroopers are one of those reference deployments, Elite Probe Droids are too. Therefore, these should not be changed.
There are certain baselines in this game that should not be ignored. E.g.: There is a maximum number of figures per army of twenty. The game designers achieved that by making the cheapest figure cost 2, e.g. regular Stormtroopers. Therefore, reducing the cost of any figure to less than 2 points per figure is not an option.
Command cards are a whole different story. For many reasons, it is impractical to change a Command card's text. Furthermore, game-winning Command cards cannot be rebalanced by just raising their costs, as they will be played anyways. For overpowered Command cards it is possible to raise the Deployment cost of the figure(s) to achieve balance (e.g. Son of Skywalker or the Hunter cards). Other truly overpowered Command cards have to be banned. There are so many viable Command cards, that buffing underpowered Command cards isn't necessary.
I would like to thank all the playtesters for their great work and Feedback!
The complete ruleset is attached to this thread.
Edited by DerBaer