Rebalanced Imperial Assault Skirmish Tournament [RIAST] Rules
Designer Journal
Introduction
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 my opinion) in a bad state right now. The 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.
This document is an unofficial Fan Creation. I'm not affiliated to or sponsored by FFG.
Approach
First of all, we wanted to define an approach or guideline:
Many Deployment cards are either underpowered or overpowered and therefore there is only a small number of Deployment cards actually played competitively. The plan was to make as many figures playable as possible. (But priority is on the characters from the original trilogy.)
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 be 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 just changing their costs got new rules. The plan was to make as few changes to Deployment cards as possible.
Deployment cards should not get banned (with the exception of Upgrade cards).
In general, we wanted to buff before nerf, just because it feels better. But then we saw that in some cases it was the decision to either make like 40 Deployment Cards cheaper or 3 Deployment Cards more expensive. So we decided to go with the least disturbance or the least amount of changes necessary.
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. Elsewise swarms could become too powerful.
Darth Vader is the chosen one, he who brought balance to the force. Therefore he should have the most expensive Deployment card in the game (including Driven by Hatred) . No other Deployment card should be more expensive.
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 some overpowered Command cards it is possible to raise the Deployment cost of the figure(s) to achieve balance (e.g. all Hunters have been made more expensive, because the Hunter cards are so good). Other truly overpowered Command cards have to be banned.
This is quite a lot of text, and most of it is "we evaluated that unit and came to the conclusion that no change is needed, here is why ...". So actual changes are marked in red.
In my opinion, everything marked in blue will need further attention. The rest is already OK. But this is just my opinion. So what do you think?
Edited by DerBaer