One thing I noticed they held over from the first campaign - exhausted 'veteran' tokens do not refresh in the status phase. That feels like a bummer, it means the token is only good for 2 rerolls, which...I dunno, doesn't seem super powerful for the level of effort needed to get them.

Something they did change was - 'scarred' ships and squadrons are no longer permanently destroyed, when destroyed a second time? I have to say, I dislike this one - it means, effectively, there is no additional risk in not repairing a scarred unit. That saves a LOOOOOOT of cost over the course of the campaign. Granted, the source of the ability TO remove scars is now completely different, so in RitR this 'cost' is now more specifically 'the sort of bases you need to take to deal with this' rather than directly draining your overall pool of resources...but it feels like you could basically just ignore this entirely, and focus on more important locations for 'winning the campaign'...basically ignoring this part of your logistics. Once scarred, you're just...scarred, that's all, you can't get MORE scarred; there is no additional risk to justify the cost of fixing this.

(It's been said, of course, 'amateurs study tactics, but professionals study logistics' - I've noted before that I do like how RitR does introduce SOME more logistics into the game, with the 'low fuel' or 'low supply' states. It simply feels like the changes to the 'scarred' state diminishes its part of that consideration.)

The custom commanders are definitely cool - they add a light-RPG sort of element to the game, with players able to invest in a personalized commander.

The new three-act structure feels...odd? I think it would work well if the overall campaign had a more rigid flow to it, but given the campaigns can be so free-form...or does this cadence of pivotal battles organically GENERATE that kind of narrative? Definitely curious to hear from players that have done a campaign, how these feel like they fit in compared to the CC campaign...

1 hour ago, xanderf said:

One thing I noticed they held over from the first campaign - exhausted 'veteran' tokens do not refresh in the status phase. That feels like a bummer, it means the token is only good for 2 rerolls, which...I dunno, doesn't seem super powerful for the level of effort needed to get them.

I'll have to disagree with your assessment on Veteran tokens. After running 4 CC campaigns to completion, I found them exceedingly powerful and some fleets, especially those comprised mainly of unique squadrons, earned them easily. Two free re-rolls per game, along with any other dice manipulation you can muster, can make a huge difference in alpha strikes + the follow-up turn where most of the damage is done. Remember, veteran tokens apply to ships as well. My double Garm/Ashoka Liberty fleet with Mon Cal Exodus titles was generating a ridiculous number of free tokens each game. All of those free repair tokens made surviving the Ion Cannon: Base Defense a lot easier.

While the scarred rules are different, RitR is not a "points value" campaign like CC. I feel it's a lot less about permanently destroying units in the opposing fleets so you can outmuscle your opponents to victory, which was the standard way to win in CC. With the 250 point fleet maximum and very few ways to add a ship to your fleet, earning a lot of money isn't really a concern in RitR. This new campaign seems geared toward controlling the right places on the map, cleverly combining the commander abilities on your team, generating the right strategic effects at the right time, and winning key pivotal battles.

After playing a lot of CC - which I enjoyed - I felt that campaign was really just an escalation league with a cool map disguised as a campaign. RitR is a proper campaign with more difficult, strategic choices. In our first meetup this weekend, my players took a long time to ponder their options in the post-battle sequence as there weren't any obviously correct choices. And even after their first battle they could see some of the tactical mistakes they had made in their initial planet selection or how they built their fleets. Based off their reactions, I think RitR is going to have a lot of replay value.

Last point, but one I think worth mentioning: The Task Force fleets + the rules about no unique upgrades means RitR plays a lot different than 400-point tournaments, forcing players to re-think their Armada preconceptions. For example, one of my players was facing down a pair of Gladiators. Initially he was very nervous and assumed he was going to lose, but during the game he realized his reaction was based on the traditional upgrade set paired with the Gladiator, not the base ship itself. Without the full suit of Demolisher, Brunson, Ordnance Experts, etc... the GSD-I is a very different beast. I think this will be a very good thing for the Armada community, as the more viable ways there are to play the game, the longer people will stay engaged with it.

4 minutes ago, Yipe said:

...the rules about no unique upgrades...

Ehhh...you can definitely equip unique upgrades. The rules even provide examples of a few of them (Darth Vader, for instance) being limited across fleets.

You cannot start with any unique upgrades, true, but that lasts about 1 round before everyone has enough points from battles (even losing battles) to buy a title or officer or two, presuming a campaign objective*.

* To be fair, I think this was a change from CC, too. In CC, obviously names were still unique in a fleet (no change, there), but beyond the round 1 restrictions, it was basically open season on whatever upgrades you could afford. RitR does qualify that you can only equip unique upgrades from campaign objectives - generic objectives = generic upgrades only. So there's that. But unique upgrades are definitely buyable. ?I suppose the goal is to try to get players to choose campaign objectives more often than regular ones? If so, laudable - and nice to see we got a bunch more campaign objectives this time, too.

You can't start with unique upgrades, and you can't always battle at a planet with a campaign objective (no one played a campaign battle in the 1st round of my campaign), so they're not an automatic option. While you can add unique upgrades later on, it's definitely not the same as CC where you could have as many unique squadrons as you wanted (shared with your team) and even equip unique upgrades on turn 1. By turn 2 in CC, you could fairly easily recreate the 400-point tournament standbys. That's not the case here. I'm curious, have you gotten a chance to play RitR yet?

Scarring is still significant. Scarred ships are more brittle. That is the risk, even if it isn't additional risk.

Note that a player can remove a number of scarred tokens equal to the number of bases their teams have. To start, that is 2 or 3 (depending on the number of players). Let's say it is 3 for the sake of argument. That's 1 ship and 2 squadrons. Or 2 ships 1 squadron. Or 3 squadrons. You get the idea. Squadrons take the same amount of "effort" to repair as a ship. The currency of this campaign is really quite different.

I had some concern about the possible proliferation of bases in the campaign, making repair yards useless. After all, 7 bases in a 3 vs 3 campaign seems like a lot of ability to refit ships and squads. The quickest you can get to 7 bases is by about campaign turn 4 (that's if you choose to get all the resource tokens you can, and your opponents let you do it). By then, you're almost certainly out of the first act. And that means there are a LOT of counterplay options for the opposing team (like the Conquest pivotal battle or lots of strategic effects that give very tangible battlefield advantages).

I've been putting together a task force or two for this campaign, and a very real concern for me has been how long is it going to take me to get to 250 points. Roughly half the time, my fleet is probably going to be asked to defend, so I'm not going to necessarily be on a planet with an upgrade that I want/need for my fleet. I think there may very well be a lot of fleets that have upgrades just because they were rewards for a planetary battle they were forced to fight on defense. The only way around THAT is by having the right base planet (since you can choose a reward from a planet you have a base on too). But planets could be chosen as bases for reward/upgrade availability, strategic effects, OR logistics (you wanted a base in region II to avoid low fuel for future attacks, right?). This doesn't seem easy to balance.

I think it looks awesome.

26 minutes ago, Yipe said:

I'm curious, have you gotten a chance to play RitR yet?

Not yet - I have it, and am setting up one, but haven't played it yet. Played a few CC campaigns, though, so focusing on the points of comparison between them.

15 minutes ago, RobertK said:

Scarring is still significant. Scarred ships are more brittle. That is the risk, even if it isn't additional risk.

Note that a player can remove a number of scarred tokens equal to the number of bases their teams have. To start, that is 2 or 3 (depending on the number of players). Let's say it is 3 for the sake of argument. That's 1 ship and 2 squadrons. Or 2 ships 1 squadron. Or 3 squadrons. You get the idea. Squadrons take the same amount of "effort" to repair as a ship. The currency of this campaign is really quite different.

But that's the thing, though - as you say, it's a different way of managing it. It's a new TYPE of base you only really need to pursue if you want to deal with scarred ships/squads.

But...scarred ships/squads are only more brittle (and very little, in the case of squads - first move, fly to the station, *bam*, effectively un-scarred). Nothing worse. Which makes the effort to fight over those bases, when there is so much else to do, feel....?meh?

I dunno, I really think the risk of losing them entirely would add more difficulty to those decisions. Maybe even split the difference - have a "severely scarred" status step you advance to if killed while scarred, which cuts squad strength to half (round down) and removes all defense tokens from a ship. If killed THEN...permanently killed.

15 minutes ago, RobertK said:

I think there may very well be a lot of fleets that have upgrades just because they were rewards for a planetary battle they were forced to fight on defense. The only way around THAT is by having the right base planet (since you can choose a reward from a planet you have a base on too). But planets could be chosen as bases for reward/upgrade availability, strategic effects, OR logistics (you wanted a base in region II to avoid low fuel for future attacks, right?). This doesn't seem easy to balance.

Well... one player per team can pick the reward from one of the team's bases.

But, sure, generally I agree with your overall point - RitR fleets are going to be a lot more hodge-podge, as unspent rewards are lost, and something (even if nothing you really want) is obviously better than nothing .

I LOVE THAT ABOUT IT. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want..." after all. It's definitely one of the highlights I think of the RitR changes.

Still ...without the added thread to scarred ships, the difference really comes down to 'what locations do I need to defend' vs 'who wants a killer upgrade that will give them a huge advantage, and where can we get those points?' - not nothing, but if you added that extra wrinkle of 'but we also desperately need to get player X some more repair yards, or he's in real danger of permanently losing ships, and then we're hosed'...

I mean, that would be icing on the cake for complexity of decision. And that's really what you want to have the 'command staff' of a campaign to have to deal with.

9 hours ago, xanderf said:

I dunno, I really think the risk of losing them entirely would add more difficulty to those decisions. Maybe even split the difference - have a "severely scarred" status step you advance to if killed while scarred, which cuts squad strength to half (round down) and removes all defense tokens from a ship. If killed THEN...permanently killed.

That's a really good point. The stakes for having your task force be soundly defeated are relatively low for the ships in that task force. Scarring isn't crippling. The challenge in building a campaign like this is that if you make the stakes too high, it risks the snowball effect becoming prevalent. The designers may have been leery about this since one of the main criticisms of the Corellian Conflict campaign was the ease with which teams could run away with the campaign. We'll see if they overcompensated.

But if I may offer another point of discussion that is related to this. In this campaign, the fleets are smaller and therefore more brittle. Losing one ship in the Corellian Conflict was a problem, but it wouldn't necessarily make your fleet unusable. If you lose one ship from a 200-250 point fleet, that's a significant portion of the fleet. It probably leads to retiring that fleet. So the task forces are made artificially more resilient, by saying ships are never permanently destroyed. But since the stakes are lowered for the fleet itself, how do you raise the stakes so that there is still tension in the campaign as a whole? I'm not sure how they did it, but I suspect it's in there. Some possibilities:

1) More of the strategic effects are relevant and have concrete battlefield effects. Conflicts over planets aren't just fights over generic resources, but instead are struggles to gain specific abilities that affect more than just your ability to maintain and upgrade your fleets.

2) Pivotal battles can really swing the campaign since they appear to put a lot of campaign points in play. Since the team that is behind gets to choose the pivotal objective, the tension stakes can be high (on both sides!) while giving the team that is behind a significant chance of catching up or even taking the lead.

I think adding the pivotal battles mechanic is a master stroke. In Corellian Conflict, what people were most looking forward to was fighting that final battle. The problem is, that final battle made the rest of the campaign just an exercise in building your fleet. Everything was focused on getting resources so that your fleet would be the optimal 500-pt fleet you had envisioned at the start. The campaign map was mainly window dressing.

In Rebellion in the Rim, you get to have 2-3 "final" battles! While they don't completely determine the outcome of the campaign, they do strongly influence it. That means the other battles you fight matter for the campaign's outcome and don't just serve as a means of building your optimal fleet.

2 hours ago, RobertK said:

That's a really good point. The stakes for having your task force be soundly defeated are relatively low for the ships in that task force. Scarring isn't crippling. The challenge in building a campaign like this is that if you make the stakes too high, it risks the snowball effect becoming prevalent. The designers may have been leery about this since one of the main criticisms of the Corellian Conflict campaign was the ease with which teams could run away with the campaign. We'll see if they overcompensated.

But if I may offer another point of discussion that is related to this. In this campaign, the fleets are smaller and therefore more brittle. Losing one ship in the Corellian Conflict was a problem, but it wouldn't necessarily make your fleet unusable. If you lose one ship from a 200-250 point fleet, that's a significant portion of the fleet. It probably leads to retiring that fleet. So the task forces are made artificially more resilient, by saying ships are never permanently destroyed.

Yes, I think that is the reason - but I think FFG erred on the side of caution to avoid it; removing from players even the risk of making that 'really bad decision' of sending forces into battle that were too badly damaged and at risk of permanent loss.

I think removing a decision from players because it carries too great a risk, and they might make a mistake by doing it when they didn't need to...I dunno, not a fan.

I mean, heck, even if we have to accept that a unit CANNOT be permanently destroyed, no matter what*, I'd like at least one more step past the modest-inconvenience of 'scarred' - the 'severely scarred' idea I suggested above (IE., half health rounded down for squads, no defense tokens for ships) could serve as that final state. At that point, the player is just about screaming for repair yard time, which is something a campaign should factor in.

* Seriously, though, that 'no matter what' just throws me. I think I'd even take a specific campaign objective for it - 'sink the Bismarck!' style, where an enemy fleet can commit to trying to eliminate one ship and if they actually do, it's really gone . Maybe make that a campaign decision - rather than fighting three battles in a campaign step, if you want to fight that objective, you can only fight one battle and two of your fleets sit idle giving the enemy two easy map wins. But in exchange, you can pick one ship in one fleet and fight a battle that, if it gets destroyed, it's permanently gone? I dunno, something like that to make it possible to actually kill a ship .

2 hours ago, xanderf said:

I'd like at least one more step past the modest-inconvenience of 'scarred'

I agree. Also the whole idea of the current scaring effect seams strange. It scales so strangely across ships. Just compare an ISD to a Quasar. A scarred ISD probably doesn't even care that is looses its contain. I can totally see ISDs that go the whole campaign without removing the scar token, whereas a scarred Quasar is absolutely crippled. Combine that with the fact that a Quasar is a million times easier to get scarred than an ISD and the whole system seems to be in need of a serous overhaul.

2 hours ago, LordCola said:

I agree. Also the whole idea of the current scaring effect seams strange. It scales so strangely across ships. Just compare an ISD to a Quasar. A scarred ISD probably doesn't even care that is looses its contain. I can totally see ISDs that go the whole campaign without removing the scar token, whereas a scarred Quasar is absolutely crippled. Combine that with the fact that a Quasar is a million times easier to get scarred than an ISD and the whole system seems to be in need of a serous overhaul.

Nevermind the squadrons. Scarred TIE Interceptor? That's not a happy squadron. Scarred TIE Defender? *meh*

Either way - make a beeline to the station, *poof*, instantly good-as-new. While ships have nothing they can do at all.

It's bizarre. At the very least, having it proportional rather than a flat number would have been better. IE., half health (round down) remaining on squadrons or half defense tokens (round down) remaining on ships. That would at least sting a bit more equally.

Y'all do bring up a valid point, scarring hasn't scaled well. Tbh, instead of discarding defense tokens, have a reverse Motti effect. Small ships start with one face down damage card, mediums two, and large three. Makes keeping them scarred significantly more detrimental.

You then have to devote engineering commands to discard those, and an ISD starting at 8 hull instead of 11 hurts. Just a thought.

Ok, there's some concern about how scarring is too light of a penalty in this campaign. Maybe.

But this campaign is different than Corellian Conflict. This campaign isn't a glorified exercise in fleet-building spread out over 3-4 campaign rounds. The focus isn't solely on building the best fleet so you can win the final battle.

In THIS campaign, what you do in the meantime matters. Let's say you fight a battle, your fleet gets tabled, and you lose presence on a planet that your team had hoped to build a base on. The loss isn't that your fleet got beat up. The loss is positional. You just lost the opportunity to bring in strategic assets that your team may have been counting on. And instead of refitting 4 ships/squads per turn, you've only got 3 refits to spend because that base isn't getting built there. And that loss of a campaign point to the other team isn't just slowing down your inevitable march to the final battle like in Corellian Conflict. Nope. That's a point you'll have to make up somehow if you want to win the campaign. Because unlike in Corellian Conflict, you can win the final battle and still lose the campaign. Losing is bad.

I know there's inevitably a big focus on the fleets, but this campaign is different. Fleets are very much a means to the end, rather than the end in itself. And that means the scarring mechanic, no matter what it is, is less important than it was in Corellian Conflict and other campaign systems we might be used to. It requires an adjustment in thinking.

In CC all teams tried to get the repair yards, that were most important and then went for resource points. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like in RitR their is a similiar logic that forces teams to go for the border locations. You need a base in an area to avoid "low fuel" condition. Border locations count as being in 2 areas. And you can force a "low supplies" condition to your enemy if you control the two border locations of an area.

I would think imperial team should build their first base at Lothal (Areas II&III) because you'll get resources (which you need to build more bases).

If it's a 6-player campaign, the imperials will take control of 3 border locations (what means to get 1 more area control than rebels).

12 minutes ago, Triangular said:

In CC all teams tried to get the repair yards, that were most important and then went for resource points. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like in RitR their is a similiar logic that forces teams to go for the border locations. You need a base in an area to avoid "low fuel" condition. Border locations count as being in 2 areas. And you can force a "low supplies" condition to your enemy if you control the two border locations of an area.

I would think imperial team should build their first base at Lothal (Areas II&III) because you'll get resources (which you need to build more bases).

If it's a 6-player campaign, the imperials will take control of 3 border locations (what means to get 1 more area control than rebels).

The problem is that the rules state you cannot build in border locations at campaign start. But those will be crucial locations to contest early.

10 minutes ago, Destraa said:

The problem is that the rules state you cannot build in border locations at campaign start. But those will be crucial locations to contest early.

Really? They do? Not at page 11 "Starting the Campaign" or am I blind?!?

Edit: There it is! I am blind!

10 minutes ago, Destraa said:

The problem is that the rules state you cannot build in border locations at campaign start. But those will be crucial locations to contest early.

That's a very good rule!

2 minutes ago, Triangular said:

That's a very good rule!

It is, otherwise the campaign could unbalance as soon as the first round of declared assaults.

Actually, you can't build at border locations OR in the sub-areas (Mandalorian Sector or Hutt Space). This also limits access to the Allies strategic effect since the only two planets with "Allies" are Mandalore and Nal Hutta. I'm interested in seeing what people value as their strategic effects. I think I really want Allies tokens! An extra ship or 3 extra squadrons are a big deal with 200 point fleets. What do others think?

3 minutes ago, RobertK said:

Actually, you can't build at border locations OR in the sub-areas (Mandalorian Sector or Hutt Space). This also limits access to the Allies strategic effect since the only two planets with "Allies" are Mandalore and Nal Hutta. I'm interested in seeing what people value as their strategic effects. I think I really want Allies tokens! An extra ship or 3 extra squadrons are a big deal with 200 point fleets. What do others think?

I think Destiny and Diplomats will be the kingpins. The former being useful in guaranteeing a kill-shot, and Diplomats assigning the “Low Morale” condition.

5 minutes ago, RobertK said:

Actually, you can't build at border locations OR in the sub-areas (Mandalorian Sector or Hutt Space). This also limits access to the Allies strategic effect since the only two planets with "Allies" are Mandalore and Nal Hutta. I'm interested in seeing what people value as their strategic effects. I think I really want Allies tokens! An extra ship or 3 extra squadrons are a big deal with 200 point fleets. What do others think?

Quite good! That means, you start with at least two areas without a friendly base. And going for a border location is high-risk high reward!

59 minutes ago, Destraa said:

I think Destiny and Diplomats will be the kingpins. The former being useful in guaranteeing a kill-shot, and Diplomats assigning the “Low Morale” condition.

You could be right! Diplomats become less useful later in the campaign, though, since they only affect locations that are unoccupied in the area in which they are placed. Once there's a lot of presence on the map, diplomats become less useful. But early on, I think you are right that they are crucial! Hmm. This isn't going to be easy picking starting planets.

17 hours ago, RobertK said:

Ok, there's some concern about how scarring is too light of a penalty in this campaign. Maybe.

But this campaign is different than Corellian Conflict. This campaign isn't a glorified exercise in fleet-building spread out over 3-4 campaign rounds. The focus isn't solely on building the best fleet so you can win the final battle.

In THIS campaign, what you do in the meantime matters. Let's say you fight a battle, your fleet gets tabled, and you lose presence on a planet that your team had hoped to build a base on. The loss isn't that your fleet got beat up. The loss is positional. You just lost the opportunity to bring in strategic assets that your team may have been counting on. And instead of refitting 4 ships/squads per turn, you've only got 3 refits to spend because that base isn't getting built there. And that loss of a campaign point to the other team isn't just slowing down your inevitable march to the final battle like in Corellian Conflict. Nope. That's a point you'll have to make up somehow if you want to win the campaign. Because unlike in Corellian Conflict, you can win the final battle and still lose the campaign. Losing is bad.

I know there's inevitably a big focus on the fleets, but this campaign is different. Fleets are very much a means to the end, rather than the end in itself. And that means the scarring mechanic, no matter what it is, is less important than it was in Corellian Conflict and other campaign systems we might be used to. It requires an adjustment in thinking.

It feels like it will have a negative effect on the gameplay, though, too.

I mean, beyond the as-noted "an ISD can just shrug off being scarred and probably runs the whole campaign scarred and doesn't care" thing, which feels anti-thematic...

It also makes Interdictors much less significant, and indeed the whole 'escape to hyperspace' mechanic becomes a big...' but why? ' In CC, you would see players putting scarred ships into battle periodically - knowing the risk - and they'd play a LOT more defensively with them. And if they seemed to be in real danger... JUMP TO HYPERSPACE! That was a cool, very Star Wars-y thing to see...badly damaged ships turning away to jump to hyperspace and escape. And Interdictors became a bit of a big deal, because forcing someone to be STUCK...and die for real ...that was valuable, and justified the inflated cost of the ships.

Now, in RitR, I just don't see the Hyperspace escape happening at all - that entire section of rules becomes redundant. So the battle is going badly, do you flee to save what ships you have? Well, no, why would you? Worst that will happen to them is they become scarred - which isn't anything but mildly annoying to most ships. And if they are ALREADY scarred, why not just fight to the death of the last hit point on the last ship and squad every game ...nothing worse happens, so might as well draw the game out fighting to the bloody end because there is no penalty to it and you could do some more damage to the enemy (who also kinda doesn't care, because 'scarred'... meh , whatever).

If it's not too late... I'm in.

(Noooooo - wrong place 🙄 ... why am I here? Why are we all here? What's going on)

Apols

3 hours ago, xanderf said:

It feels like it will have a negative effect on the gameplay, though, too.

I mean, beyond the as-noted "an ISD can just shrug off being scarred and probably runs the whole campaign scarred and doesn't care" thing, which feels anti-thematic...

It also makes Interdictors much less significant, and indeed the whole 'escape to hyperspace' mechanic becomes a big...' but why? ' In CC, you would see players putting scarred ships into battle periodically - knowing the risk - and they'd play a LOT more defensively with them. And if they seemed to be in real danger... JUMP TO HYPERSPACE! That was a cool, very Star Wars-y thing to see...badly damaged ships turning away to jump to hyperspace and escape. And Interdictors became a bit of a big deal, because forcing someone to be STUCK...and die for real ...that was valuable, and justified the inflated cost of the ships.

Now, in RitR, I just don't see the Hyperspace escape happening at all - that entire section of rules becomes redundant. So the battle is going badly, do you flee to save what ships you have? Well, no, why would you? Worst that will happen to them is they become scarred - which isn't anything but mildly annoying to most ships. And if they are ALREADY scarred, why not just fight to the death of the last hit point on the last ship and squad every game ...nothing worse happens, so might as well draw the game out fighting to the bloody end because there is no penalty to it and you could do some more damage to the enemy (who also kinda doesn't care, because 'scarred'... meh , whatever).

Good points there! How the battles unfold will be influenced by the cost of staying in them. We'll have to see if it really is no big deal to be scarred. A couple of things I'll point out, though...

1) A LOT of objectives in this pack don't use the station obstacle. That means your scarred squadrons won't have the option to repair that hull damage.

2) Interdictors will have value as the assaulting player in the "Evacuation" pivotal battle objective. The defender MUST hyperspace retreat in that one to score points. I might also add that there are a LOT of obstacle shenanigans that can be pulled with an Interdictor on a small map.

But overall, I get your points and agree that there is likely an issue with how the scarring mechanic "aged" into this campaign. We'll have to see.

On 10/7/2019 at 9:38 PM, Yipe said:

After playing a lot of CC - which I enjoyed - I felt that campaign was really just an escalation league with a cool map disguised as a campaign. RitR is a proper campaign with more difficult, strategic choices. In our first meetup this weekend, my players took a long time to ponder their options in the post-battle sequence as there weren't any obviously correct choices. And even after their first battle they could see some of the tactical mistakes they had made in their initial planet selection or how they built their fleets. Based off their reactions, I think RitR is going to have a lot of replay value.

Last point, but one I think worth mentioning: The Task Force fleets + the rules about no unique upgrades means RitR plays a lot different than 400-point tournaments, forcing players to re-think their Armada preconceptions. For example, one of my players was facing down a pair of Gladiators. Initially he was very nervous and assumed he was going to lose, but during the game he realized his reaction was based on the traditional upgrade set paired with the Gladiator, not the base ship itself. Without the full suit of Demolisher, Brunson, Ordnance Experts, etc... the GSD-I is a very different beast. I think this will be a very good thing for the Armada community, as the more viable ways there are to play the game, the longer people will stay engaged with it.

I went back and re-read this post a bit, and I think @Yipe makes awesome points here. We haven't started our campaign here yet, but I think there is a lot of depth to the choices you make in this campaign. I think our team is going to want a base in 3 different areas on the map to start, and then push into border areas adjoining our occupied areas with areas where we don't have a base. That way we get coverage for all areas as soon as possible and threaten the supply of our opponents. That seems the obvious choice, to an extent. But it ignores the strategic effects sub-game and the upgrade sub-game. Plus, we'll need the resource tokens to build those bases.

As for the second paragraph, I think you are right on again. I think it is going to be really hard to fully optimize our fleets. I think my mantra is going to be, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." In the Corellian Conflict, I built my starting fleet backwards from the optimal fleet I wanted at the end (ie start at the 500-point fleet, and keep removing things until I met the rules for the starting fleet). In Rebellion in the Rim, it feels like I shouldn't even really bother with that. Just build your best 200-point fleet with an eye toward what you want it to do, then add things that make it better as you go even if you can't make it perfect. That's going to open some design space for interesting, but sub-optimal synergies that are still effective.