So.....Legion is now getting a skirmish mode. You know, If only there was a game that supported a small number of units for one-on-one competitive play.....oh wait. 凸(>皿<)凸

Watch, the next Legion box will be set right after The Last Jedi. It will introduce a game mode where you have four high powered units against a large number of weaker units. Maybe they'll make a campaign out of it. 🤣

On 11/22/2019 at 10:12 AM, Scuro said:

So.....Legion is now getting a skirmish mode. You know, If only there was a game that supported a small number of units for one-on-one competitive play.....oh wait. 凸(>皿<)凸

That's weird. Isn't Legion a skirmish game? You mean they are going to add maps. I guess I should check the news.

No, they're making a 3x3 500 point mode for Legion, which is smaller than the normal 6x3, 800 points games.

1 hour ago, ArcticJedi said:

No, they're making a 3x3 500 point mode for Legion, which is smaller than the normal 6x3, 800 points games.

Ohhhh. How revolutionary. It's almost as if it was a bad idea to use 32mm miniatures for large battles.

On 11/22/2019 at 10:12 AM, Scuro said:

So.....Legion is now getting a skirmish mode. You know, If only there was a game that supported a small number of units for one-on-one competitive play.....oh wait. 凸(>皿<)凸

Exactly. We'll probably start seeing 3' x 3' legion maps now with, "gasp" grid squares on them.

18 hours ago, Rikalonius said:

Ohhhh. How revolutionary. It's almost as if it was a bad idea to use 32mm miniatures for large battles.

Exactly. We'll probably start seeing 3' x 3' legion maps now with, "gasp" grid squares on them.

I know right, somebody in FFGs R&D team probably earn a Christmas bonus for that idea.

But seriously, this isn't even funny anymore. They're putting a Skirmish Mode in Legion but they couldn't think of making a Legion Mode for IA, instead of discontinuing it and making players buy a new game from scratch?

Adding skirmish mode to Legion doesn't make Legion a boardgame, while adding Legion mode to Imperial Assault doesn't stop Imperial Assault being a boardgame. Enter: Business reasons.

You're half right, adding a skirmish more to Legion doesn't make it a board game but that was the beauty of Imperial Assault, it was both a dungeon crawl board game and Skirmish war-game in one.

Now you say business reasons, okay what makes more sense from a business perspective.

A) Putting out an Expansion that expands a mode to an already established game or

B) Discontinue the older game and start from scratch with a lesser game (and I don't mean lesser in that it's a worse game. I'm sure it's fine, but now instead of having a game that's both adventure game and wargame you just have a wargame.)

That's only one possible business reason.

Should they continue with IA the boardgame with lower margin than Legion the miniatures game? (Assuming the agreement with Hasbro doesn't have an expiration date.)

Force the retail to keep the core IA box and all expansions stocked while majority of the interested players already have them in favor of a game that's new for everyone?

People may also be underestimating how much work goes into designing and testing both the campaign missions and skirmish missions for IA compared to a more laxed structure of Legion.

9 hours ago, a1bert said:

That's only one possible business reason.

Should they continue with IA the boardgame with lower margin than Legion the miniatures game? (Assuming the agreement with Hasbro doesn't have an expiration date.)

Force the retail to keep the core IA box and all expansions stocked while majority of the interested players already have them in favor of a game that's new for everyone?

People may also be underestimating how much work goes into designing and testing both the campaign missions and skirmish missions for IA compared to a more laxed structure of Legion.

I completely agree with this. It is the reason why, I think, FFG switched to a system with no board. Still, the complex (by the average gamer standard) assembly required, GW style miniatures of Legion are a reducing potential customers compared to a game like X-Wing with pre-painted pieces. Reducing Legion to a 3x3' table with smaller "armies" doesn't change the fact that many players are not interested in the hobby side of the game, both painting miniatures, and/or building and painting terrain features. It all looks great when someone capable does it, but it is difficult for most to develop that kind of experience.

17 hours ago, a1bert said:

That's only one possible business reason.

Should they continue with IA the boardgame with lower margin than Legion the miniatures game? (Assuming the agreement with Hasbro doesn't have an expiration date.)

Force the retail to keep the core IA box and all expansions stocked while majority of the interested players already have them in favor of a game that's new for everyone?

People may also be underestimating how much work goes into designing and testing both the campaign missions and skirmish missions for IA compared to a more laxed structure of Legion.

-I've heard the argument that Imperial Assault wasn't selling well several times now. However the facts don't agree with that point. Imperial Assault is ranked #37 on BBG with 31k reported owners. While Legion sits at #1,491 with only 2k reported owners. Even if all 2k of those owner bought two copies of the core set, which by all accounts is necessary to play a full game and was criticized for, that number pales in comparison to the 31k Imperial Assault owners who only bought 1 copy each. it all there, in black and white, clear as crystal. You stole fizzy lifting drinks! (ꐦ ಠ皿ಠ )

-Retailers aren't forced to stock inventory, they keep stock of inventory that sells. Which again according to the number is Imperial Assault by a landslide and besides that wouldn't your argument suggest that retailers are also going to be forced to have copies of Legion too? Your argument doesn't make sense.

-I never said that game design is easy. Regrettably though that's part of the job description when you're a board game company and it's not as if Imperial Assault was their first dungeon crawl game. They've developed 2 editions of Descent and their expansions as well as all the work they've done on Imperial Assault. I would hope they've gotten the gist of it by now. Aside from that, my argument has been instead of spending the time, energy and resources into developing a new game, instead put it into an already successful game and make it better. That way, instead of ending a game 31k have invested in and ending up with a game that 2k are invested in you have a single game that caters to both groups and you have 33k playing it.

4 minutes ago, Scuro said:

-I've heard the argument that Imperial Assault wasn't selling well several times now.

You have not heard me saying it, I'm not saying it. Imperial Assault is/was doing fine as a campaign game, but it's a 5-year-old game, and games have their time.

Inventory: shelve-space is precious, and when you look at the number of SKUs, Imperial Assault is a complete game and takes a lot of shelve-space.

I'm giving obvious reasons which affect FFG decisions, I'm not arguing.

1 hour ago, a1bert said:

You have not heard me saying it, I'm not saying it. Imperial Assault is/was doing fine as a campaign game, but it's a 5-year-old game, and games have their time.

Tell that to Warhammer,, I don't think they got the memo. I agree all games have their time but that doesn't mean you kill one prematurely, there's no set time limit to board games, it's just a matter of can you keep people playing it. Chess has been around since the 6th century and they'll probably still be playing after the eventual nuclear apocalypse.

I wasn't saying you alone have, I'm saying others in general have been saying that but the numbers don't support that.

Pure speculation, but...

I think the "business reasons" they encountered with IA was that they were running out of Original Trilogy figures to sell for skirmish (I know some of us were looking forward to Zuckuss or Ewoks, but I think we all understand that General Grevious would probably sell better), they had minimal data that campaign mode was actually driving sales, and they didn't realize the market potential until it was too late to introduce factions from the Clone Wars.

FFG could have developed factions for the Republic and the Separatists, but there's just not enough material there to allow them to have as much product as was already out there for the Empire and the Rebels. Their solution was to launch a whole new product line that made a much stronger play for the wargaming crowd with a more staggered release for all four factions from the first two trilogies.

I can't tell if this is FFG bending over backwards to get the IA skirmish crowd on board with Legion, or just giving us leftovers as an afterthought. Either way, as a campaign-only player, I still wish there was a SW themed "guys-on-a-grid" or dungeon crawler campaign game being produced.

41 minutes ago, Pollux85 said:

they had minimal data that campaign mode was actually driving sales,

I think this may be an important piece of the subject. In the market segment for skirmish everyone buys their own set; whereas the campaign driven sales gets you a purchase from one of two-to-five customers. Legion only works on the former model

6 hours ago, Scuro said:

Imperial Assault is ranked #37 on BBG with 31k reported owners. While Legion sits at #1,491 with only 2k reported owners.

You may be overlooking the fact that Imperial Assault owners are more likely to primarily be board gamers, and therefore much more likely to register the fact that they own the core set.

I would be very surprised if you were to find even 20% of the Warhammer players out there actually registering any of their purchases on Board Game Geek, and I would naturally expect Legion to be the same. However, as I have often said, and others have mentioned above, a core box of IA would service 1-5 players. A Legion player is more likely to have at least 1 core set each, and is also much more likely to buy multiple copies of a Stormtrooper expansion pack, as you can never have enough troopers. With IA, you really need to even WANT to purchase the Stormtrooper pack, as you already start with 3 squads in the core set. Sure, the command cards and alternative stance are good, but that just makes them something to pick up when you want to get them. You certainly don't need them.

My point is, Legion, like X-Wing and Armada, falls into the mindset of a player being in a store and picking up a character / trooper pack as an impulse purchase than an IA player who just buys the specific pieces they are after as and when they can justify it. (I mean, aside from playing the Hoth campaign, who would ever actually want to use Dengar? Maybe someone trying to run a Bounty Hunter squad, which would be purely for fun and not at all competitive...)

1 hour ago, Uninvited Guest said:

I think this may be an important piece of the subject. In the market segment for skirmish everyone buys their own set; whereas the campaign driven sales gets you a purchase from one of two-to-five customers. Legion only works on the former model

That's what I was thinking. In theory you could look at overall sales, and look at the buying habits of skirmish players based on lists of units used in tournaments, and maybe arrive at buying habits in campaign in a kind of backdoor roundabout way, but I think the real value of the app to FFG was being able to have real data for the first time about how often campaign players play, and what units they play with. Once they knew that, the decision to end IA may have been obvious.

Boys, we may have slit our own throats here.

2 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

...I think the real value of the app to FFG was being able to have real data for the first time about how often campaign players play, and what units they play with. Once they knew that, the decision to end IA may have been obvious.

Boys, we may have slit our own throats here.

This doesn't make much sense. There's five of us in our gaming group playing campaign, and I enjoy being the Imperial player. The app offers us precisely nothing, it is completely worthless to us, so we've never played it because why would we? The app is its own thing. For any gaming group like ours, the app gives zero information on our playing habits.

Look, honestly, it's pretty obvious why FFG canned IA. Money. It can't have been selling well enough given what it cost to produce (by which I mean, either that it didn't make a large enough profit, or that something else made more of a profit). It really will be that simple. We don't need to over-think it or blame ourselves for not playing the app "enough". It just wasn't making enough money (any more?) for them to keep doing it. And if we're honest, are we really that surprised? Our FLGS owner is enormously pro-IA and in the biggest tournament we ever had, there were seven players . Conversely they fill the shop with 48 X-Wing players for a weekend every month. Which do you think he sold more of? If you were him, trying to make a living, which game would you keep in stock? This is not an unusual story, many shops will report the same. IA is a great game, but it's not a big financial success - not big enough to keep throwing more development time into it, anyway. And no, I don't have deep insight into FFG's financials to make that claim; but come on .

this discussion is summoning Mep. be warned

I just don't understand.. do people think board games are infinite?

12 minutes ago, FrogTrigger said:

I just don't understand.. do people think board games are infinite?

Nah, but IA was exciting to a lot of us, and there are a lot of things that people think should be added.

Star Wars is big, and they never could've added everything people wanted, of course (but I want my Hohass Ekwesh, gosh darnit).

But it' hard to fault people for wanting pretty iconic stuff like Yoda, scout trooper snipers, tauntauns, etc. The addition of stuff late in the cycle like Sentry droids, BT-1 and 0-0-0, and freakin loth cats kinda showed that this game could go to some pretty wild places- not only making the iconic stuff seem like a shoe in, but giving hope to those of us who wanted more of the weird, too.

7 hours ago, onyersix said:

My point is, Legion, like X-Wing and Armada, falls into the mindset of a player being in a store and picking up a character / trooper pack as an impulse purchase than an IA player who just buys the specific pieces they are after as and when they can justify it. (I mean, aside from playing the Hoth campaign, who would ever actually want to use Dengar? Maybe someone trying to run a Bounty Hunter squad, which would be purely for fun and not at all competitive...)

Of the many mistakes FFG made with character selection, Dengar is high on my list. Outside of the die hard Star Wars fans who read comics and EU novels, or did when they were younger, nobody knows who Dengar, Zuckuss, or 4-LOM are. But inside that world, Zuckuss and 4-LOM are infinitely more liked by those niche fans than Dengar. We've seen many posts asking for them, and the polls taken clearly showed their popularity, but FFG gives us BT-1 and 0-0-0. Instead of Noghri, we get Loth cats.

9 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

Pure speculation, but...

I think the "business reasons" they encountered with IA was that they were running out of Original Trilogy figures to sell for skirmish (I know some of us were looking forward to Zuckuss or Ewoks, but I think we all understand that General Grevious would probably sell better ), they had minimal data that campaign mode was actually driving sales, and they didn't realize the market potential until it was too late to introduce factions from the Clone Wars.

I would take that bet. I wish it could be proved. I think Zuckuss and 4-LOM, or Mara Jade, or Noghri would outsell a General Grievous any day. Of course, it would all depend on how OP he was, and therefor necessary for skirmish, but just on fan popularity? No way.

2 hours ago, FrogTrigger said:

I just don't understand.. do people think board games are infinite?

It's the 5 stages of grief. All this talk about ways to extend the game and finding "the real" reasons for the cancellation is just us being stuck in bargaining.

22 hours ago, Uninvited Guest said:

I think this may be an important piece of the subject. In the market segment for skirmish everyone buys their own set; whereas the campaign driven sales gets you a purchase from one of two-to-five customers. Legion only works on the former model

But again, BBGs listing show that there are 31k individual owners of the game and my argument has been, if instead of releasing Legion they added a large scale skirmish mode to Imperial Assault, they could have drawn in the wargaming crowd while giving those that already have the game a reason to by extra packs that they might already have.

21 hours ago, onyersix said:

My point is, Legion, like X-Wing and Armada, falls into the mindset of a player being in a store and picking up a character / trooper pack as an impulse purchase than an IA player who just buys the specific pieces they are after as and when they can justify it. (I mean, aside from playing the Hoth campaign, who would ever actually want to use Dengar? Maybe someone trying to run a Bounty Hunter squad, which would be purely for fun and not at all competitive...)

Aside from what I already said about expanding Imperial Assault in order to encourage more purchases. I agree, I think some of the releases Imperial Assault got were lackluster.

20 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

That's what I was thinking. In theory you could look at overall sales, and look at the buying habits of skirmish players based on lists of units used in tournaments, and maybe arrive at buying habits in campaign in a kind of backdoor roundabout way, but I think the real value of the app to FFG was being able to have real data for the first time about how often campaign players play, and what units they play with. Once they knew that, the decision to end IA may have been obvious.

I they discontinued Imperial Assault because of lack of interest of the App, that would have been incredibly stupid on FFG part.

17 hours ago, Bitterman said:

Look, honestly, it's pretty obvious why FFG canned IA. Money. It can't have been selling well enough given what it cost to produce (by which I mean, either that it didn't make a large enough profit, or that something else made more of a profit). It really will be that simple. We don't need to over-think it or blame ourselves for not playing the app "enough". It just wasn't making enough money (any more?) for them to keep doing it. And if we're honest, are we really that surprised? Our FLGS owner is enormously pro-IA and in the biggest tournament we ever had, there were seven players . Conversely they fill the shop with 48 X-Wing players for a weekend every month. Which do you think he sold more of? If you were him, trying to make a living, which game would you keep in stock? This is not an unusual story, many shops will report the same. IA is a great game, but it's not a big financial success - not big enough to keep throwing more development time into it, anyway. And no, I don't have deep insight into FFG's financials to make that claim; but come on .

Again if they had made a Legion mode for Imperial Assault, that might have brought more people in for tournament play and my other point is how well is Legion doing that they decided it was better to keep supporting that instead of Imperial Assault. In other words if you have two games, why would you discontinue to support the more popular one?

13 hours ago, Rikalonius said:

I would take that bet. I wish it could be proved. I think Zuckuss and 4-LOM, or Mara Jade, or Noghri would outsell a General Grievous any day. Of course, it would all depend on how OP he was, and therefor necessary for skirmish, but just on fan popularity? No way.

That's what I've been saying, even ignoring the Legends Expanded Universe, there were so many more interesting options FFG could have released. Mustafar/Vader's Castle, Dathomir, Korriban, Scariff but we got 2 expansions on Tatooine, Bespin, Lothal and Hoth. Especially Hoth, did we really need to return to it, that place sucks, it's nothing but snow and wampas. Coruscant was cool, too bad it was one of the last to come out.

But I deffinaly would have liked to have seen more expanded universe character both Legends and New canon, Dr Aphra, Mara Jade, Kyle Katarn.

Once you run out of ideas for the Rebellino era, release a new starter in another and start over, while making everything compatible of course, maybe even sneak out a Kotor set.