Subfactions come to Rebellion in the Rim : The concept of accepting restrictions on your list construction in order to gain a small buff is common in tabletop wargaming, but theme forces have never been officially supported in Armada. I'm hoping to change that with my newest Armada homebrew project. The add-on is written with the Rebellion in the Rim campaign in mind. If you checked out my 2017 project, Siege of the Arkanis Sector , then you saw a complete campaign built on the foundation of the Corellian Conflict . Like most, I've found RitR to be a gigantic improvement on CC (playing it right now with the rules as written and having a great time), so much so in fact that I hardly think RitR needs an overhaul. For that reason, the footprint of this add-on is kept smaller, to make it easier to use. Simply play Rebellion in the Rim as written, with these as additional rules.

Pick a homeworld: For fun, each subfaction is built around a planet of the Star Wars galaxy. Both the benefits and composition requirement for each subfaction are meant to evoke the flavor of that planet or that naval group. This expansion's subfactions therefore represent planetary security forces sent to support Outer Rim operations, or an insurgent cell operating from a certain planet's base, or honor fleets hailing from a particular corner of the galaxy. This was the most fun of the whole project. I have toyed with other names, like "theme forces" as other wargames do, but in the end I went with "subfactions" because that's really the goal.

Requirements of fleet composition: Each subfaction has a rule that applies to your fleet. Usually, you are required to include a certain number or exclude certain types of cards in your fleet. These have been reworked several times in an effort to maintain a balance between too light and too heavy of a requirement. In the current iteration, it is up to the player to adhere to a subfaction's composition requirement. If you overstep the rule, your fleet becomes less efficient until you are once again "themed." Specifically, your ships can be assigned one fewer command token than normal if you are not following your subfaction's rule.

Unlocked cards list: Now, the good stuff! Subfactions include a list of "theme cards" (squadrons, upgrades, pushing the boundaries where possible) that are treated as always available to your fleet. One of the biggest limitations in Rebellion in the Rim is the limit on how you are allowed to expand your fleet. You can only purchase certain types of content--squadrons, or upgrades of a certain category--by fighting battles at corresponding locations. You can only purchase unique cards if you used certain objectives in the battle. The core of each subfaction's identity, then, is its list of "unlocked" cards that you can purchase regardless of location or objective, and this expansion makes it easier to build your fleet toward that identity.

The basic rule is that, when you gain location rewards during the Management Phase, you can choose which cards to purchase by selecting from cards of the type allowed for the location, or anything off of your list of theme cards. These cards are always available to you, even if they are of a different type from the type normally allowed for the location, or even if they are unique, or in some cases even if they aren't normally legal for your faction.

Looking for feedback: In this post, you'll find the first set of subfactions, twelve classic planets for the Rebel and Imperial factions. I'm looking for feedback, particularly for the following design questions:

• Balance issues
• Clarity and simplicity of rules
• Interest in this as an add-on to Rebellion in the Rim
• Level of impact on campaign play, too much or too little?

Future Plans: After initial balancing, I hope to run through a RitR campaign testing these rules. As my initial balance tinkering progresses, I'll show off more of the theme forces I've worked up so far (plenty in various stages of design). As Armada moves into the future, hopefully I will be able to expand on this concept for new themes. When Clone Wars content releases for Armada, I will discuss some of my thoughts on incorporating those factions (oooooooh).

Links

Rules page

Subfactions, Set #1

4/27/2020: Current design version 1.3

REBEL

IMPERIAL

Saved for later

Saved for later

This looks interesting, might give it a try

I'll probably try the Alderaan condition sometime. I'm not a particular fan of large capital ships so making a fleet without any is no problem for me.

We are starting ritr next week. When we finish I'd LOVE to replay using this system

When you say pick a planet...

Naboo.

I'm gonna fly those little fkrs until my opponents are sick of the color yellow.

The Jedha homeworld has an imperial squadron

Woah, last time I checked on this thread it was at zero comments, so it's been a little while! I'm still tinkering on this, but frustrated by the forum's ability to post formatted content into something readable for compact info blocks like I'd like these to be. The project is still in an early draft form, but I'm making changes to it almost every day.

On 1/30/2020 at 12:50 PM, Blail Blerg said:

When you say pick a planet...

Naboo.

For sure, but I'm holding certain planets in reserve for later. After I finalize the first set of these, I'll aim to mix it up with a second set of planets that include Clone Wars content. That'll have to wait for Armada CW to come out, though! For now, I'm not actively working on Naboo (or Felucia, Geonosis, Kamino, etc.) But eventually!

On 1/30/2020 at 2:21 AM, RogueCorona said:

I'll probably try the Alderaan condition sometime. I'm not a particular fan of large capital ships so making a fleet without any is no problem for me.

It's my hope with this project that each planet reflect certain lore elements. I don't want to be heavy-handed or explicit about it, since that's not everyone's cup of tea, but if I do it right then that's the natural outcome of using this add-on. So, mechanically, Alderaan naturally trends toward a distinct playstyle, and as an "early Rebellion" theme it acknowledges the story of the franchise to the extent possible. I'm a lore enthusiast, but people who don't care about that as much as optimized mechanics should still get something from this.

• You can decide if your Alderaan fleet is a cell of insurgents hoping to score the Rebellion's first major victory against the Empire. In the Star Wars story, the lack of large ships is therefore justified because Alderaan must maintain plausible deniability about its support of the Alliance, and because the Mon Cala shipyards aren't yet producing large cruisers. Your fleet will have Alderaanian characters equipped as Officers, will have blockade runners and corvettes zooming around, and generally plays as a peaceful people driven to oppose tyranny.
• Or you can decide if your Alderaan fleet are survivors of the planet's destruction, although nowhere am I staking a specific point in any canonical timeline for groups to adhere to. That's much too pedantic for what this is, and it would be unplayable to exclude content based on which cards are named after people who died in certain movies. In fact, once Clone Wars content comes out for Armada, I plan for all of that content to be compatible within the same campaign.
• You can always decide that you don't care about lore and are just happy playing an MSU list that says the word "Alderaan" at the top. Even if the flavor aspects of this add-on do nothing for you, it provides a gameplay improvement by giving you more choices about what rewards you can gain for your fleet. In my current RitR playthrough, most of the group has had a couple of rounds where they didn't gained rewards but nothing that helped very much. Knowing that you can always pick from the theme list should clear that up.

On 1/30/2020 at 8:36 PM, Nekzous said:

The Jedha homeworld has an imperial squadron

Yes, it does! Anything in the theme list is allowed, even if it would be cross-faction in a normal game. Jedha is an example of a more unusual theme. I think of each planet like a sub-faction. Some themes (Alderaan, Kuat, Mon Cala) don't actually require any special rules. You could play standard RitR and pick only things found on these theme lists, no add-on rules required. But I am writing other planets to break the rules in fun ways. A few examples: Jedha is allowed to pick up Firesprays because they're partisan extremists who don't limit themselves to Alliance hardware any more than they adhere to Alliance rules. Mandalore has gauntlet fighters, but also Ketsu Onyo, and I have a variant that's Rebel-aligned and Empire-aligned. Ord Mantell may be affiliated with the Empire by way of Black Sun, but they have access to Headhunters. I even made a Vardos planet that puts Iden Versio and Shriv Surgaav into the same sub-faction... I'm still determining how far to push these themes. I will certainly have some degree of cross-faction mingling, to keep things interesting. But can Atollon take Agent Kallus as part of its theme? When Clone Wars content is available, could Ilum be a light side faction with Rebel and Republic ships?

Big update!

Homeworld Subfactions now has an official test document.

Homeworld Subfactions Rules

Homeworlds, Set One

One of my big questions in this project was about how much impact the "requirements" part of the subfaction should go. The idea of having subfactions as straight powerups from playing without subfactions, that they would unlock theme cards with no drawback, seems both anti-design and less thematic. On the other hand, putting firm restrictions on listbuilding seems to cordon off sections of fun as off-limits. I aimed for a mixed approach here, with the idea of being themed as long as you comply with a rule, and taking a moderate hit to command efficiency for as long as you aren't in compliance.

To compare this approach with a few others I trialed:

Theming Rules is the system of counterbalancing penalty/requirement that I chose for the current iteration. Taking Mon Cala as an example, you are themed as long as at least half of your ships have a title, reflecting their famous shipyards that produce unique warships like works of art. While in compliance with that rule, you are themed, meaning that your ships work at normal efficiency and you get the benefits of buying from your theme cards without restriction. If you can't meet the rule, you take a penalty until you do. (Sometimes, that means that you cannot avoid a penalty in your first battle. I think that's an acceptable risk, and in some cases matches the flavor of certain worlds being earlier to become active in the war than others.) The universal penalty for being out of theme is that your ships can be assigned one fewer command token than normal. I've played around with each subfaction's penalty being unique, or at least there being several different flavors. I opted against that in the interest of avoiding the potential that some penalties could be mitigated and others couldn't. Command tokens are about the closest thing Armada has to a pure, universal currency.

Allowed/Banned Models was another option, and I have a draft of these rules with each homeworld containing a list of ships and squadrons it is allowed to use, and being prohibited from purchasing other units. This had two problems. One, it seemed unfun to disallow people from using parts of their collection (counterpoint: lots of wargames do it this way). Two, it seemed unbalanced in favor of subfactions whose list gives them the closest thing to a min-maxed tournament comp.

Anything, as Long as it's Negative was my first approach. I had a subfaction that was cut off from fielding large ships, another that started the campaign with Low Morale, one that had to scar ships or squadrons whenever something occurred, and one that was prohibited from hyperspace retreating. As I worked on it, the mechanics that I liked best were the ones that gave the player flexibility in how to meet the requirement. For instance, Chandrila always required the player to have a certain total Command value across all his ships (reflecting the Alliance's evolution into a formal navy, plus a perfect home for the Starhawk), and Hoth was similar for Engineering (tough, reliable ships that won't break down). These encouraged certain ships without being heavy-handed, and emphasized the fleet as a whole rather than policing individual units.

Let me know if you think I should take another look at the balance.

Reading this I asked myself, why the planet themes? Why not using the actual building blocks and subdivisions of both organizations, which are both not that regionally tied?

In the end that would boil down to naming and lore representation changes, not gameplay ones. Just to illustrate here a few examples how it could be changed:

Alderaan House of Organa -> Fulcrum Network

Chandrilla New Republic Defense Fleet -> New Republic Navy

Mon Cala -> Exodus Fleet

Hoth -> Rebel Command

Yavin -> Rebel SpecOps

Mustafar -> Death Squadron (just dropping the planet obviously) or Disciples of the Dark Side (even both could exist)

Scarif -> Tarkin Initiative

Coruscant -> Political Leadership (That name needs work. I just want to emphasize the top of the hierarchy over the location)

Csilla -> 7th Fleet

Corulag -> ISB

Kuat -> Sector Fleets. Here are multiple options, basically one for each Over sector (Core, Corporate, Mid Rim, Outer Rim, ...)

So yeah, it's just about dropping the planets to eventually gain more freedom for new candidates. After all in some cases the planets still make sense. Exodus Fleet for instance is still very much tied to Mon Cala.

@LennoxPoodle

Thanks for your input, I really appreciate your thoughts. You're probably right that the planets are an artifact of the earliest iteration of this. To give some backstory, I started this, while bored, as a mockup of different fleets built around the characters who might be found on different planets. "Can I put all the Alderaan characters onto ships in a fleet together?"

I added the titles/identifiers like "House of Organa" originally as flavor text, but later I swapped these. The identifier is the name of the subfaction, and the planet name is flavor text without a rules effect. This has a similar concept in other FFG games, where you might have "Luke Skywalker: Hero of the Rebellion" as well as "Luke Skywalker: Jedi Knight" (different because you can only have one Luke character in a battle, but you can have multiple subfactions that share a planet name in the same campaign).. If it's better for balance or fun or to pull in newly released cards there's every opportunity to later cook up a second Coruscant subfaction, for instance, given the hugely important role that world has (indeed, it would be very hard to avoid doubling up Coruscant especially, and I only stuck the ISB on Corulag instead of Coruscant because of the aesthetics of each subfaction in my first set being its own world).

Yes, subfactions can repeat planets. In fact, my upcoming designs have two different Mandalorian subfactions, one Rebel and one Imperial. Mon Cala might be similarly split between the traditional good guys of the Mon Calamari and the traditional bad guys of the Quarren. And although I'm saving these plans for down the road since they're more unusual, I fully plan to have subfactions that blend units from different factions, especially once Clone Wars releases. There is even the grandiose idea of blending teams on a campaign according to Light Side and Dark Side, and throwing canonical timelines out the window even moreso than regular Armada already does, so a Naboo subfaction could be on a team with a Hoth subfaction, and a Scarif subfaction could be on a team with an Utapau subfaction. Maybe the biggest reason for me to cling to the planet names is because it would work with that future cross-era plan. At that point, getting too narrow about which sector fleet of the Galactic Empire you're roleplaying as is more of a straitjacket than a fun tool.

So, I still like keeping planetary origins as an element of design, though you make a good point that it seems misleading to place the planet name in such a prominent position when it is less important to the rules than the italicized identifier text. Planet names have a certain Star Wars charm, and for me it's fun. I take your meaning, and I could definitely play up the "military hierarchy" angle over "galactic geography" if that is more fun for more people.