I'm looking to get some opinions regarding one of the RitR rules about acquiring fleet conditions, a rule that I'm beginning to question as possibly a poor one that I may want to overrule in the campaign I'm running. The rule I'm referring to is the fact that a fleet can only have one condition at a time, and that if a fleet has a condition and would acquire a second one, it ignores the new one it would gain and only keeps its existing one. Allow me to describe the current state of play in my campaign and my point of view on the rule.

I'm running a 4 man campaign, and at present, two players have the Low Fuel fleet condition (myself on the Rebels and one of the Imperial players). Currently we have not made any efforts to clear the condition because 1. we are saving our resource tokens for base construction and 2. no one has played the "Steal Supplies" campaign objective which would allow clearing the condition at the end of the battle. The Low Fuel condition is not that significant of a debuff (in my opinion), and in my case, I'm able to mitigate its affect rather well because my task force commander has the Master Navigator II ability which allows my ships to change speed by up to 2 on a navigate command. Here's where the issue I have arises regarding the ruling on gaining conditions. Because one of the Imperial players and I have Low Fuel, we are in a sense blocking ourselves from gaining either Low Morale or Low Supply conditions, and those conditions have a bit heavier of a penalty. The opportunity to gain Low Morale or Low Supply for any fleet has not happened yet, but I feel that this rule of only being able to have one condition lessens the board impact of playing a diplomats token as well as maintaining control of the border systems which are required to trigger a possible application of Low Morale or Low Supply.

It is my opinion that fleet conditions should not be restricted to only having one at a time, but that the rules should allow for fleets to be affected by multiple conditions at a time as long as those conditions are gained on separate game turns. I feel this would maintain the value of playing those diplomat tokens on the board as well as acquiring/maintaining control of the border systems to offer the threat of Low Morale and Low Supply to your opponent as well as the danger of acquiring those conditions on your own fleet should the situation be stacked against you. I also feel that this would emphasize trying to clear those conditions more so than retaining them as a tool for blocking something worse. After all, real world armies are certainly susceptible to low fuel, low supply, and low morale often at once, with one condition possibly causing another.

The rules do state that if you would gain two conditions on the same turn, you may choose which one you have to acquire, and I believe this rule is still proper and I have no qualms with it.

I'm considering house ruling that multiple conditions can be a threat in our campaign. Since we have already started and have played 3 turns at this point, I may put it to a vote rather than just implement the rules modification in the interest of fairness. I'd welcome other peoples viewpoints and perspectives. If you agree or disagree, please share why you think so. Our next turn isn't for a couple of weeks so I have some time to receive input before I bring it up to my players for debate and voting.

It’s your campaign, go for it.

The condition rules were seemingly added and balanced to explicitly be a minor issue at worst - more thematic than debilitating. But their inclusion certainly gives you a framework to ramp up the difficulty if you feel your campaign warrants it.

The sort of thing only newbie untested commanders worry about, because the named heroes of their respective sides get all they want it seems 😀

13 hours ago, Smokedgouda said:

I'm looking to get some opinions regarding one of the RitR rules about acquiring fleet conditions, a rule that I'm beginning to question as possibly a poor one that I may want to overrule in the campaign I'm running. The rule I'm referring to is the fact that a fleet can only have one condition at a time, and that if a fleet has a condition and would acquire a second one, it ignores the new one it would gain and only keeps its existing one. Allow me to describe the current state of play in my campaign and my point of view on the rule.

Smokedgouda, in the campaign we are running we have concluded something similar. We are in fact NOT removing the condition intentionally for the reasons you list. Another thought we had was that conditions could be a forced removal (assuming you have the tokens to remove it). I like the idea of gaining multiple conditions though.

If you do add multiple conditions I would be very curious to see how that works for your group.

Sorry for resurrecting this old thread, but I thought I’d share our experience. We slightly house ruled fleet conditions. We concluded that it didn’t make sense to allow a weaker condition (like low fuel) to block getting a worse condition, so we decided that when you get a condition, if you already have a condition, the other side gets to pick what condition you have.

We have all conditions active, but your opponent chooses which condition affects the fleet during the battle.