We had a conversation about this tonight and thought it would be worthwhile to get the community's opinion.

Quote

While an objective squadron or ship is defending, before it suffers damage, you may reduce the damage by 1. If the defender is destroyed during that attack, each other ship and squadron at distance 1-2 of the defender suffers damage equal to half the crits in the attack pool rounded up. Then the first player gains 1 victory token.

The question concerned the relationship between the three sentences, in particular the last sentence. Is it meant to connect to the first two as a sequence, or specifically to the last one. In our last campaign, we ended up playing it twice (actually between the same two players), and our in-the-moment reading of the card sent us in two directions. Then I thought of a third in the past 24 hours.

Reading-1: Sentence-1 connects to sentence-3. Basically, the second player's reduction of damage entails that the first player gets a VP. This presents the strategy of keeping the ship/squadron alive long enough to cross the other side and score two VP tokens, or keep a ship/squadron that might otherwise die alive so that its points stay on the table.

Reading-2: Sentence 2 connects to sentence-3. The first player gets the VP when the ship/squadron carrying the token blows up, but the first sentence is always active, which means it incentivizes big attacks. The whole "auto-Derlin" on three ships/squadrons seemed a bit much in the game, but might have been a factor of the ships/squadrons on the table.

How has the larger community been playing this objective?

I think that the 2nd sentence is not connected to the first, but the 3rd is connected to the 2nd. So if an objective ship or squadron is destroyed during any attack, you deal damage to each ship or squadron at distance 1-2 and the first player gains 1 victory token.

When I played it (and lost, horribly, as first player, but still got my unique upgrades I needed), I used the 2nd Reading.

The 1st Reading might be a bit more balanced, but I don't think it is a valid interpretation of the text. If the 3rd sentence applies to the 1st sentence, that would mean the First Player got a victory token whenever they attacked one of the objective ships, even if they didn't reduce the damage. The reduction of damage is optional, but the 3rd sentence doesn't say it applies only if that option were taken.

Sentence 2 and 3 is an if/then statement like in programing. If X happens, then do Y. The first sentence, as I interpret it, would have no bearing on the 2nd and third.

I'm curious to know for those that have played this objective if any chain reactions occurred. One objective ship blows up and it takes another objective ship/squadron with it.

Just another well writen card 😀 😉

Lets see it in another way. IF the first player could get one victory token for each attack on a ship or squadron, he could farm tokens. While the second player can only get 6 victory tokens at maximum.
It is not fitting so well for the campaign missions.
And it way more fitting (for the mission) when the first player get victory tokens for each destroyed cargo, and the second player for each delivered cargo.

I would understand (and play) this mission that the first player can only get a max of 3 victory tokens. Only each time a ship or squadron with such a token is destroyed.

In our first game, player-1 only got a token if player-2 used the ability, which meant player-2 had absolute control over whether player-1 got any tokens at all, but then the ability didn’t factor much into the game.

In our second game, tycho/shara had tokens, and all the damage reduction was a mess. So what we were trying to figure out was whether the objective was just really Doing what it was supposed to be doing or not. I mean, there is some frustration in having damage reduction on Shara just to net a VP token. But in every other objective, there is some build combination in which that objective is not a good choice.

Is a Shara/tycho or Cierna/valen type set-up going to be one where this objective likely snowballs to the second player, in which case it is much like taking an obstacle points objective against an Interdictor or Advanced Gunnery against an MC-80?

And thanks for all the replies! They add perspective!

I played against a Shara-Tyhco combination (with only Maarek on my side). It was obviously going to snowball out of control and I was going to lose horribly.

But if I'd cared about that I wouldn't have picked Volatile Cargo.

Remember, 1st player gets a huge amount of control over objectives, as they get to choose the location and the objective. If you're going to do badly from Volatile Deposits, don't play it.

I played it because it was Round 1 and I had an Interdictor in need of Experimental Retrofits... and I felt losing the first round was worth getting the uniques (particularly as it did nothing for my opponent).