I use these, separately or together, when I want to make a minion group almost as dangerous as an equal-sized group of Rivals without slowing down the game by giving them all separate initiative slots. Just throwing this out there in case others wanted to achieve a similar effect with their minions.

Elite Minions: Skill ranks for this minion group are capped at 7 rather than 5.

Coordinated Attacks: This minion group's attacks have the Linked quality, equal to the number of minions in the group beyond 1.

Ooooo, I likey

The Coordinated Attacks one seems like it could be problematic, depending on what sort of weapon the minion group is using.

A minion group using clubs or pistols wouldn't be much of an issue, since the base damage is fairly low. But a larger minion group using blaster rifles could lead to downed PCs in an awful hurry. For instance, a minion group of 5 stormtroopers (blaster rifles) with this quality would be attacking with Damage 9+ weapons and have Linked 4; with a really good roll of the dice on the GM's part, that could mean three or four hits, which very few PCs are going to able to withstand.

I'd suggest amending that to provide Linked equal to one-half (or even one-third) of the total minions in the group, rounded down to a minimum value of 1.

Another way of tackling this, particularly with minion groups with powerful weapons such as blaster rifles, that i have used to make the group seem like a Big Bad Evil Group (think deathtroopers/purge troopers/Mandos), is to give them

Adversary (group): When attacking this group, Upgrade the difficulty once for every character in the group at the time of the attack.

Basically, at full strength they are freaking deadly to attack head on (rolling 5 reds hurts), and it then takes a concerted, and often unconventional, effort to bring down there numbers to something manageable. But this also prevents their powerful weapons from becoming OP.

Multiple despairs can be used to give them extra actions and maneuvers, similar to a nemesis, whilst keeping track of them simple (as opposed to tracking 5 rivals/nemesis separately)

I would modify Linked to some sort of "massed fire," and rule that they can only hit each target once. Make them dangerous to the whole group, but they can't focus-fire multiple hits to one PC.

1 hour ago, The Grand Falloon said:

I would modify Linked to some sort of "massed fire," and rule that they can only hit each target once. Make them dangerous to the whole group, but they can't focus-fire multiple hits to one PC.

That's essentially the Fire Sweep action from the Droideka . You could give that ability to certain dangerous Minions. Or how about a talent for a squad leader Rival that lets them spend a maneuver to grant an allied Minion group Fire Sweep?

Either way works. Mostly I just think it's a bit much to pile on the hits to one person, probably better to spread it out.

On 7/3/2020 at 12:08 AM, rogue_09 said:

That's essentially the Fire Sweep action from the Droideka . You could give that ability to certain dangerous Minions. Or how about a talent for a squad leader Rival that lets them spend a maneuver to grant an allied Minion group Fire Sweep?

That's a great Ability and I promptly stole it for my Dark Troopers that my players may or may not happen upon soon. 😈