Minion groups and squad rules are great for simplifying combat among other things and it's clear in the RAW how to do so with minions that are identical.

However, I'm curious if anyone has an elegant solution when it comes to crafting unique droids and then merging them into minion groups?

Between crafting and programming a droid there is a highly unreliable outcome of any two droids being exactly the same due to the randomness. When merging those unique droids into a minion groups, what would be the best way to merge group skills and managing personality quirks and other things like weapons and armor and other minor details that individual droids might have.

As for Group skills, only minions that share a Group skill would count toward ranks. For example: You have 4 minion droids in a group, but only 3 have Mechanics. For this group, treat it as only having 3 members (so 2 ranks).

As for weapons: I don't think it would be game breaking to allow them to choose 1 weapon to use if they have mixed weaponry. The Storm Trooper minion already allows that (with a squad having a single heavy weapon). However, like above, only minions that have the necessary combat skill as a Group skill can contribute.

I allow my players to make one crafting check, then apply that to all the minions with enough time and credits. Same with programming.

It makes things much simpler.

I don't, however, allow them to "keep" the same result for future droids. It only applies to the "initial batch."

Thanks for the feedback.

I like the straight-forward option to do a onetime crafting check for the group. However, in our games we keep the players hungry and they don't have a huge amount of credits or find enough scavenged parts to do so. When building a group of minions, even if it's just a monotask chassis at the lowest-end of 600 credits, it would still be very expensive to build them in a batch. How it works in our games and I think in majority of other people's games, is that droids are acquired through gameplay discovering them as prebuilt NPCs or added to the character gradually as they get enough resources to craft one a new one. Also if a player had a lot of credits they would probably build a better droid chassis like specialist or advanced combat which can't be used in minion groups.

It wouldn't be too much of an issue if droids in minion groups didn't drop like flies but they do if there is any serious kind of threat or a weapon with blast is introduced. Once that minion group starts to diminish, the minions are next to useless. That is why I love FFG's scaling with minion groups which actually makes them viable for their cost.

So as a GM, when I have multiple minion groups and they start to drop, I like that I can remerge the individual or small groups of minions into a new group to make them still potent for the encounter or be able to adjust the difficulty if the encounter is too easy. I would like to have something similar for droid minions. But again, the crafting or diverse nature of droids makes it extremely difficult. Obviously, I can treat them as individuals for initiative slots but that defeats the purpose squad rules or minion groups which make gameplay much smoother.

Also to touch on reprogramming droids, I think the ability to reprogram a group of minions to all the same programming would make sense and is easy to manage since you just multiply the time it takes by the minions you are trying to reprogram. However, it's not as straight forward with a already built chassis.

That leads me to think, what if a player could retrofit a droid chassis based on the type? Similar to reprogramming a droid, their is no cost for credits but it would take time. I think thematically it would make sense as well since a tinker type mechanic is always going back and making improvements to their inventions and repurposing old tech. To keep it balanced, an example of how I'm thinking about this a labor droid only can be retrofitted into a labor droid chassis and not retrofitted as a combat chassis. That would limit the minion that could join that group based on their chassis and programming type.

Any of these suggestions I've heard or I'm making would be house-rules but overall I'm trying to figure out a way for anyone who plays a droid minion group focused character like a droid tech or a separatist commander, a way to manage this easily.

My suggestion for retrofitting is still charge a certain amount.

Say, 25% of full cost, just like repairing a weapon with 1 step of damage.

This is the reason why as a player I don't craft expressly unique droids. Though I've only done it with Monotask Droids so far, I've taken to deciding the droid's function and then standardizing exactly what the chassis results and programming results are for that function. Say I decide to make Melee combat droids. I work to roll for a success with 2 advantages, spend the two advantages on Reinforced Chassis for 5 WT, then program combat programming with Melee and Brawl combat skill, then work to roll 3 advantages so I can I add 1 more rank to Melee for the droid, and just continue building until I get the desired number of droids. Any droids that I build that at one step in the process don't fulfill these requirements gets sold.

This is for the sake of my own sanity and the GM, and I make credits along the way too.

The only issue there is that, by RAW, any individual Minion group must consist of like members. In other words, they must all have the same stats, the same specific species or droid type, the same weapon loadout, etc. they have to be identical. A Minion group cannot be a “ mixed group”.

Thank you for asking this because I had the same exact question. I recently dove into crafting droids in the campaign I'm in. My goal was to have a group of monotask droids, little probots that float above my shoulder like the inquisitor in the Rebels TV show. I was planning on doing monotask droids with skills in perception and vigilance as they were going to be my "eyes". However, after crafting my first one I realized how inconsistent this would end up being. I had a decent roll as to where I could add a few other random skills, so I added Medicine and something else. Then I realized if I didn't roll the EXACT same amount of advantages next time, I may not be able to get the same extra skills I got when I crafted my first one. Thus I would have a group of probots where all had ranks in perception and vigilance but maybe some have medicine and some don't (among other skills). Seeing as how remote the chances are of getting the exact same rolls every time, I quickly abandoned my dream of having a group of little droids because it would be a nightmare to manage.

Remember that you can spend Advantages for other things, such as Boosts on the next checks.

You can "settle" for fewer perks to your droids to make them uniform.

And as a GM, I wouldn't have a problem with allowing a crafting roll to build a set design for a droid that could be used to create identical droids.

While this is not RAW by any stretch, you could make a minion group of droids with the same base stats but different skills and only count the skill ranks of the members that have the skill. So, PrisonMic’s droids, let’s say there are 4 of them, would have 3 ranks in Perception and Vigilance, as per standard minion group rules. But, the minion group would get 1 rank in Medicine for the 2 droids in the group with that skill.

Sure, it is a little complicated and non-standard, but for a PC droid-builder, it could work. And I’d allow it as a GM. I’d actually prefer it over PrisonMic and 4 droids taking up 5 initiative slots and making 5 sets of dice rolls every round, which is the RAW alternative.

After getting feedback here, I'm working on some revised homebrew rules for crafting generic droids. I will share it here after play testing it some and hopefully be able to get any of your feedback to refine it further. I'm basing it off the idea how custom schematics work and I have it purposefully generic so it's easily compatible to any era.