Thanks for all the help!

So I'm relatively new to the game and I want to be very clear on something. Rebels can fight rebels and imps can fight imps, correct? How is initiative determined? Is it one side for the entire battle or alternating each round.

Welcome Moose.

Everyone makes up the list he likes and if it's Rebels vs. Rebels that's fine indeed. (Or imps vs. Imps) In competitive play this is normal because in tournaments you can't avoid such pairings. At Home you can of course always play Rebels versus Empire because of the fluff. But the rules work just fine for any matchup.

Initiative is determined per dice roll in tournaments if you have the same number of squad points. (100 vs. 100 for example -> Roll Dice)

If you have a player with less squad points he gets the initiative automatically (99 vs.100 points -> 99 point player has initiative)

For friendly games at home, Rulebook suggests to always give the imperial player the initiative (although I ignore why, so we always roll dice to determine it even at home). But hey the Rulebook also suggests to always play imps versus Rebels at home too...

After all it is very unclear if having initiative gives you an advantage or even a disadvantage, so it is not a big deal at all. There have been interesting Threads in this forum discussing exactly this and mostly we agreed that having initiative is a (very small) disadvantage even. So you might look those threads up if you want

Welcome. Nice to have another Moose on the forums, even if you aren't a Jedi. :-)

I just want to second ForceMs comments. Whether initiative is an advantage or disadvantage, if you role dice or flip a coin for it, then that advantage/disadvantage is left to chance so no one can cry about it. If a particular player really wants initiative then he can build his squad with less then 100 pts if its that important to his strategy.

And whoever has initiative has it for the whole battle.

Happy gaming

When playing red on red or blue on blue you could just look at the situation as some kind of "war games" situation. Even if the the same uniques are on both sides you can just think that everything is a simulation and that no one "really" gets hurt during them.

Initiative is determined per dice roll in tournaments if you have the same number of squad points.

Dice roll? I thought it was a coin toss. I've wanted to get a Rebels/Imperial coin made on Shapeways, just for this flip.

What do you use for a dice roll? 3 green dice and the most evades wins, re-rolling for ties?

Thanks ForceM for the really detailed response!

Or you can roll a red die...blank / focus / hit / crit , lowest to highest...ties = rerolls

... I've wanted to get a Rebels/Imperial coin made on Shapeways, just for this flip.

This would be a great prize in tournaments!

We normally roll 3 attack dice, count hits+crits for each, and reroll ties. Defense and evades would work too. I wouldn't use something that ranked the order of the faces though, since they're not evenly distributed. It's probably not unbalanced either way, but it will make people nervous because of it

I came up with a system using 3 attack dice. Blanks are 0, focus is 1, hits are 2 & crits are 3. Both players roll 3 dice, highest total wins initiative.

Mu0n shared with me the simple method of calling "hits" or "misses" on a single attack die. It's much like flipping a coin and calling heads or tails, but instead it's "hits & crit" vs. "blanks and focus." Still 50/50 chance, and it's nice and simple. I will be advocating this in my matches as it is the most similar to a coin toss.