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| It's going to be Rey and Kylo pics for most of these articles, so enjoy the glimpse into THE FUTURE! |
Pretend outward appearances and jokes written online to the contrary, we DO actually like the guys over at Steel Strategy and we all talk fairly often (how many podcasts have I appeared on now? One more and I get a free donut I think), so Biggs and I were talking and we're going to actually work on this whole thing together. There's a good, hefty chunk of things to cover with respect to Rebellion in the Rim (henceforth, RitR, Ritter, or John Ritter as the mood and dumb jokes strike me) and I do NOT want to have to write up the entire campaign book and offer advice on everything. We're splitting up the work and looking over each other's shoulders/adding material as wanted/desired, allowing us to divide and conquer. We're writing these introductory articles separately, but we're looking to follow the below rough outline.
Introductions (individually)
1) Fleet-building and everything involved in that aspect - "Me and my own"
2) Teamwork and Team-building - "Us and ours"
3) The campaign turn and everything involved, stepping through the whole thing
3.5) Setting up the board for fun and a good time. Where the good planets are and how to find them
4) Battles and Fights - "That guy? How dare they exist where I wanna be!"
5) Green objectives - Who wants to play these and a basic summary of how they play
6) Pivotals - Them, Us, and a galaxy to fight over
Conclusions and what we learned from this experience
There will be some basic guidance here, but as I said in my previous article, I don't want to lead you towards a specific build/definite way of playing. This is a much more fun sandbox-y place, and it's way more interesting seeing what YOU can do with the restrictions. After it's all over, I may end up putting some notes in the individual ship/squadron articles about how specific things are better in RitR than they are in the regular game, but as THIS is a passion project and we're more usually focused on the 400 point game, I'll make that call when I get to it.
Why RitR over Corellian Conflict? Because RitR is more fun, and because the campaign snowballs less. The campaign in RitR seems more developed and more story/theme based. That's largely the green missions and the acts, but we'll get there. If you ever wanted to tell a story through your Armada games or make some friends by teaming up to fight the other guys, RitR campaigns are the way to do it. First up: fleet-building.
So glad you guys are taking this on. FFG rule books can be horribly confusing and you guys are more or less our go to source for how things are supposed to work in this game.
ReplyDeleteMy Armada group just started a new campaign. Maybe our 3rd or 4th. We really enjoy the quicker games on a smaller table. The best part of campaigns are of course teamwork, progressive list building, strategy in terms of picking assaults, and battle planning between matches. We have a saying that the best upgrade in the game is free - a 2nd brain.
I would love if these articles would address some things we've struggled with that are unclear in rules and were not addressed by the FAQ. Did they really play test a campaign and not think about addressing these next two issues in the rule book?
- Do flotillas need to be killed for tabling using original rules vs. tournament rules? We've decided no, but we finish the out the round. Mostly we are looking to discourage lists with more than one flotilla and avoid Pivotal battles with 6-8 flotillas.
- Is Montross off limits for initial base placement? Montross is in what looks like a Sub-Area called "Mid Rim" that otherwise seems to serve no purpose in the game. We've played this both ways. Our preference is to make it off limits to make it harder for one team to just add 30 points of squads each round.
Other things we've house ruled to make the campaign more fun:
- You can only get access to Veteran tokens by spending a Skilled Spacers tokens pre-match. We feel veteran squadrons are somewhat overpowered and with planets that give you 30 points of rewards the matches tend to turn pivotal battles into giant balls of squadron fights. This also makes Skilled Spacers planets and reward tokens a bit more valuable.
- Reduce the value of Ally tokens to 30 points of squads or one flotilla with upgrades. Ally tokens have seemed too important and we keep having to play the same green campaign objectives at Mandalore and Nal Hutta - if I have to play Holonet Overdrive one more time...
- We've also gone away from Custom Commanders and started our current campaign at 250 points with traditional commanders. Otherwise everyone was just adding Ion Tech
Love the blog. Thanks!
We debated for a long time about custom commanders or traditionals. We've decided to allow players to choose but as custom commanders become more powerful fear this may become unbalanced. It's not unbalancing the campaign as a whole for us as we have two players per side each with two fleets to play and we all went with one commander and one custom commander.
ReplyDeleteIt has led to use of some of the low cost commanders that haven't seen much play in the past (Admiral Piett had his first ever game).