/swg/ - 150 Hyperjumps Maintenance Edition

Last night I played the dumbest and maybe most entertaining game of Imperial Assault skirmish. I knew it was going to be a mess early on, when both of us brought Heroic Effort lists. (Heroic Effort is a 0-cost Rebel upgrade that you can only run if your list is entirely named characters.)

I was running Jedi Luke, Obi-Wan, Davith Elso, Hera, Chopper, Gideon Argus, R2, and 3PO. My opponent was running Han, Leia, Lando, Jyn Odan, Hera, Gideon, and 3PO.

Things were going fine -- I took out Leia and Lando fairly early on -- until my opponent hunkered down with Han, Jyn, and 3PO. I'd already gotten 4 damage on Jyn, so I wanted to finish her off before turning to the rest of his army. Big mistake. Between the free evades Han and 3PO gave her, her Cunning ability, and a string of good defense rolls, she survived something like 5 or 6 attacks from Luke, only taking a single damage.

I finally took Jyn down, but not with Luke. Gideon finished her off with a focused shot. Once I finished off Jyn, the rest of the game went a lot more smoothly for me, and I won with Luke at near-full health and R2 at full health. At some point after killing Jyn, I realized I could have killed her a lot earlier using Jedi Luke's Deflect ability, but I'd forgotten he had it. (It was my 1st game using Jedi Luke.)

That sounds like a crazy game. Rebel heroes is a neat archetype but I haven't had much success with it. I like my imperial troopers too much.

What are you running for Imperial troopers? Does it stand up to scum hunters?

I recently had my X-wing stuff get thrown out by accident when moving, and my IA stuff remained, so I'm debating getting more into IA rather than re-buy my X-wing collection.

I'm playing 2x eJets, Terro, Blaise, BT, 000, Zillo and Rule By Fear

My dudes tend to have enough hp/defensive tech to not immediately drop to hunters, and I can hit pretty hard. I barely missed day 2 at worlds and I'm taking this to gencon so we'll see how they do.

Does anyone else get inspiration for games or campaign ideas from music?

This track for example really makes me want to run a Band of Brothers or The Pacific-style campaign with stomtroopers or army guys.

youtube.com/watch?v=0uKU_Z05vPQ

I tend to plan out my Star Wars games to the soundtracks from
>Ace Combat series
>KOTOR I & II
>Republic Commando
>Battlestar Galactica

So are normal Elite Stormtroopers pushed out of the meta by scum hunters?

I really want to run some normal elite grunts with guns- Etroopers, eISB, etc.

Do you think the Elite Sentry droids will be good?

eStorms got dropped with the Reinforcements nerf. I think they're still good, but I don't know if they can hang with eQuays. eISBs are scary but very fragile and reliant on positioning.

I'm hoping eSentries are solid, they should be with 4ish cost per model Droid Guardian Troopers.

What armor is the guy in black wearing?

starwars is a space opera. some cinematic trope laden epic poem, and i love it because of that.

but when is it too much? ive written a campaign for my local group, and got it going. i wrote in about 100 pages of relativley loose story, providing several paths to the same destination.

now when i watch my players stumble through it, my story is changing, into something gross. full of murderhobo subplot and imperial killcount.

i feel like they are being stupid and intentionally ignoring the story. i then talked to one of my players and he admitted that they didnt see any plot hooks. they couldnt see the path of the story, so left with their own devices, murderhobo is the soup de'zure.

what should i do tg? just let them do whatever, and take my 100 pages to Veeky Forums and write my own book?

>starwars is a space opera. some cinematic trope laden epic poem, and i love it because of that.

There's your first problem/misconception.

Some people need more guidance than others. You can't run a sandbox campaign for every person or every campaign. The best part is honestly sitting down with your dudes and talking what you and them can do to reduce the murderhoboness. Maybe they basicly need a Commanding Officer doling out missions, or they need a general mission of "this is your ship, this is Sector Brak, defeat the imperial forces by any means necessary"

>not knowing a space opera when its right in front of you

theres your problem

ANH and Disney Star Wars, but Star Wars itself isn't a space opera in my opinion, and it shouldn't be.

see they have all that, but they dont use it. they are in deep cover so they can call ou,t but incomming is all radio silence.

they also have a clear goto objective but keep getting caught by imperials. they are basically the worst rebels ever.

okay, im actually intrested in that answer. what about the OT doesnt appeal to you as the over-plot of both man vs self, man vs man, and man vs nature/group?

the classic heroe's journey is exploited as lukes character arc through out. in fact that journey is all we see luke do in the movies, assuming that as main protagonist, he is also main character.

You overplanned. Anything more than a skeleton plot WILL get trashed, 100 pages is so far beyond overkill. Next time think of some fun multiple use hooks and characters to throw at them if they start to stagnate, but anything more than that is unneeded.

i understand what you are saying but, the players got tired of the 5 week rotation witb 1 week ti choose and learn then 4 week (thus 4 sessions) of story, and decided they wanted a long running plot. this will carry us through to about christmas or the new year.

There's nothing wrong with long term goals or plans, but leave as many routes there as open as possible.

Sandbox campaigns are extraordinarily overrated.

Hell, in my high school my English teacher showed my class the OT to teach us all about the heroes journey.

He was easily my favorite teacher in HIgh school and normally I hate English.

>tfw my senior year english teacher would always play ANH in class for Heroes Journey but mine was the first year they didn't let her

That's shit man I'm sorry.

That doesn't mean Star Wars is a space opera.

Don't know what your "man vs." tangent is.

Anybody got any good art for cyborgs/cybernetic implants?

Avengers quip humor ruined TFA.

What is this, 2015?

What's the lowest reasonable rank for an imperial officer assigned to command a capital ship, even a very small one?

Probably 1st lieutenant

What sort of mat is that?

It depends on how much of high command is out of commission

ok newbie player here.

someone recommend me to play Soonthir Fel with stealth device.

while I'm thinking I could use some extra damage with targeting computer Instead.

other upgrades are Lightning reflexes, royal guard and autothrusters.

suggestions?

still trying to figure out the other builds for now.

There are a number of factors that pushed elite Stormtroopers (and other low-cost troopers) out of the meta.

The change in the scoring system meant you couldn't run the third figure away to deny them points and hurt Reinforcements which was the best command card for those lists.

Jabba's ability to score an extra point every time an enemy figure is killed further hurts lists with lots of cheap figures.

And elite Weequay Pirates basically do everything better than elite Stormtroopers, even before accounting for the amazing command cards Hunters have received lately.

Star Wars Armada post:

So FINALLY was able to get a pack of Imperial Fighter Squads... My full squadron in pic.
Going to prime them tomorrow, and try my hand at painting them during the week...

The imperial navy tends to have some fairly aberrant promotion scales based around nothing rational/merit and their training seems to be somewhere between sub-par to fucking terrible along the way.

If they where barely competent you could use-
The shallow end you have Midshipmen and Acting Sub LT's which are essentially learning the ropes so you can have them run sections of the ship, command a couple of dozen people and do stuff with smaller ships on their own. They should have some basic knowledge of some parts of the ships operations, with a little bit of navigation and leadership skills. But you wouldn't want them running anything very big.

SBLT, LEUT and LCDR are much higher ranks you can easily use on smaller capital ships with say 150-600 crew, unlike the trainee officers these guys actually know some shit, have been in command a while and have a pretty good grasp of most if not all of the ships they run and more times than not, actually know where the fuck they are and what they're doing. They might be lieutenants, but in terms of rank scale they're fairly high and should have been properly experienced at their job.

Much bigger ships you can run with a CMDR or Captain. At a technical and tactical level they can also run a single large ship competently as well as a squadron or two of escorts, when to deploy fighters, how many and should be quite fearsome opponents for the average pirate or smuggler.

Stealth device definitely. When flying Interceptors you must remember that if the enemy hits you, they will kill you. But first, they have to hit you. The harder you are to hit, the better.
Sadly, from what I've heard Fel and Interceptors in general don't do too well in the current meta, with there being way too much unavoidable range 1 damage. Shame, because I loved flying them. The interceptor only has two speeds: fast or dead. Either you dance around the enemy arcs of fire like some kind of ballet dancer made of lasers and murder, or you become a rapidly expanding ball of burning debris.

"Kill them dead" Soontir with a TC instead of a stealth device is a legit build. The ability to do a BR or boost to dodge arcs and then grab a TL + Focus is a powerful combination that ups the amount of damage he does compared to the SD version considerably. The fact it's a point cheaper can also help.

Also, when flying Interceptors, do not be afraid to disengage if you think there's a good chance you'll bump or get bombs dropped on you. It's how most Soontirs I see end up dying, assuming they don't run into ABTs or bombs, is getting too aggressive. Also if you use PtL every round you end up getting fairly predictable in what you can do.

I don't know where you're getting the idea that the Imperial navy is the most incompetent thing in the world.

Maybe in Disney and a few shitty EU stories, but it's pretty damn good otherwise.

Any suggestions on a good template for this concept?

A Kaminoan !Mengele has created a Force-infused chimera made out of dead jedi and a "volunteer" to catalyze it. I feel like in its current stage, it would be about the size of a Wampa.

Out of curiosity how much practical effects did TFA use? There's so much CGI.

Did you even watch the Empire Strikes back where they manage to fuck up the assault on Hoth, then spend a goodly amount of time running into each other, running into rocks and generally being fucking idiots.
There's a reason Darth chokes them, they're terrible and if he can choke enough of them, then maybe he'll end up with some that are not cretins. But in the meantime I'm sure it makes him feel better.

Dark Hunter (Nexus of Power)

Is there a good way to run a roleplaying game for a squadron? Maybe like a modified X-Wing?
The fighter stuff was always one of my favorite aspects of SW. youtu.be/aHQrcyerVQQ?t=17s still gives me goosebumbs

If you want modified XWM, Heroes of the Aturi Cluster is right up your alley. If you want FFG's RPGs, you'll need to hunt down some of /swg/'s starfighter house rules unless you like X-COM-grade turnover rates.

This has a lot in it to make them run better, think it was compiled by Danon back in the day, got some rules from Shipfag, shield rules by me, some other people on Veeky Forums and other sources to make it just a little more survivable
(It is insanely lethal just by the book rules!)

Been thinking about doing it as well when I get the time (hah!) to run another campaign and I'd run it a little like a mix of The Expanse and Space Above & Beyond where the players are doing a 50-50 mix of being pilots and the other half the time they're fixing shit, scavenging bits, doing commando things etc
They'd literally start out with a busted arse space truck, a supersekretspess base, some contacts for resources and a cranky old engineer NPC who used to run a race team before the Empire clamped down on 'fun'. First mission is stealing some old Mk1 Headhunters from a boneyard, getting them back to the base to convert into Z95-heavy's with a hyperdrive and other mechanical fuckery.

That's the result of bad screenwriting more than anything else.

That's some fancy wall insulation offcuts I got hold of and turned into mats for my local games store, since they're using MDF boards for lack of funds.

RPG question.

Initiative. Cool and Vigilance for initiative. I can't figure it out, and the results on google were all inconclusive discussions from over a year ago.

So by the RAW, a character rolls Cool if they've planned for and initiated a fight (a la an ambush), and Vigilance if they're surprised or otherwise haven't had an opportunity to prepare. On the surface, that seems straightforward.

A character with high Cool would naturally want to ambush or prepare whenever possible. A character with high Vigilance is ready for action at a moment's notice.

But what if their roles are switched? Low cool, high vigilance is worse at attacking someone unprepared than he is attacking someone spontaneously, which seems odd, but okay maybe some people are bad at throwing the first punch maybe? It's still a little rocky...

But then, say BOTH characters are low Cool, high Vigilance. In this case, one would WANT the other to ambush him to make use of his higher stat. The other would want the same thing. Whoever ambushes the other is essentially penalized for taking their opponent by surprise. They'd basically want to wear blindfolds and run at each other so that they're both surprised, and they both can roll their higher initiative stat.

Is there something I'm missing?

Han Solo would be Low Cool, High Vigilance

Voort "Piggy" saBinring would be High Cool, Low Vigilance

>That's the result of bad screenwriting more than anything else.

So you've crawled past the week old tuna frames, some old prawn heads left out in the sun and come up with a big ol pair of blue gungan balls as bait.
I mean seriously if you hate the EU as well as the new Disney films and think the OT is written badly as well... we ain't got much here for you son.

Oh wait, we do.
PQ films for the win!

I get that, thematically. The problem is mechanical. A character is incentivized to dump Cool and raise Vigilance, because they can *always* initiate combat unprepared thus forcing a Vigilance roll (which is their higher stat.) A character who dumps Vigilance and raises Cool is at a disadvantage.

There's basically no reason, mechanically, to ever start an ambush.

I don't understand what you are trying to say.
How do you start combat unprepared? A fight between two people requires at least one of them to be aware of the other. If you know where the other guy is and he doesn't, I'd hardly say that you are unprepared. And that's where Cool comes in.

Im thinking of putting Soonthir with that upgrade to do more of the engagement while i put in another 3 more TIE, 2 blacksquadron and howlrunner. Which upgrade is best for the other 3 you reckon?

Autothrusters is the only mandatory upgrade to keep you alive against turrets. Push the Limit is pretty much stapled to soontir as well since interceptors need actions and it keys off his ability.

From there, stealth/hull/shield/targeting are all valid options.

>they can *always* initiate combat unprepared
No? Unless they also plan to dump Cunning so they can lose every perception check, and now you've got two shit non-combat skills so you're going to get shafted any time you're not willfully walking into an ambush, but not too willfully because then you're not unprepared.

Black Squadrons with crackshot etp are pretty good damage for their cost, but Howlrunner's only really worth it if you have a large squadron of TIEs (since her whole point is making other ships better). Soontir will probably not be in range of her most of the time, so buffing just the two BS pilots probably isn't worth the cost. Mitchell or one of the other TIE aces with damage- or survivability-boosting abilities might work better.

Speaking of X-Wing squadron building, I haven't played actively since around the time Imperial Veterans came out. What would a decent Imperial list look now?
Although from what I've been able to gather, that might be a pointless question as it seems Empire is completely dead in competive level, and the meta revolves around Jumpmasters and unkillable Rebel ubersquadrons.

Both of these are really fun.

IonRexpert & Friends
geordanr.github.io/xwing/?f=Galactic Empire&d=v4!s!71:220,22,-1:34:17:;209:-1,36,-1,-1:42:31:;10::-1:-1:;10::-1:-1:&sn=IonRexpert & Friends&obs=

SS-Upsilon, PureStrike & TCrackBlacks
geordanr.github.io/xwing/?f=Galactic Empire&d=v4!s!227:186,183,46,-1,-1:45:-1:;239:27:48:31:;12:140:-1:5:;12:140:-1:5:&sn=SS-Upsilon PureStrike TCrackBlacks&obs=

Anyone got some good empire focused fan fiction to recommend? Preferably focusing on a Captain and his star destroyer?

>fan fiction
Why, though?

>tfw /swg/ will never again get together to have pain train nights
I miss those goofier, more innocent days.

because i'm not seeing any good official material about it? The closest you really get is Pellaeon playing Watson to Thrawns Holmes in the thrawn trilogy. Doesn't quite scratch the same itch.
Oh boy. I wonder if the authors look back ten years later wondering what the hell they were thinking.

So Plinkett says that Valorum didn't need to send a commision to see if Amadila's claim was true, but wasn't the whole point that Valorum sent the Jedi behind the senates back?

Qui-Gon says thaf the negotiations will be short because people like the Trade Fed are cowards, so presumably Valorum had the same idea.
But the Jedi failed because of the Sith.

Valorum could have had the Jedi testify etc if they were successful, but they weren't, and he's already on shaky political ground. That would do him in.
And unlike many others we see in the senate, he's clearly a friend to the Jedi, going behind bureaucracy to use them.

I honestly can't think of any off the top of my head; the overlap between people who would be interested in writing that and people who actually write fanfiction is very small, and mostly exists over on Spacebattles.net, but I'll give it a look
I mean, why not?
Two movies in two years really did us in, eh?

Can a K wing, an arc-170, and an Auzituck Gunship work together? I just love their models and the idea of such powerful ships packing as much heavy fire power as they can.

Now Plinkett is saying that Qui-Gon should just steal the part from Watto, but that would mean Watto calling the hutts, which they can't have happen.

I feel like Mike has never actually seen the movie.

Probably. To quote our resident champion "Fly what you like".

Make a list that's fun to fly and you'll find ways to make it work when you know your list and how it handles

>just walk off with a part that big

Arc and Auzituck definitely can, as Arc, Auzituck and Biggs is probably the most broken thing in the game right now. You could probably squeeze a K-wing there instead of Biggs.
K-wing plus Captain Nym is also apparently very strong (two durable bombers with turrets and some extra tricks; not particularly suprising they do well together).

Death trooper armor, from Rogue One

Empire being dead is a meme. PS11 cruise missile aces is brutal, cruise missiles in general do a lot for palp aces by giving them a heavy hitting option. Quickdraw, Backdraft, Defenders are your heavy fighters. Omega Leader and Pure are solid budget options. Chiraneau is still crazy good with Kylo. The Upsilon is a very underrated support ship.

Lowhrick, stress Braylen, and Miranda would be fine as a chunky little group.

Now Plinkett is saying that Windu should have sent more Jedi back to Naboo, even though the whole point is to draw Maul out, which he won't do if there are a whole gaggle of knights and masters there.

Why would Obi Wan ignite his lightsaber in a crowded spaceport bar?

Because he's old and crazy.

why would a man cast his daughtere as a chubby twi'lek? The mind of georgey is not ours to understand

But he's not crazy. And 60 isn't old.

>60 isn't old.
Whatever you say, grandpa.

Well, he couldn't cast her as a fit twi'lek.

For a human, 60 is not the age where you lose your mind.

Are X-Wing AI's worth using? If so, what's the best one?

I never said the OT was badly written, I said that particular sequence is badly written. A lot of people here even love RotJ but think the Ewok sequence is dumb. Many many many fans hate the Ewoks, but love RotJ.

Though yes, I hate the Disney films and there are certainly parts of the EU I hate, but not all of it, and not all of it portrays the Imperial Navy as a bunch of dicks-up-their-own-asses shitlords.

The OT is absolutely perfect, fuck off.
The writing is one hundred percent air right in every frame.

Agreed. Every frame is so dense.

I dunno, I found Leia to be a little flat in ROTJ. She seemed to be too passive, compared to how she was in ANH and ESB (with the sole exception of her killling Jabba).

I'm 99.8% sure he was being sarcastic, user.

The OT films are flawed masterpieces. The best Star Wars films, among the best scifi films, masterpieces, but they have faults.

>The OT films are flawed masterpieces.
This describes all six.
ANH has just as many giant contrivances as any PT film.

Hell I'd even say ANH is a ropey as shit film saved by an inspiring vision and a perfect last half-hour.

ESB is more ropey desu.
It has the biggest hole of the series- why Yoda (who is shown to be much stronger in the force than Luke) is just sitting on his ass in a swamp.

When I say ropey I mean in the sense of how awkward things things are in terms of scenes being shot and lines being delivered.

Ag yes, ANH wins there.
I will add that the PT fares no worse than ANH in that department.
The "faster, more intense" legend started with ANH after all.

I don't get this meme. Every movie ramped up the sfx. Empire was more dense than ANH, Jedi was more dense than Empire.

The narrative seems to have changed in order to justify PT hate, but I know that a big part of ANH's appeal was its mindblowing SFX.