IA: Campaign - Building your Team

“General Solo, is your strike team assembled?” - Return of the Jedi

As a rebel player, the first thing you do at the beginning of any campaign is choose your Hero. You have a lot to think about here, with somewhere between 6-13 choices depending on how many expansions you’re playing with, as each character has their own play style that makes them unique. But something you may not have considered is how your teammate’s character choices might affect your own. The Rebels have to work as a team to accomplish each mission, and that means their chosen characters and their abilities and item choices need to work well together too. If everyone is just choosing their character in a vacuum without considering the choices of the other Rebel players, you might accidentally end up with a team of heroes whose abilities and styles don’t necessarily compliment each other. You may find yourselves not being able to deal enough damage in a mission to keep Imperial figures at a manageable level, or struggling to achieve mission objectives, or too many Heroes competing for the same type of items. This is where understanding roles comes into play.

Categorizing each Hero

The roles of the other members of your team should determine what role you build your hero towards and sometimes even which hero you should or shouldn’t choose.

Each Hero in the game will fall into 1 of 3 categories, sometimes depending on what xp cards and items you buy for them; Ranged damage, melee damage, or support. I have separated each of the existing heroes into these categories, with the heroes that can be built into an alternative secondary role indicated by a colored border, blue for ranged, red for melee, and green for support. For example, MHD is primarily best as a support character, but he has enough offensively based abilities that if you already had another dedicated support character, you could give MHD a good weapon and maybe a modification and use him as a ranged damage dealer with cards like Combat Override and Field Surgeon. In this way, if you find your team with too many characters of a certain role, you can adapt one character to fill a different role instead of having to switch to another character. However, I wouldn’t recommend doing this kind of role swap with more than one character per team, as it could leave the team too compromised early on in the campaign before you have access to the xp cards that allow these role changes.

Defining the Roles

Ranged vs Melee

The reason why you don’t want too many of one type of weapon user is item scarcity. If you have too many characters that are trying to be either ranged or melee damage dealers, you won’t be able to buy enough of the right equipment to outfit them all properly. Because of how the item types are distributed in the item decks, I would limit the number of melee damage dealers to 1, and limit the number of ranged attackers to no more than 3. Basically that means don’t put Gaarkhan and Davith on the same team and don’t Fenn, Jyn, Mak and Biv all on the same team together. Remember that not all heroes have to be built to deal damage, so a hero’s starting weapon might sometimes be irrelevant and not count towards these limits.

Because of the distribution of the types of items, it’s best to limit dedicated melee attackers to 1 per team and ranged attackers to 3 per team.

Good Offense is Good Defense

A good team should have a core of 3 characters that are focused on dealing as much damage as possible. A lot of people might tell you that killing enemies is not important in this game and objectives are all that matter, but things are definitely not that simple, especially as you move further in to the campaign. It’s important to always keep the mission objectives on your mind, but in most missions you will lose outright if all of your Heroes get wounded. t’s true that you can still win as long as one hero is not wounded, but getting wounded comes at a steep price, costing your hero -1 speed, -1 endurance, one of their core abilities and decreased surges on attribute tests, so you also don’t want your heroes to get wounded too early. You have to manage how much damage you are taking each turn. Resting is one way to do this, but the amount of damage you can heal per turn by resting is static while the Imperial player’s damage output per turn is constantly growing if left unchecked, and eventually the Imperial player will put enough figures on the board that even double resting will not be enough to keep your Heroes safe from being wounded faster than you can progress the mission. Relying on defensive skills and armor to And if you let too many Imperial figures build up on the board the Imperial player can use them to surround an objective and impede your movement and line of sight to key areas of the map. And of course not all mission objectives are about toggling switches, many involve dealing damage to objects or boss characters, so not having enough damage output could leave you completely unable complete certain missions.

I have found that the best way to control the Imperial player’s damage output is to just kill their figures. Each time you kill a figure that hasn’t activated, you are also preventing all of the damage that figure would have dealt that turn, as well as reducing the number of overall attacks performed by the Imperial player against you during the mission. While it might feel like the Empire has an endless reserve of troops at its disposal and killing soon-to-be-revived enemies is pointless, the Imperial player is still limited in their deployment by the threat level, and by killing their figure, you are making them spend threat on redeploying that figure rather than bringing in additional troops and overwhelming you. I have found that a good rule-of-thumb is to attack until you have killed more figures than the Empire can deploy at the end of the round, then to use the rest of your actions on progressing the mission, and actually I think it’s not a bad idea to just spend the entire first round killing as many enemies as you can, then start focusing on objectives without having to worry about taking so much damage. Of course killing enemies does become less important the closer you get to the time limit, so just remember to keep adjusting your priorities as the mission progresses.

In order to reliably kill more figures than the threat level each turn, you’re going to need a strong core of damage dealers that are getting steadily upgraded each mission, and I recommend any good team have at least 3 characters that are good at dealing damage. This way, even if you need one of your damage dealers to take a break to rest or clear an objective, you’ll still have 2 heroes that are able to attack and manage the Imperial deployments. Luckily most of the characters in the game fall into this category, so let’s talk about the ones that don’t or might not have to.  

Support

Support characters are ones that can don’t necessarily need to be attacking to be useful. Generally these characters do their jobs by making the other heroes better, providing re-rolls, damage buffs, healing, etc. Support characters are important because they can do their jobs with very little credit investment, since they attack very rarely and focus more on using their abilities and interacting with objectives. This is important because it’s very difficult to optimally equip 4 heroes, either because of lack of credits or a shortage of good items appearing at the end of the missions, so having a support hero allows the other 3 heroes to be better equipped for dealing damage. Generally the only items you’re going to buy for these characters are armor, as they tend to have lower health than other characters and are often targeted early. It’s also important that you realize what you are signing up for when you choose a support character or realize that your character might have to fill a support role, that you are going to be doing a lot more moving, resting and interacting than everyone else and usually very little attacking. It’s important to know this going in, as support heroes can sometimes be a bit boring to play as. I recommend that the player that is most willing to take on a leadership role in the team and offer guidance and reminders to the other heroes, often known as the Quarterback, take control of the support character as they are going to be less likely to get bored if they aren’t rolling attack dice all the time. 

If your team doesn’t have a dedicated support character, it might be a good idea to identify early on which hero has the best support xp abilities and start planning to build them towards that rather than towards offensive abilities. Currently the only offensively based hero that I consider to have enough abilities that allows for pure support play with no offensive upgrades would be Loku, and some would argue that he is actually primarily a support character, although I believe he does better as an offensive character if you know how to use him that way. Jyn and Mak both have some support based abilities, but their core abilities and most of their xp cards lend themselves much more heavily to offense based builds, and their starting weapons are very much in need of upgrading right from the start.

Having a support character is very good for a team, but you should never have more than 1 on a team as it will be difficult to control the Empire’s figure count relying on just 2 heroes to deal damage, as 1 will inevitably have to stop attacking for a turn to rest. There are currently 5 heroes that I consider to be primarily geared towards a support role, and 2 of those characters I consider to be purely support with no secondary role to switch to, Murne and Gideon, so I would advise against using those characters in the same team. Diala can switch to a melee attacker with Way of the Sarlacc if there is no other melee attacker to compete for items with, and Saska and MHD can build their skills to increase their damage outputs using skills like Power Converter and Structural Weakness for Saska and Combat Override and Field Surgeon for MHD. When you are transferring a support character to a range-based damage build, I recommend equipping your other characters with modifications first and then buying higher cost 3-dice weapons with less modification slots for the converting support character, like the T-21 and most T3 guns, after they’ve picked up some of their offensive xp skills.

Great weapons to give to a hero mid-campaign to give them a quick damage boost without needing modifications.

Creating a Balanced Team

So what if you’re reading this but you’ve already chosen your characters and are several missions into your campaign? Don’t worry, your team isn’t necessarily doomed, as I mentioned there are several heroes that can build themselves towards more than a single role. Use the character role guide above to see what secondary role your character might be able to take and then look for class cards that would support that role. When I get around to writing guides for each hero, I will include example xp and item builds for each of the heroes possible roles. And of course, you can feel free to completely ignore all of this and just play your hero the way you want. But if you notice your having a hard time winning missions as the Rebels, it might be a good idea to see how each of your heroes has been built and see how they balanced they are based on the above recommendations. You might find that you have too many characters built towards a certain role than you need. 

If you are just starting off the the 6 Core set heroes, any combination should be fine, your main question will be how to build your Diala depending on whether your team has Gideon or Gaarkhan, although I would advise against putting all 3 on the same team. Once you start adding in heroes from the expansions, you’ll want to start referencing the above chart to what role each hero can slot into so you can bring a balanced team to challenge the might of the Empire.