I've been doing some thinking about alternate formats for SWM, and I wanted to bounce an idea off you guys and see what you think about it. My apologies if it's already been tossed around, I haven't been keeping up with the forums.

Disclaimer: This is completely hypothetical, and I have no authority to change anything, and no association with the designers making the v-sets, or whoever else is in control of SWM's future.



I'm sure there's a way better way to word that. Anyway, here's an example:

You have a 200 point Rebel squad. It can include 200 points of Rebels, Fringe, or characters that have Affinity to be in a Rebel squad. Under the new rule, you could include a character from another faction (say, an Imperial Darth Vader), but you would then only have 180 points to spend on characters. In order to mix a second faction into the squad, you have to pay 10% of the total squad points (10% of 200 is 20 points). Once you've paid the 20 point fee once for the Imperial faction, you could include any number of Imperial characters in the squad.

If you wanted to add a third faction into the squad, that would be another 20 points off, so you could only use 160 points to build your 200 point squad, but you would get to include characters from 3 different factions.

The characters would retain their original faction for the purposes of Special Abilities and Commander Effects that are faction-specific. But if a character has Affinity, they could potentially have more than one faction at a time. So if you built a Republic and Imperial squad and included Mas Amedda (Republic with Affinity for Imperial), he would be subject to Commander Effects that specifically affect Republic characters and ones that affect Imperial characters.

Fringe is always free to add to a squad no matter what.

A cool outcome of this would be the ability to create characters in future sets with multiple factions that can only be played in a mixed faction squad. For instance, a Dooku that can only be played in a squad that has both Seperatists and Sith. He could be pretty aggressively costed, because of the inherent penalty for playing a mixed faction squad. You could even make a 3 faction Sidious (Seperatist, Sith, and Imperial) or something like that.

I went with 10% of the total squad points, because it's easy to remember and easy to calculate (10 points to add a faction to a 100 point squad, 15 to add one to a 150 squad, and 20 to add one to a 200 point squad). But a different amount of points might end up being necessary to make it balanced.

So what does the Bloo Milk community (Commbloonity? Bloomunity?) think of this idea?

interesting idea.

possibly fraught with rules headaches.

I wonder what would float to the top in a faction free format.

Universes Playformat. Anything goes.

I think you would have a rough time fitting all the good stuff in with the points hampered. Bastilla + thrawn + klats?

I don't even want to THINK about Daala deathshots! lol

Or even double-swap in Imperials...outactivate with Ozzel, run an Amanin out there, swap for Cad, kill something big, then swap away. Rinse and repeat.

I'm not opposed to trying new formats, and this one certainly looks interesting...but don't be surprised when some really broken combos (and even NPEs) start to surface. I really like the creativity behind it though. (And by the way, no, there is no conceivable way that we could plan for this format when designing new minis...not a chance of that happening, because we're talking about 6-8 extra required playtests at minimum, per piece.)

I remember a scenario rule that allows pieces to change factions, but it increases their cost by 25%, rounding up. "For example, making Kyla Katarn an Imperial cahracter rather than a New Republic character would increase his cost to 39 (31 * 1.25, rounded up)." This would work for most pieces, though Prideful and other new cost-based SAs make this rule a bit shakier.