So I've been thinking for a while about the past 5 years of Star Wars Miniatures. The 10th V-set just finished up, so I figured this is a good time to look back on the highlights of these sets. I've been working very closely with the project from the start, and even on the sets that I wasn't directly involved much in I still always followed along with everything. So I spent this morning typing this up; it doesn't hit everything by a long shot, just hits some of the highlights in my mind, and for every set I tried to give a behind the scenes tidbit that people might not know or realize.
Of course, this is all just my point of view. I'm certain that some people, both on the design team and off, will disagree with my opinions here. There are also clearly controversial subjects that I just touch on, because this isn't meant to be a whole essay about every little thing, and it's already pushing 4,000 words.
For example, Mace Windu LotLS gets a half-sentence mention, when I could probably write 4,000 words just about him! If you want to hear more, buy me a drink and I'll talk your ear off about it.
Destiny of the Force
Designers: Deri, Eric L, Dennis
The original intent of this first set was to bring the bottom four factions (OR, Mandos, Vong, and Sith) closer to the competitive tables. Each of these factions got some really strong pieces, but they each also received a power 10+ piece to bring them up to speed: Bastila Shan, Jedi Master; Darth Revan, Sith Lord; Jaster Mereel; and the Yammosk War Coordinator. Jaster is a bit of the odd man out as he didn’t do quite enough to make Mandos competitive, but he was a big step for them. There were additions for the other factions that were interesting, but a lot of them were more flavorful than competitive. The odd man out in that regard was everyone’s least favorite bug, Poggle the Lesser. I think the issue of inexperience in designers shines through nowhere better than Poggle. I don’t mean that in any way to be a slight to the designers on this set, it was just a fact of the matter that nobody had done something like this before. It’s actually commendable that the set came out as good as it did! The biggest issue with Poggle was, unsurprisingly, lack of playtesting. Originally his Rapport was for ALL non-unique Separatists, which was found to be abusable when combined with Gha Nachkt and Battle Droids. So it was tempered to just living and that was that. Unfortunately, he didn’t get tested with a focus on Geonosian Drones, but this was a lesson learned for the future (no 2 point pieces, playtest any changes).
Another one of the big lessons learned was about organization. This was a purely behind-the-scenes issue, but there was exceptionally little organization on DotF. To write this, I’ve gone back and poked around the old forums, and finding any specific information is a nightmare! I think this was another result of lack of experience, and definitely something that started getting fixed in later sets. I think there are a lot of problems with the way sets are designed currently (there are certain things that I have been complaining about for years behind the scenes), but the organization is truly much, much better now than it was originally.
Renegades and Rogues
Designers: Bill, Deri, Dennis, Eric L (only for the Battle of Theed subset)
For set 2, the intent of stabilizing the meta was still strong. This set is special to me because I was made a lead playtester (along with Weeks), and I also got my very first design experience with Kyle Katarn, Rebel Operative. This set brought some real power to the OR and made them a truly tier 1 faction with new versions of Atton Rand and Carth Onasi, and of course also brought Mace Windu, Legacy of the Light Side, another new controversial figure. This was also a very thematic set with a big focus on pilots in multiple factions and the Klatooinian Captain. Even the Vong got a pilot with the YV Slayer! I feel that just the little bit of experience from having made one set resulted in a much more polished product. This is one of my favorite sets.
The most notable thing from behind the scenes was the Battle of Theed subset. After the first set we realized that we could make 10 more figures without paying the printer much more. This was handled poorly. Most of everyone involved in the V-sets at this point didn’t even have access to the Battle of Theed forum or even knew it existed. Weeks and I, although we were the lead playtesters on R&R, hadn’t even heard of it before it was released! When the idea first came up I believe it was just a thought of “Oh, 10 pieces will be easy, no big deal”, but even 10 pieces need to be done correctly. The Royal Naboo Security Forces came out in this set (which is a keyword that we have buried and forgotten about apparently), which most people consider to be pretty big NPEs. The pieces on their own are not bad, but adding in Mon Mothma for deathshots makes them very annoying to play against and immediately tier 1. Another bit of history that most people might not remember is the drama around Darth Maul, Sith Infiltrator. He was originally previewed at 52 points without Sith affinity. Then after some comments on the previewed version, the affinity was added and 5 more points tacked on. People thought he was really brokenly good! Turns out…. not so much. It’s really funny in hindsight that there were people complaining long and hard about how Darth Maul would be crazy broken, but nobody mentioned Mace for a while.
Vengeance and Cantina Brawl
Deisgners: Bill, Deri, Daniel, Eric L
I got brought on to this set to fill in for Eric L after the set list was determined, so I actually didn’t have a hand in that. It has a lot of characters I love, though, especially Corran Horn. I think in this set we felt that the “minor” factions had started really catching up, so we began playing with the design space a lot more, and I think that helped us create some really interesting things. My favorite part of this set is Bribery on Tyber Zann; Lobot has been a tier 1 piece from the moment he was created, and Bribery doesn’t take that away, but it does make the whole act of choosing Reinforcements to be much more interesting. The Cantina Brawl subset in general has been very successful, with some really interesting tech and counter-tech that is still competitive today. It didn’t all work as planned (here’s looking at you, Wuher), but I think we accomplished some really interesting designs. There are also some strong, more traditional designs in the set, like Corran Horn, who has featured in the top 8 at GenCon. and Vergere, who was played quite a bit in different factions. This also gave us the birth of the SpecForce subfaction, which has gone on to win some events and also saw top 8 at GenCon (although that squad was built around different SpecForce pieces).
From an organizational standpoint, I think this set is where we really got everything together. It was a very smooth set to design on, didn’t have any crazy surprises, and didn’t have any real big arguments. We were getting the hang of the basics of the project, even if it weren’t refined yet. The biggest issue behind the scenes was with the design of Galen Marek, which I’ve spoken on before. The Rebel faction hadn’t gotten much lately (Dutch and the Red Aces is the best they had gotten, and that wasn’t quite competitive), so we wanted a big ole beatstick for them to really help them out and also add another dimension to a faction that had mostly been about shooting and swarming. It made sense for Galen to have affinity for Imperials, but that wound up being part of the problem. One group of playtesters found him to be overwhelmingly powerful in Imperials, so he got toned down somewhat and only given a token benefit in Rebels (Rapport 1 for Juno). The people who believed he was too strong still thought he was going to totally break the game, but it turned out that they were wrong and he is not very good in Imperials and basically unplayable in Rebels. He’s never once seen competitive play, because his damage output isn’t better than other options and his Force tricks are seriously hampered by having only Renewal 1. Sure, you can get a nice Repulse 4 on Round 2, but then Galen will die horribly, and you’ll rarely get 66 points out of him. This was a good example of how difficult it is to make powerful pieces with Affinity: trying to balance him in 2 factions just made him bad in both.
Scum & Villainy and Jedi vs. Sith
Designers: Dennis, Weeks, Les, Jason
This was another set with a strong theme, with a ton of interesting Fringe pieces. The most notable to the modern metagame is the Klatooinian Assassin, but at the time there were a lot of big splashes in the meta in this set. Marka Ragnos, Dark Force Spirit gave a powerful tool to Sith (and also completed the Marka Ragnos from Vengeance who had Force Essence), the Sith Recruit was instantly playable, the BX Commando Droids are incredibly strong, as was Grievous Hero of Hypori. This set also brought the first direct attempt at making Imperials playable without Thrawn in the Imperial Triumvirate. Unfortunately these pieces didn’t work out that way, because although they were strong, they were best when played together, and at that point you’re paying 66 points, and it wasn’t even better than Thrawn. This set also brought out some really powerful things for Mandos with Fenn Shysa and the Mandalorian Protector as well as Mandalore the Vindicated. Rebels and Republic also got a new piece that was supposed to change the way they were played in Master Yoda, whose purpose is to make old crappy pieces better. The Han and Leia with Versatility also had that as a partial goal. Of these, Leia was the only one that really made a big impact, and she was usually played without taking advantage of Versatility. The subset didn’t have much of a competitive impact except through Satele Shan, who is a great value and was an instant addition to OR squads. Qui-Gon Force Spirit also gave Republic some very powerful initiative control and is occasionally seen and always considered in design.
A notable thing about this set was that of the 4 designers, only 1 had ever designed before. Weeks, Les, and Jason had been very heavily involved with the process and done a lot of playtesting, but this was their first shot at actually being on the design team. This was the set where we really started putting emphasis on adding new people to the design team; for the previous 3 sets it was done mostly out of necessity of schedules and such, but for this time new people were added in because they were new. This had the benefit of expanding the pool of people who DID have experience for later, but it also meant that some of the lessons learned from past sets hadn’t been learned by 3/4ths of the designers here. That resulted in this having a little more behind the scenes drama, but the set actually came out quite well.
Galactic Heroes and The Old Republic
Designers: Deri, Brad, Trevor, Scott
This set has a ton of flavor, especially with The Old Republic video game, which you see both in the subset (which is entirely devoted to it) and the main set. Sith were a focus of the design team, which is why Caedus and Malgus were very powerful designs. They also did a lot for living Separatist squads with Aurra Sing and Cad Bane. Rebels finally got a new real power piece in Admiral Ackbar, Supreme Commander, who went on to get Deri to the top 8 again. Jan Ors was a favorite of mine since I love Kyle Katarn, and is one of my favorite designs in the whole game. Making old Universe Kyle be the biggest benefitter of her Camaraderie was a great design choice. You can see the designers really giving love to some old subfactions with the Imperial Knight Strike Team Leader and Desann and Reborn Shadowtrooper. Luke Skywalker, Galactic Hero is also a top tier piece, and featured in the 2013 GenCon winning squad. Also in that squad was Marn Hierogryph, which seemed to kind of come out of nowhere, as nobody really played him much but he was a fantastic addition to that squad. Finally, Supreme Overlord Quorreal is basically an auto-include in Vong now. This set hits the entire spectrum of playability, with power 10+ pieces as well as some really weak pure flavor pieces, like unfortunately most of the TOR pieces from the main set. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen any of them on the table. Aric Jorgan has become a little better, but as a whole they are mostly just flavorful fun pieces.
This was another set with 3 out of 4 new designers. The designers were actually in flux for a while, with Dennis and I starting the early work on this set and then the other guys coming in, and Brad and Trevor were originally just going to work on the subset, but then they got shifted to the whole set. The set list also went through some changes, and overall this set got off to a murky start, but once it all came together it went quite smoothly. This was also the set for which the Playtesting Committee was founded. We had always farmed out community playtests, but we wanted to start formalizing it a little more with the most active testers to try to get more (and more organized) feedback. This meant assembling a team of the best testers, giving them access to read the design forums, and giving them their own forum to discuss things in. I think overall the PTC has been a success and it’s still used to this day, and we definitely get better tests out of it than we did before.
Command of the Galaxy and Vehicles of War
Designers: Daniel, Weeks, Les, Lou
Probably the most ambitious set to date, we really stretched the design space with this one. The most notable piece was, of course, Admiral Daala: This was another attempt to break Imperial reliance on Thrawn, and boy did it work. She’s a great example of too little/inaccurate playtesting: her original version got one test and we got back 2 suggestions of what to change. The PT report actually said “Charging Fire doesn’t quite do enough”, but we decided to be “safe” (lol) and went with it anyway, even if it made her a little weaker than the other suggestion (which was a new ability). Of course we all know the story after that, Charging Fire was actually still far too good, and she wound up getting errata’d to be toned down considerably. There are other pieces of note, though: Aayla Secura, Jedi Knight and Quinlan Vos, Double Agent are both very effective mid-range Jedi, Alto Stratus brings a new squad type with him and helps out the Nimbus Commando, Luke Skywalker, Hero of Endor bring Rebels a serious beatstick Luke, and the SpecForce Wilderness Fighter hit top 8 at GenCon. There is also a new 72 point Vader! Talon Karrde is another piece that really changed the surface of the game in that it made all-Fringe a faction all its own, which it had never been before. There was serious division on whether or not Talon would work out and be playable at all, but he has become a major part of the current metagame. We also made the Warrior Caste Subcommander, which opened up new Vong squads, as Vong were still far behind competitively. All of this to not even mention the subset, where we created the Vehicle ability and new versions of some of the most iconic vehicles in Star Wars. The subset has been received very well in general, with competitive options in Luke and Leia on Speeder and Durge on Lancer.
An interesting behind-the-scenes note for this set is that it featured the very first fully community designed piece, the Trandoshan Hunt Master. It was also interesting from a playtesting perspective because none of the pieces that came out really powerful were considered much of anything during playtesting; the pieces that playtesters seemed most worried about were Kyp Durron, Jedi Master and the Czerka Shield Technician. Kyp went through a lot of changes early, but the Czerka didn’t get tweaked too much, and still sees very little play. At this point in the game I think we had really gotten down how to produce these sets, so organizationally we looked good and didn’t have a whole lot of issues in the process.
Armed & Operational and Invasion
Designers: Brad, Tim, Jason, Deri
This set saw another big beefy melee piece in Darth Bane, Sith’ari, who had been heavily requested up to that point. It also brought support for Ewoks in Golden One, a subfaction that hadn’t gotten a lot of love lately, but this piece really made an interesting and thematic build for them. In general there were a lot of lesser known pieces made in this set, but one thing that the designers specifically set out to do was to represent more of the movie character that hadn’t been seen in mini form yet, which is where we got Chief Chirpa, Shmi Skywalker, and Owen and Beru Lars. There is also a lot of counters to Strafe Attack and other similar abilities here, with the LIN Demolitionmech, Buzz Droid, and and Tso’asu from the subset. The subset went back to being tied together by a single source instead of a game mechanic, and brought NR and Vong pieces from the Invasion storyline, which had never really been explored much. The main set also had a definite “military” theme, which is part of what the set name conveys. General Rahm Kota was made to try to help out Galen Marek, and did bring him up to at least playable in tier 2, but 110 points on two beatsticks still wasn’t a very good investment. The Tantive IV Trooper became another major piece for the Rebels, and Fenn Shysa got another really interesting piece in Ghes Orade. Shamed One was started as a new subfaction, but it is still getting off the ground.
Once again, at this point everything was pretty well organized, so it was business as usual behind the scenes. The biggest change was that this was where we started getting our Quality Control more formalized; we did it a little in set 6, but really buckled down here, and it has improved our output pretty significantly. Dave, TJ, and Cory are still with us doing that job, and they’ve been absolute heroes the entire time.
Shadows and Undying
Designers: Les, Trevor, Scott, Lou
This set had a couple of strong themes. First was Black Sun, which is what the name “Shadows” refers to. There are a few new non-Unique Black Sun pieces (including a new Vigo), plus a new Guri and a new Xizor, so it really puts them front and center. This set also has remakes of the Republic Commandos; this time they’re all Unique and have huge amounts of synergy with each other, making a really competitive squad type of just them. Rebels got a couple cool toys with Chewie and a new Dash, an Mandos got a new very powerful subfaction with the Neo-Crusader pieces. The subset had a more general theme about clones, ghosts, and people who just wouldn’t die. Between both the main set and subset the New Republic got new versions of some of the main characters of the Legacy comics, which are tier 2 but really fun. Trevor was able to make Serra Keto to go along with the Cin Drallig he made as a prize for winning GenCon, making a really hard hitting and fun to play duo.
This was the first set to drop the number of new stats. This was done for a bunch of reasons: First, it was becoming apparent that playtesting wasn’t quite getting us what we needed, so we wanted a smaller set list to have to worry about to help concentrate the tests. We also heard some people saying that with the speed at which we were releasing sets, having 72 new pieces every set was too many to really play everything before the next set came out. It also cut down on the printing costs a little. This was a change that some of us had been wanting to happen for years now and finally happened. I think that overall we have been able to create a higher quality product with the smaller set lists and that it has been a change for the better in basically every way.
Warfare & Subterfuge and Diplomacy
Designers: Daniel, Jake, Jason, Bill
A big goal of this set was answering some complaints about the meta. It wasn’t meant to get all of them, but at least throw some things in there to help out. A few pieces got Sentry, which helps kill Stealth and Cloaked on non-uniques; we also released direct counters to Self Destruct, and tried a few different “minor scissors” options for different factions. Kerra Holt is a notable one, with Rolling Attacks, so she can cut through a swarm like butter. The Wraith Squadron Pilot also got Rolling Fire, which is a variation on the same concept but balanced differently for a shooter. An interesting piece that I felt came out very well is the Corporate Alliance Energy Pummel; it actually has higher base Damage than can go in the Bloomilk database! Making huge pieces is interesting, because a huge base is a very big (no pun intended) detriment to most pieces. This one is also a melee attacker, which just makes it that much harder to maneuver. However, it’s not easy to kill with 170 HP and DR 10 and it packs a serious punch, and also has Overwhelming Power. It’s not competitive, but it’s been incredibly well received and was fun to design and play. We also wanted to bring back some old fun Rebel pieces with I-5YQ and Roan Lands, which makes a cool new squad for them. Then there is the new Killik subfaction which got a number of pieces in this set; it’s something people have asked for for a while, and we managed to not just provide them with a couple of interesting non-uniques, but also got some older pieces to become Killiks through Camaraderie on both Raynar Thul and Welk. Then there is the subset, which stretches the design space in a new way again with the Negotiation ability. It requires you to choose one of your own characters and an enemy character and then something bad happens to both of them. Your has to be more expensive, but since you control it you can arrange it so that the ally you choose gets hurt less than the enemy you choose, or you can just use it defensively to protect yourself from a big hit at a bad time. We also made the Imperial Governor which has gone over really well, and brought the Dominate mechanic back to the forefront.
One of the coolest things from this set is that we talked to the playgroup from New Zealand about what they specifically wanted, and that’s where the Wraith Squadron Pilot came from. They gave us the idea and a first draft, we tweaked it and went back and forth with them some to get the final version that was printed. The NZ players are such a big part of the game it can be too easy sometimes to forget about their contributions when we are travelling to regionals and GenCon and such, so we really want to keep them involved as much as possible, and I think this was a good way to start doing that. Mauri ora, mauri mate!
I had a baby in December so I was less involved than ever with set 10, and it's also obviously not released yet, so I won't really say anything about it here. I'm sure that the designers can't wait to share it with you, I know that's how I always feel before releasing a set.
So all that to say, it's been an exceptionally fun 5 years. Things haven't always been perfect, aren't perfect now, and won't be in the future, but I think we've got a good thing going on. I don't get to play as much as I used to, but it's always great to see this game that has been a big part of my life for so long keep going. Here's to another 5 years and V-set 20.
