The only thing i'd say is every faction should probably have a piece that grants boardwide CE's

+1 to this.




+1 to this as well, with a caveat: make it a feature of specific builds. A lot of people don't like Mas because he's a bland 8 point piece that you can just jam in anywhere. My personal preference would be, not a Mas Amedda for every faction, but Darth Wyyrlok and Boss Nass-type pieces. Booming Voice is the sole purpose for Mas Amedda, there is no reason you would ever run him aside from that. But on Boss Nass and Darth Wyyyrlok, it's more of a feature - definitely a prominent feature, but they do more than just Booming Voice. Pieces like that allow you to give a faction access to Booming Voice without unceremoniously dumping an obscure 10-pt tech character into every squad in that faction.

Just my two cents

+1 to all of this. Especially the bolded section.

+1 to all of this. From what I've seen of the complaints people have about booming voice the main one seems to be that you can just take 8 points and then keep all of your key commanders away from the action. By including it in characters that have a higher point cost it sort of mitigates that as you won't want to spend a whole lot of points on a piece that doesn't see any action.

Potentially Booming Voice could be included in frontline pieces that are main attackers so you have to actually use the piece. Rather than just keeping it in a corner you have to play tactically to keep booming voice.

great question, and a recurrent one.
its great to see this instance, folks are talking more about the thing-itself
and there's less ad homs at the design team -
in the past, on this issue I've been less than stellar, and personally made the mistake
of ad homs, so hehehe

I digress -
boardwide CEs oughta be costed moreso than others...
if they're a negative effect boardwide, like Nute Gunray...
then they can hamper a squad, so oughta make costs lower.
boardwide negs are rare.

If they're a very beneficial CE (+4/+4 or twin, sometimes both boardwide)
they also need to be costed appropriately.
GGDAC is undercosted by maybe 20pts, by CE combos alone.
Im a separatist player through and through - but thats true, and prior to Poggle reform,
CIS was ridiculously the 'space marines' faction of SWMinis -
they were the default, not cause folks liked em,
but because they had the better combos.

Mouse Droids and Mas Amedda were key in shifting the meta that way...
yet,
if CEs and SAs force miniatures into a bottleneck,
it makes a vulnerability that balances out the potential gimmick or awesome meta combo.
8 figures clumped in a room?
grenades 40 or missiles 40/60, a splash turret or force power will wipe them out. all of them

Boardwide tend to be beneficial,
and undercosted relative to what meta-combos could form,
so recosting those via errata could be a way to make CEs more meaningful,
while keeping that "must be in 6 squares" constraint.

As harsh as I am about MouseDroids,
they are fragile to direct-damage and AoE,
and i tend to lose my mousies really early in matches.
speed 4 them, limited programming so they can't increase defence or gain evade somehow,
5pts base cost, +x, where X is 15pts per CE you want to relay through it...
and they're fixed.
now, there'll be 1 mouse droid per squad,
and it will be this fragile unit, so folks will take instead more lore-friendly
Astromech droids and whatnot.

Aves is just a nice piece,
disruptive or suppressive, but not both on the one piece.
it covers some loopholes,
and games with Aves as an opponent,
have been generally fun.
Usually, there are ysalamiri too, but I don't find them as broken as
a whole faction of force immune what the's? that can use armor and direct damage...
and sometimes, droids.
Vong squads oughta not have droids, as a epoch rule or something,
except for Rhommamool and Osarian hehe.
Vong squad with Zann-consortium DD that I can't have in a separatist squad?! that is insult to injury,
with salt in the wound even.

---

A lot of CIS players will hate me for this, hehe,
but, boardwide CEs are a dual-edged sword,
and moreoften than not, the CIS gets some ridiculous meta-combos from CEs being board wide.
anything that makes more strategy,
rather than a turn-burning wait to whittle away with opportunist or superstealth,
is going to be awesome for CIS.

Lancer squads were one thing,
but I still like having a battalion of droids march in and blast at +4atk for twin maybe 40dmg per unit.
there's something awesome about
not having enough dice to roll,
and absolutely blasting the crud out of a CT emplacement or that
one jedi who defeated your jedi.
rolling 30 or 40 dice in a battledroid swarm is fun,
and of that, maybe 15 hit, 3 crits,
and you remove only 2 or 3 enemies.
they roll 8 or 9 die,
but of those, 4 or 5 hit,
and they remove 3-5 enemies,
games come close to the wire then.

My thoughts exactly haha

There are a ton of commander effects that are good only because they are board wide. Like the Nautolan Black Sun Vigo: Fringe followers with Stealth gain Black Sun. There's a long chain of boosts to get there: they get +4/+10 from Xizor, super-stealth from the Dug Vigo, etc. Limiting the Nautolan's CE to 6 squares means that every clump of troops you have gets a mouse droid - and ubiquitous mouse droids are pretty bad thematically. General Rieekan - yes he's broken, but Mobile Attack on a range 6 CE is next to worthless unless you have saturated an area with Mouse Droids.

I'd even say that rangeless CE's are pretty thematic: it's not like Crix Madine was always standing 10 feet away shouting orders at SpecForce - they were briefed on the mission beforehand and then they left. Crix stayed back on the ship, or at the base, or whatever. Even given pre-mission briefings, how many times have we seen people use comlinks to keep in communication with their commanders while on a mission?

Some CEs definitely should be limited - like Fire Support Mission CEs. There are some that are more "inspiring troops to great feats" than "this is our strategy." Maybe the answer is some really awesome commander effects that specifically can't be helped by Booming Voice/Relay Orders?

Counting squares would be horrendous and slow the game down immensely.

Also - most people don't understand what doubling a range does.

A range 6 CE reaches 85 squares

A range 12 CE reaches 313 squares


Board wide CEs require no counting.

In a game that already takes too long, more counting is a big minus. Tournaments especially.


In a casual game with no time limits, I'd have no problem with it as a house rule

This is definitely fine as is. I didn't realize people actually disliked the concept of rangeless commander effects. 3 factions have Booming Voice for relatively cheap, every faction has Mouse Droids to even the odds and the factions that don't have booming voice have relatively solid rangeless commanders of their own (GGDAC, Rieekan, etc.)