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Rank: Clone Trooper
Groups: Member
Joined: 1/9/2016
Posts: 9
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I'm just getting back into the game after playing from 2004-2006, and I'm rebuilding a collection for casual gaming.
Looking at the late WoTC sets and the insanely overpowered virtual sets, I'm getting the impression that it might be better for my purposes to just collect the figures from the "good ol' days": RS, CS, Universe... this way plenty of figures that have since been made competitively obsolete could still be played.
Is there anyone else who just plays casually, and what's your strategy for keeping things simple and fun?
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Rank: Moderator
Groups: Member
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Joined: 5/26/2009
Posts: 8,428
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If you're playing casually, just make sure you have squads that are balanced against each other and you'll have a good skirmish. Doesn't matter if it's early WotC, late WotC, Vsets, or customs. I remember when someone told me early on about Star Wars Minis - they thought it was simplistic. I didn't get into the game until Imperial Entanglements, but looking back I can see what they meant if playing with only the first couple of sets. Movement breakers and faction identities are for the most part what makes the game interesting to me. Without them, the game is certainly simpler but also a lot less interesting to me. I couldn't enjoy it like I do now. I could play a skirmish or two every once in a while, but this is my favorite game and it wouldn't be with only the early pieces. If you are going to play regularly, though, play with what you like. If you ever get tired of it and want more variety, there's plenty available. Here's my boilerplate about the Vsets. They're not overpowered if they're used in the right context. I wouldn't mix them in with RS, CS, and Universe pieces, though. Based on your comments, I would just avoid the Vsets for now: Quote:
Quick note about Vsets...
Wizards of the Coast produced Star Wars Miniatures with a very skewed power level. They did it intentionally, I'm sure, to promote sales of booster packs and create "chase" pieces that were exceptionally strong. In the end, they produced about 900 different pieces over 6 years. But of those, only 100-200 of those pieces were "tournament-worthy".
With the Vsets, the goal was to produce new cards that were on par with the tournament-worthy pieces from Wizards of the Coast. Most Vset cards meet that goal, and there are now over 600 Vset pieces. Probably a little less than half of them are "tournament-worthy". That leaves us with roughly 400 tournament-worthy pieces: 150 WotC and 250 Vsets (just rough guesses). If you look at the Vsets as a whole they will appear a lot stronger than WotC as a whole, due to the skewed power levels that WotC produced.
I mention all this because if you have a smaller collection (100 minis or so), you probably have about 10-20 tournament-worthy pieces. Tossing in all the Vsets at once means tossing in 250 more tournament-worthy pieces. It makes it look like the Vsets are overpowered. If you want to mainly play with the original WotC minis, you may want to avoid the Vsets to start - or just use 1 or 2 pieces at a time. On the other hand, the Vsets are free to use, so if you want to start playing with tournament-worthy squads (and maybe even find a play group to hold tournaments), you can do that right away with minimal investment. You don't have to track down any super-expensive minis to be competitive.
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Rank: Advanced Bloo Milk Member
Groups: Member
Joined: 6/23/2010
Posts: 3,562
Location: The Hutt, New Zealand
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http://challonge.com/SWM_SetVsSet is a pretty interesting comparison of power levels between the sets too. It was a recent squad building contest, where players constructed the best squad they could out of each set and they competed in a tournament. WOTC sets before Alliance and Empire got crushed, but the WOTC sets from A and E onwards and the v-sets seemed more or less on an even footing with each other. The v-sets have a higher density of good pieces, but the top power level is fairly close to WOTC. Few, if any, v-set pieces are as strong as the top WOTC pieces like R2 Astromech, General Dodonna, and Mitt'Thrawn.
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Rank: Moderator
Groups: Member
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Joined: 5/26/2009
Posts: 8,428
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For casual gaming, I like linked skirmishes/scenarios best. Four is a good number to not be overwhelming but still provide a narrative arc. I put these together: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/848551/boba-versus-han-campaign-ruleshttps://boardgamegeek.com/thread/822831/clone-wars-campaignThe other part of casual gaming for us is just exploring using the new pieces that come out.
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Rank: Advanced Bloo Milk Member
Groups: Member
Joined: 5/3/2014
Posts: 2,098
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Bluebane, the TN play group had similar idea about playing.
What we did was eliminated some of the NPE's from Wizards of the Coast that we all agreed on. Than we looked at the V-set pieces and selected a "set" from them that we called V-set all-stars to play with.
We actually designed our own pieces to play with.
Point being that if you feel overwhlemed by the V-set characters I would recommend limiting it to the ones that you want/like. because there are some good designs in them.
For instance, I really enjoy Figrin D'an, Ulic Qel-Droma, Master Thon, Ponda Baba, Quinlan Vos, HK-47, etc. that I feel are really fun pieces.
This allows for more variations of gameplay that can be "handled"
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Rank: Advanced Bloo Milk Member
Groups: Member
Joined: 5/12/2012
Posts: 456
Location: Kokomo, IN
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I personally like the options that the vest cards give someone with a smaller collection of minis for squad building purposes by way of utilizing proxy pieces for a character that you may really like but don't own a version of. For instance, I didn't even play my first game of minis until after the game was out of production for about a year or so, however once I did play I quickly realized how much I liked the game and decided to try to start a small collection. That being said, minis do cost money, and I didn't have a big bankroll to start a collection with, so I bought a couple of medium sized lots off of eBay and friends who were looking to get rid of some of their commons and uncommon, mostly fringe nonuniques. However, I was lucky enough to get a complete set of vset cards upmto whatever had been produced by that time, I think maybe only 2-3 vsets in, and that allowed me to build a few fun squads utilizing substituted minis for vset characters until my collection got bigger. The important part like flying arrow said is to make sure the squads are relatively even and if there is a certain dynamic to the game that you don't like for a casual game, house rules are fine as long as everyone agrees to what the rules are beforehand, the most important part of course is having fun!! Welcome back to the game
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Rank: TIE Crawler
Groups: Member
Joined: 12/26/2008
Posts: 42
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Personally, I would agree.
I'm an oddball here, because my observation is that the majority or at least the most frequent posters here are experienced competitive players with access to (almost) every piece, who (were able to) play so much, that they got somewhat bored even with the huge selection of WotC and wanted something fresh with the V-Sets.
That's not my world, I live in a totally different one.
I get the chance to play 2-3 times at best per year and still have so many pieces and combinations to try out, even from my, many here will consider small and very limeted, collection (I don't consider it that small, it's my largest collection of any collectible game I own with around 440 minis).
Later set minis and the V-set pieces are typically (over)loaded with SAs and other effects. I personally don't like the game at the point where you have minis, like one I consider an overpowered example, that have easily effectively (through CEs) Quintuble Attack and Greater Mobile Attack, it's just not the game I want to play anymore.
While some might argue at this point, it's not that strong, because other pieces might easily be powered to this and that to counter this, I want to say that I don't like the "armsrace-like" powercreep that made it neccessary to include ever more powerful minis to "fix" the factions in that armsrace in the first place.
I see the point, why WotC has done this from a marketing point of view, but I think it hurts the game at a certain point in the later sets where the combined powercreep of the sets just gets too steep in regard to the older sets.
So, the V-Sets just continue the "original sin" of WotC for me, that is why I don't like them.
Having said that, I can still see why many others here love them and respect that and the effort and enthusiam that the community has put into them.
So, back to the initial question, I consider the game best at a mid-sets level, where you have already access to loads of minis and effects, but the overwhelming power of the later sets hasn't set in.
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