dulljackieboy

I've done a good little bit with this. In my current settings, I'm dividing the Imps resource and maintenance numbers by a factor of eight while keeping my rebels at default--this is too hard for me to play with (I always play huge and toughest difficulty) because any system I show up in is libel to have around a dozen Vics waiting for me. I've also given the Imps the option of building Neb-B's (hey, they designed them in the first place) by removing the 2 troop carrier ship. I used to play at a quarter cut and that was more reasonable, but also too easy (though it did slow me down a little). One of the main problems is fighters. You can only cut down the values on the fighters so much before they're at zero, and when the Imps have tons of capital ships, they can very rarely fill them all up with fighters, which actually does away with the challenge. Let's say the Imps show up at your base with 3 ISDs, 6-8 Vics and a bunch of Nebs and Carracks and all you've got is a bunch of fighters (In the neighborhood of a couple dozen squadrons). Scary, right? Nope. Odds are, they'll not have a full compliment of TIEs, and lacking numbers, these will get shredded quickly. Then you turn your guns on their capital ships and suddenly you've got a victory you didn't really deserve. Until you can give the Empire an adequate number of fighters, capital ship strength will only allow the AI to hold on for a short while. I don't know how many ships they have in total in these settingsl, but I commonly run into Neb-B #22 or so near the beginning of a new game, suggesting that they've run out of names before the action even starts. VSDs and ISDs soon follow, so I'm assuming they start out in the neighborhood of 80-100 capital ships.

The original Pimp of the Galaxy, Jek Porkins.

This happened just last night, so I thought I'd weigh in with it. My current Luke had two run-ins with Vader early in the game, which knocked his combat so far below zero that he actually stayed at zero for ~50 days, but he was advanced to Jedi Apprentice by the encounters. When he returned from Dagobah, he was already a Jedi Master with stats comparable to Vader's.

You simply need to increase Luke's Jedi level. Set really difficult tasks for him, like sending him against a Stormtrooper Regiment with no decoys, sabbing ISD's and other tough assignments. Often he'll fail but get some Jedi points anyway. And there's always the battles against Palpy and Vader, but those are dangerous. I hate waiting for Luke to heal up.

"Sun-crushing" (great term, btw) is not cheating. It's not even impolite. Anything allowable within the game mechanics must be expected as a matter of policy by either party. The idea of war being a gentleman's game has always been fatuous, though there was a period around the American Revolution where the British really (stupidly) tried to make it so. And as for daily double (or triple, or quadruple) bombardments, I recommend spacing your bombardments out over 2-3 days if possible. I've found that the first military-target bombardment is successful at killing off troopers, mostly, but multiple in a day can result in unintended destruction of construction yards, mines, etc (you'd hope Imperial-era technology could at least match modern selective targeting capabilities), which often results in popular support on the bombarded planet turning solidly in the opposing side's favor. My experience suggests that high priority targets (like an devout enemy system with a high number of shipyards) is better handled with a combination of bombardment (for the troops) and sabotage (for the facilities). Even if you can't sway the locals to your point of view, you don't want to piss off their neighbors any more than you have to.

Rebellion, like so many strategy games, boils down to Chess. Your job is not to take your opponent's pieces, but to take one of your opponent's pieces (or three, depending on the type of game you're playing). When you're playing as the Empire, you must understand that your enemy, be he AI or human, has the distinct advantage of being able to take his King off the board and move it somewhere else. That's why espionage and recon, to a lesser extent, are absolutely essential. This may not have occurred to you if your typical game expands to thousands of days and you take the time to build SSD's; you've gotten so good at keeping the AI Rebels at bay, you've always been able to choke them out of resources and hunt them down at your leisure. I advise that you put your own limit on how long you play a game out, maybe start at 1000 days, then cut it back to 800 and so on. This is going to force you to recognize what the Empire's strengths and weaknesses at the start of the game are and ultimately make you more dangerous to a human player.

I've never directly compared rates of research between the two conditions, but doing independent missions gives you the option of doing research on different planets. If your yards get bombarded, captured or sabbed or your agent gets killed or abducted, this means that you'll still have research going on somewhere else.

To answer Darth--The SSD is a pushover as long as you've got plenty of fighters. The AI gets cocky when it has that much firepower and plows right into the middle of the fight, only to have its TIEs quickly overwhelmed and to be tractored in place by the MC just long enough for the fighters (admittedly I had Luke as Admiral and Wedge as Commander in this case) to drop its shields and hit it with torps, which cut it's hyperdrive and then it's sublight engines. Goodbye to all 200,000 souls aboard.

Just finished my first game as the Rebs. Everything ran through without a hitch, but I'd say that the new voicework needs some amplification to get up to the regular game volume. Also I've noticed that the Card for "Smuggling Losses End" features a group of Stormtroopers instead of Republic Troops.

Boooom-Yow! Just killed an SSD with my MC40 and ~30 squadrons of X-wings. Dinged my MC and lost a 'vette, but at 130 days into the game, not a bad kill at all. The Imperial Remnant is dumb, dumb, dumb as far as I can tell, so that may be one thing the Beta Tester folks might want to know. Additionally the SSD's rectangle is overly wide and asymmetrical--it sticks out to the port side of the ship .

Yeah, B-Wings are useless against TIEs, especially TIEs with shields. I always enter an Imperial system with a fleet full of A and X-Wings, then exchange them out with B's and Y's from a neighboring Rebel system once I've cleared out their fighters. Very rarely will an Imperial fleet show up and catch you with your pants down.

No doubt about it. I'll admit I've never seen 9 Y's take on an SSD, that's gotta be a rare occurance. My Y's are usually long gone by the time the Imps have the SSD.

Another thing I like to do is to move my HQ to Coruscant once I've got enough troops there to defend it, and a whoooole bunch of GenCores. That way you defend one planet instead of two. At later stages in the game, I find the Liberator-class Cruiser to be the real bargain, especially when backed up by Gunships and CC-7700s. There's no job too big for a fleet made of those ships, in enough numbers, obviously. I tend to relegate frigates and the original Escort Carriers to defensive duty given how slowly they move, though those are my workhorses up until the capture of Coruscant, usually. With my RebEd settings, I commonly run into what I call "TIE nests", where a weakened Empire can still hold me at bay by having dozens of TIEs in its few remaining sectors. Since getting my Cruisers damaged or maybe even sent packing after an unsuccessful voyage into the Rim really slows me down, I'll send a whole fleet of twenty gunships or so to clean out the TIEs.

Yeah, I forgot that. Good call. Still, it doesn't make any sense, you know? His combat's great, but his leadership's in the toilet. What happens when you make Darth a commander, by the same token?

I gather this is a rare enough event (I never saw the Imp AI try it until I heavily modded the game), so I wanted to know what people have seen as regards tactics. After I severely cut the maintenance and materials costs for every Imperial Fleet unit including the Death Star, I finally started to see the Imps build one from time to time in games. Here's what I noticed (admittedly in a modded scenario, but not a crazy-modded scenario). -They don't care who sees it. They'll build one right in the middle of the core sectors. -They also don't care if they're circling down the drain resource-wise and surrounded by rebel worlds in the Coruscant sector. They'll build the thing on a planet with three normal shipyards, which should take, I don't know, a couple of years to build, even at 2/3 normal maintenance and material costs (I had the rest of the fleet set at 1/4 M/M cost). -They don't defend it too well, even on hard difficulty. I've never seen the AI build a Death Star Shield, and I set it's research value to zero, so they definitely have the option of building one at any time. The construction planet has troops, but never crazy numbers of them like you'd see on a disloyal planet. -If they do get it built, they tend to pair it with Interdictors, which makes sense. -They name the damn thing like it's a capital ship. The one I blew up (on it's maiden assault, no less) was called Trampler. All in all, it's a great blunder and a curiosity.

Here are the keys to succeeding against the Empire, in my experience: 1) Take away their shipyards. Target these from the beginning of the game and odds are the Imps aren't going to be able to make a comeback unless you play stupid. Use combat teams, infiltrators and of course, His Lukeness to rock them in this way. The real danger of Imperial-held shipyards is the Empire's potential to have such a huge group of TIEs at Coruscant and other important systems that your fighters won't be able to get through them before they have an opportunity to attack their Capital Ships, which leads me to my next point 2) Offset their Capital Ship advantage with your Fighters In the early stages, the Imps have a disgusting advantage as far as Capital Ships go. Even the dinkiest, the Carrack, is almost as fast as Han Solo, and obviously their Star Destroyers can carry huge numbers of fighters and troops. But Imperial Capital Ships are hopeless without fighter support until they have the Lancer. To begin a big battle, sic your Y-wings on the Carracks (they're the only Imperial craft that poses a significant threat to Reb fighters in the beginning) and your X-wings on their TIEs. If you've got enough fighters to begin with, you'll suddenly have an Imperial fleet at your mercy. I'd happily sacrifice a Bulk Cruiser or two to kill a Star Destroyer with an overabundance of fighters. Remember, you're never going to build another Bulk Cruiser (because they suck), but the Imps have to build SD's to stay dangerous. Build Escort Carriers and X-wings, even when you can build the Frigate and the Mon Cal Cruiser. It's cool to have a big fleet with loads of cool ships, but if the Imps can't get through your fighter screen to get to your Carriers, they simply cannot beat you. 3) Spread out your Diplomats Leia and Mon Mothma have skills, no doubt, so put them on opposite sides of the galaxy. If they can both start out getting planets with shipyards for you, that's the best option. And have them work in the Core, not the Rim. If you take the Core away from them early, you'll force the Imps out into the Rim, and that means they can't reinforce their home territories effectively. The Imps themselves are a little short on Diplomats, so treat a poorly defended Diplomat (say, on a recently-acquired Imperial system) as the most valuable target of a potential Abduction mission. If you capture two or three of their Dips, they'll be forced to use Vader and maybe even Palpy to do Diplomacy, and this is where their game falls apart. 4) Divide and Rule If you're lucky enough to have the makings of two goodly sized fleets (being able to distribute two Corvettes to each is the ideal here), then split up your sabotage capable operatives between these. There are going to be planets on either side of the galaxy near to uprising, so hit as far apart as possible to make the Imps split their own strength. Using fleets for this rather than using Han Solo's increased hyperdrive speed to strike from an in-sector base means you can hang in orbit over their planet and that infiltrators used as decoys won't slow you down (Han travels at normal speed if he travels with just one Spec Ops team). Once you liberate one world, move on to another with all speed. Sometimes turning one planet in a sector is enough to make all the other planets go into uprising or better yet, immediately flip. 5) Don't worry too much about Imperial Bombardments and Assaults The Empire doesn't discriminate between Military and Civilian targets usually. When they blow up your mines and refineries, the local neighborhood of planets will start switching their allegiance--the Imps do your work for you. And if they take over one of your planets, do your best to get back there and bombard the crap out of their regiments on the ground. When your people go into uprising, the local planets will likely do the same, helping you out once more. 6) Design research is best relegated to the back burner until you have a foothold in the galaxy. The design guys all have valuable skills aside from design. Don't burn them on R&D when you don't have enough shipyards, construction yards, etc. to make them really shine at their jobs. The one exception are the troop trainers, because the Sullustan regiments are possibly the greatest bargain in the game--they're cheap to build and they detect saboteurs and spies. 7) Use shields to protect your planets, not troops. Two GenCores are a necessity for any planet you want to keep. Troops are a bother to keep track of and even if you've got enough to defend a planet from assault, that doesn't mean that the fleet in orbit won't just bombard them until there are none left. As a matter of fact, the Imps will happily sabotage the GenCores on a trooped-up planet (say you've got it trooped-up with Fleet Regiments, which are no good at detecting sabotage missions) and then show up with one Dreadnaught and murder your boys. Don't let them do that. Give your planets a couple Sullustan Regiments and a pair of shields and they'll weather anything less than Vader himself. The Magical Bothan Spy Ratio Don't waste sabotage capable operatives on espionage unless you've got a suspicion that something really big is going down on an Imperial planet (Vader's headed there or they're building a Death Star). Rather, build five Bothan spy units and use two to carry out the mission, three to decoy, and DON'T send them to planets close to uprising, as these usually have a ton of troops who'll find your spies. If you start regular espionage from the beginning, you'll be way ahead. 9) The Han Solo Dilemma Han's an excellent espionage/sabotage/commander character and he's double fast, so I love to use him as an operative and as a commander/admiral in a fleet. But in the long term, it's probably more advantageous to use him as a recruiter. Luke doesn't really have the potential to be a great admiral or commander (his starting leadership is 70), but Han's is 90, so you could potentially get him up to 109, which is up there with the Imperial cats, especially without their Palpy-on-Coruscant bonus. Leia and Mon Mothma can also be used as recruiters, but since they can't command fleets, fighters or troops and since they don't have the relevant espionage skills to not get caught when attempting to start an uprising, high leadership skills aren't useful to either of them. Hope this helps.

http://starwars.wikia.com/images/d/d9/Vadermauls.JPG just for the doubters. I don't care if it's canon. It's too cool not to have run through your mind every once and a while. Improved my life tremendously.

Hate on Zahn all you want, it's a free country--But SW: Rebellion uses more of Zahn's stuff as source material than any other non-OT source. Just something I thought I'd point out.

Anybody read the comic where somebody cloned Maul, and Palpy sent Vader to wreck their cloning operation (this is the early days of the Empire) and Maul was totally waxing Vader's ass until Vader stabbed himself through his own guts to kill the Maul clone coming up behind him? Awesome.

Just finished a 744 day (Expert and Huge) campaign as the Rebs. Took Coruscant, controlled the entire core, captured Vader by day 500, then just took things easy doing recon and looking for Imperial systems out in the Rim, doing Diplomacy for inhabited Rim Systems, building fleets, colonizing. In the course of my conquest, I managed to capture every Imperial operative with the exception of Palpy himself. But one of my Core sectors kept getting blockaded and bombarded by an intermediate size fleet (~6-8 Vics, a few Dreads, a few Carracks). I could never catch them, because they were striking from a hidden base and they kept hitting the Sector, trying to run me down in the only way they had available. So ultimately I did some Espionage and found out where they were arriving next, put a CC-7700 there along with a goodly sized fleet. Goodbye. Anyway, around this point I had completed my Recon and had found only three Imperial systems in the Rim, all in one Sector, so I loaded up a quick, tiny fleet with my Han, Leia and Luke and some assorted combat personnel. Did a little espy, found out that Palpy was arriving in a months time. The three systems had no troops, no fighters, no construction, no training, no shipyards and only a few mines and refineries, which sabotage made short work of. When Palpy showed up unaccompanied--no fleet, no commandoes, nothing, Luke (who was just at Jedi Student Level) whipped his ass and the game was won. I am assuming that from the extreme poverty of the Empire at this point--three systems, no mines, no refineries, that maintenence was in negatives and that any ships or troops that might have been in hyperspace would have immediately combusted into nothingness when they dropped out, but I'm fairly certain that the fleet I dusted was all they had left. Thusly the title of this post...Total Victory.[/i]

For somebody who thought the first two prequels were abysmal, to the point of having no real desire to see Episode II and having my fears confirmed and amplified, I gotta say that the trailer for Ep III that I saw at Sin City was pretty great. I s'pose I don't keep up with the Star Wars stuff as well as you kids do, but I saw a lot of what would logically lead up to the events of the original trilogy, which has been deeply lacking from the two most recent films; that is to say, good guys getting trampled, Palpatine stepping up slickly, and a prototype TIE fighter looking thing. I'm betting on an entertaining film that will still fail to save the franchise's respectability. Lucas lost my respect with the goddamn Ewoks, and making Anakin into a smarmy kid and a petulant pretty boy dug the hole that much deeper.

Luke is best used as a saboteur, in my experience, with Wedge and Chewie running interference for him, and whoever else you're dealt at Yavin and the first sector you hit (Sluis or that one immediately "north" usually). I give them the best fleet I can put spare, generally nothing better than a couple corvettes. If there's a Bulk cruiser, I'll throw that in too, if only for some tactical misdirection in a sector with heavy Imp fleet presence--they can come in handy for bombardment as well, though I find that unless his Wedgeness has a high leadership for his Admiral slot, I end up pissing off the locals by hitting mines and refineries). Anyway, selectively target Imperial worlds that have little love for the Imps. They don't have to be at 50% red, but it helps. Hit them in a planned sequence, taking out the troops only, and bombarding military positions to speed things up if need be. Only the most loyal worlds won't be yours by the end of your run, and the manufacturing facilities and ground defenses are ready to serve you. Repeat as time allows, but the name of the game is zeroing in on Coruscant. My plan was developed for maximum momentum and shock, not developing him as a powerful Jedi--if that's your goal, I can't help you. Luke's capabilities as a saboteur in this way (and don't forget to stick in some infiltrators for decoys if you can get them to the fleet in time) way outpace anything he could do as a diplomat in terms of getting new worlds on the team, and his skills as a recruiter are laughable in any case. Best to use Han and Mon Mothma for that purpose, being that he can bring his squad of recruits to bear on Coruscant or any other ultimate destination much more quickly than can any early available fleet craft.

prison planet? You don't need a prison planet. Just stick the sumbitch on a throwaway vessel and send him out to the rim. When he gets there, send him to the other side of the galaxy. Guarantee he'll never get away.

What I'd really be interested in is a mod that keeps the original units of the game intact but starts the sides up on a footing more accurate to the films. That is to say, each side should have LOTS more ships, especially the Imps, and for that matter, LOTS more wealth and influence in the core systems (for the Imps). Something to force me to stay in the Rim for a while. Additionally, the Imps should have their full spread of operatives from the beginning, at least the military people. Rebs should have a few more themselves, though not as many as the Imps. And has anyone been successful in stopping the Imp AI from doing recon in the core systems? That's a totally unnecessary drain on its production capabilities that really cuts out the fun in beating them. Oh, and this is something I'm sure has been discussed to no end here, but where in the blue fuck is Boba Fett? I know the Imps have an generic armored Bounty Hunter character--why not the real thing? It's stupid!

Yeah, I figured. RebEdit sounds like a real fine idea.