Star Wars: Legion – New Rules Reference Guide 2.0 Released
Fantasy Flight Games has a new Rules Reference Guide out for Star Wars: Legion. New points updates, new rebalancing, and more!
Despite all the play testing, feedback, and information a game developer gathers, it’s extremely difficult to completely balance a wargame. Once you start adding in more and more options and the complexity grows, the balancing act becomes more and more difficult. Star War: Legion has had some of those same growing pains as new factions and units have been introduced and it’s been time for FFG make some tweaks. And that’s just what they have done.
“It is our pleasure to announce Rules Reference Guide 2.0, which features the 2020 competitive points rebalancing. This update represents a major overhaul to the game, so we’d like to take a moment to highlight some of the key changes.”
Star Wars: Legion Rules Reference Guide 2.0
FFG’s design philophy is to raise up the lesser performing units instead of going after he “tall poppies” as they put it. So they have done some major work in the points department. Many of the lesser-used units have gotten points reductions. The idea was to bring the vehicles in the game to the same level of effectiveness as say the TX-130 Saber-class fighter tank and the AAT. Additionally, heavy weapons and anti-armor weapons have received some points changes as well so they can be more accessible to units that may need the extra firepower.
It’s not just points tweaks though. Some units have even gained special rules and new errata. The T-47 Airspeeder and the Wookie Warriors gained some new keywords to try out.
Here’s quick breakdown of some of the most important changes from FFG:
- Units embarked on a vehicle with the Open Transport keyword are now able to perform attacks and to be attacked, and benefit from heavy cover while embarked. This should lead to some interesting new strategies involving the X-34 Landspeeder and the TX-225 GAVw Occupier combat assault tank.
- Units that are obligated to perform a compulsory move during their activation can now perform that move at either the start or the end of their activation. With the additional tactical flexibility this change provides, I expect to see units with the Speeder keyword become more popular than ever.
- The Agile X and Tactical X keyword now require a standard move in order to generate tokens. Units with the Scout X keyword and either Agile X or Tactical X can no longer produce tokens during the Deployment step of Setup.
- Finally, we come to the most decisive change: Eliminating the ability of clone troopers to use the standby tokens of other friendly clone units at range 1. Clone troopers are now restricted to sharing aim, dodge, and surge tokens.
That last bullet point is a big one. And I think it’s worth hearing out FFG as to the “why” as this certainly hits a particular faction much harder than others.
“This is a change we thought long and hard about, because it will have serious ramifications for the Grand Republic faction. Numerous alternatives were tested and ultimately discarded, because we kept coming back to the same core issues. Widespread standby token sharing is problematic for several reasons; it is too powerful, too frustrating for the opponents of the Republic, and it leads to highly non-interactive game states.
In many cases, the right move when playing against a Republic army with access to numerous standby tokens is to simply not engage. When a mechanic is able to punish players severely for doing what they need to do to win the game—namely, attack the enemy and advance toward objectives—it can feel like there’s no right answer. We want to encourage interactive games and keep Star Wars: Legion approachable, and in order to do that, the rule had to change. The simplest and best solution was simply to remove the option to share standby tokens from the core rules of clone troopers.”
That seems like some pretty sound reasoning to me. If you’d like to read the rest of the changes you can check out the Rules Reference Guide at the link above. Good luck out there Generals, may the Force be with you!
Clone Nerf? Aww. No wonder they got replaced by Storm Troopers…
