For Season 3, the Steering Committee wanted to give the Imperial faction a variety of changes to their list building options. With Imperial Retrofitting and the rework of General Weiss in Season 2, we saw usage of Massive Vehicles increase. We wish to continue this trend by addressing the SC2-M Repulsor Tank. Our new Command cards for Guardians benefit the Empire, so we added a change to Elite Royal Guards in an attempt to make them potentially playable. We wanted to add a brand new Deployment group for Imperials, settling on Scout Troopers. Finally, one unused existing Deployment group gets a surprising change.
Below are the new & changed Command cards we’re introducing for Season 3. Remember that your feedback during the Season 3 Discussion period will help determine if these cards should be adjusted or dropped for Season 3 testing. Additionally please keep in mind that the card images below are not the final images that we’ll use for distribution for testing.
Changed Deployment Card: Royal Guard (Elite)
Update January 22nd: This article previously showed a card for Elite Royal Guard that had incorrect information on it. The actual Season 3 Elite Royal Guard card is now shown above.
Royal Guards are infamous in Imperial Assault Skirmish. Imperials dominated early Skirmish tournaments with 4 deployments of Regular Royal Guards able to use Sentinel on each other. After both Regular and Elite Royal Guard cards were changed by FFG to their current form, Royal Guards fell out of favor due to their high deployment cost and limited attack ability. Despite FFG’s change, Sentinel remains a valuable ability when paired up with Zillo Technique.
To get Royal Guards back on the table, the Steering Committee elected to improve the Elite deployment card. The price is reduced to be just slightly more than the Regular Royal Guard card (dropped from 12/6 to 9/5). We give the Elite Royal Guard a static Pierce 1 ability. The card also gains Professional, which allows the attacking Royal Guard figure to reroll one attack die. These changes significantly improve the Elite Royal Guard’s expected damage output. We’re not for sure if the Elite Royal Guards are cost-efficient enough to escort Vader, but they may have the right price and damage output now to escort Emperor Palpatine or a Massive Vehicle.
Changed Deployment Card: SC2-M Repulsor Tank (Elite)
The Steering Committee considered several options for the SC2-M, from a simple price reduction to a full rework with different abilities and traits. Ultimately we decided that we wanted to see the existing SC2-M design work within the confines of IACP play. In order to do that, we felt a price reduction (from 10 to 9) and an increase in Health (from 10 to 12) were necessary changes. This new SC2-M paired with Imperial Retrofitting has potential to be dangerous versus your opponents: The tank can perform a move for free and then use Focus Fire to melt most figures.
New Deployment Card: Scout Trooper (Elite)
If you are part of the Zion’s Finest #imperialassault Slack channel, you should remember a flurry of community card design involving new Imperial Trooper deployments. We really appreciated everybody’s efforts to create fun and powerful cards! Several members of the IACP community took turns submitting designs for Scout Troopers, a unit seen in Return of the Jedi that has yet to grace Imperial Assault. Some designs focused on using planted explosive charges; others focused on the scouting aspect of the unit, assigning buffs or nerfs based on hostile figures within line-of-sight; still others designed their Scout Troopers to become powerful snipers, as there are not many long-range attackers in the Imperial faction.
The Steering Committee opted to go with a version of the Scout Trooper that combines an ability to “scout” hostile figures and then snipe them from afar. The Camouflage ability allows Scout Troopers to peak down long hallways without drawing fire. Find Weakness costs an action but causes a hostile figure to become Weakened. Exploit Weakness allows the Scout Trooper to gain a surge result when attacking figures with a Harmful condition. The Scout Trooper’s attack range can be incredible but unless it is buffed via Focus or other means, the only rolled Accuracy result comes from its blue die.
The attack output of a full deployment of Scout Troopers can be impressive: Just with the Exploit Weakness ability, Scout Troopers average roughly as much damage per attack as Elite Jet Troopers using the three-die attack of Fly-By. We’re also excited to see how Scout Troopers help enable other Imperial units produce more damage output attacking Weakened hostile figures.
We’ll reveal our recommendations on how players can represent Scout Troopers in physical games in a future post.
Changed Deployment Card: ISB Infiltrator (Elite)
In other sections of the Imperial Assault community, there were discussions involving an oft-overlooked Deployment card: ISB Infilitrator. When they were first released, ISB Infiltrators were playable but tricky. Coordinated Raid was difficult to set up on maps with more open space. We wanted to add a little mobility to these figures without increasing their Speed.
Our change to Coordinated Raid allows the non-activated ISB Infiltrator to gain 2 movement points as part of the special action. These movement points are spent similar to other abilities within special actions: You will need to spend one or both movement points either before or after the extra attack. Coordinated Raid also makes the attack optional. This means an ISB Infiltrator can move up to 8 spaces during its activation, then can move 2 more spaces via Coordinated Raid. We’re interested to see if this extra mobility combined with new figures like Thrawn and Scout Troopers make the ISB Infiltrator playable again.