Closed Lanes: Legion is Beginning to Feel Like a One-Way Street
November 18, 2024
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Nearly four months have passed since Legion emerged from its chrysalis, earning the oddly specific but nearly universal moniker of “Version 2.6.” While it would have been nice to have taken it all in live at the time, Atomic Mass Games (AMG) had the audacity to present this new iteration of the game while I was professionally obligated to provide a little bit of “errata” to the thought processes of a team of medical residents in a hospital ward. When I finally turned on the stream I could only listen to it because I had to get on the road to pick up my puppy from the sitter followed by my takeout order, both of which were around the same size.
This picture of my puppy Freya (right) attacking this poor other dog who did nothing to her, was taken on the day Legion 2.6 was introduced. Was it a portend of what AMG would later do to Yoda, or just my own inadequate training? Read on to find out!
“One of the big things that we wanted to do with these new missions is we wanted to increase the number of viable playstyles, viable ways to create their armies right?” one of the developers explained as he revealed the nature of the new Secondary Objectives, “we’ll have different missions and different secondary missions that cater to certain army types so we try to do a good job to spread it out to give players different options of how to build your army.” I was heartened as I heard them describe the Shifting Priorities objective especially. Players losing a victory point but getting a little bonus such as moving an objective around is actually fairly common in AMG’s foundational game Marvel: Crisis Protocol and is similar to a key element of Star Wars: Shatterpoint as well. In both these games, it’s a mechanic that adds to the dynamism within a game and variety between games. I was also optimistic about the changes to cover; small dice pools without Sharpshooter or Critical were close to worthless since the inception of the game and I figured it would encourage more unit diversity.
Like most players, my mind reeled once I actually got to sit down and read the rules…not because I thought they were awful or something (anybody who tells you any aspect of them was “clear” before playing any games is full of hot air) but because of how much had changed. And let’s be honest here: I was ready for it. When lists like the legacy versions of Experimental Droids and Clones dominated the meta, both of which were mostly good at just sort of..sitting around and plinking at you…the game felt quite stale. You’ll find very few people who wouldn’t admit that objectives needed a refresh and a points re-balance was due, and though there were a few early doubters most of the community embraced the “out with the old in with the new” mentality. It was only after my fast handful of games that I began to wrap my head around what the “new” really meant and, more importantly, what it would mean to the diverse ranks of players in the community at large.
The first thing I began to notice about Legion 2.6 was the extraordinary importance of one’s ability to gain an advantage in the first round. A cynic would say that is nothing new, even legacy games could be won or lost with unfortunate deployment choices or daring (but often risky) alpha attacks, but usually most of the time the first round was spent getting into position for a Round 2 where the fun really began. A harsher cynic (perish the thought!) would then say that sometimes the fun would only begin in Round 6 if the objective was Key Positions, or never if the objective was Sabotage the Moisture Vaporators after ties became possible…but I digress. In Legion 2.6, there is little time for cautious positioning, you need to be ready to DIVE on those objectives for when scoring begins. That means that for many infantry units the “right” call is very often to just double move in Round 1 so they can participate in scoring thereafter. This is especially true if that unit is melee or Range 2, if you are too far away and find yourself spending almost half of the game doing nothing but move actions one would question whether that unit was worth spending points on.
And thus began a new form of classism in Legion: for a shortcut, we can call them Racers (who have either Infiltrate, Scout, a high speed move with a long-range attack, or to a lesser extent Prepared Positions) and Ramblers (who have none of those things). I began to notice that the best Round 1 strategy was to start with moving any short-range units in who could remain completely safe. Then, as soon as my opponent deployed a unit that would potentially be exposed, I started using any Racers who would have the ability to poke at their most exposed unit from relative safety. My opponent would often be aware of this (it’s not completely new after all, the new rules just compressed and accelerated the concept) but if their list had a whole bunch of Ramblers in it they could either choose to put their units at risk of getting shot or decline to move towards the POI’s, a difficult dilemma indeed. This divide inherently made the use of certain units risky. Short of getting invited to Wicket’s Scouting Party, a Tauntaun for example has no way to avoid being a Rambler, which especially becomes a problem for Rebels since they have poor order control.
A complete-ish list of Natural (via unit or command card) Racers per faction. I included units with big enough bases or enough speed (flutters, mando super commandos) to SAFELY make round 1 attacks. I didn’t include the LAAT with HE shells…because, yeah. PP stands for Prepared Positions, which IS a deployment keyword but its built-in vulnerability makes it weaker.
This naturally incentivized packing your list with Racers. But while a Rex 501st list (that Battle Force sure has come a long way hasn’t it?) can achieve this without even a single upgrade, most lists would have to consider investing heavily into multiple copies of Recon Intel to keep up. Thus, overnight, Recon Intel became what was likely the most universally popular upgrade card in the history of the game (per Longshanks it has been in over 2000 lists between August 15 and November 15, which is 500 more than the next one down). In legacy, paying 2 points for one on a Rebel Trooper would have usually seemed like overkill, now it bordered on necessity to pay 5 for it! The flexibility of deployment keywords (which, again, can be mimicked by being fast with a long-range gun) not only allowed close-range units to race to safe places close to POI’s but allowed long-range units to lay a lot of Round 1 heat on the opposition, sometimes with a boatload of attack mods. The 501st list was egregiously good at doing this but I began to notice that most of the other consistent high-performers could unload a lot of Turn 1 dice as well (Triple Republic Commando, ExD, Tempest, Blizzard) or were so obscenely survivable that they could weather getting unloaded ON by those dice (Vader Immortal, Ewoks, some Rebel Dodge Spam, CIS 2-Health Mini Repair Spam). To keep up with this race, any players using a list that wasn’t amazing at either of the above strategies would be highly motivated to include multiple copies of Recon Intel just to keep up with the competition, and so they did exactly that.
AMG noticed this of course and responded in kind…by increasing the cost of the upgrade, the only one that gives Ramblers a permission slip to become Racers for a day. This felt a bit sour to me, the popularity of the upgrade was driven completely by the nature of the new rules. Raising its cost was akin to offering candy to a child and then scolding them for eating it. I became frustrated that the Wookiee lists I’ve been running, which really need Scout on all those units, went up by 18 points despite feeling like the list was already balanced. I’ve heard similar sentiments from Rebel and Empire players who were cramming Recon Intels on their Stormtroopers and Fleets to keep them relevant but were now faced with paying nearly a quarter of the cost of the entire unit to make sure they stayed useful. With a couple of exceptions though, natural Racers did not increase in cost, and thus the value of any unit with a natural deployment keyword has risen in contrast to the falling value of units that relied on Recon Intel. Though it’s early, I’m concerned all this may make this “class divide” even harsher and motivate players toward choosing natural Racers, further narrowing the list of units that feel fun and viable.
This is a real thing that happened, on Round 1, in a recent game I played. It was fun for me, less fun for the Maul player.
The nature of a progressive scoring system universally based on huddling around Points of Interest was an early source of consternation among veteran players. Though it was a little reductive, the phrase “everything is Intercept the Transmissions” was a common one heard in discord chats and around the game table. Before I really started to play Legion 2.6 I had a little of that concern myself, but hoped that the dynamism added through the special rules the POI’s evoked along with the presence of the brand-new “Secondary Objective” would keep things fresh. In reality, I personally found that the new state of objective play was even more fun for me than I anticipated. Article over then? Everything is fine! Not so fast friend, I said it was fun for me (as well as others who like a certain playstyle and unit choice), but unfortunately, that boost for my fun seems to have come at the expense of others’ ability to enjoy the game.
The challenge of winning “The Fight” is my favorite aspect of this game and it also happens to be the aspect I feel that I’m usually best at compared to other game-relevant skills. I would find myself making a poor flip in Turn 0 or assigning the wrong units to be box carriers far more often than I’d find myself screwing up an engagement. I abhorred the “plinky” nature of late-legacy meta lists and was quite glad that a hard-charging list ended up beating them all at Worlds earlier this year. You may see where I’m going with this. Legion 2.6 doesn’t just encourage engagement, it functionally forces it. This makes the tactics of winning micro-battles and the strategy of dividing your army (when necessary) more important than ever. Consequently, I’ve generally enjoyed the games I’ve played (and my win percentage is up to boot), but as time goes on I feel as if that enjoyment is ever so slightly waning. I do my best to achieve some level of variety by playing the one unit that can consistently achieve speeder-based objective play (more on this in a second) but I still find that most games are fait accompli by the end of Round 3 because someone has built up enough attrition and is sort of bound to come out on top when it comes to Primary Objective scoring. So, even though I enjoy all the killing, er, fighting. every good thing starts to get old if it doesn’t change much after a while.
But of course, there’s a bigger problem than my surfeit of savagery: many Legion players loved a type of play that no longer feels applicable in 2.6. At the most recent World Team Championships I had the pleasure of playing on the same team as Brian “weebaer” Baer who took a list that most would call “wacky” or “janky” at first glance (two buses with guns, Op Luke, R2, and a bunch of fleets with repair droids) and went 6-0 with it there. He then confirmed his prowess by making the top 10 at Worlds a month later (the top Rebel list that was not Ewoks). I asked him recently whether he felt the new rules felt limiting, after all his list is not only literally impossible to work the same way now with new transport rules but it was also built for an environment where there was more objective diversity and where Secret Mission still had the chance to matter. He acknowledged that the raw strategic positioning for fighting one’s opponent felt improved with wider maps but also said that he’s “a bit torn. It’s net zero for me. I LOVE progressive scoring and trying to out-position my opponent for POI control. I miss some of the little nuances and tricks that are less common now.” I actually made a decently comprehensive list of various tactics that can be used in this game we all love, with a focus on what Legion 2.6 enabled, maintained, and eliminated. It ended up being pretty long so I placed it at the bottom as sort of an appendix/little thought exercise. When reviewing it, I find it hard to reconcile the parts where the game unequivocally gained (and don’t get me wrong, it improved in a bunch of ways) with the parts it lost without any real necessity for doing so.
This list, piloted by 2023 Worlds Runner Up Lyla Claire and the winner of London GT, is to my eyes the most inventive major tournament-winning list in Legion 2.6. That’s an achievement to be sure, but while inventive lists before could be objective focused, this one is basically more like “a fun new way…to do some more killin'”
In my experience as well as others I’ve spoken to, Legion 2.6 games result in fewer wild stories to tell about the way games were won or lost. Yoda is not going to double guidance to score a vaporator at the last minute, Iden isn’t going to climb up on a building and smoke the strike team hiding with a box in the corner, Vader isn’t going to descend from a LAAT to wreak havoc on the back lines. So far for me in Legion 2.6, the story is “we both piled in on 1-2 POI’s, and somebody won those fights,” to the point that the secondary objectives (which are universally worth less than the primaries) didn’t feel like they mattered all that much. I’ve heard many speeder fans lament that even the “dive on to a POI from afar” strategy feels almost nullified by the fragility of all speeders with the new cover system. I suppose I’m lucky in this respect, I have had a FEW games highlighted by POI dives but I’m one of the few (proud!) psychos out there who routinely flies triple Flutter Attack Craft, which is the only vehicle fast and maneuverable enough to pull off such tactics in the game right now simply because it does such a good job staying away from enemy shots entirely. So even in that respect, a strategy that should encourage diversity doesn’t achieve that end because the level of risk vs reward is usually too high to rely on paper-thin vehicles to get the work done. Thus, we are to a large extent left with armies built to survive crashing directly into other armies. Whereas before most armies could be classified as “gunline, objective skew, or aggro” it feels like ALL lists have to be a hybrid between gunline and aggro (gaggro? aggrunline? I’ll work on it) and the objective skews are a complete thing of the past. It’s an environment that is less chaotic than in the past, the only problem is that to many players, the chaos was the fun.
I have a deep, dark confession: I’m pretty bad at bowling. I can probably count on one hand the number of strikes I’ve scored in my life. When I was a kid, it was a safe bet that I’d ask to put the bumpers up when my family decided we were gonna take a trip to the alley. These days I don’t find myself bowling very often at all since my wife doesn’t like it anyway, but on the rare times that I do I certainly wouldn’t think of asking the poor underpaid teenager working the front to bust out their bumper-deployment pole. Now that I’m an alleged adult, I see the value of the challenge those dreaded gutters add to the game. There is more to bowling than just the act of knocking down pins: most fans of the game find it fun because scoring involves doing your own tiny version of the Death Star trench run, avoiding obstacles and (trying to) hit the target in just the right way. Some players are good at utilizing spin, some use brute force applied to just the right place, and others like me just kind of go for it and hope for the best, but no matter what everyone is dealing with the same challenges presented by the laws of physics and the arrangement of pins after the first bowl.
AMG’s recent change of the move-and-shoot keywords (Charge, Steady, and Relentless are no longer able to trigger outside of one’s own activation) felt like the bumpers on multiple lanes rose up from the floor without anyone having asked for it. During the recent developer stream where this was announced, they explained that this was done for a variety of reasons (game balance being one of them) but stated that the most central one was to reduce confusion about game mechanics. Specifically, the key item here is the difference between “move” and “move action.” In other words, the rules question they sought to eliminate was “why can a Wookiee Warrior unit perform a charge after a move given by Guidance but not after the move given by Leia’s ‘No Time For Sorrows‘ command?” I’ll admit that this is a question I asked myself…once or twice. In exchange for that very brief confusion though, Legion players got a variety of gameplay options. Those aren’t just limited to Yoda’s guidance but also include Palpatine’s Pull The Strings, Luke’s You Serve Your Master Well, and various uses of standby tokens (primarily by Jedi) to enable getting out of tight spots when engaged to an unactivated enemy unit. In one stroke this significantly weakened multiple command cards (Yoda 2, Krennic 2, Obi-Wan 1, Lando 2) and made one in particular sort of a cruel joke:
To be fair, Jyn was wrecking face and needed to be taken down a peg
Yoda combined with Bad Batch was perhaps a little too good, but this combo was being used in combination with commandos and ARCs (both of which got significantly more expensive) pretty often anyway, and no one would have batted an eye if they had just made Bad Batch pricer for GAR while leaving the Rebel version alone. The end result will likely now be that people will still run Bad Batch, just with Anakin or Rex now, but many fewer people will play Yoda. That character in particular already lost utility on the change to Legion 2.6 since non-free actions never mattered for objectives anymore, but at least he maintained that all-important combat utility. Yoda was built around Guidance, it’s quite literally a foundational element of all four of his command cards, and now its use will be limited to the rare occasions you need to use it to move a friendly unit onto a POI. I was having a lot of fun with a Yoda Kashyyk Defenders list, but now I’m going to be much more likely to drop him for a couple more generic squads. I’ve heard similar sentiments from other fans of Yoda but also from fans of the above-mentioned characters who were also affected, as well as Jedi players generally: they are bummed that a fun element of the game has been ejected in favor of simplicity.
I do want to be specific here because there are two kinds of “streamlining” AMG has implemented in this game and I feel quite differently about each:
I’ll quickly also add that the change to AI, which was technically in category 1 above but took nearly all the challenge out of optimizing droid orders, went too far in my estimation. I do recognize they had to account for a wider battlefield however so let’s just set that one aside. From the way I see it, changes in that first category made the game more fun for just about everybody while changes in the second category made the game less fun for players who enjoyed those units while only gaining a brief modicum of rules clarity for the newest of players. I realize that I myself and The Fifth Trooper as a whole are weighted towards the “competitive” side of the game (we are trying to figure out how to make that more balanced by the way) but at the end of the day…fun things are just fun because they’re fun! “Casual” and “Competitive” players alike enjoyed doing things like carting R2 around with a bus or using Yoda to tell Wookiees to bash into a unit of hapless B1’s. If someone didn’t realize such a thing was possible it may sting a little for the moment, but they’ll be on the watch for it thereafter, and they may decide to take on that strategy themselves after a surprise trouncing. Blocking off such a “gutter” does make the game more predictable, but if that comes at the cost of the sum total of enjoyment felt by the players, then what is the point of doing it at all? AMG knows that a little bit of nuance can open all sorts of doors for gameplay and ability variety, take this for example from an FAQ about Shatterpoint (a game AMG made whole cloth) that explains that there is a difference between moves and…move…actions…which continues to be an important distinction in that game.
Cool
At the end of the day, I wrote all of this because I still love this game. I’m planning on two local tournaments in December and on going to Adepticon in March, then World Team Championships 2025 in the UK later in the year, and I’d be doing that even if nothing else changed. The objective is not to “dunk on the devs” or “rage bait” or any of those other immature internet-isms that I completely detest. The people working on this game have clearly shown that they are invested in its success and their increased interaction with podcasts along with the agreement to schedule points adjustments are evidence that they’re willing to put themselves out there in front of the people who buy these boxes of plastic dolls. They had a big challenge to overcome when they inherited a game several years in from another team and needed a lot of lead time to adapt the game to something they felt more comfortable with, this would have been true of any game studio on the planet and I think most of them would have failed.
Instead, I’m hoping to drive the conversation in the community to whatever extent I can. However…if any of you AMG folks are reading, I have some things to say:
I’ll expand on that last one a little to close things out. Marvel: Crisis Protocol (MCP) had its own ups and downs but I can unequivocally say that Atomic Mass Games has done an excellent job honing, balancing, and sharpening the experience of this game over time. This is a product that features almost 200 unique characters and almost 30 affiliations. It’s gone through some eras of badness where one character or team was completely bowling people over to the point that those games weren’t fun at all but those instances got dealt with relatively little delay and the game has consistently gotten more fun (to me, as a casual player) as the game has aged and expanded. But I don’t just view MCP as proof that AMG can take a design philosophy and score buckets with it, I think there are some specific elements they could keep in mind as they continue to shape Legion. Through various tweaks, for instance, they have toned down the value of Round 1 blitz plays. When new characters had abilities that inject new (chaotic some may say) game mechanics but are overly powerful, they typically have simply increased their cost rather than removed abilities entirely. Perhaps most importantly though, they have two varieties of objectives for every match but they are generally worth an equal amount of VP’s and have other ways they stand out from each other.
These are both equivalent to “Primary” objectives in Legion but unlike say…Close the Pocket vs Bunker Assault, these play wildly differently from each other. Also, the “Extract” objectives (closer aligned to the Secondary Objectives in Legion) are worth basically just as much as the other set. The end result is that no two games feel quite the same, and while there are some lists that can skew toward certain objectives the random nature of Turn 0 reduces the risk of “abusing” that too much. Unlike in Legion, someone is always getting their card in the mix at the end of the day in MCP.
So, again, I’m not “dooming” as the kids say but I do think our beloved Star Wars minis game can truly thrive if the developers placed a little more trust in players to find the fun when given a wider variety of gameplay options. Closing a lane on a busy highway may be temporarily necessary from time to time to keep its users truly safe, but building a new exit, and creating a new opportunity to get to your destination, can make a drive more enjoyable for years to come.
Thanks for reading! You can check below for the thought experiment I mentioned above on changed strategies and tactics, otherwise please do discuss here or wherever your buds are! Happy Legionning, and watch out for those Round 1 shots!
As I mentioned above, this is meant to be a thought experiment more than anything else. Some of the new stuff is fun, some is a bit of a letdown, and the same is true with the old stuff. It’s up to all of you to decide whether it’s a net positive by the time the dust settles, but for what it’s worth I think the door is open for AMG to expand that list on the left quite a bit with more objective variety.
| New Strategies and Tactics Enabled by Legion 2.6 | Strategies and Tactics Shared by Both Versions of the Game | Strategies and Tactics Eliminated by Legion 2.6 |
| • List building for Bring Them to Heel (mostly available to Empire) • Destroying the Enemy Base!(fast units or melee) • Breaking unit caps via the new nature of “Detachment” • Being OK with smaller dice pools without critical in your army (this is a huge good change in my book) • Using the free reposition to move vehicles more easily • Doing a good job with unit positioning on Surface Scan or Recon Mission • Scoring two objectives at once with long vehicles (certain maps only) • Making good choices on how to split your army for a two-front fight (this was possible but rare in the legacy game, mostly now happens in Breakthrough and Shifting Priorities) • while we’re at it, Moving POI’s around with Shifting Priorities can be fun • Utilizing Backup • Utilizing new Fire Support • Fleets and ARCs have access to charge now • Grogu is playable now that he isn’t a floating liability, which has made Din better too • Trying to draw Advanced Intel, and preventing your opponent from doing the same • Losing the roll-off so that you can guarantee to use your primary/secondary objective (sorry that was low but it’s right there) | • “Winning the fight(s)” as a victory condition (just as in legacy, there are times that you build so much attrition advantage that objectives are secondary, I have found this more common in 2.6 than before) • Using force push, body blocking, or clever melee placement to get opponents off points • Diving onto an objective from far away using speeders (more useful in 2.6 but also harder because most speeders die easily) • Token sharing (now in all factions) • Using deployment keywords to your advantage (even more important now) • Various fun command cards and tricks not mentioned in the righthand column (such as “Vader’s Might” or “I am A Jedi”) • Using panic to prevent VP scoring • Bounty…? | • Bounty actually mattering much • Turn 0 Back-and-forth: Bidding was always controversial, but even aside from that there were usually two types of cards (deploy and objective) that always mattered and sometimes (usually only Rapid or Limited Vis) conditions mattered too. Blue player had the advantage of using their cards but red player got the last laugh, it felt pretty equal and you had agency over it. • Recover the Supplies: Do you risk putting the Cad token there? When do you rush the middle? Where do you put your own boxes and do their holders feel safe? • Hostage Exchange: It wasn’t perfect but it often resulted in really interesting scenarios and you did need to have a plan for it regardless of anything • Bombing Run: This includes both building for it and the act of playing an objective where the clock worked against you, and sometimes getting the rush of capturing an enemy bomb • Breakthrough: Do you set up to engage at a distance? Take them head on? Run away? It often made for interesting deployment decisions • The Wild West standoff that was Key Positions: A lot of players didn’t care for it but there was a lot of strategy that went into it that…some…enjoyed • Vaporator antics: This was sometimes too slow and led to too many tie games late in legacy but the puzzle of where to place them was often very engaging • Payload, although I think we can all agree it was most fun when it could still teleport • Placing objectives, generally, this added additional agency and strategy to the pre-battle phase that made you really think about the location and layout of terrain pieces • Choosing a deployment map that fits your list: Now that objectives are tied to deployments the map isn’t the reason a list will pick one over the other. • Taking standbys with engaged characters with charge/relentless as a strategy: This severely reduces the value of Lando’s 2 pip, Krennic’s 2 pip, and (sob) Obi-Wan’s 1 pip • Most of the fun stuff I wrote about in this Yoda strategy article is just gone now…Guidance is now better on Veers than it is on him • All sorts of transport antics: Basically everything except the Republic LAAT had options for off-the-wall success at one point or another • Legacy Fire Support though thankfully I’ll never have to hear the BARC defended as “a good fire support platform” anymore • Building around AI: This was a little puzzle CIS players had to solve, but they had plenty of tools to do so. Now AI is mostly a bonus because it enables Super Tac abilities • Secret Mission: I know it still exists but it really doesn’t…while we’re at it… • Authoritative as a way to make Padme’s command cards more useful (they’re awful when she can only command herself) • Using Jyn Erso whose 3 pip has been terrible since the rules change and now that Charge was changed her 1 pip is similarly awful • Using table-setting command cards like Return of the Jedi or General Kenobi, there just isn’t time for it anymore • Using elevation or attacker distance to a terrain piece to deny cover, this is technically still possible but much harder to do • Blocking movement paths with vehicles • Placing vehicles behind cover, but good riddance in my opinion. |
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