Season 8 Community Vote Results

The Season 8 Playtesting Phase is finally over, and we have our final results after 2 weeks of community voting. 30 players, members of the community just like you, including 4 steering committee members, participated in an open voting process open to everyone and cast their votes for the cards that should be permanently added to the Imperial Assault IACP skirmish project. Once again, I am happy to say this is an increase from the number of players that participated in last season’s community vote, so thank you everyone that chose to participate and welcome to all of our new players that have been slowly growing the ranks of this amazing community.

Every card from Season 8 reached the required threshold of 50% Fully Approved votes and less than 30% disapproval votes. Although 17 out of the 30 voters did choose to fully approve every card with a single click at the beginning of the ballot as a new convenience voting option this season, no card received more than 2 votes of disapproval out of the 13 voters that did choose to vote card-by-card.

Results

Card Name	Fully Approve Votes	Disapprove Votes	Result
Technician Training	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
All in a Day’s Work	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Personal Energy Shield	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Repair	96.67%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Reverse Engineer	90.00%	3.33%	Fully Approved
Set the Charge	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Supercharge	100.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Disable	90.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Double or Nothing	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Elusive	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Field Promotion	100.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Just Business	96.67%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Orbital Bombardment	80.00%	6.67%	Fully Approved
Baze Malbus	86.67%	3.33%	Fully Approved
Final Stand	96.67%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Chirrut Imwe	86.67%	3.33%	Fully Approved
Lightbow	90.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Cal Kestis	90.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Cal’s Buddy + BD-1	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Saska Teft	100.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Verena Talos	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Del Meeko	90.00%	6.67%	Fully Approved
Support Specialist	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Second Sister	90.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Force Drain	86.67%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Scout Trooper	80.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Vader’s Finest	83.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Overwatch	90.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Gar Saxon	80.00%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Choose a Side	86.67%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Super Commandos	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Kuiil	80.00%	3.33%	Fully Approved
Desperate Escape	90.00%	3.33%	Fully Approved
Bossk	96.67%	0.00%	Fully Approved
Nexu	93.33%	0.00%	Fully Approved

Highest Approval rating

These were the cards that were universally accepted by all voters with full approval. Supercharge and Field Promotion were the Command cards that were fully approved by 100% of voters. Supercharge took a bit of tweaking to get it right during the playtest period, but I was especially surprised by Field Promotion, it turned out to be a great little piece of design that had a very powerful effect but was offset by its limited use-case and exploitable counter-play.

Saska Teft was the only deployment card to be fully approved by 100% of voters, and I’m grateful that the community has really taken a liking to this redesign of Saska. She went through a ton of different designs before her playtesting debut, and the final solution we went with where her device tokens stayed in play for the rest of the mission felt almost too novel, like a gimmick, but the amount of work and iterations and testing put into this card by the steering committee to get her design right before her debut seemed to have really paid off.

Lowest Voter Confidence

These were the cards with the lowest number of full approval votes, though not the cards with the most disapproval votes. Scout Troopers, Gar Saxon, Kuiil all had full approval votes at 80% of the total votes.

The common reasoning that I saw given for each of these cards in the voting comments was a doubt in their power level relative to the rest of the season and IACP meta as a whole, with some voters thinking they could have used a bit more of a boost at the end, or in the case of the Scout Troopers, feeling that they had not playtested the final version enough to feel confident giving the full approval.

Most Disapproval Votes

Orbital Bombardment and Del Meeko received 2 votes of disapproval each, signifying that these voters felt they should be removed from the game entirely.

In their comments, the 2 Bombardment disapproval voters either felt it was too overpowered or they didn’t like the cards overall design. Orbital Bombardment was also tied for lowest voter confidence with only 80% of voters giving it the full approval, so this community designed card was nothing if not controversial to say the least.

For Del Meeko, only 1 disapproving voter gave their opinion, but it was that we had gone too far in nerfing the Expertise ability. However 90% of the community did fully approve Del’s most recent version so these 2 voters are likely to be more of a passionate minority.

How did we do with the Technician trait?

93% of voters fully approved the Technician Training card as released in 8.0. Only 2 voters took issue with a deployment that we had given the technician trait to (Mak and E-Webs) and 2 other voters felt we should have included additional deployments as technicians (rebel saboteurs and general Weiss). All of our Technician command cards had full approval ratings of 90% or higher.

65% of voters liked the way we implemented the new trait this season and would like to see other new traits potentially added in the future, with others saying they liked Technicians but wouldn’t want anymore traits and a few saying they don’t like seeing any new traits added to the game. It’s important to remember that it took us multiple seasons and development cycles of preparation before we finally felt that it was the right time to introduce the Technician trait to the game, so don’t expect to see another new trait being introduced in the very next season.

We’ve been Failing our New Players

While we have tried to create digital landing spaces and onramps for new players to get into the daunting world that is the IACP version of IA skirmish and online play, we got a lot of feedback from new and un-enfranchised players that we could be doing a lot better in this regard. There was a lot of great feedback and suggestions on how we can improve in this regard, including better visibility of our new player resources, better tutorials for how to use online tools and resources like Vassal and how to play games online, and more ready-to-play resources for new players to be able to just jump right in like pre-made armies, tier lists and starter kits.

While it won’t be happening overnight, increased accessibility will be a major focus for us in the coming months and we will be working on projects that aim to better ease new players into the process of playing and list-building in the much more vast IACP sandbox and playing both online and in the print-and-play realms.

We are in a Transition Period

As I alluded to in my Community vote announcement post, the IACP is in a bit of an awkward place right now. For the past few seasons, I have been taking on about 80% of the work that goes into creating new content for IACP, including creating card images in photoshop, updating IACP pdfs, updating the website, collecting and parsing data from vassal game logfiles, communicating updates to the community, etc., on top of creating youtube content for the game. This was just a part of my personality as I like to be a jack of all trades and I like to have control over important processes as much as possible without leaving them up to outsiders that are less invested in Imperial Assault than the steering committee and core community members are.

However I’ve recognized this was unsustainable and was causing me a great deal of stress and anxiety in my personal life in combination with real life responsibilities, and I’ve been forcing myself to take on less IA related responsibilities, prioritize real world responsibilities and healthy amounts of sleep first, and delegate more things to the rest of the steering committee and to volunteers in the community. Some things are just going to take a little more time to get done in the next few months, so I really appreciate everyone’s patience as I work on things like the Approved card images for Vassal and Tabletop Admiral and organized play events in the time that it is appropriate for me to do so.

All that said, we have noticed that the yearly season structure that we have been trying out for Season 8 has problems. The increased length of the competitive play period of 8 months with no new cards had a major drop off in participation in community interest in the last few months of February and March. Similarly, we saw a huge dropoff in playtesting participation during v8.2 and v8.3 of the playtest period which lasted 4 months in total. Part of that was no doubt due to the issues caused by issues with our tournament system RollBetter and having to restart and reregister people for the playtest league, but we saw community engagement and discussion drop off as well in the 2nd half of the playtest period across all platforms, not just playtest games themselves. Another problem is also that there are just too many cards all being playtested at the same time, and some cards inevitably get more attention than others, which leads to a lopsided and unsatisfying playtesting process.

We asked all of you how you would feel about doing 2 smaller seasons per year instead of the current 1 season per year, with each season lasting for 2 months of playtesting of half the amount of cards in the current season on top of 4 months of competitive play before introducing a new season, and effectively more than half of you were in favor of this change, with about 40% in favor of keeping the current structure.

Most of us on the steering committee believe that shorter seasons will be better for the game as a whole by preventing the doldrums periods that come in the final months of a competitive season or playtest period, but we’re currently figuring out how best exactly to do 2 seasons per year while not burning out on the work that’s involved in creating and testing new cards for the competitive IACP environment. Stay tuned for more information and details on future seasons, but know that it’s more than likely that you’ll be seeing content for a new season closer to January 2024 rather than April, and likely less cards then we’ve been putting out for previous seasons.

Final Thoughts

Season 8 has been a season of a lot of firsts for us. Our first time introducing a new figure trait to the game, our first time doing a card that the entire community helped to design. It’s also the first time I really had doubts about the future of the project and the community. But we had more voters giving us their feedback this season than we’ve had for a few seasons now, and more new skirmish players interested in IACP this season than I’ve seen before, and I’m feeling a lot more confident about the future of the IACP, even if I see less of myself in that future. As always, the future of the game hinges not on any company or one person or small group of people, but on the interest and engagement of the playerbase and community as a whole. As long as enough people are interested in Imperial Assault continuing on, it will continue to evolve and grow and be there for the people that want to play it.

Oh yeah, and here’s what you guys asked for for future IACP content:

Your suggestions for future Season content: 19 responses

• N/A
• there are so many gotchyas in this game that make it hard to learn already, let alone all the changes .. maybe some focus could be placed on organizing noobs .. .. i think there is latent interest in IA, but IACP is a bit opaque without years of experience with ia and ia skirmish.
• Variety as you’ve been doing is good
• Please expand the roster of possible additions to include Legends and Prequel Era characters. Starkiller, Grievous etc
• Ewoks, more Mandalorian characters (from the show)
• Add: Ewoks, speeder bikes. Ban: Greedo.
• Black Krrsantan, Definitely thought there would be a figure after their appearance in BoBF. I would also love to see more stuff that’s not just transplanted Legion figures. I know that’s where most figures come from but IA is a different game and different characters be included. I loved how Krull was created for the most recent season, That figure isn’t in Legion and has unique abilities.
• I’d like to see new “Spectre-Cell”-like cards for themes and teams like for the “A New Hope” characters, the “Rouge One” team, or Mandalorins in general. Stuff from new Disney+ shows like Andor, Ahsoka, & Book of Boba. Finally; Let’s get The Ronin in here!! SCUM FORCE USERSS!!
• I think with declining player counts, if there is another season, obvious gaps should be the next priority. Obviously things like Ewoks have been held back for the right time but given the uncertainty, another season should probably finish what we started just in case.
• As I said before I think custom competitive skirmish maps and CIS and Republic factions should be a priority to increase engagement.
• I really enjoy new cards.
• Some new droid cards, like the maintained ones from jedi survivor or the broken down ones from Rebels and some cards from Jedi Survivor. Maybe another card like Mara Jade, from alternative timeline. (Personally I would love the Mortis Trio being added as very expensive cards 1 for each faction but thematically it makes no sense, maybe the bendu?)
• No special requests.
• I would like to see characters from the ‘Force Unleashed’ game series.
• Keep maintaining your balance between introducing new cards and fixing old ones. Staying in the era restriction is also really important to me, although I’m not sure whether or not Bad Batch fits (that’s definitely a community discussion we should have). I would also like to see more new cards from the original films (Tarkin, Ackbar, Ewoks, etc.) and not just from the latest shows.
• New era
• Beasts, maybe an Ackley? A Rebel pilot? Scout troopers with speeder bikes. Ewoks.

And what you guys told us we can do better to increase player engagement and enjoyment of IACP

What can we do as the Steering Committee to get you to play more Imperial Assault Skirmish? 21 responses

• I’m really a campaign player myself, but I’m a big fan of Imperial Assault in general. I was sad to see that IACP may disband even though I’m not a skirmish player, because I don’t like the idea of an active IA community dying. If any of the content was designed to crossover into campaign, that would certainly greatly increase my interest in IACP, but I don’t think that’s what ya’ll are trying to accomplish. I’ve considered playing skirmish before (played once with a friend locally), but my two concerns are A) lack of one vs many format which I really enjoy about campaign and B) playing online. In general, I’ve found playing online board games to be a finnicky experience.
• streamline the process. there are 2+ communication streams between discord, slack, etc., which is hard to deal with, considering some people are hipsters about one or the other platform. there are 2 or 3 websites you have to know to get all the info. there is a client to play, but no good tutorials on how to use it effectively. a lot of my initial games were experienced players telling me that i cant do a thing i meant to do because of some strangeness of the presentation. THEN you have the angle calculator, and other 3rd party stuff .. and there is no way to learn that except by spelunking into deeper and deeper mind caves with no idea of if there is a way out. it’s a lot, and there is no map.
• Babysit my children 😛
• Introduce Prequel and Legends characters
• Keep pushing the events like UKGE and Adepticon!! Revive Built on Hope
• Work on accessibility, I’ve been trying to get some friends into Imperial Assault Skirmish coming from other board games and with IACP, There’s a lot going on. Maybe suggested starter lists? Lists that don’t use command cards for the first game? What about a ‘learn to play’ OP kit/instructions? Also the cost of getting into the game physically is a bit high, I don’t want to have people buy the core basically just for tokens and a couple figures they might use. Maybe a starter pack of IACP cards and tokens and they figure out their own figures?
• make the league 1 match every 2 weeks, and start running monthly tourneys again. I sometimes feel like 1/week is a lot to squeeze in, and wonder if the rest of the community feels the same with new games coming out and their lives growing.
• More exciting videos including much more tier list videos.
• Honestly I just wish more people were playing! I’ve enjoyed every game and just wish more people would love this game! The only exception would be the addition of a three player game for in-person stuff, and maybe an 80 point version (also for in-person reasons). I’ve given a lot of thought to the 80 point idea specifically so I”l let you know if I figure it out.
• I think more regular content drops and updates would make the game more engaging. I don’t have a problem for the game being too difficult to keep up with. If I fell behind, there’s nothing a quick read wouldn’t fix.
• More availablilty for games, more competitive events
• More training on the apps required for the online tournament/skirmish. Simpler UI would help.
• I mostly play with a small group of friends. When ever you release an update we get together and play woth the new cards a bunch
• I enjoy the tournaments that play out over multiple weeks, since I can never block off a day to play a standard one
• Change my timezone lol.
• The new cards are motivation enough to keep trying new combos.
• I don’t think there’s much more for you to do besides all the amazing work you’re already doing. Some specific things that I think have been particularly engaging for the community that I’d love to see more of were the community card design event and steering committee members asking questions about how everyone feels the current season’s cards are doing. Playtest bounties (like for Vinto and now-banned Mando) are really fun, too. And I’d be remiss not to mention the game log reviews that TVboy and TheSecondFlock put out on YouTube; nothing makes me want to play IA more than watching them.
• tournaments later in the afternoon!
• Just more people
• Not much – I do a campaign about every other month and an average of a skirmish every week.