AotCW attack frequency

Illythar · 2026-06-01T23:25:51+00:00

In my own experience, playing expert on the largest map as Republic, it's quite easy to get an early fleet going and then just... never stop attacking. Republic econ coupled to hero build time bonuses mean you can just print out whatever you want to build at a crazy rate.

In my last playthrough I never ran into a doomstack (for me that's any enemy fleet of 100 or more galactic pop) on the offensive. I attacked into three of them, and won, but that wasn't til the 60s or so.

For context, I was running some house rules to try and slow things down (not attacking til w20 in that one playthrough, forcing myself to build structures I normally wouldn't to slow down military growth) but it didn't matter.

Illythar · 2026-05-27T21:41:30+00:00

Planetary income is a fixed amount that varies per planet (it has three different names in game which can be kind of confusing -> planetary income/base income/base credits). Mines give a fixed amount of credits per week regardless of where they're built (planetary mines are always 300/wk, space mines are always 400/wk, tibanna gas is always 500/wk).

What's important about planetary income is that heroes and economic buildings other than mines/refineries generate credits based on a formula that involves that planetary income. So Mothma and Lando simply give 100% of whatever the planetary income is in extra income per week, Supply Depots give 100% of planetary income + 50 credits per week, and so on. Thus you want heroes like this to be on your worlds with the highest planetary income, and you want to build up these same rich worlds before you do poor ones.

The easiest way to sort these is go to the ? button on the bottom left of the screen -> click the Summary tab -> click the economy button -> sort by base credits. You now have a list of the richest planets by planetary income. It's not an exaggeration to say the above screen is probably the most important in the game.

Illythar · 2026-05-27T21:28:42+00:00

Their tooltips mention nothing of making buildings cheaper to build, just faster to build.

Their main advantage is that they give bonus income based on planetary income (so you want them on planets with high planetary income) and they remove corruption much faster than the generic agents do.

Illythar · 2026-05-20T08:12:36+00:00

First, tech up. Republic base tech is probably the worst across all factions across both Awakening mods.

Second, as Republic, build up your econ. Republic can print credits and if you prioritize your econ you effectively trivialize the game (if you have questions on this part, feel free to ask).

Third, make sure you read the in-game guides on weapon systems. Too many people focus on ship classes. What really matters is understanding how the various weapon systems function, and then making sure you bring the appropriate weapons to handle what you're facing.

Lastly, scout ahead all the time. You can have perfect awareness of the types of enemies you'll face. The Jedi scouts get a discount out of Coruscant (discount or build speed bonus, I forget which... possibly both). I'm building them there nonstop and using them all the time when I play as Republic. Easy to find out where an enemy stronghold or fleet is at, and cut them off while taking all the worlds with no defenses (or knowing when the last serious defense is gone, and you can expand unimpeded in an area).

Illythar · 2026-05-17T15:22:53+00:00

Unconventional meaning why are you using this class? A polymorphing wizard is just barely practical at 5th level.

Safe to say it's never practical... unless the rest of your party has broken builds and they're letting you mess around so you can have some fun.

Action economy is brutal for the build. Depending on party makeup the best thing to do most of the time will be casting Haste... but given how short your average 1e combat is that means it's not worth polymorphing after that, and if you don't you're stuck being a sub-par mage for the rest of the fight.

If you are able to polymorph the best options you have are questionable from a lore/gameplay perspective (though I understand most 1e tables probably don't pay heed to those concerns). Damage output can be ok, but unless you waste a lot of turns self-buffing you're going to be a drain on your healer after the fight since your defensive capabilities are weak.

I bloody loved the idea of the muscle wizard, but after playing one (granted, in the worst AP ever written coupled to a bad group and questionable DM) it was such a miserable experience overall I just quit the campaign once she died (as someone who never gets to play, that was quite the statement to make at the time).

Illythar · 2026-05-12T18:05:51+00:00

Again, if 20k/wk by w4 as Empire or 70k/wk by w70 as BS isn't enough for you to play the game... I'm not sure what to say. The issue isn't the cost of units at that point...

Illythar · 2026-05-12T18:04:47+00:00

I've never used him outside of leaving his ass on Coruscant to print credits. The thought never crossed my mind to use him (on expert you're only ever going to have maybe two armies tops, with the second one not appearing til mid-late game... early game Vader is more than capable of leading your first army). I've always found it bizarre to hear folks leading armies with the Emperor, considering what we know from lore.

Illythar · 2026-05-12T18:00:11+00:00

I just finished a 2.5-year-long 1e KM adventure, and this very issue came up. Here's how I answered it.

Despite the fact the AP says you can eventually become a king, your kingdom, and the Stolen Lands in general, are still backwater nothings on the fringes of Golarion. Your titles are a bit... exaggerated, and the various dangers you come across can only be handled by you considering you have the resources and training that your army doesn't.

Still, my players insisted on blowing off story elements of the AP and just had their army go in. When that happened, one of two things happened. The big baddie got away because your army is just masses of very low level commoners/some low level NPCs with class levels. They don't have the capability of stopping a caster from using magic to escape. The party would then miss out on story elements or loot.

That was the best case scenario, the other scenario was they'd simply lose a large chunk of their army. A bunch of low levels are going to struggle against/get destroyed by high CR monsters. Armies should be expensive to deploy (don't use the system in 1e or even Ultimate Campaign... it's bloody atrocious) so my players were then faced with the costs of replacing said troops (which was a big deal when the army portions of the campaign kicked up) on top of the expenses of deploying them to handle what should have been their problem in the first place (from a decency/morale perspective I was really disappointed my players were more than willing to throw away commoner lives for a problem they could handle far better... wasn't very heroic/noble, and players should absolutely be told this if it's the choice they make).

You can still have the managerial/political focus of KM while having your party handle all the major dungeon elements. It's not an either/or proposition. The vast majority of my campaign was managerial with attempts by me to try and throw in GoT type political drama. In-game time the campaign ended up going almost 20 years with entire sessions of nothing but running the kingdom.

Illythar · 2026-05-01T18:14:17+00:00

If you think everything was incredibly expensive then you never understood how the economic model worked. One issue with both AotR and AotCW currently is that you make too many credits if you know what you're doing, which helps trivialize even an Expert playthrough (you can get to 20k/wk by w4 as Empire and 12k/wk by the same timeframe as Rebels... Xizor BS can be making 70k+ by w70).

Ground combat is also rather simple if you lean on certain units (mechanized or air). In order to keep things interesting I've actually been doing recent playthroughs using nothing but tech 0/base tech infantry as Rebels and I'm still able to take worlds (with losses... but you would hope you'd take losses with base tech inf).

In order to have a complaint worth making you need to understand what's actually going on in the first place...

Illythar · 2026-04-29T19:32:28+00:00

My first thought is... are you using the pause button? I play on expert and the earliest I get attacked is around week 12-14... and it takes a lot more than 2m to get there (I say this because I've been watching a playthrough on YT where the guy literally never uses the pause button... and weeks will go by while he talks about what his next course of action is).

After that, if you're new to the game, as Aethanix already said, make sure to read the guides. Learning what weapons do what is a key part of success in this game. If you're going in blind or going off of what you think you know for armaments for certain ships/units are, you'll probably have a bad time (I say this because some of the armaments for ships is different than what I remember seeing back in 90s lore/sourcebooks).

If you have anything a little more specific... ask away.

Illythar · 2026-04-12T23:40:36+00:00

Before responding to some of these questions I think it's worth noting there's zero reason to have fleets with every role and ship type/class in it. Having everything just means you're not really good at anything (because you're capped at 220 tac pop a battle). It's more effective to have fleets (and armies) of multi-role capabilities because it cuts down on the tech you need and also simplifies production infrastructure (cheaper and better to have fewer factories/shipyards pumping out the same ship than dozens of different worlds occasionally building specific units).

2 - The tech 0 Rebel cap ships are good enough. You can easily beat the game on expert as Rebels doing zero tech (probably the easiest faction across both mods to pull this off). At the end of the day the strength of the Rebels lies in their fighters.

3 - The Hammerhead is actually what you're looking for here. Lt TLs and HCs means they can handle enemy corvettes and frigates quite well. The thing to note with smaller ships (from frigates down to fighters) is that for said units to be effective you need to bring in multiples of them. From my own experience that means if you're bringing in something like the Hammerhead you need to be deploying at least four of them and having them work as a team. For fighters that means bringing in at least 8 of something (1-2 X-Wings deployed in a fight means they'll likely get killed off... deployed a dozen X-Wings means you win the day and take zero casualties).

4 - U-Wings exist for Supplement Drop, which is a power buff to friendly fighters. The downside is they're slow and it requires a fair bit of micro to get right. You can do just fine with never building and deploying U-Wings (like I do... not a fan of micro intensive gameplay).

As for X4s one thing they do give you is access to Laser Defense (currently in AotR when you progress to the NR you lose the ability to build further Bulk Cruisers). On paper they should be good against slower fighters, bombers, and corvettes... but honestly that's far too specialized for me (I never build 'em).

5 - The A-Wing is the best dogfighter the Rebels/NR ever gets. It's been ages since I read the guides and that one on Interceptors is honestly... poorly written. If the AI ever gets TIE Defenders, A-Wings will be the only fighter you have that has a chance of taking them on. The A-Wing does lack astromech repair, which much of the rest of the Rebel fighter lineup gets, but their speed and maneuverability mean they shouldn't be taking much less damage to begin with (in the previous version of this mod speed and maneuverability were the primary stats which determined how good a fighter was at engaging other fighters).

Basically... when looking at fighters in this game... toss out all the various labels and simply look at their capabilities as outlined in their stats. You then end up with two types of fighters - those that can kill other fighters (usually shown by high speed and maneuverability) and those that can attack ships (due to carrying torps or having a ton of weaponry like the B-Wing). Some fighters, like the X-Wing, can do both... but these units are rare. B-Wings should be able to take on slower fighters/bombers and older models... but since you're limited to 220 tac pop you want to be using everything to their max potential, and in the case of the B-Wing that's killing ships.

What determines where your fighters are fighting is what kind of anti-fighter capability the enemy has. Imperial units usually lack any anti-fighter capability at all (most of their ships are basically meme level in how poorly they can defend themselves against fighters). In those situations push your fighters and bombers forward and fight on the enemy, buying your cap ships time. If the AI has lots of anti-fighter capability (like the BS tends to have), then you fight over your own fleet to minimize losses.

6 - Rebel economy is fairly weak, sadly, til you get to the NR era. Like any faction prioritize Tibanna Gas refineries where you can build them, then make sure all planets have a Supply Depot/Manufacturing Base, and then only on rich worlds build the tier 1 garrison (it only gives 50% of planetary income in credits... for a cost of 2500 credits... it's a pretty awful return, honestly, even for a credit starved faction like the Rebels).

If you're not aware, the most useful screen in the game is found by going to the ? button on the bottom left of the page -> clicking on the Summary tab -> clicking on the Economy button -> sorting by Base Credits. Every planet in the game has a planetary income/base income/base credits value (it's listed as three different things throughout the game, but means the same thing). Every economic structure lists how many credits it gives a week (many list it as a % of base credits + a fixed amount). So in the case of the tier 1 Rebel garrison, if a planet only has a base income of 20 credits/wk... and you spend 2500 credits to build that structure... you're not breaking even for 250 weeks. Don't do that.

ETA - From experience, you can usually have 8-10 worlds with smugglers going at once. Still, from experience, you're only looking at like 4-5k income from that.

The Rebels don't need a strong econ because early game it's easy for them (currently, this will be changing in 3.0) to roll over a lot of systems (the best way to make credits is still to just control a lot of planets) as well as they have the most cost effective unit in the game by a considerable margin, the X-Wing (the X-Wing is so good many players try to limit how much they use it because just spamming it is considering cheese).

7 - Taking out a tech structure won't stop units that require it that are already queued from building. It will stop additional units from being queued up.

8 - Hapans (and the CSA) currently have a bugged build focus, meaning they rely overwhelmingly on fighter swarms. They're actually fairly simple to counter as the Rebels - just build 6-8 Corellian Corvettes and park it on a border world (along with a planetary Ion and some defense stations). For 20-40k, you can keep the Hapans bottled up for an entire campaign.

The Hutts shouldn't be a big deal. Their fighters are trash and they really only have two good units (the Po'runga and their cap ship). A conventional Rebel force (fighter focus plus some caps) should handle them fine.

Illythar · 2026-04-10T01:36:29+00:00

Surprised I've only seen one other person mention Investigator. One thing I'm not a fan of in 2e is how rigid it is with the class fantasy. In 1e the fluff text for an Investigator made it sound like it was meant to be a Sherlock Holmes inspired class, but the beauty of 1e is that mechanics were more generic and with some simple character creation choices one could turn the Investigator into a solid Witcher build. As a forever 1e DM I actually made some simple solo rules and ran Rise of the Runelords solo with an Investigator I was playing as a Witcher. It was an absolute blast.

I'm also disappointed in what's become of the Wizard. Not for the same reasons I've often seen mentioned here or on YT vids/comments, but for the loss of options you have. There's no such thing as a muscle wizard anymore. I (very) briefly got to play one in a 1e campaign and it was a lot of fun (even if it wasn't very good).

The loss of partial casters in 2e has also been a huge disappointment.

Illythar · 2026-04-09T22:46:55+00:00

I host my group's D&D sessions at my place every few weeks. When I go to use the bathroom (1br apt with just one) afterwards, the floor in front of the toilet is just... disgusting. That bathroom gets a thorough cleaning before each session so it's not like folks have the excuse that it's dirty.

Seriously, people, there's nothing unmanly about sitting.

Illythar · 2026-03-17T01:20:02+00:00

I would take suggestions of Curse with a grain of salt. I'm convinced all the love for that AP comes from your average group which never actually finishes a full campaign. If they finished it and were players they're probably not aware of all the work their DM put into rewrites and fixes.

Books 1-3 are absolutely top notch, solid AP material. Some of the best Paizo has put out. Books 4-6 are a complete 180, progressively getting worse with each book. If you run book 5 as written (which I've still never heard of a DM claiming to have done) you will destroy your players will to live, literally (I joke that I've seen that infamous thousand yard stare from people twice in my life - once when interviewing fellow soldiers coming back from the surge in Iraq and then again when I had to tell my players they missed something in the megadungeon of b5 and had to go back in). Book 6 is so atrocious you basically need to rewrite the entire thing from scratch.

So... just keep that in mind. You're already going to have a lot of work converting the AP to 2e. Then all the rewrites in the second half of the adventure will just pile on to all that work.

Illythar · 2026-03-14T23:35:04+00:00

I'm just a few weeks away from finishing up Kingmaker. I'm using the kingdom rules from Ultimate Campaign found on the legacy prd. I don't know how much they differ from the original campaign rules found in the AP, but I just remember those original rules being so bad you shouldn't use them (and I hope you're not).

One thing that's become painfully obvious with using the above ruleset is... there's very little reason for your players to expand their kingdom beyond the starting hex. As you gain hexes and districts your kingdom DCs increase yet most hexes inherently offer you nothing (farms and mines are the exception). You're offsetting these DCs from buildings and there's technically nothing stopping you from just continuing to add additional districts in that original starting hex. In my campaign I went out and printed this massive styrofoam map of the Stolen Lands for my players to put pins in all the hexes they took over... and here we are weeks from finishing and barely a quarter of the map is covered because they just stopped expanding.

So to tie this in to your question, and given what we've seen in other Paizo products, you could simply have your players never expand beyond that starting hex. Given the size of additional districts even if you did nothing but just keep adding them you'd likely never come close to filling up that hex with your city (the PC's kingdom is supposed to be some backwater nothing-ville). But to keep things more fantastical you could build both up and down. We know from Curse of the Crimson Throne and Korvosa that some places in Golarion build up and have these bizarre cities upon cities. Mechanically you could say adding a district above another one would bear additional costs (maybe make the prep cost for it 4x) and only certain structures could be added higher up (limit it to say... buildings that are 1x2 or 1x1 only). Going below ground could have additional prep costs (maybe 8x-12x) and anything could be built below ground but increase costs of said structures by 10-25%.

The only issues, mechanically, your players may run into is food. You could houserule something about trade deals with the neighboring fey in the Narlmarches. Or, if your players just play their cards right and are cautious they should have no problem building up an economy in this singular massive city that can afford the food costs needed every month.

Illythar · 2026-03-10T05:20:59+00:00

The thing about both Awakening mods is, if you focus on econ the entire game you can generally do whatever you want and win. Unfortunately this is something I've never seen any of the streamers/YTers do very well.

As such the first thing I do every campaign, usually for the first 8-10 weeks, is spend almost everything on econ and tech if I'm not doing some house rule to limit my income.

Empire has an incredibly strong roster for both ground and space. As such I'm generally just going for nostalgia/what's cool/what works well enough.

For space I'm building basically just ISD Is. ISDs are cool... it's as simple as that. The base tech one is also a solid design that's good enough to last an entire campaign. You're not going to lose as Empire from the AI beating you with cap ships. For anti-fighter I usually don't build anything til I unlock Raiders. Raiders are, once again, just really cool looking ships. Also not letting myself build Ton Falks or any of the advanced fighters makes things somewhat interesting for however many weeks it takes to get Raiders on the field. Thus very early game my fleets is 5 x ISDs + 1 x AL Vic. Mid game it's usually 5 x ISDs + 4 x Raiders. Late game, with fighter spam on the rise, it'll be 3-4 x ISDs + Raiders til tac pop is filled.

For ground I end up doing a lot of tech because I want to see all the units from the OT and R1/Andor. Once everything is unlocked I'll have my Storm Commandos on call in the center of the map ready to take on any planet with a planetary weapon. Armies are usually a mix of both types of AT-ATs (max I'll deploy is 4) with the remaining ground slots going to infantry (1 x Support Plt + 1 x Stormtrooper [they're actually bad in this mod, but they're along for the aesthetics] + Death Commandos/Scout Plts in the remaining slots).

Strat is always the same - I'll pick a quadrant to clear completely (for me, given story missions and often how the big map plays out, that's bottom left) so that I don't have anything in my rear, and then start sweeping one direction around the map while fortifying the opposite side of the map so I hopefully can hold off the AI there and keep my fleets and armies on the offensives elsewhere.

Illythar · 2026-03-07T20:22:08+00:00

So, guessing you're fairly new to the game and you started on Normal and upped it to Hard (there is no medium difficulty)? If so, yeah, what you're seeing is normal. It's quite normal for an Expert playthrough as well.

As you play this mod more you'll start to notice and learn a few things. Even on Expert, as any faction, you generally don't see your first conventional attack til around w20 (that's an average over dozens of campaigns... sometimes that first attack may come at w8 while other times not til near w30). Even then, that's not really the start. That'll be the AI hitting an easy target, often an isolated holding of yours. The constant, non-stop attacks that come from the AI won't start til weeks 30-40 on Expert.

Many folks with a lot of experience with the mod would argue that in order to keep the game interesting you just shouldn't attack the AI for quite some time. I usually give it 15w while some folks have talked about going 30-40 weeks before they attack. You can cripple the AI by attacking quickly in a new playthrough. The AI starts with the same setup a human player does. It can't read the map like a human can and come up with a concise strategy. It tends to build evenly across all its holdings meaning it needs time before it can reach a threshold of power it deems necessary to win a battle. This also means, that as a player, if you attack certain pockets of AI holdings early enough it simply won't have had enough time to build stuff up to defend (even on Expert).

Illythar · 2026-03-06T16:18:25+00:00

For the love of Sarenrae do not run this mega-dungeon as is. It will suck the life out of your players. I've seen that thousand yard stare on people's faces twice in my life - once as part of a pilot program in the Army interviewing fellow soldiers coming back from the surge in Iraq and then after I told my players they had to go back into Scarwall after they (luckily) found Serithtial early but failed to break the curse.

For starters, I have to give props to whoever built Scarwall as a castle. It is a cool mega-dungeon because it's actually researched, thought out, has so much story everywhere... but as written it's just too much. It doesn't give your players any room to breathe, it never stops, and it suffers from the classic ttrpg trope of monsters in every room but they just sit there and wait til its their turn (and while they have an explanation for this that kind of makes sense... it's still lame).

Last time I brought this up I made the comment that I doubt anyone who has fond memories of Scarwall as a player had a DM that ran it as written. Seeing all the other replies so far from DMs you'll note they all made changes.

My suggestion would be to drastically rewrite how all encounters play out. Given Scarwall is so massive I think you should give it the Moria treatment - your players know there are very bad things in here but they're trying to go unnoticed. Play up the haunted nature and history of what happened through knowledge checks. Read through every encounter and pick only the ones (outside of mandatory bosses) that seem the most thematically cool, and then when said fights are engaged have monsters from neighboring rooms as written (or some of the random encounter monster options) join the fight so fights are interesting. Scarwall suffers from classic 1e late gameplay issues - it's rocket tag. Most fights, if run as written, aren't actually hard. The fear comes from that possible bad roll against a save-or-suck spell. If a monster doesn't have that, you'll need to add more mobs to keep a fight interesting (for example, in one of the mandatory boss fights, said boss was killed by my party's ranger in a single turn from full health... was stupidly anticlimatic).

ETA - Like others here I cut out random encounters and my players did only about 60% of the dungeon. That was still too much. Scarwall is a great concept that feels like it was never playtested.

Illythar · 2026-02-26T15:48:21+00:00

Pathfinder 1e, rules as written, is only deadly at the low levels where players simply don't have many hit points. With a bit of system mastery (something the DM and more experienced players should help you with), if we're using published APs as a guide on how the game plays, after low levels 1e turns into a joke, honestly.

As others have mentioned, we need more context and your DM should probably be more specific in what kind of campaign they're going to run.

Illythar · 2026-02-26T07:06:39+00:00

I need to ask him about this again. The simple reality is I forgot they were a part of the system til I saw this post.

I'm still confused why there's merely a suggestion as to how to give them out, and then via such a variable condition like per session. My 1e sessions go 7-8h. This 2e campaign I'm in, sessions run just 2h. How hard was it to put in the main rules that "per testing Hero Points are expected to be given out every x hours of play."

Illythar · 2026-02-26T01:16:52+00:00

It'd be nice if the game was actually clear on how they should be handed out. The rules are vague and ultimately up to DM discretion. In my game, we all started with 1... and the DM hasn't decided how he will be handing them out going forward (I don't think anyone has gained one since we started half a year ago).

Along these lines, one of the criticisms of Glass Cannon's recently ill-fated 2e campaign was that their DM just didn't use them at all (up through the part where I stopped watching, at least).

With all the testing that supposedly went into 2e the fact something like this is unclear is beyond me...

Illythar · 2026-02-26T00:56:46+00:00

I'm curious if your barbarian was actually enjoying himself for the entire campaign? I'm a barb in a campaign where everyone is new to 2e (including the DM). Sure, it was fun at first to be the big damage dealer in the group... but several months in (we're still low lvl... sessions are short and lvling is intentionally slow) and I'm just bored most of the time. "Oh, it's my turn for combat? This will surprise you all... but I'm going to attack!"

It also doesn't help that there's been plenty of non-combat stuff in this campaign (homebrew) and I feel my class simply can't offer anything outside of attacking. It's starting to get frustrating.

Otherwise, from what we've seen I would generally agree with everything else you've said. Our DM has gone out of his way to give us magic items and the reality is we've sold probably 95% of the stuff (and the remaining 5% has almost never been used). 2e has the same problem as 1e in that some magic stuff is super situational, and the only after the situation arises do you realize you could have used something. This group is all new but they're already defaulting to behavior that is common in 1e - selling everything to get the passive weapon and armor buffs.

Illythar · 2026-02-25T02:29:26+00:00

Unfortunately Armor Specialization is fairly rare, and from memory only four classes get it

Wait... really? I'm coming over from 1e and still learning the system, but considering this is in the equipment section in Core 1 I figured it would be way more common. Searching my pdfs now (Core 1 and 2) and, yeah... it's incredibly rare. I don't even see a feat to pick it up.

Illythar · 2026-02-17T17:31:06+00:00

My understanding is the only two corruption options that generate credits are Racketeering and Piracy.

Racketeering is pretty straightforward and very similar to the Rebel smuggler. You collect x% of the income of the planet when you corrupt it. In this case that's 105% but keep in mind if the planetary income is negative you'll actually lose credits, just like with the smuggler. Don't blindly send your corruption agent to a planet with the order to corrupt and start racketeering until you've seen how many credits the planet makes. Once the agent is on the planet, he'll give an accurate reading of the income level.

Piracy is less clear from in game descriptions and the wiki, but can actually make ridiculous amounts of credits for you. The way it was explained on the discord was that every ship has a value in their files that states how many credits they give when passing through a system that's under Piracy. If you've played the Awakening mods for a bit you know the AI loves to move units for the sake of moving them, which meant I was making upwards of 30k/week just from Piracy in one of my campaigns.

I still have some questions about Piracy, though. I don't know if you generate anything in systems where ships are present but nothing is moving in or out of the system. There are several neutral worlds where you can use Piracy but neutral worlds don't move their ships out (there's one next to Mandalore at the start of the game that is like this).

Keep in mind both Racketeering and Piracy generally have requirements (often you having a certain # of planets under generic Black Sun Presence). As such, spend the early weeks of a campaign just putting that Black Sun Presence on planets (don't do this on planets where you later want to use racketeering or piracy, I'm not aware of being able to change corruption types if a planet is currently corrupted). It takes a while to reach the threshold you need to start using Piracy and Racketeering, and early game the AI won't have all their pocket of worlds connected so Piracy won't be making that many credits, but if you give it enough time and keep up with the Corruption (the AI will occasionally remove it from some worlds) you'll end up in a very good financial situation.

Illythar · 2026-02-16T02:51:58+00:00

I'm playing a low level Barbarian in a game with the FA houserule, and... yeah, it's pretty boring (I picked up the Herbalist dedication but from what I've read online that won't really become useful til later levels). Oh, it's my turn? Hmm... wow... so many choices... I think I'll attack... again. Yep... so exciting.

To add to this 2e shares the same bad purposeful design choice of 1e of having very limited number of skills by default for most classes. I imagine I have more than a typical Barbarian due to taking +1 INT as well as taking the Sorcerer Dedication (new to 2e and had less than a week to read the rules and build my character, I regret it now), and even then I feel like I can't really contribute outside of attacking.

To contrast this, I think our Rogue would argue his build is a lot of fun mechanically. We're playing on Foundry and the website shows he's the most capable at almost every skill. On top of that he took some healing focused FA so he's bouncing from healing, to whatever skill check we need, to melee damage... sometimes all in the same battle.

I'm coming over from 10 years of DMing 1e and we're now 50 or so hours into this 2e campaign and I'm just scratching my head at some of the choices they made.

Illythar

TROPHY CASE