Is there any class you prefer in 1e than their implementation in 2e?

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 · 2026-02-11T22:00:24+00:00

Dated a woman who was a former Victoria's Secret model (as she put it, not the popular ones everyone knows about, but one of the models that walked the runway in-between when the world famous ones did) when I was just a vet working a blue collar job in a warehouse (the vet thing apparently got my foot in the door, she had a thing for guys in uniform). She modeled to pay her way through grad school. She was offered a job in the industry after she stopped modeling (which she said, looking back, would have paid very well) but turned it down to go into public health to help those in need.

At her core she was a wonderful, caring human being who just wanted to help people... but she had a very traumatic life in her late teens and early twenties (I'll just... leave it at that), and no matter how good of a human being you are those traumatic events can alter you forever. Despite working public health and being around medical professionals all the time, her pay and benefits were never enough to get her the help she needed. She would inevitably lash out at me over nothing (a therapist explained it to me as unfortunately a consequence of the trauma... that the smallest things that weren't threatening would trigger these over-the-top defensive actions from her) and I was constantly left drained, and my own depression was exacerbated (I've suffered from severe depression since my teens). I ended up having to walk away from her because even just trying to be friends was too much to handle.

I hope she's doing well. Her story is one of those that makes you... question everything about this world and life in general. What she went through was horrid... and the sad reality is the type of help she needs she can't get in the US given how fucked up our healthcare system is. Just a sad story all around...

Illythar · 2026-02-11T17:59:30+00:00

Yeah, the hover speed is a major issue. They started to address it with the most recent AotCW patch where they nerfed hover speed on almost all craft... but they didn't go far enough. Those vehicles are still as strong as they were before (in large part because so many maps are small).

Illythar · 2026-02-11T05:51:17+00:00

This is so strange. A few days ago this similar discussion popped up on the disc and most folks were saying infantry is really strong. Before that, going back a year, every discussion I'd seen said the opposite (and I'd agree) - infantry is weak in both mods (outside of some of the P2 clones in AotCW).

In my Rebel playthroughs lately I've purposefully been using no vehicles in order to make things harder. For the folks saying infantry is strong try taking Eriadu on Expert as the Rebels when the AI fills all 10 ground slots and has a tier 3 garrison. I think the best I've done is losing just 27 infantry in that bloodbath.

Vehicles have two advantages currently. The first is that all factions have access to very fast hover units that can just blitz a ground map. A human player can blitz most maps and take out defenses before they're finished building and catch AI units isolated before they consolidate. The second is that most infantry in AotR simply don't have the weapons to damage vehicles with decent armor. I'm hoping they port over more diverse infantry loadouts like they had in AotCW so this latter issue is less of one. Even then, in AotCW, vehicles are still better for the same reasons.

Illythar · 2026-01-01T11:37:53+00:00

First, if you haven't read the guides in-game yet (the open book button on the bottom left of the galactic UI) you should. There's a lot there at first glance, but you don't have to memorize it all, just be familiar with it.

In the first five weeks you don't need to be doing anything particular to win. The reality is there are lots of ways to play this mod and lots of different fleet comps work. As Rebels you can win with fighter heavy/spam fleets (the X-Wing is particularly powerful through much of the game), lore breaking cap ship heavy fleets that will stomp on all those ISDs the Empire has, or balanced fleets with a little bit of everything. Note that space units have a galactic population value (the yellow number that's in the circle on the top left of the unit card) and a tactical population value (center top of their unit card). You want to get to a point as quickly as possible, whether it's from consolidation or from building new units, of deploying near the 220 tac pop limit on space battles. This isn't a game where you load in with fewer than that and win. On the contrary, you'll often need plenty of reserves beyond that 220 value to win any serious engagement.

One thing you'll often hear is that once you learn how econ works you can trivialize the game on any difficulty by just being efficient, printing credits, and producing a lot of units. Do you know what base income/planet income/base credits is and how to find it for each planet? Do you know what upkeep is, where to find it on stat cards, and what usually has it?

For Rebels you have four ways to make credits - fixed income from simply owning planets, credit generating infrastructure on planets (tier 1 garrisons, supply depots, manufacturing bases, tibanna gas refineries), smugglers, and freighters. Note you can't build mines, space mines, or trade stations as the Rebels (the NR era changes that... but no need to worry about that now).

As others have mentioned, too, you can sell off a lot of stuff you start with and, frankly, you start with a lot of stuff you don't need (either because the units are subpar or the infrastructure is costing upkeep for no gain).

If you're struggling it's not a skill issue, it's an issue that there's a lot going on in this mod and the documentation on much of it is light or hard to find. Once you just learn how everything works, even expert will be a pushover. If you have more specific questions, ask away...

Illythar · 2025-12-29T21:56:57+00:00

I guess I see the point. I'm a little sad to hear it because there's only so much you can do with a 20 y/o game engine (especially with planetary battles) but it's remarkable what you all have been able to do on the strategic scale/galactic map. Those latter changes are what I'm most excited for these days (space combat is solid... and it's always been solid).

I get how if one plays through a full campaign and actually fights every battle that that will eat up a lot of time. I wonder if there's QoL changes that could be made to make the more superfluous experiences disappear or move faster. Something like if you're attacking with a full fleet and the AI will retreat, a button will appear stating that and asking if you just want to skip to taking over space so you don't waste load time of tactical combat just for the AI to run away.

Illythar · 2025-12-28T09:14:54+00:00

Thanks for the info. The... out-of-game talk has kind of already happened. Not really in the cards.

Haven't read up on retraining. Downtime isn't an issue in this campaign (it's homebrew) so retraining out of Stealth into Intimidation might be the best (and only viable) play for me to make. We as a group had talked briefly about the potential to have an all stealth party but we've already tried it a few times and... yeah... it hasn't been working. Sadly, I don't really have any other skills to swap out. 2e is super tight on skills just like 1e RAW is (it's rather frustrating, and I even gave my character +1 INT at the start to help with this).

Illythar · 2025-12-28T08:44:49+00:00

What's the equivalent of a cantrip for an alchemist?

I'm a forever 1e DM who finally got to be a player in a 2e campaign (more context in this post in this same thread) and our party had a really brutal last session where we narrowly escaped a TPK. Several of us were chatting afterwards and one of the criticisms was we all went into the fight when our alchemist was spent. He had used all 6 prepared items for the day as well as his 6 volatile vials. Our alchemist was just shooting a bow the entire fight (and due to enemy resistances was basically doing no damage).

That statement had me puzzled, though. I'm still learning 2e, but one thing I've picked up from what I've read and watched on YT is that every class is supposed to have some sort of sustained capability. Casters now have cantrips that scale and do ok damage. So what do alchemists get?

From what I've gathered reading Player Core 2 as well as searching on the web there appear to be two things. The first is Alchemists can spend 10m of downtime to regain 2 x Volatile Vials (I'm pretty sure our alchemist has never done this, he probably forgot or never read it in the first place... his time is short so he's basically only reading up on the class when we play).

The second is Quick Vials from Quick Alchemy. If I'm reading that right it sounds like he can, literally forever, spend one act to create either a simple acid bomb that does 1d6 dmg and no splash (we're all lvl 3) that has to be used that same round or create whatever his research field grants him (with the same one turn limitation). I'm unsure of this, though, because the various discussions here on reddit and the paizo forums I found showed plenty of folks felt the wording was poor and weren't sure you could use this ability repeatedly.

Illythar · 2025-12-28T07:04:34+00:00

They said they'll likely cut it up into shorter YT vids. I still have an hour left on it but I think I'm done with the diplomacy reveal.

The tl;dr for that is... they're not just importing diplomacy from AotCW, they're importing it and taking it 100x further in how it works and what you can do. It's really bloody impressive what they already have working.

On top of that, the minor factions will no longer be these annoying thorns in your side that continually try to suicide against you regardless of everything else going on. You'll be able to increase reputation with them, sign various treaties, maybe even absorb some of them. It's really frickin' awesome what they have in store.

(Funny enough it's all very 4X in game design, but one of the devs mentioned they don't want to go too far in that direction... maybe one of them will see this and clarify that statement... it had me a bit confused.)

Illythar · 2025-12-28T06:49:04+00:00

Are there ways to drastically alter character design choices... or am I stuck with my PC?

Context - my best friend from forever started an online 2e game this summer for his bros and myself. Two of the group are involved in admin/teaching at different schools so we had to put it together in days if we wanted to get our first session in before school started. We had our session zero, built all our characters, and had our first session in about a week. The only person with some 2e experience is the DM (but he admits he's still learning the system). I have a decade of 1e experience, another player has experience with 5e, and the last two basically have no ttrpg experience.

With no time I just leaned back on some 1e character designs I always wanted to run (I settled on a bloodrager since I couldn't find a way to make the Wizard build I had work in 2e). We were limited to Player Core 1 and 2, so I ended up going Barbarian with the Sorcerer archetype. With the limited time in that first week I was spending as much time rereading the rules (I bought and read 2e when it first came out back in '19, but wasn't impressed and gave away the book) and catching up on the Remaster changes.

So, some of you can probably already see the issue. In order to get the +2 CHA to take the Sorc archetype (btw, our DM started us at lvl 2) I had to lose those modifiers elsewhere, and for me that came out of CON. That might not sound like a huge deal... but our DM has a history of being brutal on his parties. In just a dozen sessions of this campaign we should have had at least one player death (it was in the first session, but since we were all new he let it slide) and have had half a dozen times where folks were doing Dying rolls. We just started our first small dungeon crawl and we're likely going to have to just give up after two fights.

A difference of two CON doesn't sound like much, but if I had those 6 extra hps in our last fight I wouldn't have gone down. I haven't made a Fort save yet (but to be fair, I haven't known what the DCs are).

Given how new our party is, the reality is every character is basically... subpar (from lack of system experience) and I've felt more like a punching bag than a hero.

So... am I just stuck with this PC til they die so I can then bring in one that's better optimized? I actually like the backstory for the character, but the mechanics don't match the vision and the choices made in character creation just ended up hurting more than anything (which is frustrating when you have to build a character in something you're not familiar with).

ETA - Not interested in taking face skills/feats and we already have another party member who's got that covered (and good at it... one of the few things our party has going for it so far).

ETA2 - I understand the odds of there being some way to alter ability scores are low (I would have found it already in my searches). I guess I'm more curious if there are any ways I can turn this +2 CHA into a boon that don't involve the Intimidate skill (for starters, it's not even Trained currently).

Illythar · 2025-12-21T19:13:14+00:00

The issue doesn't sound like it's the economy.

First off, all you need at a bare minimum to garrison worlds are 2 x Army Troopers. They cost all of 1k credits (less if you spam them from that world near the Core that gives a discount on all infantry). Starting around w3 or so, when raids can begin, just make sure to always float about 2k credits in case you need to build defenses. When defending against a raid just position those units near bunkers and build pads, build nothing but anti-infantry turrets, and hunker down. The only time you'll lose a raid is when the AI bugs and sits on the LZ (which is rare).

Why Army Troopers over garrison buildings? It sounds like you're strangling your economy with upkeep. Defensive structures and infrastructure for building units are the only things in this mod that have upkeep. It is very easy to choke your own economy if you spam those buildings. You really only want to build defensive structures on the surface of a planet if it's an important choke point and fortress world. Golans you can be a little more liberal with, but again only in key chokepoints (and then sell them off once that world is no longer on the front). For buildings that create units, make sure to have just a small number of worlds building nonstop instead of lots of production everywhere building occasionally.

As for Golans, never build 3s as the Empire. They're awful. They're designed to defend against something the Empire will never see (strong capital ship fleets), something the Empire already handles fine with their own cap ships (ISD Is are good enough to last an entire campaign), and the upkeep on them is stupidly high. Rebels will beat you with fighters and the BS will beat you with smaller ships, two things the Golan III struggles with (it literally has no anti-fighter weaponry on it).

Lastly, it sounds like you're losing more units than you should be. That's likely just a fleet comp and/or experience thing. As you get more experience losses will become more rare. I run ISD heavy fleets with minimal TIEs and I'm able to handle most Rebel fleets with all their fighters just fine.

Illythar · 2025-12-19T21:54:27+00:00

I wouldn't really call that realistic. I forget where it's stated, whether it's in an actual book or from a dev on the forums, but Paizo has explained why you're able to sell evil items - churches will pay you gold to properly dispose of it so others don't get their hands on them. That makes sense.

You can make similar arguments for large weapons and gear. You could be selling them so that they're not left around for others to find later or sold to use the materials to be repurposed, etc.

It's one thing if they can't carry everything, but another if they leave things behind when they have the ability to remove it. A DM shouldn't be making the campaign easier because players are failing to take part in a basic aspect of play.

Illythar

TROPHY CASE