The Players’ New Republic of Star Wars Pt1: A New Hope
22nd December 2024
Rosco
8 mins
Most of you reading this are probably well aware already, but in recent years - this year in particular (2024) - the Star Wars miniatures wargaming community has been faced with a bittersweet reality: official support for some of its most beloved games is coming to an end. Star Wars Armada and X-Wing are set to lose their official backing from Atomic Mass Games (AMG) in 2025, while Imperial Assault was declared a “complete game” by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), back in April 2019. Now, instead of fading into obscurity… the passion for these games continues to burn brightly thanks to the tireless efforts of a passionate community.
This will be part of a multi-part post looking into the current state of play for these three games and where they’re headed in the future…
How does a game survive when the official devs are no longer feeding it new content? Well… of course, the community takes over.
No… not quite like that lol
When Official Support Ends: A New Beginning for the Community
For many players, the end of official support can feel like a gut punch (that’s how I initially felt anyway). With few or no new updates or fresh content in a long time, and with the last lot of officially supported tournaments on the horizon, it was beginning to feel like Armada and X-Wing were set to start dying a slow death, which sent waves of different emotions across the community. However, what we've also seen since the June 2024 announcement of AMG’s decision to withdraw support for X-Wing and Armada is something far more powerful—a surge of creativity and dedication from the community.
Key groups within the Star Wars Armada and X-Wing communities respectively have started developing their own plans for balancing, designing possible new content, and running competitive play events. In fact, many believe the best days of these games may still lie ahead, driven by the innovations of the people who love them most - which also includes people with some very relevant skills and experience. The Imperial Assault community, too, has embraced its "complete" status, with fans designing new campaigns, challenges, and fan-made expansions to keep the game alive and well for those who love the game.
Not Just Rules Updates and Balance Changes
One of the most remarkable aspects of the community's response has been its ability to rapidly create player committees in response to the withdrawal of official support. X-Wing, Armada and Imperial Assault all have very dedicated teams of people that are, or preparing to be, the new guardians of (what I’m calling) the “Players’ New Republic of Star Wars” (I think I would’ve found myself under some questioning for calling it the ‘People’s Republic of… um, never mind…😅). As I got more into writing this, I realised that I’d bitten a bit more than I can chew… So, in future posts I’ll go in to more detail on some other points, but the main communities leading the charge for each of the aforementioned games are as follows:
X-Wing
The X-Wing Alliance (XWA) have already introduced unofficial points update in beta (currently version 3) to bring balance to ships, tweak the power level of certain factions and bring back existing ships that were previously left out by AMG in X-wing Version 2.5. Squad building options for XWA Beta points is available in YASB2.0 and in the Launch Bay NEXT mobile app (not the website yet). Already popular among some players, the return of some our favourite ships into the game and some different squad building options has breathed some new life into the game, though opinions continue to differ between 2.0 & 2.5 players. That said, the move to community content now opens that up for those who like to play a certain version over the other, and that’s pretty great - IMHO - as having fun is meant to be the whole reason we play these games, so play it how you like to!
X2PO X-Wing: The Legacy Continues is a community that focuses on X-Wing version 2.0 and keeping that alive for those who prefer it, particularly for those who like to retain more agency over list building with all the available upgrades for all of the ships and pilots up to the full 200pts (or for a bid), plus removing the somewhat contentious Random turn Order After setting Dials (ROAD) and obstacle rule changes that came in with 2.5. List building is even available using the Infinite Arenas Legacy Squad Builder.
Either way, both of these are excellent tools to help you get the most out of your games and in the way you like to play them, while also having the support to do so!
Armada
The Armada Ruleset Collective, work is underway in looking at the current state of the game and what it will look like following the ‘final’ update from AMG that was apparently ‘due’ last month (November 2024). There is currently a beta test in progress for some minor upgrade and objective changes during a purpose-run online tournament, so as to gauge community response as they prepare to take on more after support officially ends. There’s no website at the moment, but all announcements, news and discussion can currently be found on the Armada Hub Discord channel, an active invite link can be found on our links page. I presume that much, much more info will be coming out from them in the future, which I am very excited for. I’ll leave it at that for now.
Next up, is Armada Legacy and Armada Legends. These both began with Legacy, where a passionate group of former FFG play testers and leading community members started a community expansion project for creating content last year (2023), which was of course, some time before AMG decided to start divesting of the game. Since then, the project has grown and been re-shaped, with a very handy website (here) added to provide links and tools to access the third party providers for all the current ships and squadrons that are in the official version of Armada! As I understand it, ARC and Legacy have a current agreement on rules and intend to run concurrently, with ARC maintaining the lead for Organised Play (OP) moving forward, as detailed in a Reddit update post from Legacy, here. Fleet building is also available for previous beta content using the Armada Fleet Builder website/app and selecting the ‘Legacy Beta’ variant.
"Dear humanity, we regret being alien bastards, we regret coming to earth, and we most definitely regret that the Corps just blew up our raggedy ass fleet!” - Johnson
Armada Legends is a spin-off from the Legacy team that is focussed on “a community-centric space dedicated to developing and sharing homebrew content for Star Wars Armada. This includes content that integrates seamlessly with the base game, complements Armada Legacy, and even incorporates elements from other media franchises”. These guys have some excellent content and they have worked closely with other members to even create a Legends test variant of a test Fleet Builder for AWESOME Halo and Battlestar Galactica content (additional content needs to be toggled in the settings first)!! Personally, I’m very excited for this content and I will be getting ALL of my minis out of storage for this when I move back home to Aus in 2026!
Links to the Discords for both Legacy and Legends can be found on our links page. Failing that, reach out on Reddit and they’ll respond pretty quickly!
Imperial Assault
For Imperial Assault, the Imperial Assault Continuity Project (IACP) has been operating for around 5 years now, bringing new characters, organised play and fan-made campaigns and other new ways to explore the game and experience new stories. Currently in the middle of their TENTH season (2 seasons per year), IACP have been creating new and enjoyable content for the competitive skirmish scene for both online and in-person play, their dev cycle has been through many iterations and is now a well-oiled machine of Star Wars content, including new characters from recent movies and TV Shows! The community is pretty active still and printing files or links to third party providers is usually readily available through the website, on Reddit or their Discord here. IACP stand out as a success story among many others across a vast array of different other IPs, where a community has taken charge of their game and carried on for a significant period of time.
The Role of Online Platforms
A CIS Subjugator Class Heavy Cruiser: Terrifying…
You might have noticed a bit of a recurring theme, but thanks to forums, Discord servers, and other social media groups, players and fans have all of these different platforms to share and discuss their creations with others such as all those mentioned above. Reddit, Discord, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, and fleet/squad builders have all become bustling hubs for collaboration, where players can exchange ideas, provide feedback, and keep the conversation alive. At present, the major ones for all of these games are mainly on Reddit and Discord; I highly recommend that you get involved if you’re interested, doesn’t matter if you’re a veteran, rookie or just curious.
Where to Next…?
Well, from here, we’ll likely go on to talk more about what each of these communities are doing, how you can get involved and where you can get your hands on some sweet, sweet minis!! I’ll go into some other community content success stories from other games like Star Wars CCG and BloodBowl, and maybe why some people are more excited than others (but that’s also incredibly subjective… so I might just leave that for discussion in the relevant Discords).
To be continued…
Cheers and thanks for reading,
- Rosco 🥃
