Star Wars Imperial Assault: Return to Hoth

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“Echo station 3-T-8, we have spotted Imperial walkers.”
–Echo Base Officer, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

The secret Rebel base on Hoth has been discovered by the Empire. Imperial Star Destroyers blockade the planet from above and Imperial forces descend the surface, led by Darth Vader, and bringing the battle to the entrenched Rebels. As the Rebel heroes flee from the icy planet of Hoth, they have no idea that events ahead may force them to make a desperate gamble and return to the dangers of Hoth!

Return to Hoth is a new expansion for Imperial Assault, offering new content for both campaigns and skirmishes. A brand-new full-length campaign invites you to escape the aftermath of the Battle of Hoth and protect a colony of Rebel refugees from the depredations of the Empire. Meanwhile, four new skirmish missions bring your forces to the icy expanses of Hoth and new rules for four-player skirmish games invite you to experience massive, multi-fronted skirmishes with up to three opponents! 

 Whether you’re playing a narrative campaign or a fast-paced skirmish, the addition of thirty-seven double-sided terrain tiles invites your heroes to travel the snowy wastes of Hoth and race through the claustrophobic corridors of Echo Base. Sixteen sculpted plastic figures also arrive for you to command in campaigns and skirmishes – three new heroes, six Snowtroopers, two Wampas, four HK Assassin Droids, and a SC2-M Repulsor Tank! With new Agenda cards, Class cards, Deployment cards, Item cards, Mission cards, and Supply cards, Return to Hoth expands every game of Imperial Assault.

In addition, four new Ally Packs and Villain Packs correspond with the Return to Hoth expansion, highlighting the most iconic characters introduced in this expansion and offering new cards and missions for campaigns and skirmishes. You can command Imperial forces across the sector with General Sorin, seek a diplomatic solution with Leia Organa, fight bravely with the Echo Base Troopers, or punish your foes as the deadly bounty hunter, Dengar. For more information on these figure packs, visit their announcement article! 


Return to Hoth contains three heroes, six Snowtroopers, four HK Assassin Droids, two Wampas, and one SC2-M Repulsor Tank.

Echo Base Defense

Three new heroes join the forces of the Rebel Alliance at Echo Base in the Return to Hoth expansion. You might heal your friends and protect them from the cold as the loyal medical droid, MHD-19. MHD-19 has been trained in thousands of medical procedures and will go to any lengths to protect his companions – even taking up arms against Imperial soldiers! Alternatively, you could join the Mon Cala special forces and take down your foes from afar as Loku Kanoloa, a deadly marksman. Loku Kanoloa relies on clever battlefield reconnaissance to bring down his targets, placing recon tokens and gaining a host of benefits for attacking enemies with recon tokens. Finally, you may engage in vital operations for the Rebellion as Verena Talos. This deadly operative is eager to take revenge for the destruction of Echo Base, and she’s a fearsome opponent in a campaign or a skirmish. Each of these heroes also features unique talents and abilities in their Class decks, which make playing each hero a dramatically different experience. We’ll explore all of these heroes in much more detail in a future preview.

New Item cards and Supply cards allow you to further customize your heroes as you move through the campaign, whether you’re on Hoth or not. You might purchase a DDC Defender , a pistol that can perform up to three attacks every turn, or you might customize your weapon with a Under-Barrel HH-4 modification. This expanded barrel not only improves your accuracy, it helps you spread your fire across a group of figures.

Return to Hoth also introduces nine new Command cards, granting you new tactics to employ in the skirmish game.Set a Trap allows you to choose any map tile at the start of a round. If you and your opponent both have a figure on that tile at the end of the round, you can perform a free attack with your figure! If you field Loku Kanoloa in your army, you may use Coordinated Attack to have two figures attack the same target simultaneously, potentially destroying a single large target before it can strike! Whether you field these new Rebel heroes in the skirmish game or in your campaign, they have the power to turn the tables against the forces of the Empire.

The Might of the Empire

The Rebellion gains access to several new heroes, but new figures are also eager to join the Imperial and Mercenaries factions. Snowtroopers are similar to Stormtroopers, but benefit from improved surge abilities and insulated Environmental Recovery Gear that can protect them from the freezing cold of Hoth. As the Snowtroopers swarm forward on foot, you can support their attacks with the raw firepower of an SC2-M Repulsor Tank. Meanwhile, the Mercenaries of the galaxy gain some deadly new warriors and monsters. HK Assassin Droids use their advanced technology to gain the upper hand on biological targets and no creature knows the icy wastelands of Hoth as well as the Wampas . When faced with such dangerous enemies, even the greatest Rebel heroes will have a fight cut out for them.   

 

The Empire receives more than just more figures, of course. Two new Agenda sets – Natural Warfare and Defensive Tactics – open the door for you to pursue the heroes with punishing effects throughout the campaign. You may equip your warriors with personal shield generators, or loose a deadly Creature against the Rebels. In addition to these Agenda cards, two new Imperial classes allow you to modify your forces and tailor them to suit whatever gameplay style you prefer. The Precision Training class improves your figures’ attacks with cards like Find the Weakness , while the Armored Onslaught class allows you to use the Empire’s Vehicles to destroy the Rebels withExplosive Munitions . With these new Class cards and Agenda cards, the Empire gains a host of punishing effects to level against the Rebellion.

Bane or Boon

Return to Hoth also introduces a new type of mission as the beleaguered Rebels flee from the Battle of Hoth. This new type of mission is a threat mission, and it gives the Imperial player a new way to demonstrate the power of his nearly limitless resources. Like normal side missions, two threat missions enter play at the beginning of a campaign, and the heroes may choose to undertake the mission anytime that they would choose a side mission. The heroes may choose to ignore threat missions – but as long as a threat mission remains in play, the Imperial player has a Bane Reward card at his disposal.

     

For example, while the Survival of the Fittest threat mission is in play, the Imperial player gains the Weary from Toil Bane Reward card, which forces each hero to suffer strain equal to his activation tokens at the beginning of each mission! However, if the Rebels can fight back against despair and complete a threat mission, the rewards can be significant. If the Rebels successfully complete Survival of the Fittest, the Weary from Toil Bane is converted into the Invigorated by Success Boon, which the Rebel heroes can use once to recover from strain. With the addition of threat missions to the Return to Hoth campaign, the Empire’s power grows more oppressive and the Rebels receive an additional incentive to bring them down.

The Icy Planet

The Rebels may escape from the Empire at the Battle of Hoth, but Imperial forces will never stop searching for them. To stop Imperial operations and safeguard a colony of helpless refugees, the heroes of the Rebellion even dare to return to Hoth! With new heroes and dangerous villains, alongside dozens of new cards for the campaign and skirmish games, Return to Hoth changes your games of Imperial Assault forever!

Legends of the Alliance App:

At the opening of the Return to Hoth campaign for the Legends of the Alliance companion app, it is several days after the Battle of Hoth. Our heroes are stranded on the Imperial-controlled ice planet and they must find a way to escape. Luckily, they are not alone. Joining them are two Echo Base troopers, Lieutenant Talcon and Corporal Kish—who you might remember from the Legends of the Alliance tutorial missions!

As the heroes and their trooper allies trudge across Echo Base’s now-defunct trench line, they are assaulted by Imperial forces under the command of General Sorin. Accompanying this Imperial patrol is a vehicle the heroes have never seen before, the SC2-M Repulsor Tank. This vehicle proves too well armored for the heroes and troopers, so they must find an alternate means of taking it down.

Much of what you encounter in this campaign may be familiar if you played through the physical Return to Hoth expansion, but for this new take on the Return to Hoth campaign in the Legends of the Alliance app, we decided to make Sorin’s Repulsor Tank central to the plot. We wanted the tank to not only make an appearance in the opening mission, but to be impervious to normal attacks. Thus, the opening mission presents the players with a formidable puzzle: how do you defeat an indestructible enemy?

The initial version of the mission presented a satisfying puzzle, but once it was solved, it became a little too easy to rush to the ending of this mission, especially upon repeat plays. As we revised, we decided that players would need to not only defeat the tank, but the entire Imperial patrol! This incentivizes you to spend more time dealing with the other Imperial forces, rather than just rushing to defeat the tank… but you still can’t take too long to take out the tank, however, because it is such a powerful threat. Leave it alive too long, and it will blast your team to bits!

Another late addition to this mission was the DF.9 Anti-Infantry Battery. Players first encountered one of these laser turrets (albeit in less-than-working condition) in the introductory mission from the original Return to Hoth campaign, which also has a mechanism for allowing the heroes to fire this turret. So, we decided to bring this mechanic back, with some tweaks to take advantage of the app’s functionality.

In the original campaign, this turret could only be fired four times in the entire mission. For the digital mission, it can be fired any number of times, but only twice per round. This keeps the turret as a tool the heroes can use throughout the mission, but also limits the frequency with which it can be used. And as you might expect, there are some other interesting ways that you could use the turret, but if you haven’t played the campaign yet, we’ll leave those for you to discover.

One other element of this mission that we liked a lot is the Echo Base Troopers. On this mission, the heroes are accompanied by Lieutenant Talcon and Corporal Kish, in the form of a regular Echo Base Trooper group. These Echo Base Troopers are a powerful pair for the players. Their Front-Line ability gives them strong attacks, stronger even than most hero starting weapons, so long as they are in close with the enemy. At five health, they won’t survive long in close quarters, so keeping them alive becomes a challenge. However, you may find it’s worth your while to keep them alive through the entirety of the mission…

Designing a Mission

As we continued to move forward, we knew the second mission of the campaign needed to introduce the main villains: General Sorin and Dengar. A general bent on hunting the surviving Rebels on Hoth would likely be camped at Echo Base and would probably have a shuttle to steal! And if a general like that were desperate enough to prove themselves to the Empire, they may even hire an elite bounty hunter to help them in their task.

After choosing the mission’s premise, we took stock of the Return to Hoth box expansion’s components. We wanted to use as many of the tiles and figures as possible, and it quickly became clear that if we were going to visit Echo Base and encounter Wampas in this campaign, the second mission was our best chance!

With a hazy feel for what the mission might contain, we looked at what it needed to accomplish. Over the course of the second mission, the heroes needed to evade Imperial pursuers, encounter Wampas, elude Dengar, infiltrate Echo Base, steal a shuttle from under Sorin’s nose, and escape from Hoth. Noting the Wampa tunnels running beneath the base, the story seemed to write itself!

But now that we knew the story our second mission would tell, how would it go about doing that?

First, we considered how we wanted players to feel as they played the mission. The heroes would be running low on supplies as the Empire closed in around them. They would be chased into the uncharted caves below Echo Base where they would be lost and cold—maybe even a little frustrated, too.

A maze where you can’t even trust the map’s geometry seemed like the perfect way to make players feel as lost as their characters. We theory-crafted a few concepts before deciding to use a maze we knew we could build, along with a few tricks to make it difficult to remember where you’d been. The mission seemed like a perfect embodiment of the vision. And the maze was glorious!

But the mission was not. The heroes spent too much time walking through empty hallways, setting up map sections, fighting minor skirmishes, and freezing to death. On top of that, it was much too long. Some playtesters reported wandering the caves for as many as five hours! Each week we trimmed a little more of the maze, and each week it was still too long. Eventually we accepted that the original vision was too ambitious. Reluctantly, we stripped out everything that we thought defined the mission and sent it back to the testers.

To our surprise and joy, the reports were positive! From our isolated perspective we felt like we’d had to sacrifice our vision. But in reality, players were finally experiencing what we’d set out to create. We had to remember that Imperial Assault is first and foremost a tactical combat game. While the mission’s initial design had strayed too far from this core experience, we could still deliver on the vision.

We were satisfied with the mission’s buildup, but we still needed a satisfying conclusion. Reinvigorated, we got to work building on this stable ground.

Rediscovering a Mission

The longer we work on a mission, or any game project, the more we learn about what it isn’t. We know so much about what isn’t in the mission anymore, that it can be difficult for us to see what the experience really is. Sometimes during playtesting it’s helpful to take a step back, refocus, maybe ask another developer to play your content, and critically analyze what the game is right now.

When we reexamined the second mission, we noticed that it flowed well, but toward a natural conclusion that was, at the time, far too complicated. With fresh eyes, we saw that we were trying to do too much storytelling “on camera.” It was interfering with good mission pacing. With a new sense of what the mission really was, we reconfigured the ending to carry the story with core Imperial Assault mechanics. The front of the mission was already interesting enough to be memorable. Now, we just needed to let the heroes play.

Reimagining the Return to Hoth campaign for the Legends of the Alliance app was a wonderful experience—and it went far beyond these two missions. Each of the six missions in the campaign (five of which you’ll play in a single playthrough) offered its own unique challenges and rewards, and we hope you find the new campaign similarly challenging and rewarding.