Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is rolling out a major update for the game today that will introduce a new mode called Territory Battles. These Territory Battles will take place with your guild and will allow you to use your entire collection of heroes to wage war.
Although the update isn’t quite live for us yet over here, StarWars.com received a lot of information about the upcoming mode in an interview John Salera, general manager of Galaxy of Heroes and the head of the EA Capital Games studio.
What we do know from the interview is that cooperation with your guildmates will be key to success in this new mode. Think of it as the raids that are currently available but on a much larger scale. Here’s what Salera has to say about the mode.
Yes, it definitely increases the scale of the battle quite dramatically. A Guild in our game can have up to 50 players. We currently have over 120 characters and nearly 30 ships available to acquire. So a full Guild can bring around 7,500 units to bear against this epic, living battlefield. It’s massive! And importantly, this is the first time players have been able to benefit from all aspects of their collection of characters and ships — including every single element of progression of gear, level, abilities, rarity, and mods. And that was one of the founding goals of this feature. We wanted a new way for people to play collaboratively with their Guild, to have all aspects of their collection be directly relevant, and to have it step up the scale of the experience beyond anything they’ve seen before.
This means that an active guild is key for this mode. If you happen to be in an inactive guild you might want to jump ship and find a more active one if you want to participate and have success in Territory Battles. New characters will be introduced with this mode including Rebel Officer Leia Organa and Captain Han Solo. Since this first battle takes place on Hoth those two characters will be decked out in their Empire Strikes Back outfits.
Furthermore, depending on where the battles take place, your characters can receive boosted stats. With this being Hoth that means characters such as the Hoth Rebel Scout and Hoth Rebel Soldier will receive boosted stats. We don’t yet know if this means Snowtrooper will be receiving a similar buff as of right now. It’s possible that Empire units won’t be allowed in this event as the Event Calendar says Rebels, Light Side and Phoenix Squadron characters are required.
A new way of measuring the power of a player’s collection is also being introduced called Galactic Power. Here’s what Salera had to say about that.
The idea of Galactic Power stemmed from the fact that we wanted to capture a more holistic picture of how much a person has done to level up their character, from gear to mods to star rating. Galactic Power is the term we use to summarize the total power of a player’s characters, ships, and all the upgrades they have applied to them. It’s a simple way to understand the total scale of a player’s collection. We also track and display the total Galactic Power of an entire Guild. Furthermore, in a Territory Battle, one of the activities is deploying units to an active territory. The units deployed this way will apply their power to that territory. The more Galactic Power deployed, the more points the player will earn for their Guild on that territory.
Another idea we started with was wanting to provide value to all units, even those that the players might not normally bring to battle. That’s how we came up with Platoon Missions. These missions require a random selection of characters and players fill out the platoons by assigning characters to them. This means though that you can’t use the character in other missions in that phase — so this is where the strategy comes in. Guild members must work together to make sure they have the optimal combat squads and still are able to complete the Platoon Missions, which can take strategic landmarks like the Ion Cannon to provide special abilities for your guild in future battles.
From the outside looking in, it looks like Territory Battles will operate like a game of Risk. Guildmates will deploy their heroes to certain areas and coordinate them in battle. Both characters and ships will have a role in the Territory Battles so this seems like an excellent opportunity to build up your ship roster and actually have a good reason for doing so.
A new trailer was released to coincide with the event that you can check out in this post. We’ll update this post with more information once the update is available to us.
Update 1: The game has updated and added in a couple new areas in your guild hub. We have the Guild Events section which is not yet opened for us and we have the Guild Search section. Guild Search allows you to look at other guilds, including guilds your allies are in, and request to join them.
The update has been delayed, however.
Hiya Holotable heroes,
We have found a fix for the visual issue affecting training droids (See dev update <<HERE>>) and certain characters during the pack opening sequence. This fix will go up as soon as possible. As a result, we will not be launching the first Territory Battle at 6AM this Wednesday (8/30) as intended. However, we do plan to release it shortly, and will keep you posted.