Some context to my SWM journey... Had a small collection 10 years or so back, didn't get to play so sold it. Been getting back into it now recently with some new ability to actually play more. One of my first interests were the Ultimate Mission books and ended up getting enough of a collection to play some of them... That brings us to the topic of the post...

We started with the Rebel Storm book and the first mission was pretty straight forward in being understood, though it seemed very hard for the Rebel side to win that one. Also had to figure out an error with the character names vs. picture. Playing the 2nd mission, it was again pretty straightforward with its setup and rules, though the 2nd win condition it offers to the Rebel player, where they only use the 8 Bespin guards to win the fight, seems also pretty impossible. Most of the questions, hiccups, and thoughts now come from trying to play the 3rd mission...

The 3rd mission seems to have an excessive amount of holes and issues... Firstly, the Imperial player has 6 setup spaces but 3 squads totaling to 18 pieces. The books says the imperial player can use 2 squads for reserves but acts like this is optional. Reserves was the first thing that so far has seemed underwhelming, it almost never seems advantageous to put pieces into a reserve. Anyway, back to the question/confusion... It would seem that according to rules (FAQ) if you run out of spaces for setup you use the closest adjacent spaces to your starting spaces. So does anyone know if that makes it legal to jam all 18 pieces into that opening hallway for that mission? Also, what if the rebel player setup first and setup their pieces right in front of my 6 square starting area "cutting it off" Do I get to setup behind their pieces once I go to setup after filling in my other 6? That whole process didn't make much sense...

Another confusion is if I can setup all 18 pieces at once, then the whole hidden movement mechanic this mission introduces becomes obsolete... My troopers would always be able to see the droids. Another confusion is it talks about the rebel player having the win goal of "Having Leia escort R2" but it really wasn't detailed about that process... There was no text that specifically forbid R2 from moving but it felt like that was the intention, that Leia had to reach R2 first to then move together to the win goal area... Also if that is the case, then furthermore the hidden movement means pretty much nothing. Leia is very likely to only have one path to R2, and then an obvious path from there to the win condition area... Another wrinkle is if I know R2 is the goal and can have all my pieces in play from the start, and if he can't move, then isn't it pretty easy to just go immediately kill him? If he is able to move without Leia, then it seems the Rebel player could win very easily in like a single turn or 2...

So any help understanding exactly what the intention of that 3rd mission is would be cool, as well as wondering people's general feelings about the Ultimate Missions. They seem possibly pretty poorly executed but I could be wrong about that with my little experience.