This mod was designed so that when you take a loss, it hurts and when you inflict a loss, it'll feel (semi-)rewarding.

Getting a good income is pretty easy to achieve. I mostly play as the Empire and usually have an income of 13k a week, pretty much constantly having at least one ISD in fabrication. For the times I play as the Rebels, I usually have an income around 10k a week. The Imperial mining planets give a great amount of income. The Rebels get a good amount from all the smuggling (Rebel Sympathizer.) Both factions benefit from having frighters going around too, which I usually run about three to four of the second tier frieghters.

Over the course of the campaign the income snowballs rather easily if you pay attention to it. It's easier and more straightforward to snowball as the Empire, but the effect is even stronger as the rebels.

I guess new players tend to struggle more with the Rebels, so here's how to get the ball rolling:

Start of the campaign, hit pause

- Think of this phase as planning your grand strategy for the Galactic Civil War.
- Sell all structures on planets you're likely to lose to the Empire/Black Sun early on. Focus the selling on planets with low income, low development potential or maps that don't give a good advantage to the defender (look for bottle necks in the galactic map, and space and land if you know the battle maps).
- Sell high upkeep high cost defensive structures (Ion Cannon, Shield Generator, Generator, Turbolasers) on planets you're either unlikely to lose (Mon Cala) or that are not strategically important (Hoth). Defensive structures should be reserved for strategically important planets only (usually this means your bottleneck planets).
- Sell space units that provide very little value in battles or that are easily lost in battles without heavy micro management by you because each unit lost is literally money wasted (I usually get rid of low tier fighters that don't fill important early game roles as well as Braha-Tok gunships). I tend to always save at the very least the Z-95's, X-wings and Y-wings as they have clear roles that they fill extremely well when used correctly early on. Fighters with Astromech droids are also superior.
- Save all land units so you don't have to spend money buying new ones for a while. Especially V-25s are insanely powerful early on when used offensively in large groups with a few seraphs against weakly defended planets.
- Designate one to three planets for production. You can choose where you want to focus but I recommend at least Mon Cala as it is great for both ground and space production. Mon Cala should focus on producing ground based X-wings and Mon Cal cruisers as quickly as possible. Spend credits on getting the production on Mon Cala ready immediately, elsewhere production is not as important until later in the early game since your focus will be in building economy.
- Designate all remaining planets that you plan to defend for economy, this means building towards having at least a rebel camp and always a manufacturing base + garrison if it's available. Spend the rest of your credits from the selling of units and structures towards this. Eventually all economy planets should have at least a supply depot and garrison post.

Early campaign, after unpausing:

- Gather your fleets and fleet heroes into fleet only stacks in all sectors, gather all your ground units and ground heroes into ground only stacks. These will be used for attacking and active defense. A ground or space unit sitting on a planet that is not in need of being defended is useless, if the same unit could make an impact as part of an army or fleet.
- Your first focus with fleets and armies above should be to connect the outer rim while taking as little losses as possible while doing so. There should be other guides of how to do combat 😉. The strategic focus should be holding as many planets as possible for the quest "The Mon Calamari Buffer zone" before it even starts and getting Mon Mothma to Mon Cala. The earlier you complete these quests, the better as your fleet power level goes up faster with Ackbar and the free cruisers Mon Mothma gets you which lets you either push towards the core or towards the minor factions.
- Always have the max amount of Rebel Sympathizers getting credits from high value planets. Pause and check back constantly that you're always building and sending out sympathizers.
- As soon as your first manufacturing base completes, start churning out GR-75 Freighters.
- Get Bespin, build Tibanna Gas Refineries immediately and park Lando in space on Bespin for extra income.
- Get Raxus Prime (part of Buffer Zone) and Ord Mantell as early as possible for salvage bonuses. Over time the credits made from the bonuses will be huge.


Some other advice:

- If you're willing to cheese in order to protect your planets and therefore your economy, attack enemy planets that can be used as bottlenecks, don't land troops and just hold their space with a fleet instead of holding the fleet above planets you own. It's probably the most effective way of protecting your own planets. Obviously don't do this on planets where the enemy has ground based space weapons though.
- Don't ignore the missions, at the very least complete every mission that requires little effort or gives a good reward.
- When a unit no longer serves any purpose, or you're near the population cap and have obsolete units (such as SecForce infantry when already hitting the popcap mid-game), sell them.
- Manage all your active fleets and armies with your heroes for the bonuses they provide. Stack heroes so you get bonuses for all the ships or units you will be using in the fleet/army. Fleets without heroes are only for reinforcing planets.
- When you're swimming in credits, focus on your fleet and spend anything extra on upgrading everything. Your fleets are an active part of the campaign that indirectly earn you money by fighting battles to take territory and protect your economy, while campaign components such as structures are just sitting there doing nothing unless they generate income or units. The fleet should always be in your focus and maintained well.
- Avoid building ground to space weapons or other expensive structures with upkeep on planets that are not actively going to be war zones. Structures such as Ion cannons have their place, but only when it's a map you're constantly going to defend. Same goes for production buildings, they cost upkeep and you should never have more buildings for production than what you can sustain when it comes to producing. As soon as the production building isn't producing it becomes a waste of money.
- Build all the Tech Upgrade structures on planets that are well behind the front lines.

Thank you for the suggestions, I'll try them out on my next campaign.

To add onto the suggestion of don't skip on the missions; also know your limit. If you get a mission telling you to take a planet, but you know you are going to take a lot of losses (in space, land, or both) then it may be best to skip/fail it. Especially if the reward isn't something great. You'll get enough other missions to make up for the hit to hope you'll take for failing it.

You're welcome! If you follow my pointers, you should have around 10k income per turn as Rebels by week 5 or 6. And that's while there's still a bunch of stuff to build... Keep at it and you will soon have doubled it 😎

The advice don't work for empire when rebel can pop up at any moment with doomstack of infiltrator about garrison.

Having 10k income per turn by week 5 sounds BS. Considering you start with 2k, I just don't see how you can do that without some cheats. Also, this mod is so tedious with the building times and cost. Needing to wait 5-10 weeks just to get maybe a capital ship and some smaller ships is ridiculous.

Those advice look like generic one. + Income even by controlling half of the galaxy end up at the said 10k/week with this mod...

@Platonov, as I said you can't snowball economically as much and as fast as Empire as you can with the Rebels. Maybe when I'm done with my current Rebel campaign I can write something similar for the Empire 😊

@Jin, here's two screenshots (look at the weekly income) of me following my own advice. Turn 6 and Turn 19 respectively.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/Melqart/screenshot/2050877940587550069/
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/Melqart/screenshot/2050877940587549366/

Playing on hard. No "cheats" (XML editing). However I am an EAW veteran, having played since 2006. My total playtime is almost 600 hours on Steam, but as a teen and young adult I've probably clocked more than 2-3k hours on non-Steam EAW as well as worked as a beta tester for mods in the past (but not AOTR).

Today AOTR is one of my favorite mods precisely because of the difficulty and the pacing of the campaign while being pretty true to the Star Wars canon.

I also think there's way better players than me in this community. When I play I'm not 100% tryharding or minmaxing, the core of this campaign is still just having fun. Storming the AI for instance is pretty easy, letting you win super early. But I prefer to just let the AI build up in peace while building stuff I want to fight with. I think with some practice you will get better at the game too Jin! 😊

I guess I just suck since I'm struggling on normal not even hard difficulty

The base mod is already difficult. The difficulty levels are basically just a matter of money and build speed bonuses to the AI. In my opinion hard is a good balance (double bonus for AI), while expert just involves fighting more battles (triple bonus for AI). The normal difficulty in AOTR is similar to hard to expert in more forgiving modern strategy games.

One thing to point out from my screenshots though, is that I am currently playing a Rebel vs Empire campaign without the Black Sun.

I have 1823 hours in EAW (not countiing the time played with CDs) and AOTR is super easy on expert :)

As empire, focus 80% on economy first 20-30 rounds or so. I.e. build space mines (borleaias and chandrila) and ground mines and tibanna refineries (ord ibanna, bespin, zhar).

On the first round, sell all ground and space turbolasers buildings and I would recommend to sell everythign at Kessel as well and move the units there to the Maw (or just retreat there when attacked). ALso move bin essada to aargau (should have 3 or 4 mines built depending on if you garrison it with troops or an outpost) and palpatine at coruscant. When you have bespin, move Jerjerrod there ASAP.

You may also start buidling a few trade stations and transports but not a priority early on. Trade stations should primarily be build on high base income worlds such as thyferra, abregadoe rae, aargau and coruscant as its multiplier only affects the base income and not any other income e.g. from mines.

Another thing not high prio the first rounds to generate even more money is to build palaces on these same wortds.

With the 20%, start fortifying the worlds you need to hold e.g. corulag, carida, bilbringi, preferably naboo as well - build outposts lvl2 on these and then landing pads and then power generator and then anything else. Ground defense is higher prio than space defense as ground is easier to hold. The fighters from the landing pad if grouped (ALT-1) will kill any infantry attack and the power generator will boost tower damage so that vehicles do not last long.

Gather your ships under Vader and attack south focusing on getting Bespin as that alone will give you an income of 2400/round when built up with refineries and trade stations. Ord ibanna will net you 2000/round. Couruscant and Aargau will net you 1700 or so each when built up (depending on how you garrison). Always scout in the tactical space map using your fighters before attacking as there often are money-generating trade posts and space mines to be found on the maps and every credit early on counts! Avoid attacking Hoth as you may want to keep the ISD of Ozzel for now. After you have the southwest, move east to secure Naboo and Zhar and the adjacent mine-worlds e.g. ord plutonia.

When this is done, you should have an income approaching 20-25k and have pretty much won the game. For tips on how to do battles, e.g. look at GenesisKing playtroughs on YT.

YMMV but my first research is usually "infantry 1" to get medics as you want to be able to heal early on, you will get an officer from start with superslow vehicle healing though. As you want to save troops and do the first rounds without buyilding new troops and ships this is important for me. After that I usually research small craft etc. to get lancer and raider corvette as these are a must against massed fighters later on. I usually don't build any ISD1s at all, I do build Victory 2 and some victory 1 though. Eventually you will get ISD2s and bellators and by then space fights are rather easy as they will trash all capital ships and stations.

I would recommend to strat with Kuat as you main production hub as Bevel (as long as he is there) will speed up production. For seconday ground production hubs I usually choose Ghorman and Byss for vehicles and Anaxes for infantry. Corellia for frigates/cruisers. Remember to build 2x advanced shipyards (capital at Kuat, cruiser at Corelia) as production will be faster 100% and also one advanced fighter addon each on Kuta and Correlia.

Also some more tips on expert, I usually do not build much infantry except for medics and the red schock troopers (requires elite barracs). These you can both build with Infantry 1 researched. Focus on heavy vehicles research first to get artillery as 1-3 units per battle is a must and prefeably also have 1 on key chokepoint planets. On the offensive, AT-STs and AT-PTs will wreck any infantry and AT-ATs and artillery everything else.

Typical fleet composition I use is 2-3 tonfalk (fighter loadout), vader/daala or needa, 1-2 ISD2s, and a bellator (if no belaltor then 3 ISD2 and a Victory2). Also have at least 2 lancers and 1 raider corvette. Acclamators you get from start are important to have in the back line and preserve as they stand-in well for lancers/raiders against fighters and corvettes. Gozantis can be useful early on but due to the AI passivity I usually do not even have to build those before I get tonfalks.

The AI is very very passive IMHO in 2.10.3 (as long as you fortify chokepoints) both on the strategic and tactical maps and for some reason raids are infrequent so unimportant worlds do not need an outpost immediately when taken. Space stations on unimportant worlds are not needed and is a waste of money early on except for chokepoints, and on space mine and tibanna gas worlds. Put that money into economy instead. While building space stations, have one ship (e.g. a corvette) in orbit as the construction will otherwise be cancelled and money lost if e.g. an enemy invisible spy travels by.

As last, do not let the passive AI fool you, you need to constantly stay on the offensive from start and wreck nearby shipyards etc. or otherwise you will face monster fleets and armies later on and unless you have expanded and caused havoc and built your economy you will struggle.

Well at least i know i have already the good strat but net income come on 14k on week 150 (i guess you were talking about gross income for 20-25k) My fleet composition 1 belator 2 interdictor isd 10 lancer 10 ipv and a bunch of brawler frigate + 2 isd 1 and 1 tector.

Originally posted by Platonov:

Well at least i know i have already the good strat but net income come on 14k on week 150 (i guess you were talking about gross income for 20-25k) My fleet composition 1 belator 2 interdictor isd 10 lancer 10 ipv and a bunch of brawler frigate + 2 isd 1 and 1 tector.

Hi as long as you enjoy the game everything is alright :) 14k income on imp expert (the income the game reports on strategic map, at the week progress bar) I reach perhaps on week 15 or so depending how aggressive I play) ? Probably have 20k at week 30 or so. Right now I am at turn 90 and have 27k income (holding roughly ord mantell to mandalore) and I played super slow this time comparatively and put alot of (unnecessary) funds into back line fortficications instead of into economy to spice it up a bit.

Others play alot faster than me and get to 20k income super fast as there is not much need to build defenses first 30 or so rounds as I wrote above. It however takes a few rounds to build all those tibanna refineries especially. I really wish I could play much much slower but it is just impossible for me to sit on my hands while the enemy builds up nearby :(