Fireloque

The role of Trade Master is important to claiming victory as it has several benefits (choosing how many cards are traded, trading first, and choosing who picks developments first).

Therefore do not shy away from putting up Rare Resources or even Gold to secure the position of Trade Master for yourself, especially if Developments key to your strategy are available.

Early on, it’s greatly beneficial to offer Gold and high-value Resources for Trade in order to secure Trade Master and so gain first pick on a 1/2 Caravel/Ship Development. In the long run, that 1/2 Caravel/Ship will allow you to cherry-pick Rare and Gold cards in later Rounds, therefore again giving you access to both key cards for your goal and the Trade Master role in future.

We’ve started to delay assigning Soldiers to the Mission until Round 2, and instead focusing on Scientific Research, Base Defense and buying more Soldiers.

And for the Technologies to Research, getting the Communications Officer’s Tech’s early really help the entire team over the game: Having the ability to use a Tech card twice, reduce Panic, auto-Succeed at a Task or gain Funding, help a great deal and allow the team to perform better when most needed. i.e. when a tough Crises Card must be dealt with.

Three good tactics to keep in mind:

1. Focus your fire on enemies that have yet to act this round. If you can remove a figure from the table before it acts, you have saved your forces from facing that figure’s Actions. (n.b. This is sometimes referred to as tempo gain).

2. Schwerpunkt. This is the principle of focusing your forces on a point in the enemies defenses to achieve victory. Applied to Imperial Assault, this translates to focusing your forces and quickly destroying powerful figures/deployment groups so you gain a numerical advantage. Doing so usually means using more of your troops to destroy a key enemy figure (e.g. Elite Trandoshan Hunters), whilst one or two other figures run interference and defend or tie-up the enemies less-powerful troops, like Stormtroopers. If successful, you can swing the balance of forces to your favor and then mop-up the weaker troops afterwards.

3. Primarily for the Rebel player in the Campaign game: Open doors with your first or second figure’s activations – don’t end your turn by opening a door and allowing the Imperial player to then hose you with new troops!

I hear this query from a few new players when first encountering ICE: If the Runner does not or can not ‘interact with’ or break a piece of ICE, does the Run End by default?

NO! *only* if the ICE has a Subroutine that states “–> End the Run” does the Run actually End. If the ICE has other Subroutines that the Runner cannot break, they trigger, and if the Runner is still alive, they continue with the Run and can then themselves chose to End the Run or continue on to the next piece of ICE or the Central/Remove Server.

e.g. Ichi 1.0 If you can survive the Brain Damage, you are free to carry on with your Run.

A large part of mastering Netrunner is to understand the potential risks and rewards, and the only real way to achieve that is to play the game.

There is a learning curve to the game, but the steep part of that curve is in determining what cards, tactics and strategy your open is deploying and therefore will inform your own card-play and risk analysis decisions.

So simply play more games, play against different opponents, play as both Corp and Runner, play using all Factions/Identities, play using bad opening hands, play with infrequently-used cards, just play!