Anyone else tired of seeing Stormtroopers as completely incompetent?

Is anyone else getting sick of this? For years, Stormtroopers have been basically turned into the proverbial butt-monkey of Star Wars. Despite being elite soldiers, they are consistently shown being supremely idiotic.

I know there are in universe explanations, but this is getting ridiculous. For example, in the new The Force Unleashed trailer, no less than thirty stormies rush into close quarters with an angry Starkiller. Despite them having heavy droid backup and firepower, they decide the best way to take on a Jedi is to be right in his face. Or so they would think, if they didn't heve two glowing blades passing through the space where their necks used to be.

Is there really any place where they haven't been portrayed as completely useless? Even in LOTF, the elite Imperial Guard Stormtroopers get ravaged by a few individuals. I realize they were Mandalorians, but they didn't even manage to kill one.

I want the Stormtrooper to be the feared, implacable elite soldiers they were meant to be, not these bumbling morons.
Even the 501st, the retconned "always featured whenever the Empire does something right troops aren't enough to keep the Stormtrooper Corps from being the biggest embarrassment of the galaxy.

 

TFU Sith Master Mode.

Snipers = One Headshot = You Dead = Me Angry.

TFU2 Trailer = Ezmode = For Losers.

 

I would have a complaint if they hadn't been incompetent since A New Hope. I mean they were weak-minded (as shown by Obi-Wan's mind tricks at Mos Eisley and in the Death Star), stupid (as shown when they were fooled by the droids), equipped with either terrible armor or just awful in combat (as shown when they are taken out aboard the Millenium Falcon), and finally inaccurate (as shown in every scene they were ever in. My personal favorite is when Luke and Leia take forever to get across that gap in the Death Star while Stormtroopers hit all around them, whether it be the ones under the door or on the platform higher up).

 

You realise 99.999% of the population of the Galaxy Far Far away is incompetant right?

Jedi, mando's, Sith, Officials, cops, pirates, average joe's.


So yeah Stormtroopers a minion, who's only perpose is to die in droves agains the onslaught of main characters, it has always been so. The only Diffrence with the Troopers is they
just get to hold the idiotball more often than others.

 

Not what the thread needs. They were the **** when they were all Jango and trained well, then they decided to let regular folks be stormies instead of putting them into the mythical Imperial Army.

 

That's an apt description of the Imperial Army.

 

"An entire legion of the my troops awaits them."

Well, until the teddy bears arrived on the scene that is.

 

^ dear lord the EWOKs...remember that comic from a while back that dealt with a traumatized surviver of thoes ewock assaults? His only solice that the falling deathstar debirs killed them all.

Only to have it cruely taken away by and off hand comment from a young bar crawler.

 

well TFU is way over done. But yeah stormtroopers are usually an joke except in Zahn's or Traviss's hands. thats funny because these are supposed to be clone troopers right? they are described in some clone wars novels as super competent. so when do they become comeplete jokes?

 

When the Empire opened it to enlistment.

 

Stormtroopers are feared.. by the masses. Remember the battle on the Tantive IV? What about Echo Base.. they practically walked through it. Any time they go up against a Force user like Starkiller, or a character who HAS to survive/battle they have to lose, of course they are going to get steamrolled. The Mando scene you talk about.. well just remember Traviss wrote it (since the Stormies there wouldn't be her pet Clone Troopers, of course her pet Mandalorians are going to have no problem).

 

Well, actually I was referring to the Battle of Shedu Maad in Invincible, but yeah, the one in Revelation made no sense either.

 

I would like to see more of well trained boys in white than the regular blind fools we see when any main character is involved, but in the trailer you must keep in mind that they were up against a powerful Sith/Jedi who had been trained by Darth Vader. They aren't going to be competent against a lightsabre, especially not with the E-11.

 

Is it really odd that two members of a paranoid, duplicitus, and violent monastic order to arm their gaurds with weapons that wouldn't be effective in killing them?

I doubt palpes would be cool with vader training a squad of Snipers using self correcting anti-materia rifles.

 

For OT era stuff, I can totally buy Stormtroopers being mostly incompetent. The empire had an practically unlimited amount of young men to throw at any problems that arose. Why bother training them? Just toss superior numbers of them at the enemy and you'll win. Pick up the fallen troops blastechs, grab the next batch straight off of some farm, and toss them into the fray. This is what kind of bothered me with the "Hand of Judgement" in allegiance. We were in the movie era were an unsaid precedent of Stormtrooper incompetence had been set. Having a small group of them that could kick all kinds of behind is a stretch for me to believe. On the other hand, the 501st of Survivors Quest was awesome. They served an Empire that was most like the Chiss and less like the Empire of the movies. I'd expect them to be well trained and ready for battle. Those guys were awesome.

With the Traviss stuff, we are talking more about clone troopers and they were shown to be pretty awesome in other stories. They are different, and not just because of the Fett genes (not that having the Fett genes wouldn't be a plus) but because their entire lives were about preparing them for combat. I have not really read many of the Traviss books but I'm guessing that the clones who seem powerful are Nulls or Arcs or some other special clones. That will probably make them more dangerous.

 

Because the Stormtroopers are supposed to be the "elite", something that a lot of authors seem to forget.
On the other hand, Lucas himself stated that the cloned portions of the stormtroopers had been "politicized" by the OT, where less-than-stellar candidates got themselves selected as donors using connections because of the 'prestige' involved.

 

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree that the quality of Stormies was poor in the OT especially when compared to the Clone troopers. But outside of the authors making them that way I don't see why. I get tired of seeing them become blaster-fodder for heroes.

The fact that they were recruits is no excuse. I mean if you give someone good training, you should come out with a good well trained soldier that can competently do his or her job. The only in-universe explanation I can think of is that Palps was skimping on the training. The Clones may have been made Jango, but what made them effective was their training. So I have to wonder what was the training like for them?

Endor was just a total embarrassment. These were a legion of his "best" troops? I hope this wasn't the 501st.

 

Here we go again.

Seriously, does anybody complaining about incompetent stormtroopers in the OT-movies even understand the context of their ?failures??

ANH:
- storming the Tantive IV - competent stormtroopers, since the mission was a success

- following the droids lead on Tattooine - competent stormtroopers, since they followed the trail till the Lars-farm and managed to cover their tracks (killing Tuskens, acquiring Banthas, killing Jawas), Luke, who has lived nineteen years on Tattooine has no clue, while Obi-Wan is only more knowledgeable because of his experience from the clone-wars or a hint from the Force

- Obi-Wan using the Jedi-mind-trick: when was the last time a soldier of the GE or a normal human has encountered a JedI and resisted the mind-trick? Yoda sat opposite from Palpatine for ten years and didn?t notice, that the guy was a Sith. Does that make Yoda weak-minded?

- Stormtroopers and the technicians on the Millenium Falcon: there was no reason to be suspicious, first it was TWO technicians with their hands full against THREE men and a wookiee (one of them a JedI - mind-trick again?) and then TWO stormies against the same odds. Not to mention the hangar-guard: as soon as he noticed that something was wrong he was investigating the matter.

- Stormtroopers after the escape from the prison-block: Leia explained it later, but some people are obviously too dumb to understand it: the GalacticEmpire WANTED THEM TO ESCAPE. The fact that the stormies achived that, while taking causalities speaks in favour of their training and discipline.

TESB:
- battle of Hoth - stormtroopers win

- Bespin - similar to ANH, since the hyperdrive of the MF was sabotaged and the Executor was waiting in orbit

ROTJ:
- battle of Endor: film (and novel) make it actually clear, that until the scene, where Chewbacca shanghais the AT-ST the empire is winning that battle. Until that point the heroes are on the retreat.

I won?t go into the EU, but I?d ask you to consider, that no matter how wanked elite-troops are they are still human and things can go wrong even for the best (Murphy?s law). And anybody, who believes elite-troops to be miracle-workers and to be able to prevail against all odds, might they be from the Waffen-SS, Soviet Speznats, US Marines or the fictional Sardaukar, Imperial Stormtroopers or StarshipTroopers Mobile Infantry has obviously read too many comics or novels about Mandalorians by Karen Traviss.

 

Here's the exact quote about Lucas' comments on the subject.

"During the production of Episode III, Lucas told crewmembers that the stormtroopers seen in Episode IV are - in the story world - made from multiple sources. That is, they're not all Jango clones. By that time in the saga, other clone hosts have been selected.
Lucas intimated that the selection process has become more political that strategic in some cases - a highly placed officer's cousin might be selected over a more capable specimen, for example. This politicization results in less-than-ideal candidates, which could explain some of the embarassing marksmanship witnessed in the original trilogy.
In addition to multiple clone hosts, stormtrooper ranks also include conscripted soldiers and academy graduates, as has been chronicled in the Expanded Universe for many years now."
- Answers to Your Star Wars Questions, Insider #076

 

Your statements regarding the OT scenes are true, but it is in other forms of the saga where it gets ridiculous.
I'd say one of the worst examples is in Champions of the Force, where a battalion of Stormies get taken out by a Nanny Droid.
Even when they are being portrayed in novel form, they are treated as a bunch of monkeys.

 

Part of your examples, Zandalor, aren't "real" stormtroopers. A number of EU sources point out that the post-Endor warlords would put the armor on regular troopers because they didn't have real stormtroopers - they relied on the psychological edge that the armor gave to intimidate people (which indicates that, yes, they had a reputation of a force to be feared) but when faced with resistance fared no better than any other regular armed forces. Even in the resurgent Imperial Remnant, stormtroopers aren't going to be Jango-like clones; at best they're going to be well-trained elite forces, and at worst regular troopers in stormtrooper armor as in the warlord days.

 

You mean this droid?

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Foreign_Intruder_Defense_Organism

 

About the clone-templates being selected for political reasons, that should have actually no effects on training and indoctrination.

I find it more likely, that the rebellion got lucky against the few real stormtrooper-units they encountered and that the rest of the good ones were destroyed during internal imperial warfare post Endor or went up with Byss (one of the reasons Thrawn's discovery of the MountTantiss cloning-facility was so important was, that the Spaarti-cylinder there allowed him to overcome his shortage of stormtroopers).

 

Then I guess Sidious and Tyranus wasted a lot of time finding a suitable candidate when they could've just picked a bum from the underworld of Coruscant as the original clonetrooper template. Whoops!
Lucas indicated there was a decline in quality of clone donors. I'm going to guess that LFL is going to follow his guidelines.

Much like the XW games, we're generally not following the "average Rebellion member" in stories. Heroes routinely beat the odds - otherwise, strictly speaking, the Falcon should've been obliterated by asteroids in TESB.

 

Luke: Trained to defend himself against Sand People (and eventually assassinate Vader and Sidious), record midichlorian count
Leia: Trained to defend herself against assassins (and eventually assassinate Vader and Sidious), record midichlorian count
Han: has been committing crimes since at least age 8, may be Force-sensitive (according to the NJO)
Chewie: proud warrior race, Force-sensitive bloodline even if he's not Force-sensitive himself (but may be if the NJO says anything)
Don't know about Lando, but for Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie, it's justified.

When the Empire is a face (SQ, NJO, late LOTF, Fel loyalists in Legacy), the stormtroopers get a lot smarter.