Marlor and Me: 1,000 points of X-wing and three big dogs dead

Another guest slot allowed by the boss. Cheers, Mr C!

Ever since FFG started trailing the Imperial Raider – and civiisations have risen, fallen and been reborn since then – my good mate Simon Marlor has been proposing a “proper” Epic game. Not the poxy 300 points that amateurs like me play at Nationals, but a 1,000 point extravaganza. Not only could we get a real chunk of our respective collections on the board, we wanted to see how well a vanilla, last man standing type of game would work using standard Epic rules.

It did work, turning into a 13 hour marathon of X-Wing that finished at 1.00am.

The first step was proper preparation. Si brought a total of 21 ships, including 2 Raiders. His list broke down into – essentially – five sections, being

• 3 basic Phantoms and Whisper
• 4 Defenders, supported by Major Rhymer and his secondary weapon rerolls
• 4 Tie-Advanced, all named pilots
• A slew (by which I mean 6) interceptors, kitted with the usual
• A brace of Imperial Raiders
  

I took a total of 30 ships. the cards alone were quite a stack. Readying my box took a good couple of hours:

My ship and upgrade cards, a little higher than 3 standard CD cases. Note my great music taste.

My fleet included a Slicer Tools/ Jamming transport, a Corellian Corvette with 2 single Turbolasers, Keyan Farlander and 4 B-Wings, Gemmar Sojan and 3 A-wings, Biggs, a lone Academy pilot with the stress bot, Lt. Blount and 7 Z-95’s, Dutch Vander and 3 Ion warthog Y-Wings, Chewie, Lando, Leebo, Jan Ors, Kyle Katarn and – of course – Coran Horn.
With plenty of Heavy Laser Cannons on the B-Wings, and a pair of Turbolasers on the Corvette, I wanted to get guns into the Raiders quickly for two reasons – most importantly, their shield regeneration meant that giving them any breathing space would make killing them much harder, and also, Si loves his new toys, so bringing them down fast would rapidly break his morale!

“I don’t know if they frighten the enemy, but they scare the hell out of me.”

I had no clue how Si intended to play it. His fast, and hitty, fleet could have a go at pricking me all across the 9′ x 3′ board, or he could set up a focused fire zone and challenge me to come at him. I dumped the transport out on the right flank, supported by Lando (a Jam only really works if accompanied by a Slice in the same turn, so 2 actions was important), Coran, a few Z-95s and the stress-bot.

Si dropped his Raiders on the right hand side of the board, angling in. I plonked the Corvette opposite, and ranked up my B-Wings, shielded by Biggs, to the right. Space was a real problem, and as most of my fleet was PS2, I still didn’t know where the bulk of Si’s guns would start. I ended up spreading across the left hand third of the board.

The Phantoms went out on Si’s right flank, ready to carve up Leebo and punch both sections of the Corvette. The Tie Advanced team went to the centre, ready to take on Coran and the small team on my right flank. The Interceptors went further out still, demanding attention from the Transport and Coran. And the Defenders settled in a tight unit with Major Rhymer right between the Raiders. they would be horrid to get at in that formation, at least for as long as the Raiders remained.

In terms of time, whilst we didn’t rush, it still took us two hours to get set and get our first dials down. We had plenty of time, but setting some 50 ships was a fair amount of work.  It was time for a pork pie before dice got rolled.

Odd… Where are all the other ships?

Ah! There they are!

I decided to stick with my plan. Keyan Farlander could look forward to a good couple of turns of heavy firing using Jan Ors and Opportunist to get six target locked (with his action), focused (with his special ability) red dice into the Raiders with no defence dice. I was confident of stripping shields quickly so that crits would start to bite. Firing commenced in turn 2, and Keyan immediately made a huge dent in the Raider’s front section. Incredibly, Biggs, with an extra green dice from R2-F2, and a bonus focus from Jan Ors, managed to make it to the end of turn 3 with a hull point left. Early salvos at other fighters from the Raiders saw first blood go to Si, but that didn’t overly concern me. With eleven PS 2 ships, I was happy to sacrifice a couple early to start beating on the Raider.

The attack on the Raider’s front section gave me confidence that the centre units could swiftly turn to the right and into the second Raider, to repeat the work of the ships on the left flank. They’d receive some support from the Corvette on the left flank as it closed on the second Raider, pinging away with Turbolasers and its 5 dice primary weapon

Meanwhile on the right flank, I’d made a heinous error. The Z-95’s were pointing assault missiles at the interceptors. The Transport had successfully jammed 4 of them, and Lt. Blount had fired assault missiles to do a pint of damage to most of the Inty wing. The bulk of them were down to a single hull point. Two of the Z-95’s had target locks and missiles, but they had aimed at different ships… so that the prime victim used his tokens to avoid the first missiles, as did his friend a moment later. So no bonus hits from the assault missiles.

Coran and Lando were in a mess too, their fast ships getting stuck behind the ponderous Dutch Vander and the trundling Z-95’s trying to keep at range two of the Interceptors.

In turn 4, the first of the Raiders went down to the continuing volume of fire. It remained close: I had lost 201 points, to Simon’s 240. Happily, someof my killpoints came from the utterly evil Juno Eclipse. Even though she’s only been in the game for 10 days, I already hate her! In fact, the board was so full that her dial shifting nonsense didn’t do her a lot of good. But if Simon was hoping to squeeze value put of her in the end game when the board was emptier – as I was with Coran – he would be disappointed. More on Coran soon…

The second Raider was now facing fire on three flanks. Y-wings were ionising from the front, Chewie and the B-wings were approaching on its right, and Coran was looking to make a run on its left. A lot of the fighters, especially the Z-95s and Y-wings were in really bad shape now, but somehow the volume of targets made it hard to single out individual ships to take Rebels guns off the board.

In the meantime, the Interceptors, also in bad shape, were making a move to get around the back of the Rebel Fleet. The fact that they were mostly down to a single hull point did not take any sting out of their guns, and with things going bad for the Raiders, the Imperials were looking to use their maneuverability to get into their own position surrounding the concentrated Rebel force. Wisely, Si largely ignored the Transport.

Then Coran went on for his own strike at the rear section of the remaining Raider. This put him right in front of Vader and his Tie Advanced cronies. 6 hits, including 2 crits from the Advanced Targeting Computers, and some awful green dice left Coran regretting his courage. The idiot.

in the next term, a good chunk of real estate opened up as the second Raider went down.

This left a lot of Rebel ships pointing at a huge threat that no longer existed, whilst on the right flank, the Tie Advanced were swinging round to rejoin the battle. Nervous of Lord Vader’s rage, Si turned his attention to the Corvette. It quickly began to take hits, losing all of its front section shields in a single turn, and taking some none critical damage. A reinforce action later though, and the pilots of the oppressor had to start again almost from scratch. The next turn though, with more guns to bear, the front section was crippled, and all of the Corvette’s remaining energy was put into maintaining its shields.

As the CR-90 groaned into the endgame, the Imperial fighters were seriously outnumbered. Chewie was starting to get a little nervy, with R2-D2 constantly failing to remember to regenerate shields, and Leebo was down to a few hull points, but the punchy B-Wings were largely undamaged. Once the rebel fighters had turned round to bring themselves back into the fight, it was only a matter of time before the cumbersome Defenders and heavily damaged Interceptors started to explode.

Phew!

it was the first time that either of us had played such a  massive game, and I learned a lot:

• Turbo-lasers are really, really, really good against Raiders. All the stuff that made them bad against small Imperial ships (i.e. the doubling of agility) makes them excellent at Range 5 against 0 green dice Raiders.
• Huge ships can really hang around. Like Han Solo or a tanked Chewbacca, they need killing early.
• Energy is hugely important. Take Tibana gas and an Engineering Team and use them as soon as you can.
• Our board worked well. We used an FFG official mat (dear, but great) and the 6’x3′ paper mat I brought back from Nationals – the edge of that area is the red line you can see on some of the pictures.
• 30 ships in a 3’x3′ area makes fora crowded room. In our next super-epic game, I’m thinking that ships should be deployed turn by turn as reinforcements. Bringing so much on so fast meant that it was hard for the ships to maneuver, so there were a lot of bumps, and boosting ships were paying a lot of points for an upgrade they couldn’t really use.
• Epic does work pretty well, even at 1,000 points. The huge ships came into their own and the game felt like a cross between standard X-Wing and Armada. The action pulsed in two large bubbles on the left side of the field, before those ships merged into a single brawl, whilst all the time the ships on my right flank were trying to get in on the action without exposing themselves to easy shots. There is an issue with the game becoming one sided long before it actually finished, but deployment in stages might fix that.
• It looked amazing on the table!