Thanks again to Commander Sith for hosting this report, and love also to North West Gaming Centre and Element Games without which this game could not have happened.
Last month, I posted a report on a 1,000 point game, between Marlor and Me. That was a lot of fun, so we decided to go again, this time making a proper effort to push the boundaries of our collections. In the depths of his insanity, Mr Marlori had laid his hands on 4 – that’s right, 4 – Imperial Raiders and I had acquired a second Corellian Corvette second hand from the excellent Swap and Sell Group.
We had found that in our first game, the ships tendedto clump up as they all sought to focus fire on an individual target. This took a lot of the manouevering fun out of the game: if we wanted to play a miniatures based traffic management simulation, we wouldn’t be playing X-Wing. To fix that we agreed that we would each deploy 750 points, including all our huge ships, and then set a series of drop points. At the end of turn one, the remainder of ships would start to arrive each turn in blocks no bigger than 250 points.
With such a huge game, planning was important. It took me most of a Sunday to design and assemble the cards and tokens to run a 1,700 point list. I built the Corvettes for ranged attacks, hoping that fighters could drop in and handle the close range work, and took a pair of Transports too, in an attempt to stress the buttons off any Imperial fighter support in the opening skirmishes. Beyond that, there were a plethora of small ships (since you ask, 6 A’s, 6 Y’s, 11 Z-95’s, 4 B’s, 3 X-wings, 2 E’s, 2 K’s and 4 HaWKs).
Crew Han and crew Luke were there, along with all the gang, including my personal favourties Keyan Farlander, Gemmar Sojan and Miranda Doni. Lando, Chewbacca, Dash and – erm – Eaden Vrill were there too. Si and I agreed to name 2 pilots that our opponents had to take. For me that meant I was forced to bring Eaden and, worse still, Jek Porkins: but that was balanced by Si having to bring the underwhelming Imperial Kath Scarlet and Captain Ken Kirk, brother of another well known, smug spacefarer. Sorry, I mean Captain Kenkirk.
Si dressed his Raiders in quad turbolasers, devastating at close range. The rest of his fleet, comprising Tie Advanceds in the initial deployment, was followed by waves of Defenders, Interceptors, Tie Fighters and Phantoms . The support all like getting up close and personal so I decided to deploy the Corvettes along the length of the 9′ board, to take full advantage of Range 5 shooting for as long as I could.
I decided to focus fire on the Raiders first. Once they were taken off, my fleet would have room to move around, and they could use any remaining Huge Ships as a base to roll around. And, aside from anything else, each Raider could potentially pump out 8 shots per turn (2 from primary, and 2 from each of their 3 turbolasers). That power was not far below my entire 40 ship, 1,300 point fighter fleet.
After initial exchanges of long range fire – at which the range 4 Raider guns were at a serious disadvantage – I dropped in my Z-95’s immediately behind Si’s Raiders. He responded with Kenkirk – bursting with Emperor Palapatine goodness – and a team of Tie Defenders, loyally looking after their big boss. As we had written our dropping in rules, it was perfectly legal, but I think Si was more than a little discomforted to see a bunch of Z-95’s drop in behind a Raider. As it turned out, the strategic advantage was pehaps more apparent than real: the real advantage was that the Decimator provided something for the Y-Wing squadron to chew on en route to their ion cannons getting in range of a huge ship.
At the end of turn 2, we had deployments on the other flank, where Si’s Interceptors had the balance of power over my A-Wings and Miranda’s K-Wing. Whilst I was outmatched, the situation wasn’t hopeless for me. The Transports were little more than a speed bump, but the A-Wings had enough evade dice to stay in there for a turn or two. As things turned out, five of the six made it into Day 2.In turn 3 the first Raider blew up, under focussed fire from 2 Corvettes with help from the HLC wielding B-Wings. We had agreed that each time a Huge Ship was destroyed, it would leave 3 debris tokens in its wake. That was a lot of fun, meaning that fighters blasting through a Huge Ship would end up running through a stress field.
My Corvettes had moved far enough along the board to take on the furthest Raider by this point, and they turned their turbo-lasers to fire at it. There was some support from Miranda, who was perfectly positioned to drop a Cluster mine all across it’s base… except that Si presciently turned it to the right, so that only one part of the mine went off, causing no damage. No matter: I had another K-Wing, that dropped in a couple of turns later, perfectly positioned to drop a bomb on a Raider:
Except a dial error meant that he had to wait a turn after he bumped into it … None the less, all three circles were on the Raider’s base, but the 2 hits that resulted were a bit diappointing.
On my side of the board, the Transports found themselves facing a dozen Tie Fighters. Facing that level of incoming fire, the Transport had no option but to Reinforce its front shields.
Normally, that would have been good enough – but these Tie Fighters were Black Squadron with the Opportunist EPT. Opportunist is great against Huge Ships, which don’t normally have focus or evade tokens, but even 36 incoming dice, modded down to 24 by Reinforce, with fire support from 4 dice attacks from two Raiders couldn’t kill the Transport in one turn.
There then followed the move of the game. A four forward move would take the front Transport through the heart of the Tie swarm, decimating it, so they had to split and I had to guess which way they’d go. I choose to sweep the Tranport out to the right, hoping Si would take his swarm that way to head for the middle of the board. Only to learn I’d been suckered by a double bluff.. Si moved his fighters directly forward, avoiding the path of the Tranport and opening up even more shots on it at Range 1. The second Transport followed the first into oblivion the turn after – but the festival of destruction left Si’s swarm with a problem:
The Ties faced many debris fields to get back into battle.6 debris clouds and a dozen Ties meant Si had to roll many dice. Despite heroic rolling on the red dice – over 20 consecutive rolls with no crit at one point – the sheer volume of rolls meant that they started to suffer.
Elsewhere on the board, Keyan Farlander had finally been destroyed. He too ran with Opportunist, in order to gain stress to use his pilot ability. That tactic can be risky in smaller games, where small ships might be “tokened up” depriving Keyan of a red dice and the chance to convert his focusses to hits using a stress token, but if Keyan had lived long enough in this game not to have a Huge Ship to shoot at, I’d’ve been happy. As if that wasn’t filthy enough, Jan Ors pootled along behind him, giving him yet another dice, with – in effect – focus and target lock every turn. As a result, the third Raider was starting to ship suffer damage, and by the end of the day, we were both down from four Huge Ships to just one. We’d been playing for 14 hours, and for 6 turns, and it was time for some rest before we restarted the game the next day. The fighter squads were fairly evenly matched at this point, and the only real distance between us was that my last Corvette was nearly completely undamaged, whilst tthe last Raider was already in deep trouble. It wasn’t a huge margin, but I felt I was going into Day 2 slightly ahead.10 hours later we got going again. My first priorirty was to destroy the remaining Raider, a task which was complicated by the fact that its front section was within range 2 of the Corvette depriving it of all shots, and the back section was quickly crippled. I wasn’t keen to rush fighters to the middle of the board to kill it, so I looked for another solution.
I found one: I rammed it with the last Tantive.
The crippling of the rear section meant that the Raider’s movement was limited, so that the two ships were effectively locked into each other unless I wanted to disengage. As the Raider was already damaged, dealing face up damage cards to it as a result of the collision was a very effective tecnique. With a little supporting fire from surrounding ships, in particular a Green Squadron pilot determined to ofload his Proton Rocketsand the nearby Tie Swarm still taking critical hits from the debris of the Transports, I could start to worry about the remaining fighters.
The Tantive was, by now, benefitting from an extra dice from Jan Ors, an extra dice from an energy token and a focus token from Kyle Katarn. Even with an extra defence dice for range, it started to become excellent at carving up smaller ships before they could close in to get out of range.
Tycho had found a great spot to hunt already damaged Tie fighters, and there were still 6 undamaged Y-wings, 2 YT-1300s, Coran Horn and Eten Abaht powering across the board from the right flank.
The Intys and Phantoms were by now well out of formation. Back over on the left flank, a heavily damaged Leebo teamed up with Gemmar Sojan to take on a Phantom. 
The two of them managaed to inflict some damage, but with the volume of shots left on the board, Si felt it had become a fight he could not win. With 18 hours of X-Wing in the bag, we were both flagging and there was little point in drawing out the inevitable Rebel win – and we had a a little bit of tidying up to do.
Once again, we learned an awful lot from this game:
- Using target locks from Attack Wing (Apparently it’s a game Si’s found, which is a bit like X-Wing. He has some funny ideas.) was a Really, Really Good Idea. They were obviously different to the standard X-wing ones, and avoided much confusion. Ok, I’ll say it: 1,700 points might be too big. In terms of visual appeal and the options to put down every combo that you could possibly think of, it was even better than 1,000, but the extra organisational effort really wasn’t repaid by enhancng the game. Plus, by the end we were both making flying errors – Lt. Blount got so exhausted he flew off the board for no good reason towards the end. 1,200 is perhaps a realistic sensible maximum.Drop points worked. There is certainly room for improvement on our rules (eg. no dropping in within range 2 of your opponent’s edge), but the only serious traffic jam was entirely self inflicted by my applying overkill to deal with interceptors on the Imperial board edge. (Autothrusters. If you’re reading this, you know what I’m talking about.) Visually, the game was much improved by spreading the fight across the board.Transports are truly poor. For over 100 points they contributed little to the Rebel fleet. And even with
- , ordnance and bombs are still largely crap, except for Proton Rockets.
- >
- They will never be the best against high agility ships, without some kind of boost from Han or similar, but against Decimators, Raiders and uncloaked Phantoms, they are a useful tool. Balance is worth investing in at a high points level. The min-maxing that works very well at 100 points, whether by a Tie swarm, or the arc dodging of a BroBot duo works less well against a varied, enormous fleet. Instead, use Range 5: it’s a thing.
Taking the Sith 