On Saturday I played against a player who was just getting back into the game after having sold his entire collection. He was a skilled player that seemed to have a good grasp on strategy, but due to his still growing collection I think his list was not optimized. He brought (55) Dash Rendar with Lone Wolf, Heavy Laser Cannon, "Leebo", Outrider, and Counter-Measures and (45) Corran Horn with R2-D2, Advanced Sensors and Predator. I decided to try out my 6 rebel swarm list of (45) 3 Prototypes with Chardaan Refit, (24) 2 Bandits and (33) a Dagger Squadron Pilot with a Heavy Laser Cannon. Below is a reconstruction from my memory of the first 2 turns of the game.

In hindsight I think it would be better to put the Zs and Dagger in the middle and the As on the outside. Corran and the A's traded at range 1, with Corran only knocking off 1 shield from the A even with the double tap thanks to some good focus rolls, although the Corran also had good defensive rolls and prevented all the damage from my A-Wings.

I was now faced with a difficult decision. It would be impossible for me to bring all my firepower on Corran the next turn, whereas if I banked all my ships to the left, their arcs would converge in Dash's direction. But I had faced R2D2 Corran before, and it is not a ship that I want to be fighting against in the late game with only a couple of 2 attack dice ships. And if my opponent was using Dash as the bait ship for a bait and switch and turned him out of the fight, my ships would be useless for a turn or two, allowing Corran to come around and flank me. I decided that eliminating Corran early was my best chance at victory, and R2-D2 meant that the only way to do that was to do as much damage as possible in a single turn. But sending all my ships at Corran would inevitably leave them disorganized and it would take a couple turns to regroup, so I needed to prevent Dash from flanking my ships while they attacked Corran. Here's a reconstruction of turn 3.

Dash went 4-straight to clear the asteroid and get behind my ships, but bumped into my Z instead and was stranded on the rock for the turn, leaving him with no shots (the image shows a 2-straight, but pretty accurately shows where he ended up). The A's k-turned, while one turned left to block Corran, and while I was hopeful that I might wipe out his shields and finish him off next turn, amazingly I rolled 5 hits out of 6 dice and he rolled all eyeballs and blanks. I did roll all blanks with my Dagger's HLC though, so statistically I feel like things evened out, but it was definitely lucky for me that all my hits went into Corran instead of Dash.

It was now my nearly full health squad against Dash Rendar. My opponent played it out, and did manage to kill a Z-95 and the Dagger, and also got good defensive rolls with Dash for the rest of the game, but I was eventually able to to slowly wear him down 2 damage at a time. Oh and my opponent did rid himself of a Target Lock and prevent a lot of damage on one turn with Counter Measures, for whatever that's worth. We talked afterwards, and it sounds like he had a very solid gameplan going in, which was indeed a bait and switch where he either wanted me to chase Dash and get flanked by Corran or chase Corran and get flanked by Dash. I think if he had a little more experience avoiding blocks, or if his luck had been better, there was a good chance I could have lost that game.

My takeaway from the game: I think that whenever you face a large ship + support and you get a chance to kill the support ship(s), you should take it aggressively, but be ready to deal incidental damage to the large ship if the support ship gets away so that it's easier to kill later. Support ships usually represent a significant portion of a lists offensive power, and a much smaller portion of a list's hit points, while also being very hard to kill later in the game after you've lost some ships. If you force your opponent to roll those green dice enough times, eventually they will fail, and that low HP will sink and take a huge chunk of your opponent's offense with it. In this game I got lucky and Corran rolled badly, but If I had just let Corran go and went after Dash, I would have started losing ships a lot faster to the combined offense of Dash and Corran, and by the time I finally killed Dash, my ships would not be able to damage Corran faster than he healed from R2-D2. When taking the lower risk strategy means you are going to lose, then you need to go after the high risk/high reward play instead.

Thanks for reading! For more strategy articles and battle reports posted every week, check out my x-wing tactics blog at xwingtactics.tumblr.com