We started our Imperial Assault league last night and I ran the Royal Guard Champion with 3 units of Royal Guard backing him up. Went totally undefeated. The combo of speed, strength and numbers is amazing. Any thoughts on countering that list?

I think the most obvious is a combination of units with Stun and having more command cards. Spammed Officers/probes will allow them to avoid attacks early in the game. Other than that you just have to stay patient and pick your battles. I think if your opponent focuses on the RGC initially and forces you to split the Royal Guards up he can win. The RGC should die to concentrated attacks unless you get ridiculously lucky on the White die. Obviously, your opponent needs to watch your threat range and ensure he is not in it until after you have activated most, if not all, of your units.

Vader should be a pretty huge issue as well, since the Royal Guards can't stand up to him without the RGC (who won't survive either if you aren't really careful/lucky). and if you try to get the protection buff he can simply Brutality your face off.

For Rebels, Blast and Cleave are good ways to whittle them down - if they don't stick together they lose the +1 armor and the Focus/free attack when a guard dies, and if they do stick together you can deal damage that ignores armor. Also Luke and Diala are great for chewing through Royal Guards with Pierce 3 and ignoring a defense die, especially if they get Focus from Gideon. Burst Fire on Fenn can be especially effective here.

Nice! I haven't run up against Vader with this list yet but really want to just to see how it turns out.

Agreed. Anything hard-hitting should do well - the +1 defence result makes them very hard to stop with massed light fire, though.

Also, anything along the lines of stun - the fewer dudes you have, the more 'crippling' effects matter, and unlike their elite cousins, regular royal guard don't have a permenant counter to surge results.

I'm not sure about using Blast to counter the Royal Guards. They are fast enough to stay in lock step with any Rebel unit. A good Imperial player will just put them directly adjacent to the Rebel unit, forcing you to either damage your own unit or forget the Blast effect.

Cleave is decent, I think the only things that have it are melee units and you're nickel and diming troops with 8 health, while each pair is pounding you with two Red-Yellow attacks per turn. I think they average something like 5 or 6 damage per attack. So each activation, a pair is putting down enough damage to kill most any rebel unit except Chewie.

As for stun, that helps, but they can stun right back, and there are two of them to your single stunning rebel. Their yellow die ensures they can (if the situation warrants it) make sure you're stunned leaving you with two choices:

1.) Move away, thus forgoing your chance to stun them again, or

2.) Attack and stun them, but not getting a chance to move away, thus opening yourself up to taking the gobs of damage they dish out for a second turn in a row.

Those units are NASTY. Overpowered/undercosted. I've played a dummy game with a group of guards against any single character. Only Chewie comes close to holding his own.

Good command cards are what I think is required to take these guys down. Like this:

For Rebels, Blast and Cleave are good ways to whittle them down - if they don't stick together they lose the +1 armor and the Focus/free attack when a guard dies, and if they do stick together you can deal damage that ignores armor. Also Luke and Diala are great for chewing through Royal Guards with Pierce 3 and ignoring a defense die, especially if they get Focus from Gideon. Burst Fire on Fenn can be especially effective here.

I don't think Luke/Diala win this one. Your almost guaranteed Stun combined with Reach means you're not going to be able to be within Lightsaber range, so you'll only be able to get adjacent OR attack. Not both.

Since Diala can reroll her defense I have a real hard time thinking you will stun her. Also the royal guards dont do a lot of damage.

Blast is just fine as a counter since the AT-ST can target anyway.

Also Reach still needs Los

The Royal Guards are best as Mission guys and support. I really think if you want Royal Guards as attackers you need to add cheap guys that will die to get Focus.

Think we didnt wait. Three new counters to melee just showed up today lol

Since Diala can reroll her defense I have a real hard time thinking you will stun her. Also the royal guards dont do a lot of damage.

Blast is just fine as a counter since the AT-ST can target anyway.

Also Reach still needs Los

The Royal Guards are best as Mission guys and support. I really think if you want Royal Guards as attackers you need to add cheap guys that will die to get Focus.

Diala certainly has a good shot at avoiding one single attack:

Diala has a 26/36 chance of canceling 1 surge, while the Royal Guards have a 9/36 chance of getting at least 2 surges.

That's 13/72 chance of overwhelming her evade

Diala has a 8/9 chance of canceling 1 surge OR the entire attack, i.e, a 1/9 chance of no evades or dodges, while each Royal Guard has s 26/36 chance of getting at least one surge. That's 13/162 chance of a surge hitting her with her not evading anything.

So the probability she gets stunned by a single royal guard is 26.08%

Since you get two guards, and therefore, two attacks, her chance of getting stunned goes up to 45.36%.

So, a little less than half the time, she's getting stunned. Certainly better than anyone else's chances, but still not great. Every other turn, you can expect her to not be able to attack (since, with their speed/reach, they should be able to keep her from being able to melee) which prevents her from healing as well.

Additionally, she's only got 8 health.

You're lucky to last two attacks by the Guards.

I am not going to go by your crazy match since I am pretty sure Focus was not included. Diala still is annoying. I am going to go at it with another angle.

If we are talking about the squad above it only has four acts and speed of 5/6 with reach no Officers.

So any squad should be able to get two-three acts in after you are done moving Which helps get off focus later on but you still dont have deep movement.

If the squad goes to:

Royal Guard Champion

Royal Guard Regularx2
Elite Officer

Officerx2

Then you are able to move around but losing those guards pretty much means most of the time you will lost a sets of Guards or Champion and hurts some not getting off focus.

So I might run x4 Officers So I have a few bait pieces to try and get off Focus.

So either way you can go tank fully but make sure you can only go 5 or have officers to help out with movement but lose out on damage in the early game.

Overall I think they are good but not sure they are as uncosted as you are making them out to be.

They are good but I am still not sold on them being as good as you are making them out to be. If they cant get off Focus and run into evade they arent doing a lot of damage.

I am not going to go by your crazy match since I am pretty sure Focus was not included.

Focus from the Royal Guards ability once someone nearby is killed? I didn't include that because it's so conditional, but all it does is even more heavily favor the Guards.

Or did you mean Diala's Foresight ability? If so, yes, I did include it in my calculations.