I'm trying to decide between Elite E-Web + Elite Officer or Elite Royal Guard + Elite Officer. In your experience, which pair would be most effective? Are there better choices that I haven't considered?

I like Elite Nexu and Royal Guard for this one (Stun and Bleed).

I'd go with the elite guard as opposed to the eweb.

More health and 2 figures to attack with (yes eweb attacks twice) that are mobile and provide a block for adjacent units.

Thanks Reiryc - do you think the officer pairs well with the RG or would another unit be a better match?

Elite Officer is, I feel, not worth it. You need to do so much moving that a normal officer will likely be just as useful, and elite officers in general feel too expensive for what they do; if you don't have a unique character or well positioned heavy hitter they aren't worth it. The unique character on Under Siege comes too late to matter. I like bringing a Nexu. It quickly crosses the distance from the spawn, and can reach far capture points quickly. Another normal officer is also a great choice. It can get the free spawns into the fray quicker, plus it would help ensure your important units go later in the turn and thus have more opportunities to rush undefended rooms.

The elite officer does pair well as you can get an extra attack out of one of the royal guard units. I ended up daisy chaining my 2 officer units. I brought an elite officer for one of the open groups. I then used my generic officer to help move figures after their own movement from the spawn point and then the elite officer was first positioned to give that figure another attack and later to help give another move order.

It came down to the last round for me to win and it took an attack by vader given by to him by an elite officer that won it foe me. I essentially had to get vader moved to the far left hallway at the bottom left of the map to wound mak. Without having both officer units, I couldn't have gotten him there and given him an attack outside his turn.

In the end, I ran Elite Officer and Elite Royal Guard. The Royal Guard are great: so difficult for the rebels to kill and the Officer helped them to get into the action really quickly. I would have won the mission in 6 rounds but the rebels got lucky and grabbed a shock grenade from a crate and stunned them long enough to prevent that. I still managed to complete the mission by the end of round 8.

Well done!

The royal guards are beasts... I love when I can get them into action.

The extra block from Protector makes a real difference. I had 2 elite and 2 regular royal guard as my frontline attack and they only put down one of them.

And I thought you got the Elite versions only as rewards and cannot choose them for Open Groups

And I thought you got the Elite versions only as rewards and cannot choose them for Open Groups

I think you might be confusing elite versions with unique cards. Elite would be red stormtroopers, unique would be darth vader.

See learn to play guide, page 11. Left hand column under open groups. Then go to the RRG (rules reference guide) page 25 and look at unique. Then go to pages 4/5 of the RRG and look up allies/villains.

Nexu is a pain in the neck. Also the Trandoshan Hunters are a pain as they consume heroes strain.

As an Imperial player, I like the Elite Nexu. It's cheap, it takes up a lot of space, it has good defensive capabilities, and it has a built in auto-bleed ability.