Hello,

I am a very old hand at Star Wars minis but brand new to IA. I am thinking skirmish will be my main way of playing. I played two or three campaign intro games with friends at my gaming group and really liked it once I figured out the weird dice. I had a huge credit at my FLGS so I went out and got the core game, Hoth, Jabba's Realm, Twin Shadows, Leia, Chewie, R2 & 3PO, Echo Base Troopers, Alliance Rangers, General Weiss, General Sorin, Capt. Tero, Dengar, and Jabba the Hutt.

I know that seems like a lot but I am wondering what else I need. I didn't know much about the game I just bought my favorite characters and stuff. I am an old hand at painting minis but I might need some advice regarding this particular plastic, never painted anything like it. Plus all games need varying amounts of stuff so I don't know if I have any glaring holes in my collection. It seems like it's really hard to come up with 40 points of thematic rebels unless that theme is "A bunch of PC's and movie heroes". Am I missing something?

I'm thinking I'll need at least 2 rubber skirmish mats? I guess the Boba Fett mini is a must have along with another dewback? Is there any real reason for me to get The Bespin Gambit, considering I have the other four boxes?

How are people generally with proxies? I have no real desire to own the rebel sabatouers or IG-88 for example. So I would use Echo Base Troops and an assassin droid for those. It's got to be better than using the carboard tokens.

I can't wait to see what the future holds with this game. From Kenner's line of diecast 1.5" Star Wars toy soldiers in 1982, to Grenadier's 25mm lead line, to Hasbro's prepaints, these are the best Star Wars minis I've seen yet! I'm hoping for Endor, more Hoth, and more Tusken Raiders. My only real gripe so far is the tan hero models. They utterly lack variety. I have 4 human females with long hair and a sidearm. Two toughguy male humans with rifles. Two alien snipers. Two hulking alien melee specialists. What gives? Couldn't they have mixed it up a bit with the hero models? Maybe their stat cards are distinct but the models feel very repetitive.

You can proxy anything, but not in ffg official tournaments. The mats are used for easy set up of the current map rotation, otherwise just use your tiles. I'm a novice at painting and these figures are really nice to work with. I wash them before priming and then paint. Welcome to skirmish, it's awesome!

For painting, provided you use a decent primer, FFG PVC-ish figures are no different of an eperience than any other miniature you'd ever paint. Only thing to note though that if you screw anything up completely, it might take a while of research to find the right chemical to safely strip the paint and start over. Polistyrene and metal models are a bit more forgiving in that regard. Try to use thin coats so that any mistakes can be easily painted over and touched up without wholesale stripping and you should be fine.

You most certainly do not need any of the neoprene skirmish maps. They're pretty much just a convenience upgrade. They make setup quicker and easier since you don't have to dig out the relevant mission cards and put the board pieces together, but they are by no means essential.

Boba Fett is largely recognized as inefficient and pretty bad for competitive skirmish play.

Bespin Gambit doesn't bring very many playable skirmish pieces to be frank. You might see Davith or Murne occasionally in Rebel squads and they're decent, but they're nothing to write home about or build squads around and are easiily replacable with other pieces. Wing Guard saw virtually no play in skirmish before and the recent scoring changes and new releases certainly didn't do them any favours. Ugnaughts are somewhat playable, but TBH most of the time they're taken not for what they offer, but for the simple fact that they're the only Merc deployment group below 4pts and so are simply a way to rond out your points total after you've taken all the good stuff and can't quite squeeze anything better in. Other than the figures, the command cards in that box are mostly forgetable, and the deployment upgrade card has a very niche application. However, bear in mind that one of the three maps currently in the OP rotation make use of Bespin Gambit tiles, so if you plan to attend tournaments, *technically* you are required by the OP rules to have those (or the relevant neoprene mat) on hand. Still, whether that poses an actual problem will largely depend on how laid back the community in your area is and how your TO handles map preparation, since in practice you only need a number of playing surfaces equal to half the players and playing on bootleg printout maps is kind of an open secret in many places...

For building skirmish squads, a lot depends on your choice of faction and level of competitiveness. Also, bear in mind that we just had a serious shakeup in the Skirmish rules and a big new wave of releases on top of that, so skirmish play is a bit of a Wild West environment right now. The following is based on my own recent observations of local play, which may or may not have bearing on what eventually cristalizes as 'the meta' in a general sense.

You can build top-notch Merc squads with mostly the contents of Jabba's Realm and Jabba himself, so you have that covered (though you might find that a group of Hired Guns or an Ugnaught or two would help round out your squad to an even 40pts).

For Rebels, a lot of their non-unique units are viable in various combinations. Uniques are a different matter, they have so many that they stretch from terribad to extremely potent and everything in-between. Gideon with the Diplomatic Mission card and Threepio are pretty much autoincludes that you should start every squad with, often jokingly called the Rebel Care Package, and you have that covered. Recently, squads built around Alliance Rangers and/or the new Jedi Luke, often with Kenobi in support, have been all the rage and seem very effective, but those are the newest releases so most of the time people are just testing out their new toys.

Imps are in a weird spot right now. In the past, they were a powerhouse based around the hyperefficient workhorse of Elite Stormtroopers and generally strong Trooper synergies. However, trooper builds seem to have been hit with the nerf bat in multiple different ways. The new scoring rules penalize them and some of their strongest cards, lots of new figures and cards bring strong AOE or multi-target effects to disrupt their formations, the current OP map rotation disincentivizes average movment swarmy squads, a lot of newer figures have static defenses that hamper the DPS potential of Stormtroopers. I personally don't think that Imperial Trooper as we knew them are still viable for competitive play, but so far I haven't identified a viable alternative and from what I've seen locally and on the Internet everyone is currently struggling to find one. The new stuff like Jet Troopers and Dewbacks look nice on paper, but there's not much other building blocks you can use to build synergies around them at the moment.

Interesting stuff. Thanks! I tend to make my armies around themes and **** the odds. However it seems like with the powers cards that are not represented by models on the table, or the choice to take elite or not, I can tweak the lists quite a bit within a theme.

I'm thinking Hoth Rebels and Tatooine Stormtroopers will be my first 40 point lists. I'm hoping we get enough Sand People or ewoks to do whole 40 point squads out of someday.

In the meantime I got a battlefoam case today that magically fits all my IA figures with exactly enough room for the 4 figures I'd still like to collect. Weird.

The battlemat sounds like something I should just own one of, for when I don't feel like setting up the cardboard maps then. Going to have to keep an eye out ofr a bragain on the Hoth one.

Thanks for the detailed advice, Player 17!

That's interesting what you say about a lack of Stormtrooper options. I for one wish they'd release some non-storm Imperial troopers. Where are the black uniformed marines from the OT, the grey uniformed soldiers from ROTJ, etc? I am mostly non-competitive, and base my choices on the models. Because I'm old enough to know that rules sets come and go. But awesome toy soldiers stick around! Plus if I am seeking the vain glory of mortal man, I find that with a really cool looking army, you always get respect no matter how bad you get beat up on the table. People say a small box expansion with ewoks and scout troopers is coming out. To this I can only say, I hope it's ewoks and Imperial troops in cloth uniforms. This model line, while the sculpts are amazing, is starved for visual variety.

In my magically well suited army case I have room for two infantry models and two large models. I'm thinking a second dewback and a bantha are must-haves, if only from a collecting/painting standpoint. Kayne Samos then becomes an obvious thematic choice with two dewbacks and 4 sandtroopers on foot. Boba Fett seems like a collecting no-brainer. Its odd that he isn't that good in-game. Oh well. But it'll just look weird to have Jabba and his crowd of minions with no Boba Fett... given my limited storage space, I really wish I had a crystal ball to know if tauntauns or other Hoth rebels are coming out soon.

Am I going to feel stupid for not buying Bossk? He's my favorite bounty hunter but, the core game came with 4 trandoshans. He seems almost pointless if I've got the 4 from the box, plus Dengar (my 2nd favorite) and Boba Fett.

You don't skip buying Leia because you already have other humans. You buy her because it's Leia and she's good and she's cool.

Similarly don't sweat buying Bossk. The core Trandoshans are more or less generic troops. Bossk does his own thing, and I think you'll probably like him.