Still messing around with running 3 Proton Charge Saboteur Strike Teams
Luke w/ Force Push and Mind Trick
Leia w/ esteemed leader
4x Rebel Troopers w/ Z-6
2x Fleet Trooper w/ MPL
3x Commando Strike Team w/ Proton Charge Saboteur (Proxied as Ion Trooper with a dude)
Intercept the Transmissions
Clear Conditions
Battle Lines
Turn 1, Leia kicks things off with a coordinated bombardment that kills 3 troopers and throws out some suppression. The rest of the turn is mostly just pot shots, although one of his bike units does push up aggressively to put some damage on Rebel Troopers and pays for it. The AT-ST puts some dice into fleet troopers with a barricade, but they weather it pretty well.
Turn 2, I use Return of the Jedi to dodge up Luke and also give orders to the 2 Saboteur units near him. He activates Veers first to give the AT-ST an aim token and the Saboteur unit takes that opportunity to throw out a second charge and move behind the building detonating both that one and the one from the turn before, killing 4 stormtroopers behind the building and doing 2 damage to the AT-ST. The fleet troopers on the left get wiped by the bikes, the bike in the middle is finished off by the rebel troopers nearby. A unit of Stromtroopers and Snowtroopers were creeping towards the objective on the right, but between the coordinated bombardment shot turn 1, an MPL shot and the Proton Charge, all the Snowtroopers just died and the Stormtroopers were suppressed by a Z-6 unit.
Turn 3, I use My Ally is the Force to give orders to both middle and left Saboteur units. This pic is actually from after the activation of the leftmost unit. It threw a charge out last turn and shot at the bikes, then threw another charge, walked away and detonated both, killing one of the bikers. The middle Saboteur survives the shot from the remaining bike, throws a charge out between it and the AT-ST, walks away detonating the charge doing 3 damage to the AT-ST, and leaving the bike on 1 health. The Stormtroopers on the Right get gunned down by fleet troopers, the unit behind the middle building gets killed by Luke and the contesting the middle objective gets dropped down to just the unit leader.
At this point my opponent calls the game. The AT-ST has taken a lot of damage just from the Saboteurs and he's hemorrhaging troopers too fast (down to just a unit leader and Veers with a probable Son of Skywalker next turn to clear Veers).
Observations about the Proton Charge Saboteur in Strike Teams.
1- always use 3 of them. It opens up a lot of options and means that even if one of the units gets killed, the charges are still active unless they can also get the other 2. It also gives you the opportunity to get multiple detonates off of the same action which I used about 3 times over the game. Having 3 also makes people reluctant to devote serious attention to killing 1 since you can still do something with the charges they've placed and the units are super cheap and disposable.
2- Every activation should include and Arm action even if you don't think it will be useful. I have had a few times where tokens that I threw out on a lark became relevant especially against fast moving things like Speeder Bikes that can sometimes come from behind you. There is no penalty to having more tokens out, you can just not detonate them if you don't want to and there isn't a maximum.
3- LoS is not your friend. Notice how the Saboteur units are all playing games of ring around the building with imperial forces. They don't need LoS to their targets, just where you want to drop the charge. On a table with more limited or no LoS blocking terrain, these guys probably just die unceremoniously, but meh, they're super cheap.
4- Always remember, charges are placed off of the unit leader, but if they die, the vanilla dude becomes the saboteur. In this regard having one model on one side of the building with their friend around the corner is frequently what you want to be doing so it's hard to kill both of them with a single attack. This is also more viable with these guys than real units because you're not concerned with them doing damage with their ranged attacks, you just want them to live long enough to blow more stuff up.
Walking up the unit leader to place a charge while the joe is out of LoS puts your opponent in a kind of dumb situation. If they kill the unit leader without getting the joe, you just detonate because you have no reason not to. If they leave it for an activation, you place charge #2, walk away and blow both of them. This is pretty sever because in the case of 2 units being the radius, which happened twice this game, your cheap little unit just rolled 12 attack dice ignoring cover and with surges to crit and impact that also hands out double suppression to everything around it. Even if they get a position to kill both models, guess what, you still have 2 more detonators, so that charge is still going off.
I'm still not convinced this is super competitive, but god is it funny and annoying and, at the end of the day, that's why I'm here.