Hi All. This won’t be a very sophisticated report but I thought I would share my experience running the first mission of operation Blue Metal with my brother on my basement table.
The mission has both forces on one end of the table at opposite sides with Victory points awarded for destroying units (oddly you get a point for any unit destroyed except support units?). The major objective is to work your way to the other side of the table and occupy a zone that represents the mine. For us, we used a piece of terrain which was not exactly sized to the rules but close enough:
Here’s the forces at setup:
Sadly, I didn’t take too many more interesting pictures.
I have played exactly one other 800 point game of Legion but I’ve been following the game a bit. My brother thinks about Legion for five whole minutes before we play the game so I let him setup the terrain as some small compensation. He was Imperials and I was Rebels. He chose to run Vader and an ATST, which I knew was a bit of a mistake because it reduced his activations and decreased his chances of getting troopers on the objective. But he wanted to use the cool fun units. So I chose to use the airspeeder instead of adding additional trooper units and just ran three rebel troopers and one fleet trooper. I ran this:
++ Standard (Rebel Alliance) [794 Points] ++
+ Commander +
•Leia Organa [110 Points]: Commanding Presence, Improvised Orders
+ Corps +
Fleet Troopers [93 Points]: Concussion Grenades, Fleet Trooper, MPL-S7 Barrage Trooper
Rebel Troopers [77 Points]: Concussion Grenades, Rebel Trooper, Z-6 Trooper
Rebel Troopers [77 Points]: Concussion Grenades, Rebel Trooper, Z-6 Trooper
Rebel Troopers [77 Points]: Concussion Grenades, Rebel Trooper, Z-6 Trooper
+ Support +
AT-RT [80 Points]: AT-RT Flamethrower
AT-RT [80 Points]: AT-RT Flamethrower
+ Heavy +
T-47 Airspeeder [200 Points]: Ax-108 "Ground Buzzer", •Wedge Antilles
+ Command Hand +
Command Hand: •Ambush, •Coordinated Bombardment, ••No Time for Sorrows, ••Push, •••Assault, •••Somebody Has to Save Our Skins, ••••Standing Orders
++ Total: [794 Points] ++
Created with BattleScribe
He ran:
++ Standard (Galactic Empire) [793 Points] ++
+ Commander +
•Darth Vader [210 Points]: Saber Throw
+ Corps +
Stormtroopers [50 Points]: Targeting Scopes
Stormtroopers [78 Points]: HH-12 Stormtrooper
Stormtroopers [50 Points]: Targeting Scopes
Stormtroopers [50 Points]: Targeting Scopes
+ Support +
74-Z Speeder Bikes [100 Points]: Long Range Comlink
+ Heavy +
AT-ST [255 Points]: 88 Twin Light Blaster Cannon, AT-ST Mortar Launcher, Comms Jammer, DW-3 Concussion Grenade Launcher
+ Command Hand +
Command Hand: •Ambush, •Implacable, ••New Ways to Motivate Them, ••Push, •••Assault, •••Master of Evil, ••••Standing Orders
++ Total: [793 Points] ++
Created with BattleScribe
(hope that translates okay).
I deliberately ran the two ATRT flamersnbecause my strategy was simple. Pin his troopers down and waste their time while I ran for the objective. I positioned the airspeeder to loop around and get behind his lines and he did the same for his speeder bikes.
On the first turn I sent one ATRT charging across the map and wiped out a trooper unit he had left sitting in the open. More or less this probably won the game but we didn’t know it yet. Still, the flames had the desired effect and he never really got his stormtroopers off the blocks.
The rest of the battle hinges on two basic stories. First, his ATST made it very difficult to move my Rebels down the field. Everyone had to carefully stick to cover. I “sacrificed” the fleet trooper unit to engage with the ATST - mistakenly thinking they had an ion gun when what they have is a grenade launcher (oops). What he did was move the ATST into a good firing lane and park it there. I actually think this was a mistake. If he had marched it down to the objective it would have been mighty difficult for me to get my troops there.
The speeders crossed paths just beyond the landing platform and exchanged essentially meaningless fire. His two bikes eventually came around and did the most damage to my trooper units. Similarly my airspeeder did a lot of damage to his troopers starting in turn 3, although this was largely meaningless as they were not positioned to make it to the objective by then anyway. He had wasted too much time and energy killing the ATRTs which didn’t even net him any points.
By turn four he had twigged to the real priorities and it came down to Vader versus two rebel trooper squads and Leia all in reach of the objective. He started to move the ATST down the board in turn 4 but on turn 5, because my fleet troopers had been poking at the ATST from the rear, I turned my airspeeder into the side of it and got a lucky die roll to take it out. Similarly, although Vader managed to take out one rebel trooper squad save the leader (I stayed out of range and he had to use saber throw), he fell to focused fire from the two squads and Leia. That was game over and we called it at turn five. Took us about 3 hours to get this far as we continuously had to check the rule book etc. but it was lots of fun.
I learned that the strategy of sacrificing units can work, that movement is a priority when you need to get troops on an objective and that the airspeeder is probably underrated even if it costs a little too much.
Edited by BigBadAndy