My FLGS started a casual league last night, and I drew the store owner in his first game in something like three years. He flew a variation of Solo/Fett built for him by another player, which kept Fett a little lighter. I dropped two Cobalt Bombers naked, and Two Blue Recruits with Advanced Optics. I've been messing around with variations of Bombers and A's since they arrived, and I decided to take them to their logical conclusion last night - maximum ship count. I was of course helping my opponent to remember his triggers - Greedo and Maul and 0-0-0 and all of Han's shenanigans in Lando's Falcon - and some of the other players were giving him a hand with maneuvers and strategy.

I set my Bombers together on my right and the A's together in the middle, with obstacles relatively densely packed and shifted mostly to the left. My opponent dropped Fett left and Solo right, facing left. I slow-rolled and he charged Fett in, getting that Round One attack on an A. And we saw how the game was going to go. At Range Three with no modifiers against a focused A...he stripped my shields. Well then. I turned everything in, boosting the A's to start the bump train, getting maximum guns on Fett as soon as possible. I was expecting him to kite Solo around the edges of the obstacle field and give me a couple turns of focused fire on Fett, but no. Han turned in to follow, and Bumpfest 2019 was on. Of course, with multiple ships at R1 and Maul on board, Fett was fully modified - I never touched him. But Solo melted, even to 2-dice attacks, and you can't clear a Console Fire if you keep bumping.

I ended up winning the game at time, taking Solo and Lando in the Escape Craft, losing an A-Wing and half points on both Bombers, 102-99.

If he had kited Solo out there, I would never have touched him, and I would have lost - badly. If I had split my gunships up, one on each side with the A's in the middle, I might have had better approach vectors and modifications. But less effective blocking. If we had played it out instead of stopping at 75 minutes, Fett would have killed everything without taking a scratch. Hmmm....

A-wings are just fantastic good fun, but their attacks are so anemic. Bombers are really only as effective as their upgrade list, and they still just die no matter how you kit them out such that filling them up feels bad. I'm going to keep at Bomber/A's, but man. What a slog. Next week's league game will be in Hyperspace format, and I'm very interested to see how some variation on the concept performs in a more balanced format. Against anything except Fett. Who is flat busted. Heh.