The second of two games El Tonio and I played last Thursday night at Empire Games in Mesa, AZ, continuing to test my Rebel Swarm concept.
My Squad: Prototype Pilot A-Wing * 2, Rookie Pilot X-Wing * 2, Gold Squadron Pilot Y-Wing + Ion Turret
El Tonio's squad: Triple Firesprays
I set my ships up first, so I feigned going straight down the middle. He set his BH's up relatively close to each other across from me. My squad immediately pulled to the left hard to try to get the BH's to chase me into the asteroids, which they promptly did.
One of the BH's got hung up on an asteroid for two rounds, so I pummeled it with everything I had.
Unfortunately, my average red dice were met by his ridiculous green dice, and the BH survived those two waves of laser cannons while the other two BH's took the shields off most of my ships (most notably my two X-Wings).
Until that point, all I could blame for how things were going were the dice. But I pulled a bone-headed error forgetting PS order of movement, and one of my X-Wings got stuck face-to-face with my A-Wing, stressed because he was trying to K-Turn himself, and within range 1 of the rear guns of a BH. That X-Wing was in fact turned to toast shortly after combat began that round, and the other X-Wing fell shortly afterwards.
Unfortunately, my phone died at that point so I wasn't able to capture images from the rest of the battle. One of my A-Wings was snared by a fully healed Bounty Hunter and quickly disposed of. The other A-Wing and the Y-Wing managed to give chase to the crippled BH and flew him off the board, but time was called and I was left with a Prototype Pilot A-Wing and a Y-Wing with an Ion Turret and three hull left.
CONCLUSION
:
After playing the Rebel Swarm squad as-is for three games against some hard competition, I think it has its strengths but it also suffers from a few critical downsides - most notably, the fact that it is all PS1 and PS2. That pretty much gives control to your opponent right off the bat (unless they're flying a TIE Swarm with a lot of Academy Pilots, but... then you have to face a TIE Swarm that probably has a well protected Howlrunner and a few other surprises baked into it). The Y-Wing factored into things positively a few times, but I am not sure it did so to the point of how much more it costs to field versus another X-Wing.
I want to continue testing variations of a Rebel Swarm concept, especially as Wave 3 options emerge (Dagger Squadron would be nice to mix in). For now, I think my next trial will upgrade the Rookie Pilot X-Wings to Red Squadron (PS4, giving it an advantage over the BHs and most TIEs in a swarm), keep the two Prototype Pilot A-Wings, and add in a Green Squadron Pilot A-Wing with VI (in lieu of the Y-Wing) to have another PS3+ ship on the field of combat.
Will post more battles in a couple of weeks (have to take a week off from the game to go earn some Wave 3 money and start saving for my trip to Worlds in November
).