However, other than a practice game we played in mid-December, we had not played an actual game until Tuesday. Hubert is an excellent model-painter and drafted us to start painting all the units before playing with them. However, with over 100+ miniatures between all of us, it was a rather involved affair, and after 4-5 painting sessions and getting a little over half done, we were ready to begin. Hubert and I caved Tuesday night and got together to play a game, me as the Rebellion and him as the Empire.
I'm going to record my army (and his to the best of my ability) as I imagine it will be fun to come back and review it after we figure out what we're doing and spot our early mistakes.
Luke Skywalker
- Force Reflexes
- Emergency Stims
Leia Organa
Rebel Troopers
- MPL-57 Ion Trooper
- Rebel Trooper
- Recon Intel
Rebel Troopers
- Z-6 Trooper
- Targeting Scopes
Rebel Troopers
- Rebel Trooper
Rebel Troopers
Fleet Troopers
- Scatter Gun Trooper
- Fleet Trooper
- Emergency Stims
- Concussion Grenade
Rebel Commandos
- DH-447 Sniper
- Hunter
- Recon Intel
Rebel Commandos
- DH-447 Sniper
- Hunter
- Recon Intel
1.4 FD Laser Cannon Team
- Long-Range Comlink
- Overcharged Generator
Standing Orders
Return Of The Jedi
Somebody Has To Save Our Skins
My Ally Is The Force
No Time For Sorrows
Son of Skywalker
Coordinated Bombardment
There is not a whole lot to this army other than trying out a bunch of things that looked interesting to me. The units I were given for Christmas were: Fleet Troopers, Leia, Rebel Commandos, and the T-47, so I was able to break out three of the four here. I immediately found myself gravitating towards trooper spam, and so took all the corps that we had. I wanted to try out Leia, but not feeling confident enough to take the field without a Jedi (after getting wrecked by DV in the practice game), I decided to bring Luke as well. The 1.4 FD Laser turret seemed to be the perfect anti-armor weapon for a infantry heavy army, so I brought that alongside one MPL-57 ion to deal with the AT-ST that I knew Hubert would bring. Still probably a lot less than I should have brought but tailoring it specifically to deal with an AT-ST would have been unfair to Hubert.
The other thing that really appealed to me out of all the Legion stuff currently out was snipers, and so I outfitted two commando strike teams with snipers to use similarly to artillery in ETW. Finally, I brought fleet troopers loaded up for CQB. I love the look of the Fleet Troopers (and am very proud of my paint job I did on them), but honestly was unsure if I would be able to get them in close enough to use.
At any rate, Hubert brought a AT-ST, but not a fully Christmas-tree'd one. Veers was his commander alongside 4 Stormtrooper squads sporting DLT's, some Snowtroopers/Galactic Marines with a flamethrower, and speeder bikes.
Right off the bat, me and Hubert struggled a bit with the wording on giving orders, and I was taken off guard by Coordinated Bombardment being interrupted by cover. At any rate, no good hits were scored off of it. Hubert by contrast landed a good hit on by cannon with Maxmimum Firepower which I had not put behind cover in the mistaken belief that vehicles and the like did not benefit from it.
The Imperials came out swinging, using bikes to flank my position and cutting down troopers. However, my the end of the round, I was able to land some good hits on the AT-ST with the cannon and additionally ionize it. The Galactic Marines barely got outside deployment before having half of their squad cut down by snipers across the field.
Round one took nearly an hour, but by the end we had a pretty good idea what we were doing. There are still some things I'm unclear about re: issuing orders. But suppression more or less makes sense, and limiting actions to one for many units makes for some hard trade-offs. I know it made me grateful to have Hunter on my snipers to generate that aim token. We played the first round thinking aim only allowed you to reroll two dice, which hurt Hubert disproportionately.
I'm sure though this won't be the last game we get rules wrong.
At any rate, I had to leave at this point and Daniel elected to take over for me.
The Rebels ended up winning after a miraculous turn in which the cannon survived everything thrown against it. The AT-ST went down to Luke, but the Imperial Speeder bikes proved elusive lived through to the end of the game. My Fleet troopers also apparently landed a god tier roll with their excess of white dice, but didn't do much after that.
All in all, a taxing and occasionally frustrating introduction to Legion, but I definitely can't wait to play again.
Thanks to Hubert and Daniel as always for hosting this little shin-dig :D
Of note, suppression easily seems like the most powerful method of inhibiting various special unit effects.
ReplyDeleteLeia and Veers got hurt by not being able to take their corresponding token passing actions.
The ion trooper couldn't recover to untap the ion cannon. So it was choosing between taking a less valuable shot of regular arms fire, or choosing to recover and miss the chance to shoot for a round. All due to suppression.
On another note: I think that we really want to be playing with some real terrain. There are a LOT of mechanics that interact with terrain in a way that drastically changes the battlefield. We mostly duelled from our respective sides of the battlefield save for the bikes. Breaking lines of sight would force closer combat in a fun way.
Fleet troopers and snow troopers(?) desperately need to be able to dodge lines of sight until they get close enough to hit someone. If they don't have that they can get easily suppressed into staying stationary or just get picked off before they can push in.
Finding lines of sight around barricades with snipers was often a fun little min-maxing exercise.