Now that the initial excitement of the 2nd Edition announcement has faded a little it’s time to refocus the efforts of this series of blogs and discuss the viability of generics in 1st Edition. I’ll discuss lists, but also how to fly swarms on the able so that I can transfer what I learn into the new edition in September. This time, let’s start here:

I’ve just played my first few games with this squad, trying to get a general idea of how the list felt. A lot of players of the game who’ve been around for longer than I have may feel I’m covering old ground, but a lot of players who started within the last 1-2 years may have some very limited experience with these components and types of lists (myself included).

My general game plan was as follows; have the A-Wing hanging out at the front of the list ready to block and make a target vulnerable for the rest of the squadron to pounce on. Every other ship would focus, the bandit firing his thread tracers first to give everyone else a target lock. The two X-Wings and the stresshog would then be able to fire double modded shots and pile on some early damage. Ideally the stresshog would then keep arc on the target, never letting it take actions and whittling it down. In my wins these strategy generally worked out so I was quite pleased, but as always, there is more to learn from your losses than your victories.

My first loss was to Rey/Lowhhrick, the exact same list that won the Italian System Open.

I got this game wrong from the start. The position of the ships just prior to the opening round of fire is shown below.

How the ships were arranged just before the first engagement.

I tried to sweep the stresshog in too quickly and as a result left myself stranded next to the asteroid to the right of the Y-wing. This prevented me from turning in and engaging the enemy, whilst my opponent was simply able to turn Rey to the left around the debris and boost away from all of my arcs. My second mistake was to double down on my initial choices. I continued to bank to the right in pursuit, but this left me in the middle of the asteroid field with five ships to move around. I would have been much better to disengage towards the bottom left of the map. Rey would have been able to close distance and get a shot, but the next turn I could k-turn all the ships to present a formidable front once again.

I also would have been better off with a slower start keeping myself on the edge of the map and trying to avoid the difficulties of the obstacles. The y-wing and z95s have quite poor dials and poor re-positioning ability so choosing the route I did allowed the more manoeuvrable ships to exploit one of my greatest weaknesses.

My next attempt at an arc based team was one of the most successful swarms of recent times – Blair Bunke’s seven Z95 swarm. It’s 100 points of target lock madness.

I found with this list that if anyone was crazy enough to joust this they would inevitably find themselves with not very many ships left after the first round of shooting, but things get a bit more complicated when you face a more spread out foe. I messed this up massively when flying against a triple imperial list.

The first round of shooting against Quickdraw, Backdraft, and Ryad. The three Z95s at the back with red stripes are the Harpoon carriers.

The mistake I made here was trying to be too fancy and losing sight of the strength of my squad; concentrated firepower. I spread my arcs out to try and threaten all of his ships, but what I should have done is try and focus fire on one target. Instead I allowed my opponent to PS kill a Harpoon Z95 and face no serious return fire. He was then easily able to repeat this process again next turn. This was a serious mistake on my part as I’ll never be able to do enough damage without landing the Harpoon missiles due to the paltry two attack dice of the bandit squadron pilots.

This is a much more favourable position for the swarm. It’s still likely that a Z95 will die before it can shoot, but the return fire should be able to pick off an imperial ship in return.

Next time I’ll go over some continued list experimentation that will feature some proxies from Saw’s Renegades. I’m looking forward to flying some X-wings!