I had a game of X-Wing today in Titan Games with Rich Bloomer and it was basically a massacre; I took three fighters to his five and was destroyed piecemeal. But as ever, I'm willing to learn from my mistakes.
My squadron was:
| Components | Points | Total Points | Total Army |
| X-Wing: Biggs Darklighter | 25 | 28 | 100 |
| R2-F2 | 3 | ||
| X-Wing: Wedge Antilles | 29 | 33 | |
| R2 Astromech | 1 | ||
| Marksmanship | 3 | ||
| Y-Wing: Horton Salm | 25 | 39 | |
| Proton Torpedoes (2) | 8 | ||
| Ion Cannon Turret | 5 | ||
| R5 Astromech | 1 |
The idea behind the squadron was that Biggs and Wedge - both in X-Wings - would fly in close formation. Wedge would use his offensive capabilities of reducing the defender's agility to do some damage, and Biggs' effect that forces the enemy to fire at him rather than another fighter would keep the heat off Wedge. It kind of worked, but I mis-interpreted Biggs' effect. I thought that if the target was within range 1 of the shooter then the effect would kick in, but in fact the target had to be within range 1 of Biggs. I'll have to be a bit more careful if I'm going to run that tactic again!
The Y-Wing was to provide long-range support and hopefully score a couple of kills early on to keep the heat off the X-Wings. Sadly this didn't happen, though it was astonishing how difficult it was to kill; Rich spent around 3 or 4 turns with that being the only model left! The Ion cannon proved surprisingly effective as well, though perhaps this is because I misread the rules. I thought if one of my attacks hit then it cancelled out all other dice, so Rich wouldn't have had to roll his - but I've read the relevant section on the Fantasy Flight Forums and apparently he would still have been able to roll his dice, but I wouldn't have done more than 1 damage no matter how well I rolled. The effect of forcing the enemy to do nothing but fly slowly in one direction for a turn can take someone out of the fight for a turn though, and it ignores the normal rules for arc of fire so it is not to be taken lightly.
Also, did you see the mistake in the army list? Yes, I put the R2 unit with Wedge and the R5 unit with Horton; it should have been the other way around.
The R2 unit allows all movements of 1-2 speed as green manoeuvres. This would have been invaluable for the Y-Wing, because it has more than the usual number of red manoeuvers to give it stress tokens, and very few greens. The R2 unit would have been great for counteracting this.
The R5 unit on the other hand allows you to turn over a Critical Hit card at the end phase so that it only counts as a hit rather than a Critical. Honestly, I only took this one to fill out the points, but it proved useful in the end so it's worth hanging on to until I find something better.
So what happened in the battle?
I deployed my fighters in a 'step' formation; Wedge, Biggs and Horton. The first turn was basically spent moving towards each other on a diagonal slant across the board. I had hoped to take the flank of the TIE squadron, but instead I ended up flinging Wedge headfirst in to Darth Vader. He lasted two turns. Biggs was next to go; after flipping around to face the other way, he fired off a couple of shots only to be shot down by the entire squadron facing him. Horton lasted a little longer, as his craft was a little more hard-wearing, but he just didn't have the firepower to hold his own against 5 TIEs and went down after a few turns.
What would I do differently? Well, apart from the aforementioned changes to the army list, I would consider using the Ion cannon a lot more as it was surprisingly useful and did a good job of taking at least some of the enemy out of the fight. I've got another game coming up tomorrow so we'll see...
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