Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Battle report : Bomber swarm VS Vador Shuttle & 2 Bounty Hunters

Go big or Go home!


After reading the bomber thread on the fantasy flight games forums, I wanted to try the Tie bomber. I'm a fighter swarm man myself, so I tried to cram as many ships I could into 100pts.

Here's what I got : 5 gamma squadron with seismic charges, 100 pts. My reasoning was : more ships, more firepower, more ordnance at the impact point on the important turn. After that, higher PS means you can see where is your opponent before unleashing said ordnance.

Guess what: no plan survives first contact with the enemy!

Knowing I would be playing a 5 bomber list, my opponent decided to play :
2 Bounty Hunters, Gunner
Omicron Lambda, Darth Vador

I won the initiative and tried to spread the asteroids out. He deployed first and I deployed right across in a 2 deep formation:

We both slow played the first turn, with hostilities starting on turn 2. He focused with all 3 ships, while I target locked the middle Bounty Hunter.


I made a mistake here, I should have banked and concentrated on the shuttle, because as you can see position was ideal for him: the 2 bounties have room for a 1 straight next turn, and I won't be able to use my seismic charges. I locked instead of focusing because I knew I would be able to use the lock the following turn after K-Turning.

He did 3 damages to the top bomber : 2 crits (1 with vader), console fire and thrust control fire, while I removed 3 shields from the middle hunter, keeping 3 locks on him.

As planned I K-Turned behind him, which would have been great against almost any other ships, but was a disaster here. I managed to lower the middle hunter to 3 hull, while the he killed the damaged bomber (who had crashed into the lambda as he was stressed, he was unable to K-Turn) and did 2 additional damages to the top bomber (crit is another console fire!)

Here is the board after turn 3:

At this point, the situation was difficult for both sides.
We had the same number of hull+shield on both sides (30) at the beginning of the game, but due to the way Vador works, he actually lost 11 points to my 8. However, I was down one ship, and my firepower was thus 20% lower.

Disaster! I went too slow, letting the hunter increase the distance to range 2, meaning that I failed to destroy the top hunter, leaving him with 1 hull (choose focus as my actions, failed to roll any eyes).
The hunters on the other hand finished the damaged bomber, leaving the lambda free to crit the lead bomber, taking two damages for Vador : damaged cockpit (twice) and injured pilot .

The board after turn 4:

It was looking pretty grim for Gamma squadron!

He banked 3 the top hunter and hard turned 2 the other, the lambda banked one. On my side, the damaged bomber did 1 straight at PS0 to get an action, while the 2 others leap-frogged it, all three dropped charges on the lambda.
In a stroke of luck, the first bomber took the last hull from the top hunter. While the lambda did its thing, leaving itself and the damaged bomber with 1 hull.

The board after turn 5:

I K-turned the 2 bottom bombers to finish the lambda before it got to fire another force powered shot while the top bomber trailed the hunter.

The board after turn 6:

The rest of the game is less interesting, suffice to say I tried to preserve the damaged bomber from the hunter, failed, and lost another bomber to get the firespray down to one hull.

Here is the board on the last turn:

At some point we entered a turning duel, and I tried to match his radius, taking a 2 hard turn.
I had a 3 dices shot, with no action, to his 2 green dices and evade token for his last hull.

3 Blanks! We had to call the game as I had to leave : Victory for Vader, with 80pts destroyed to my 62 pts.

Even if I ultimatly lost, the bomber is definitely an interesting ship to play, much more resilient than my usual Tie-Fighter, and with lots of ordnance options. Now I want to try missiles and torps!

Time to reload,
Ica 

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this game Ica', I think we learnt a lot from this. I felt strange not to play with the Bombers as I actually own 4 of them, and played them quite often. Next time we can try Bombers vs Bombers if you want to !!!

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  2. Oui super partie, il faut que je m'achète d'autres bombers!

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