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Battle of Hoth

Started by Silent Disapproval Robot, March 18, 2018, 12:47:28 AM

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Silent Disapproval Robot

Big 3-day minis convention in Vancouver this weekend.   I'd hoped to get in on the Rorke's Drift game but it filled up a few seconds after the sign-up sheets dropped.  My friends and I signed up for a game of Federation Commander but the guy who was supposed to host it never showed.  The alternate host asked if we'd be interested in playing a Star Wars ground combat game using his own rules system.  We gave it a whirl and it was pretty fun.

Setup was about as you'd expect.  Rebels were in a trench.  Empire was out in the snow fields and needed to clear the trench in 12 turns.  I was assigned to the Empire.

Initial forces included a lot of AT-STs and snowtrooper squads, some with heavy weapons, some with blasters.  (Here are some of the public ones.  We also had some secret forces that would be revealed during the course of play via the use of cards.)






Rebels started with a bunch of infantry squads in the trench, 4 anti-vehicle turrets, and 4 anti-personnel guns as well as several snow speeders and infantry squads, tauntaun riders, and troop transports in reserve.  Here's a portion of their initial setup. 





View of the Rebel trench from our deployment zone.



Close up of Rebel lines (we'd already knocked out their guns by this point.)




The game used a deck of cards to allow special events as well as to place reinforcements.  We had several more AT-STs in reserve as well as 5 more infantry squads on a Lambda shuttle.  (The way the card read, we thought the Lambda shuttle could land up to 2 metres from our deployment edge and drop troops.  Turns out 2m meant 2xmarch distance or 20cm, not 2 metres so we ended up bringing our infantry on way too late to reach the fight.  Not that it mattered as we did nothing but churn out all our AT-STs as quickly as possible and stack them on one side of the map in order to knock out the guns there and then rush the trench.


Our first few waves of AT-STs march onto the board.



We pushed infantry on the left, mainly to draw fire away from our armour on the right (they died like flies but did their job and sucked up a lot of the Rebel's fire.)





We tore the Rebel's guns to pieces in just a few turns and started marching up the map.  They sent out a wave of 8 speeders on the left of the map but we had hot dice and tore those apart as well.  We lost 2 walkers and a few squads.








We got within range to use our anti-infantry guns on the AT-STs but the cover provided by the trench shielded the Rebels from most of the fire.  We'd knock down a single trooper here and there but really couldn't do much damage to them at all while their fire was doing significant damage to our troopers (and we were light in troops due to the misunderstanding of how the shuttle worked.)



We used some of our cards to unleash a rampaging wampa into one end of their trench while flinging a couple of probe droids at the other side.  The wampa tore through quite a few of their men and the probe droid drew a tonne of fire (Rebels had to pass a nerve check in order to be allowed to fire at anything other than the closest target and they failed, resulting in the probe droid eating 50 dice worth of blaster fire).  The Wampa really messed them up as well and they were forced to deploy their elite ranger squad as well as their tauntauns against it in order to take it down.  The Rangers had to deploy on the lip of the trench, exposing them to our fire and they got ripped to pieces by our E-Web blaster teams.




Finally, we got General Veers to project a hologram to "inspire" the troops and get them to charge home to the trenches.  (I just can't believe they actually made a General Veers hologram miniature at some point in the past.)




We had to call the game due to time constrains but it looked very likely that the Empire would carry the day.  We only had 2 turns left to take the trench but our walkers were right up on it and at that range, their anti-infantry weapons would have made short work of the remaining Rebel squadrons.





SirAndrewD

You needed to borrow my WOTC AT-AT.
"These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick and try to compensate by making me feel miserable. Last week was my birthday. Nobody even said "happy birthday" to me. Someday this tape will be played and then they'll feel sorry."  - Sgt. Pinback

Silent Disapproval Robot

Guy said he has a couple but they are too big for the map.

SirAndrewD

That's actually the problem with them.  They're way too large.  I've tried to do an RPG scenario with mine and it's unwieldy to the extreme. 

Magnificent table piece though.  But yeah, pretty useless in all but the largest scenarios. 

Deeplly excited to see how all this will work when Legion comes out soon.  I've got about a $300 pre-order on that system.
"These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick and try to compensate by making me feel miserable. Last week was my birthday. Nobody even said "happy birthday" to me. Someday this tape will be played and then they'll feel sorry."  - Sgt. Pinback

mirth

"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

BanzaiCat

Thanks for posting all that, SDR - that looks like a lot of fun. No way I'mma get into it ($$$), but it does look fun.