Battle Report Han Solo vs Darth Vader

Enjoy, Relasine really put his all into this tutorial battle report. So if you haven't seen X-Wing yet, give it a view.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=tvorENmi21I

Some people in my gaming group are trying to get x-wing off the ground and to be honest this battle report re-enforces all the concerns about the game I had from the read-ups I'd been doing. The movement system seems to have the seem tetchy fiddlyness of wings of war, while the damage has the same "some units are immortal (falcon) others un-hittable (a-wings) and others trash (tie-fighters) that crippled AI as an enjoyable game. Having said that it would have been nice to have had a few words from the Imperial player as to what they were attempting to achieve with their "fly about and wait to die" formation as if I think likely the idea was to try and evade the flying tank Falcon for long enough to fluke some hits on the A-wings then that would again add worrying aspects to the pointlessness of basic ships in a system where you can buy Han Solo and elite evasion ships in a basic game.

That is a really nice video report. Except that Howlrunner is not a "he" at 4:20 ;) Made me smile when that was corrected later.

Cleon, I wouldn't call myself an X-Wing expert, but I have gotten enough games to have some thoughts re: your concerns. I haven't found that the maneuver template system makes it difficult to dogfight, when combined with some of the actions that can be used to change a ship's position in addition to its chosen maneuver (none of which, I notice, were really on display in this report despite being available to both players). To me, the sense of dogfighting and the sense of each ship handling differently are very real.

A YT-1300 by itself is not actually particularly deadly - the turreted laser cannon is nice, but they are not that tough and maneuver like pigs. The Falcon has more firepower and is tougher, but it still maneuvers like a pig. Nevertheless, it can easily eat up half of or more of your list (as it did in this battle, at 56 out of 100 points). A-wings, on the other hand, have low firepower, are barely more survivable than a TIE fighter, and are quite slippery.

So the Imperial player here has two types of targets: the ones that have low firepower and are hard to hit but can take few hits, or the one that has high firepower, is extremely easy to hit, and will take a lot of hits to bring down. His main mistake, in my opinion, was in not concentrating his attacks on the Falcon when he still had all his guns in space. In my experience, even very tough ships with poor agility (like the Falcon) go down quickly as long as you treat them seriously. Instead, the Imperials decided to try to outmaneuver the A-wings - a difficult proposition to begin with, but of dubious wisdom in my opinion considering that both A-wings combined have about the firepower of the Falcon alone, yet each of them individually is four times harder to hit. Whether he realized it or not, the Imperial player played right into the Rebels' hands, allowing the Falcon to do what it is best at unmolested (blasting things) and allowing the A-wings to do what they are best at (evade). Had he instead concentrated on blasting the Falcon, the Rebels would have been faced with the prospect of defeating superior numbers with only their superior maneuverability as an advantage, a much more difficult prospect.