AKA Return of the Scarif Beach Party...
Blogger Pel and I decided it was time to give the new version of Star Wars: Legion a go. Given the wildly varying views on the internet and the bits and bobs that we'd respectively read it seemed like the best thing to do was give it a go.
We both went through and built lists with a bunch of things that needed to be tested. Pel bought a couple of vehicles so we could see what happens when armour and vehicle damage play out and I bought the Dark Troopers (for armour) and a double-sized unit of Storm Troopers to see what that did.
The mission was a Bunker Assault with Sweep and Clear as a secondary objective - that was looking to defeat enemies in all areas on the board for VPs. Pel had Ordnance as his advantage (for a once per game bombardment) and I had Garrison (adding another Prepared Positions unit.)
The game began with both of us reading the orders rules to understand how we actually started with our commanders off the table and then working out how Prepared Positions worked. I deployed half my army (in the end) because Shore Troopers and their mortars, as well as my Storm Trooper garrison. Pel deployed his blaster cannon and his Rebel Veterans.
The first turn was VERY slow as we worked out how everything worked, looked up rules and abilities and double checked things we thought might have changed. By the end of turn one, I'd plinked some damage on the Snow Speeder and killed some Rebels and Pel had started a campaign on the giant unit of Storm Troopers but the amount of damage done to either side was fairly limited.
Turn two and three were fairly violent - the Storm Troopers spent the whole game excessively suppressed and it was only Director Krennic standing next to them that kept them from panicking. The Dark Troopers armour and two activations did horrific things to Pel's Wookiees while Pel's rotary cannons destroyed most of my infantry.
What did we learn?
- Most units don’t deploy on table unless you have Prepared Positions.
- Most units walk on the base edge. So unless you have range 4, you’re not shooting much of anything in turn 1, which isn't a bad thing. Speed One Darth Vader might struggle to really impact a game but that's just an inducement for transport.
- New cover rules are just straight better.
- The flat hit reduction from v1 meant that the more attack dice you had, the better. Whereas the new cover rules allow for units to survive longer and they're more likely to be panicked than just shot off the board. Sharpshooter is a VERY good rule now.
- New armour rules just straight better, especially getting rid of the Armour with no number on it.
- Crit fishing is still a valid strategy for killing units with armour but it's possible to overwhelm armoured units with regular firepower. But dealing with armour is something that you need to have.
- Suppression doesn’t grant cover.
- That rule always seemed weird. Happy to see the back of it.
- Double sized units are interesting but not game breaking.
- The recover Suppression markers using red defence dice, not white ones, and while it helps, they're also harder to hide since a 10 man unit takes up space!
- Pretty much all the simplifications are improvements we ran across are improvements.
- The loss of fidelity on things like vehicle damage didn't measurably impact the game and having vehicles simply having a degraded state that requires a white die save to do more than one action is great.
The new battle plan setup is really good too. Picking out primaries and secondaries that your army can achieve and advantages that fill gaps in your army's capability is a nice way to go. We aren't on a 'who had the biggest bid to be Blue Player' stupidity either.
Overall?
Well pleased. I think we'd both agree that this version is better than the last one. Most of the simplifications improve the overall feel of the game. The scenario generator is both more fair and more interesting. Dropping a turn and increasing the size of a basic army up to 1000 points doesn't seem to have much of an impact. I think at the end of three turns, the score was 5 - 3 and getting either of us to 12 by the end of Turn 5 was....looking unlikely.
We're already looking at new models...
Next Time
Some more colours have been added to the Immolators. Well, black. I'll be pushing to get them done this week...
