Star Wars Empire At War Skirmish

[Sharon Harris]

Somethings to note are that I live in the Canadian meta where the Kashyyyk is released except for the Snail Tank and Infantry Support Platform. Also to note are that a points change and RRG update are due soon. All these ideas will likely carry over with some editing but there will need to be changes.

Because the engagement can start immediatelyc finding cover in deployment can often be critical. I often try to slot in recon intel in my lists not to get closer to my opponent, but to move into cover during deployment. When you are deploying your whole army in a tight area, getting it all behind cover can be a challenge, so having even a unit or two which can scout to other cover can be very important.

Another quirk of deployments in Skirmish is that Infiltrating loses some value. Your infiltrators will often be zoned out of any infiltration and essentially have to deploy as normal. However, this can be a blessing in disguise as it can teach you to be more conservative with your infiltrations naturally.

Another interesting thing about skirmish is that because there are only four Battle cards for each category there is no need to bid for battle deck. This often means most skirmish lists are 500 points or very near. The only time I would possibly consider bidding a bit is if you have an infiltration list (Maul for instance) and want to guarantee that you can get a aggressive infiltration.

In general when building lists for skirmish you will need to be aware that hyper aggressive lists are very good in skirmish. You can counter this by building aggressive lists or trying to build lists that can take the punch of an aggressive list and outlast it.

The Saltmines appear to be fruitful with some upcoming changes to Empire. Nonetheless I decided to take a crack at building lists that I think would work currently and could potentially be even better after the upcoming changes.

This list has a whopping eight activations which is quite high for skirmish. Not only that but it could easily be bumped up to nine by cutting a few things and throwing in another corp squad. This list operates under the notion that more is better. You are often going to out activate your opponent by 2-3 activations and then bury them with a lot of dice. In this list your officer will be chucking aims around to whichever squad is most critical at that instance.

Critical to this list is keeping Vader alive. This is done through keeping the Royal Guards with him and keeping him in melee. All your standard force user/Vader tips apply here for keeping Vader in the fight and doing damage. One obvious change that could be made to this list would be dropping the Electrostaff Guard for a corps heavy. This would greatly increase the potential of the gunline behind Vader, and is up to your playstyle really.

Basically this list acts as a droid gunline that is being fed aims and dodges. Any of the three Super Tactical Droids would work for this list. It really just depends what is your style. I chose Kalani as Kalani is able to hand out tons of tokens and keep enough orders around to avoid AI. The problem with Kalani is that on Orbital Strike and They Too Will Suffer, one of your Dwarf Spider Droids will not have an order which could be disastrous if their Ion Blaster is not readied. As this is the case command card selection and planning will be critical to running this list efficiently.

With the Linked Targeting Arrays and Kalani the Spider Droids should be shooting with two aims with Precise 2. This is why I chose the Ion Blaster, it has six dice versus the five of the Laser Canon. You should be able to reach that ceiling somewhat regularly. The average number of hits on this pool with the two aims is just over five, reaching six a third of the time. I would recommend once you are in position with your Spiders always Shoot-Recover, or Recover-Shoot. Always having the Ion readied is more important than a third aim. And with the range 4 of the Ion Blaster, it should be no problem in skirmish getting into position when deployed or after one move.

Keep in mind also with this list that orders can be weird in a good way. It is quite easy to get perfect order control with only one order. The HQ uplink should also provide you with perfect control every turn of the game.

Same as the Vader list you could drop the Magna Heavy Weapon and potentially the medical Droid for some B1 heavy weapons. This would increase your threat saturation, but probably make a worse list overall. In skirmish I would just focus completely on Dooku and the Magnas in this list.

Combined with Scouting Party a turn 1 Take That Clankers has the possibility of being devastating. You are going to give your orders to Fives, and the two Phase 1s. Those Phase 1 Shotguns (DP-23) become a really interesting option in skirmish. You could even consider grenades on them which you can chuck at range 2 with Take That Clankers. Skirmish makes grenades at least an interesting option. You will notice that I have left the points a bit short on this list. I am leaving a bit of room for future point increases mostly. You could get to 6 activations by cutting a bunch of upgrades. That would be up to you to decide if more acts or more elite is your style. The medic in this list is mostly there to fill points and act as a bit of a sponge to soak up a little bit of damage right off the bat. The extra man in the Fives squad is something I always try to fit as throwing eight black is really good, plus Courage 3 corps is really fun.

One piece of tech in this list is that the Wookiee Chieftain has Seize the Initiative instead of O-Push. This is because when you use Seize whenever any of the Wookiee cards are played the effect also applies to the Chieftain. This is most important on the 1-pip. You should be able to hand out a bunch of tokens on that turn.

d) armor, on a cheap & maneuverable platform, can be very useful. the winner of the tournament fielded a rebel list with a flamethrower ATRT. The ATRT had the resiliency to move into position with the flamer and the flamer really tore apart core units.

If you checked out my last article ( -wars-legion-my-side-game/) you know that I am starting to get into a fantastic game called Star Wars Legion. This week I have had the privilege of introducing this game to another person in my gaming group, and it showed me just how accessible this game is to new players. Some tabletop wargames require hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in investment to have a fully painted army on the tabletop. For most of us out there this process can take months and months to accomplish, and while there is definitely a satisfaction in getting such a large hobby project completed, sometimes you just want to enjoy your wargame of choice in a more timely fashion. Legion is already an extremely accessible game at the full 800pts level, but there is an even more accessible version of the game in Skirmish.

The 500 points level Skirmish games of Legion are designed to be played on a 33 game surface with a more scaled back force organization chart than is used in a full 800 points game. 500 points may not seem like a much smaller game size than 800, but 500pts adds up extremely quickly in Legion. A full 800pts game of Legion requires around 10 units on the tabletop which is not significantly less than games like Warhammer 40k or Age of Sigmar, but there is a slight caveat to this. In Legion the unit sizes are much smaller than in other squad based wargames. A 10 Activation, 800pts, Legion army can still only consist of 20-30 models. Skirmish Legion armies can have 6 or 7 Activations, but this means there are even less actual models on the table. This lets new players build and paint their Skirmish force extremely quickly in order to get those models where they belong, right on the table!

Some people may be worried that such a scaled back game would also mean the tactical or strategic depth is scaled back. They may also be worried that they are not getting the full game experience at the 500 points level, and while it is true a full Legion game will feel slightly different, all of the same game mechanics are used at the Skirmish level of 500pts. The game feels like it scales extremely well down to this level with activation count still mattering, the management of powerful Force users and the application of game fundamentals like the use of cover. Players will still need to manage their Command Cards, manage the amount of Suppression their units are taking and complete Objectives that come from an Objective Deck specifically geared toward the Skirmish level game size. The only thing the Skirmish level of the game misses out on is the larger 63 playing surface, and the larger army size, of a regular game of Legion.

Skirmish level Legion games are so accessible in large part to the Legion Core Sets. The Legion Core sets come with 2 armies (either Empire vs. Rebels or Clones vs. Droids) and each army comes with around 400 points of models. This means two players can split a core box, pick up one or two additional unit boxes and have everything they need to play extremely strategic games of Star Wars Legion. The friend from my gaming group and I even played games at the 400pts level for his first couple games and it still felt like our tactical decisions mattered at this smaller scale. Both of us are veteran wargamers having played games with hundreds of models per side, and I am confident in saying we both were not missing any tactical or strategic depth in Skirmish Legion.

Legion Core Sets also highlight another aspect of the accessibility in Legion I have absolutely loved. It is EXTREMELY easy to explain to someone how to get started in Star Wars Legion. There is no flow chart of books a new player needs to memorize and purchase. There are just a couple simple steps in explaining to a potential new player how they can start playing Star Wars Legion. Step 1: Have the new player pick one of the four Factions they are most excited to play. Step 2: Buy the Core Set that comes with that Faction. Bonus: You have a small force of another Faction you can trick your other friends into playing, use as a second army or sell to make some of your invest back. It is important to note that some of the unit cards, mainly the point values, from the Core Sets are no longer accurate. These balance updates to the game can be found on all the army list building tools for Star Wars Legion, and the updated cards and points are easily found on the game developers website.

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