Starfighters and Dark Elves

On Monday night Ben came round for a game of X-Wing. Ben was playing the evil Empire and I was running the noble Alliance to Restore the Republic. Our squadrons;

Ben

• Boba Fett (Slave I)
• Howlrunner (TIE) with determination
• Winged Gundark (TIE)
• Obsidian Squadron Pilot (TIE)

Me

• Horton Salm (Y-Wing) with R2-K5 and 2 proton torpedo
• Gray Squadron Pilot (Y-Wing)
• Prototype Pilot (A-Wing)
• Prototype Pilot (A-Wing)

The action was short and brutal. For the first few turns we simply closed head on. Horton's torpedo failed to inflict any damage on Howlrunner. The other Y-Wing scored a critical... but we drew a card with the Pilot characteristic, and Howlrunner had the Determination skill. New rules technicality I learned, when Determination is applied to a pilot critical it doesn't just turn the card face down (i.e. negate the crit but not the damage) it negates the result entirely. In response the TIEs stripped some shields from the Y-Wings.

During turn's 4 and 5 the squadrons had passed each other, and began circling for position. My Y-Wings carried on straight for another turn before beginning lazy turns back around - their ion turrets meant they didn't care what arc the enemy was in. To my right the A-Wings had turned 90 degrees to enter the main engagement from the side, while Ben's TIEs had turned or K-turned to get me back into his sights. The exception was Slave I, that continued straight ahead, putting it out of the action for a turn.

Combined fire from most of my squadron had taken out Howlrunner, and while a lot of my ships had taken shield hits I wasn't feeling too bad about the game. Then disaster - the now shieldless Horton got hit by two criticals from a single attack! Both were direct hits, so 2 points of damage became 4 and he had only a single point of damage remaining! In the following turn the remaining two TIEs finished both Horton and the other Y-Wing. While the A-Wings desperately fought on for a couple more turns, this round of shooting was decisive.

Progress on the Dark Elves

So not much success in X-Wing. However I've had better results making progress on my Dark Elf army. A productive week has seen both the Hydra and the spearman regiment re-based. Both are done in the standard basing scheme I use for most of my models. While I think this works well on small-medium base sizes, on the Hydra's larger base it looks a little sparse. The Hydra is this afternoon's project anyway (I'm going to heavily drydrush the underside in a lighter gray, and touch up some details) so I'll finish the basing as part of that.

(The ghost in the middle of the spear regiment is my Supreme Sorceress. Since I intend for her usually to accompany them I figured I'd do her base at the same time.)