As planned, we played our latest round of Star Wars Legion. Not as planned, it turned out to be an overwhelming CIS victory, with the Galactic Republic surrendering midway thru turn 2. I don’t necessarily agree with the “lost cause” nature of the fight at that point, but it was certainly heavily slanted, and highly unlikely to have a change in direction.
Functionally, it was a culmination of lots of bad luck – starting with mission selection. As the Blue player, I had to advantage on the mission options, having a slightly smaller force of 798 to 800. After removing options, we ended up with a Hostage Exchange, set in a Hemmed In arrangement, in Hazardous Conditions. We actually forgot entirely about the Hazardous Conditions, so it ended up effectively being Clear Conditions. However, as the blue player, I was able to select the central starting location, placing me only a short distance from the actual hostages.
With the amount of cover and obstacles on the board, it provided a lot of blocked line of sights and somewhat limited positioning. The droids clustered near the center, while the clones spread out on one corner. In the first turn, the clone hostage moved away from their forces, heading for their opposite deployment zone, and the CIS hostage unit (a unit of B2s vs a Clone Phase I unit) really just followed them. Meanwhile the CIS army shifted to box the poor clones in, as they were separated by distance from the rest of their forces. CIS snipers managed to nullify the clone snipers on their first attack, forcing them to hide in cover and be ineffective.
The Republic started with strong cards, launching an Air Strike on round one, but the combination of distance and excessive cover really restricted the impact of the hits. With Grievous holding the droids together, they quickly rallied, and surged forward on round 2. At that point, the clone hostage unit was fully surrounded and quickly dispatched, and the approaching units of cloned started to take heavy damage from the Droidekas, while the STAP riders rapidly approached. From the appearance and dice rolling, it strongly indicated that practically all foot soldiers of the Republic would be eliminated by the end of round 2, making victory impossible, so we declared an end to the pain.
Probably the biggest impact to the fight was a bad combination of placement, mission choice, and dice rolling. Each round, the order pips were identical, but the Clones lost every roll off. Attacks were fairly even from both sides, but the droids I expect beat the averages for defense (and had a lot of cover), while the Clones failed most of their saves (and rarely had cover).
Post game, we debated how the fight had gone, and somewhat agreed that a different deployment, coupled with a more focused Clone force, would have at least generated a draw. Anything greater would have been a much more satisfying fight, since both forces would have had to take heavy casualties. The plan is to potentially replay the same mission and setup, with some adjustments to the Republic army. Per our house rule, the Victor’s army is locked – only the defeated can adjust their forces before the next game.
