Star Wars Armada - Battle Report: Rieekan's Corvettes vs Vader's Battle Group

By Steven MacLauchlan

I was excited to get another Armada game, and excited to play a new opponent. This time, I faced Joey (TrueGreek on the forums) and took the opportunity to try something I'd been theorizing about a bit. The Rieekan-led Corvette Cruise Missiles. "Rieekan's Cruise Missiles"? That fits! Joey took Vader, which I was equally excited about.

We were both 400 points, and rolled to see who got their choice. I won the dice off, and elected to go second. Joey chose "Fire lanes" from my objectives and we got to work!

Here are the fleets:

I don't have too many pics for this one, as there wasn't a lot of movement. The battle was concentrated on the right third of the board which is where all the objective-tokens were placed.

My plan was simple. I was going to cruise missile my way directly at Joey's fleet and do as much damage as possible. I made a few mistakes: I slowed down my MC80 such that it was out of the fight, and I couldn't do a few double rams thanks to my own positioning, but by and large it worked like a charm.

 This is the end of turn one. You can see the Corvettes forming their line, ready to ram away.

All of the vettes got a navigate token on turn one, and so all took a concentrate fire token for turn two. Their fire was effective, but not as much as their hulls crashing into the enemy. A lucky critical hit on the VSD (structural damage) ensured that the Dominator went down before it could fire again in turn 3.

His raider was slippery, and punched through the blockade. It's parting shot destroyed Corvette 1 (just in front of the ISD), but Rieekan kept him around long enough to block the ISD on the asteroid, and get 2 more points out of a ram. His Raider was left with 3 hull damage but was able to quickly disengage from the fight.

The gunnery teams and Vader aboard the ISD knocked out two more Corvettes- a total of three were killed on turn three, but all of them got to stick around until the very end.

At this point, with the MC80 racking up fire lanes tokens and only his Raider surviving, Joey called it just in time for dinner.

Conclusion: Huh. That worked pretty well. I'm not sure there's a whole lot the Empire can bring to bear against that except maybe a Raider swarm. "MSU" (Multiple Small Unit) lists work very well with Rieekan, and the engine tech/ram cruise missile combo was equally nasty. I do not think this list could stand up to the Ackbar gunline, however, though I may have to try that.

PS- Joey used Vader very well. Not that I needed convincing, but I remain firm that Vader does in fact rule.