Turn 2- The rebellion heats up

Strategy phase two

Here is the sector board at the start of turn two. The changes to popular support have been made, as well as the addition of the "pink" colour to represent the growing "Devourer cult" on Cahn. The Devourer Cult is a doomsday style cult that worships the black hole in Talathen sector. They will play a roll in this story as it progresses. 

The map was covered in mission icons, and the forces of the rebellion could only deal with about half the activity available. This is a planned feature, as the rebels cannot be every where and the Empire needs to have some wins :)

Assignments

Our new recruits received their postings, with Hallarn yarn being put in command of a special forces squad, supported by Gaxx and Fenn Signis. 

Toryn Farr joined fighter command as a squadron leader, Ged'Ruh joined the intelligence services and Garn Dravis was posted to logistics command. 

Overall goals

The Rebellion wanted to heat it up this turn, and hit some soft imperial targets with full force. Also of priority was stopping imperial investigations near the main rebel base on Axamar, and preventing the Empire from completing it's base construction on Selano

Strategy Phase

Alpha team: The player character group was assigned to investigate an imperial expedition to some ruins on Axamar. Their are rumours of lost Jedi temple sites on the planet, so it was deemed important to keep that information out of Imperial hands. 

Logistics: Kresh, the director of logistics succeeded admirably in increasing the overall wealth of the rebellion while his finance officer, Tressk got some short term wealth by speculating.

Roark garnet lost some escorts during his smuggling run but brought home three additional supplies. Garn Travis, in his first smuggling run ever, brought home five supply points.

This gave the rebellion ample supplies to run all it's missions this turn. 

Note: I have just rewritten the logistics system to be something quite different. We will introduce the new trading, manufacturing & smuggling card based mini-game in the next full turn of the game. 

Intelligence: Nibb Nibb only generated one point for the intelligence pool, but was bailed out by Sly who earned five points. Six points was enough to support the actions this turn as well as ask for information on what a group of bandits are doing in the boneyard. 

Ged'Ruh's first mission was to demolish the construction efforts on Selano. With 1 Success and 4 advantages, this mission should succeed with some interesting consequences. 

Diplomacy: Lianna Tell attempted to open diplomatic relations with Solitude X in an effort to find out why the Empire is interested in them. While she did not succeed in creating a diplomatic station, she did find out a little about what the empire is after. 

Fleet Command: Reports of Imperial ships using a relay beacon near a small asteroid cluster in deep space reached the rebellion from it's new spy in the fleet (Dana, from operation wishbone). 

Mustering the full force of the Rebel fleet, as well as spending some fleet favour to obtain additional support, the fleet planned an attack. With significant intelligence support the Admiral made an excellent roll, generating 8 tactical points. 

He spent those to hold initiative for the battle, to deploy second, and in flanking positions, and for the Imperial ships to start stationery. 

Squadron Command: Lt Blout and Torryn Farr put their heads together and came up with a brilliant plan to attack the Imperial flight school on Fraxan. Their brilliant plan netted no sucesses, so the plan boiled down to "fly in and shoot them".

Typical Blout

Ground command:

General Del Kern worked with Hallarn Yarn on a plan to disrupt Czerka operations on Nimbala, while freeing twi'lek slaves from oppression. An amazing roll generated 11 strategy points to spend.

The ground operation will have initiative, infiltrators, deploy 2nd, cut off enemy reinforcements, and reduce overall strength of the defenders. Should be a cake walk. 

Recruitment: An exceptional roll from Evo Tras generated four successes. He wants to recruit fighter aces, fleet officers, diplomatic agents and Ithorians. Chances are, he will get one of each in next turns recruitment pool.

Training: Another phenomenal roll generating 14 training points to be spent in the end phase. 14 points is enough for many X-wing pilot skill cards, crew cards, or a few armada crew cards. 

R&D: Nun Diem turned his focus to Star fighter teach, generating 9 points to spend on X-wing upgrades. That's 2-3 good cards that can be added to the x-wing equipment pool in the end phase. Gartoka added two more points to the special category for the role-playing team to use. 

End: An up and down turn for the rebels, a lot of amazing successes and a few non results. Still, they are set up well for the battles ahead, well, asides from the first report

Z-95's attack Imperial training grounds

With no successes on this roll, it was going to be a straight fight. 8 Headhunters, including Blout, with concussion missiles vs 6 Academy Ties and Snattercat, our named chiss hero pilot using the Darth Vader card and equipped with missiles, stealth device, accuracy compensation and Elusiveness. 

In retrospect, I should probably have had a 7th academy tie as those missiles really do add up in points. 

Our forces deployed opposite each other, with a small mine field in between. Turn one we drove towards each other and on turn two I banked the Tie fighters across the line of the mines in order to speed down the line and attack half the Headhunters while the others played catch up.

This seemed quite clever at the time, the problem is, it invariably left me at range 3 of the the headhunters, where they were at their most deadly due to their concussion missiles. 

I mean seriously, compare these formations. The Tie's are moving in coordination, while the headhunters are sprawled around like a bunch of drunken baboons. 

Yet, formation flying helps you little when target lock + focus concussion missiles are fired against ties. Still, no one could fire a missile on snattercat thanks to her amazing pilot skill and elusiveness. 

Still, she did 8 points of damage in 5 turns of fighting, but not a single point of hull damage. Due to the irregular flight patterns of the headhunters, it was difficult for her to stay on one target without being exposed to fire from many other headhunters. 

It's also worth mentioning how important pilot skill is. Having the headhunters fire first was catastrophic on many turns. A tie at range one of a headhunter exploded to a missile from another headhunter at range 3 on no less than three occasions.

In the end, Blouting, the act of rushing head long into danger and randomly turning with no care for formation actually defeated the empire. It broke up their formations and reduced it to a brawl, and invariably, when a tie had got good position on one headhunter, it was in perfect missile position for another. 

Snattercat eventually called a retreat when the 4th tie fighter exploded from a missile, leaving the score Rebels 4, Empire 0.

Still, the empire has received it's first ship upgrade. Tie Advanced fighters, and the rebels will be seeing more of these in the future. 

Next update. The fleet conducts a ramraid, and special forces conduct a rescue.