X-Wing Miniatures: Tantive IV Rules

So Today I am going to talk about the rules for the new Tantive IV expansion for the X-Wing Miniature games.  Now I had not really followed all the little releases from FFG about the Huge ships so I will probably be covering stuff that shows up there but here are my thoughts so far.

The bare corvette comes in at 90 points and has tons of slots for upgrades.  The pilot skill of 4 dictates when the corvette shoots but all huge ships move after all the other ships.  It also takes its actions then and cannot lose the action for each section provided it is not disabled.  Instead of stress, the maneuver dial dictates how much energy the ship has left to power other proceses.  1 Banks and 2 Straight leave 3 energy, 2 banks and 3 straight 2, and 4 straight 1.    Huge ships run on energy and storing it up, so taking it slow is probably going to be the way to go.

Both sections have hull values of 8 and shields of 5 for the Fore and 3 for the aft.  While these are certainly significant values they are lower that the Falcon for each section and as the corvette has no agility dice I would expect it to burn through shields pretty fast.  The AFT has a few ways to deal with this using its actions or upgrade cards.  One action allows it to regenerate shields using energy tokens called Recover.  The other action, Reinforce, allows one section to be fortified such that it gets a bonus evade result against all attacks that turn but it only affect the choosen section.  The fore is the offensive section with Target Lock and the Coordinate which allow the Tantive IV to transfer its action to a friendly fighter 1-2 away.

The Fore of the ship has a Attack 4 Turret which has ranges of 3-5.  This is a primary weapon so targets at range 3 get an extra agility die.  Ranges 4 and 5 give 2 and 3 extra agility dice total so you can imagine that hitting a Tie Fighter at range 5 with this is going to be pretty tough but the card text allows you to buy additional attack dice for one point of energy so you could roll up to 9 attack dice using the full 5 energy storage.(Edit: I misread this.  It clearly is a single use event triggered by firing the weapon so max attack value is 5).   I am guessing for that you want to make sure you have a target lock.  Watch out that the primary weapon has a blind spot directly behind the ship.  You might be able to use a navigator crew member upgrade if you find that ships are able to stay in this void.

You can also spend energy to power other weapon upgrades. Each of these weapons can shot every turn if it has power.   The fore can equip two hard points and the aft 1.  Each can store 2 energy which is enough to power it use for one shot on the turbolaser and 2 shots for the quad cannon.  The weapon are not turret mounted and have broadside fire arcs but they let them fire to either side.  The quad cannon has a lower attack value but allows for another gunner type attack by paying the fire cost again.  Its 1-2 range fills in the hole for the primary weapon so I would probably put it on the front.  The Single Turbo laser has the long ranges and doubles the opponents agility value so is better for low agility ships than the primary weapon.

There are 3 named ship cards.  Tantive IV allows for more upgrades, Jaina's Light allow you to gamble with the damage decks,  DoDonna's Pride allows for your Coordinates to be twice as effective so would be a good upgrade for a support build.

You get 6 crew cards.  Lots of famous name but none jumps out at me as being really great.  They all seem to have uses but C-3PO seems sort of odd to include in this set as you have no agility to start with.  He might be an OK for like the falcon where you only have 1 die so guessing 0 most of the time will net you at least 1 evade result.  For the crew members I have around already, I would think the weapons engineer is a no brainer for any offensive themed ship as you can use multiple target locks in a turn.

Here are the cargo cards.  The corvette has 1 cargo slot in the fore and aft.  I personally like the back up shield generator as it sort of does the same thing as Recover (but is section specific) which frees up the aft for more Reinforce actions.  Comms booster looks good for the support corvette.

These are the team upgrade cards.  Sensor team seems pretty important if you want to shoot at people with your primary weapon.  Energy is so important that the Engineering team also seem pretty good.  The gunnery team lets you buy successes with the primary weapon but the cost in energy is sort of painful.

The box also comes with a campaign which has a 4 mission arc with 2 variant missions depending on the results.  Some of the missions are fixed lists while others allow some choices in the build out.  Must of the required sets are probably going to be in your collection but the first mission calls for 6 tie fighters which outstrips mine by 1 but will not be a problem for anyone playing competitively most like with tie swarm being so popular.

Overall the ship seems like it will be a lot of fun.  Very different and maybe not worth the points in a pure kill type of game but still a cool addition.  I think this week the next wave of ships are supposed to become generally available.  The Z-95, Y-Wing, Falcon, and Slave I give enough hips to make up a criminal faction which would cool to see.