Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Review - EPIC Imperial Assault Carrier

Whats This All About?

 

This month I've been sent the Imperial Assault Carrier! As seen in Star Wars Rebels, this ship looks pretty bulky but makes for a great support ship, and comes with Two Tie Fighters (Standard from the Original Trilogy/Rebels Era's) and some niiiice Upgrades and Pilot cards.

The Assault Carrier - The Gozanti -

Historically, these ships were used as Freighters and if you're a watcher of Star Wars Rebels, you may remember a shipment of Kyber Crystals being transported in one of these and ultimately destroyed by The Ghost.

It's a bulky but nice looking arrowheaded Cruiser.

As always the detail of the ships hull it really nice, and the paint job is equally good. You'll see in the picture a Radar Dish which performs during the game, I'll get to that later, but this doesn't move on this model, whereas the two turrets towards the back of the ship (top and bottom) swivel 180 degrees before falling out. I believe they are in fact supposed to be locked in place.

What makes this Carrier especially, special, is the ability to dock Ties and other small ships:

More than meets the eye..

There's more to the Gozanti than just being a big ship, even more than just the docking.

The Gozanti has it's own Ship card, which I'm sure you can see it can hold quite a few upgrades and skills aswell as having a few new actions and other stats! 

Of these new stats is of course is ENERGY. This has been added on the larger ships to provide a source of extra moves or additional shields. The 4 is how many you start with and as the game goes on it allows the player to use and gain more to firstly move, and secondly defend and keep itself alive as you may have noticed it has NO defense die.

There's two additional actions to run on this Epic ship, one to recover from damage and also Reinforce with lost shielding.

Also as you can see from the movement map above, it could be fast but only in one direction, using primarily as a distraction while your ships provide support and attack the opponent, I'm yet to try this but it's VERY exciting even thinking about it!

2 x Tie Fighters -

These are actually a little darker than the standard Ties which came with the original set of X-Wing Miniatures, as far as I can remember though their stats are the same. You can see Pilot cards a little further down. I've said before that I really appreciate the simple look of the Ties and I love playing them in game, quick on turns and pretty formidable in a squadron.

The Pilot cards!:

As you can see, a nice array of Pilot cards come in this set, various Pilot skill, sporting various skills. There are the standard squad and academy pilots which don't really do too much, but notably the "Scourge" pilot could do some proper naughty damage if the defender is already down by one hit.. The extra addition of a die can be a great asset!! 

 

More regarding the damage, these Epic sized ships are now defined by Front and Rear damage, and it all depends on where you are being attacked. 

Upgrade cards! :

There's quite a few here that we've seen before, various missiles and some really great Actions which will help you with extra damage (Marksmanship!) but there are now the extras for the Gozanti specifically. Most noticeable in the game is the ability to dock with the Cruiser, makes for a nice way of protecting your docked ships until they are needed to unleash hell (mostly due to the fact you cannot fire upon them WHILE they are docked, so the Carrier would take the brunt of the damage. A downside of this of course is that if the ships are docked and the Gozanti is destroyed, then so are the ships!

Summary:

A very exciting set to play! I hope to do a review of a battle with my Son very soon, things have been pretty hectic recently though..

This set is available to purchase NOW!

For more info on the Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures line up, check out Fantasy Flight Games Official Website!