The airspeeder is a cool unit with a lot of utility, plus it's one of the "heaviest" units the Rebels can access, so there's a lot to talk about here. We will start with the profile analysis, then examine the units that synergize well with them, and then we'll discuss the tactical uses of the Airspeeder, because they offer a lot to your force, but can be hard to position.
From a stats perspective, the Airspeeder is exactly what you expect: a swift, light, fighting platform. At 130pts (yay for erratas that drop points off the unit!), it has 7 wounds past a white defense die with surge for block, so it's not the most durable vehicle, but with
giving you more cover before attackers can modify their dice, unless the attacking unit has a lot of
or surge for crit, there's not much chance they're going to do much to you.
And it has 3 more defensive special rules that hide in the profile: it has
immunity to
Blast (so you will get your cover bonuses against ranged attacks even if the unit has
Blast, which is awesome),
Melee (so no need to worry about lightsabers being can openers against you), and
Range 1 Weapons, which is basically just grenades, but still: it's always nice to be immune to those close-range weapons that people take to turn an infantry unit into an anti-vehicle unit.
Offensively its ranged capabilities are good, though potentially misleading. On its face it looks good and has all of the things you'd expect from a good fighting platform: Arsenal 2 with the ability to use two weapons at once, and a pair of blaster cannons that do 3 reds and 3 blacks (so an average of 4-5 hits before Aim Tokens are factored in). But the Airspeeder has one issue: it can't take 2 weapons that both fire in the same arc, so concentrating your fire is far harder with this vehicle than it is with basically any other vehicle in the game.
Furthermore, your second weapon system is not very good, any which way you cut it. The Mo/Dk Power Harpoon is free (yay for erratas that adjust the cost of upgrades!), but it only does 1 red dice, and if it wounds a vehicle (which is hard to do, considering you'd need to get a hit, past a vehicle that has no cover (otherwise you don't get Impact 1), get past its Armor (ergo why you need Impact 1), and then get past its defense die (so typically a 33-66% chance it saves against the wound) to perform the pivot action against it.
Now there are ways to make this more reliable; the rule specifies vehicle, not heavy support, which means you can target something like a STAP or a Swoop Bike Rider unit, as they are both Repulsor Vehicles, and don't have the Armor keyword, though these tend to have ways to get Dodge tokens, so once again, not the greatest way to do damage to targets. So this is a tricky one to make work, and detracts from me considering this a true high-damage fighting platform: getting hits out of both weapons using Arsenal 2 is hard to do, and since they face in different directions, you can't maximize your fire against a single target (not to mention there's a decent chance you won't have shots with both on a given turn).
The alternative is a 10pt upgrade (yay for erratas that reduce the cost of upgrades!) for the "Ground Buzzer," which gives you 4 black dice (average of 2 hits) within Range 1-2 in your rear arc. No
Impact on this attack, though your chance of getting a natural crit are much higher on this attack (especially if you can get an Aim token), and it slots it into more of an anti-infantry role than an anti-vehicle role.
And this is a decent upgrade: 10pts for 4 black dice is good value for firepower, and while it's also Rear Only for its firing arc, at least it has a good chance of doing hits with every shot it takes. Though once again, part of my concern whenever I've taken the Airspeeder is that it's not really an Arsenal 2 vehicle: it only has 1 weapon choice that can reliably do hits past defense die, especially if you're on a map with lots of cover, as the Ground Buzzer is unlikely to do anything past a unit with 2 levels of cover.
So offensively I'd give the Airspeeder a B: it's not bad, but it's not great. For the same cost as 1 Airspeeder you can get 2 Laser Cannon Teams, which is far more reliable firepower even though they are stationary platforms.
In terms of
upgrades, you can take three: a weapons upgrade (which we talked about), a pilot upgrade, and a comms upgrade, all of which are good for this vehicle. In terms of pilots they all do different things, but I tend to go with
Wedge Antilles every time. Not only was he errataed not to have the recovery symbol, but he allows you to perform a free pivot action every turn. Since you don't have the
Reposition keyword, it can be hard to get an Airspeeder facing in the direction you want, especially since you have to perform a compulsory move every turn. Wedge helps with this.
He also gives you the Field Commander keyword, meaning you can reliably put out orders from other places on the battlefield if you use neutral command cards (which are pretty decent for the Rebels), but honestly I rarely use that.
Other notable choices are Ryder Azati (for tighter turns), Shriv Suurgav (for handing out Dodge tokens to troopers within Range 1-2), and the Hotshot Pilot (for Sharpshooter 1, which helps to make your secondary gun far more reliable at shooting targets behind cover, and further improves your main armament).
You also get access to a comms upgrade, which means you can take an HQ Uplink to allow you to activate more reliably on turns where you need to get an order in at a specific time. The issue is that you then need to take a recover action to use it again, and that means you're probably not Aiming before Attacking. Another option is you could take a Long Range Commlink so you can issue them orders when you need to (plus its half the cost of HQ Uplink, which is nice) with no action required to continually use the ability.
But another option (that requires a specific playstyle, to be fair) is to give it a
Linked Targeting Array. This gives you the ability to gain an Aim token (which is very good on this vehicle) every time you're issued an order. While that's eaiser said than done (as your fast movement makes you less likely to be near your commander), but if you take another unit with a
Comms Relay (like Din Djarin, who can also have Speed-3) or
Commander Luke with Meditation, they can pass an order to the Airspeeder to give you that Aim token. But just remember you'll need to build a strategy for how to get that Aim token to trigger.
But the big thing to remember as you're making choices is the cost of the Airspeeder. You can take the best upgrades for each slot if you want, but you could easily be upwards of 150pts, and while that's not bad for a vehicle, at only 7 wounds, you're pretty fragile for a vehicle of that cost. So just be careful putting too many eggs in one basket. By comparison, since we drew the comparison before, 2 Laser Cannon Teams for the same cost have a combined 12 wounds with the same defense die, and if you have heavy cover, you're not likely to take much more damage than an Airspeeder, even with its Armor (as units without Blast or vast dice pools are unlikely to shoot at you in the first place).
So now let's look at synergies, which are very different from other units because of the role that the Airspeeder plays.
II. Synergies: Fast Attack Firepower
It's hard in this section to highlight specific synergies, mostly because the Airspeeder helps to fill the critical niches of "it can move quickly to get to places" and "it can reliably bring firepower to bear against an enemy," both of which every Rebel force needs. But this is tricky, because some scenarios require a trooper to interact with a specific objective to claim/hold it, meaning that the Airspeeder, unlike, say, the
Tauntaun Riders that we looked at a while back, is useful for clearing objectives, but not for holding them.
And this is why I think the Tauntaun Rider synergizes so well with the Airspeeder. The biggest issue that Tauntaun Riders come up against is that they are good attackers, but may struggle to clear an enemy entrenched in a position that they need to take. With the added fire of the Airspeeder (who can keep up with them for speed), Tauntaun Riders are less likely to be mowed down far from the rest of your force as they try to secure far-flung objectives.
They also pair well with
Rebel Veterans and
Rebel Pathfinders, the former because Airspeeders don't mind not being assigned an order dice (unless you took Linked Targeting Array), so they synergize well with the solid base of fire to whittle down enemies that Rebel Veterans provide, and the latter because they present a solid target for harassing enemies that helps to distract fire from the Pathfinders, keeping them alive a bit longer.
The Infiltrate on Pathfinders also synergizes well with Airspeeders, as they can start far forward, able to engage early, and then the Airspeeder on Turn 1 can Compulsory Move (which is like over 12" in a straight line) + Move (another 12" or so) + Attack, so your ability to bring substantial firepower down in support of these guys as early as Turn 1 is hard to match with Rebels (unless you've got great firing lanes for Laser Cannon Teams).
But one of the other advantages to bringing Rebel Veterans with Airspeeders (and why they work so well as Snowspeeders in an Echo Base Defenders battleforce) is that you can bring Medium Blaster Troopers to assist them. Remember how we were saying that while Airspeeders have Arsenal 2, they can't really bring the concentration of fire onto a unit like other vehicles can? They can get a version of this if they can tap into the
Fire Support of a Medium Blaster Trooper. Per the text of
Fire Support, "When another friendly
unit performs a ranged attack," means that if an Airspeeder is attacking, and you have a faceup order token on the Medium Blaster Trooper (which is easy with
Coordinate on Rebel Veterans), you can give an extra 4 dice + Critical 2 + a likely Aim token from a Linked Targeting Array to the Airspeeder. Which is
crazy good for giving reliable damage, as you're effectively adding 2-3 extra hits to the attack, plus adding Critical 2 to make your damage output even more reliable. So this is phenomenal: 3 red dice + 7 black dice + an Aim token, and on average 2-3 critical hits that get past Dodge and Cover bonuses.
There are a few units, though, that they don't synergize well with. First off (and I feel bad, because this is probably my favorite Rebel soldier aesthetically in all of Star Wars), they're not a good pairing with
Rebel Fleet Troopers, as fleet troopers have short-range pistols that benefit from calling standby actions, while Airspeeds have are far-ranging vehicles that don't have long-range weaponry (only up to Range 3). So the chance that both units won't be able to support each other is high, and they'll be focused by the enemy one at a time, which is not great.
There is one exception to this that I should add: it is technically possible to move your Airspeeder slowly, and that means you could keep them together. I contend that if that's what you want you'd actually be better off with a cheaper vehicle with solid firepower (like the A-A5 Speeder), which can not only match Airspeeders for firepower, but can transport a unit of fleet troopers as well, so I think you're running Airspeeders suboptimally if you go this route. But it technically exists, so here you are, :)
From a
command card perspective, I should start by mentioning there aren't many Rebel command cards that synergize well with vehicles generally, so the pool is a lot smaller here than normal. But there are three cards that synergize very well with them. The first one is one we've discussed many times before, and that is
Covering Fire. This card encourages your corps units to attack (which is fine, as Rebel corps units are designed to provide a decent base of fire if you kit them out correctly), and when they do a friendly unit (which can be an Airspeeder) gains 1 Dodge token. Now the critical thing here is that you can use Dodge tokens along with cover to remove hits that could be turned into crits with Impact, so this helps to provide additional help to your Airspeeder to keep it in the air.
But as you'll see from virtually all of the Rebel command cards, that's not per se a benefit to Airspeeders: it's a bit of cover against a specific enemy style of attack. If your opponent relies on units that surge to crit, have Critical 1 or Critical 2, or just ignores the Airspeeder and plans to absorb the damage and push the rest of your units, the Airspeeder isn't actually any more powerful due to this command card than it was before. So we admit this is a limitation: it's a decent synergy, but it doesn't improve the vehicle like so many troopers are improved by Rebel command cards. So just be aware of that.
Second, and surprising almost no one since I like running Leia, is
Somebody Has to Save Our Skins. As a 3-pip this card's spot in your lineup is pretty heavily contested, as you benefit greatly from running
Covering Fire as noted above, but also because a lot of 3-pip cards for Rebels provide useful benefits for troopers, and that's a lot of what you will have in your army. But this card is extremely useful for Airspeeders for two reasons.
First, because it activates Leia + 2 Units, so you can pass an order token to the Airspeeder (which is nice), and if it has the Long Range Commlink, you can pass that order token battlefield wide, which is also really good.
But second, and the real reason you'd use this, is that if you keep the Airspeeder close to Leia (so using this on like Turn 1-2), you can activate Leia (and call in
Fire Support from a Medium Blaster Trooper - check out our
post on them for more on that), and then call in the Airspeeder who attacks, also adding in
Fire Support from a Medium Blaster Trooper, and you're putting out a
lot of firepower all in a row. That's phenomenal value to take advantage of the high damage output of the Airspeeder.
Third is a surprise to me (maybe not to you, because I haven't run him yet), and that is Lando Calrissian's 3-pip card,
All In. This card is awesome (and probably the best for Rebel vehicles) for two reasons. First, it gives an order to Lando + 2 Units, which means you can assign an order to the Airspeeder (great start). But second, and the big reason why we chose it, is because every enemy unit at Range 1-3 (so 18") and line of sight of Lando (which is relatively easy to do, since you only need to see 1 unit in the squad to get it) gains 2 Observation Tokens.
Now, if you've never played with Observation Tokens before, they're great: any unit - including our Airspeeder - who performs an attack against that unit for the turn can spend 1 of the tokens to reroll a dice. So that's effectively free Aim tokens on every enemy within 18" and line of sight of Lando for the turn, allowing you to increase your effectiveness with the Airspeeder against any number of targets. This is naturally best played around Turns 3-4 when your opponent has more of his units up close and within range of Lando, but once it happens, you're in great shape.
(Also, complete aside, I'm beginning to realize that I might need to pick up Lando - the more I read of his cards, the more I like him)
What might surprise you is the command card I didn't mention but you might have expected:
Turning the Tide. I didn't include it, because while there's technically a synergy here (they gain
Inspire 2 for the turn), it's not nearly as useful as you'd expect unless you're facing a specific type of list that relies on handing out lots of suppression tokens (Palpatine + E-Webs + trooper upgrades that give
Suppressive, of which there are actually quite a few). Against most armies, since you want at least 1 suppression token on so many of your units to give you that +1 Cover bonus to a max of 2,
Inspire isn't as useful as you might think it is, especially when the range of that
Inspire benefit is only Range 1-2 from the Airspeeder, which may or may not include many of your forces. So it changes your playstyle quite a bit by reining in your fast attack platform to keep it near the lines, which it can do, but I'm not sure that's a great synergy. Correct me in the comments below if I'm wrong.
So with all of this in mind, let's talk a bit about tactics and how to get the most value out of them.
III. Tactics: Swift Swively Fun
First things first, we should talk about "The Swivel": how to get both of your weapons into firing arcs in the same turn, because if you fail to do that you're over-paying for the Arsenal keyword. So there are three things to think about to set yourself up for success. First, aim toward the center of the enemy, both because you will reach the enemy faster (so you can do the damage stuff more quickly), but also so that there's a better chance that you can pivot 90-degrees (thanks Wedge!) and have enemies both in front of and behind you.
Second, the timing of your compulsory move is important. In general, I tend to take the compulsory move at the start of the turn when you're moving into attack position, and I tend to take it at the end of the turn when I'm starting in position and want to boogie away to get some cover from a potential counterattack. Your activation order may also change this, as activating near the end of the turn may mean you don't need to move away to escape incoming fire, so play that by ear.
And finally, which direction you face matters, becasue your forward cannons have Impact and better dice, while your rear gun, whichever one you choose, is only effective against units not in cover, so making sure you are facing the right opponents with the right weapon is huge.
There are only
3 victory conditions where Airspeeders can score Victory Points:
Payload,
Breakthrough, and
Key Positions. Payload revolves around escorting your bomb cart to a terrain feature, and in order for it to move, you have to have more friendly unit leaders (not "trooper unit leaders," so vehicles count) than hostile unit leaders within Range 1 of it. It means the Airspeeder is puppy guarding a pretty slow cart, but it can help with this, and is relatively difficult to remove thanks to being immune to melee attacks, so they can't just mob the vehicle like they can other Rebel heavy support options.
Second is Breakthrough, which literally just scores based on how many of your unit leaders make it to the enemy deployment zone, so naturally this favors fast, relatively resilient units like the Airspeeder.
And finally we have
Key Positions. The trick with Key Positions for Rebels is that they need speed to actually contest the far-flung objectives, but their fast units are quite fragile. The Airspeeder is the leader of the pack in terms of resilience, though, so with one of these escorting 1-2 Tauntaun Rider units, you actually stand a decent chance of punching through enemy forces to reach the objective before the game is called. And since it requires unit leaders - any unit leader, including vehicles - to be in base contact with the terrain piece and not in it, you can help to claim them.
And naturally they can help you prevent enemies from scoring in other scenarios by removing unit leaders, but they can't actually move your side of the needle forward in strategems beyond these three, so keep that in mind.
And finally, you actually like
Limited Visibility as a condition (which is strange, as that's typically something you'd pick for a melee-centric army): since your cannons only reach to Range 1-3, and your rear armament only reaches to Range 1-2, you don't actually lose anything, and you have the speed to get to those ranges on Turns 1-2 anyway, so you don't suffer from it, and you are safer from enemy fire before you activate - which is likely to be the case, since you're probably assigning your order tokens elsewhere on Turns 1-2. So it's weird to say, and I hadn't really thought of this before (because I always run these with Laser Cannon Teams, which don't want this card at all), but this is actually a pretty decent condition for your Airspeeders.
Conclusion
Should you run Airspeeders? Yes - because they are awesome! Not the greatest unit, there are probably better purchases for the points, but as far as supporting fire goes, they offer you speed, reliable suppression, and a good chance at removing 1-2 models a turn, and that's not bad. So give it a go!
Watching the stars,
Centaur
"Come one, come all! Come one, come all, to the Dancing Lawn!" ~ Glenstorm, Prince Caspian
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