Intergalactic Empire Productions

This is from the course of two games with my Gungans. I wanted to play something silly and accidentally found one of the most potent builds you can do. A few things can thwart this, namely AoE attacks so break formation if you run into a Hailfire Droid or something like that.

This entire concept focuses on a few key characters. Namely, center of each phalanx is the Gungan Shieldbearer. He is capable of protecting everyone around him, making it a weird you surround the shield instead of shield surround you situation. But it works! It even bounces the damage back at them! The stronger grenade is nice too.

We made a house rule to use the rule to only trigger on a 11+ if an attack hits instead because otherwise no one could survive the onslaught of grenades to get into Melee range. If that 11+ was passed, it hit like the Shieldbearer wasn’t there. If this is supposed to be a once per turn ability let me know, but that was not how we read it. WOTC has historically not been clear on finer rules.

Front rank is all going to be the highly affordable Gungan Infantry. They have a decent defense, but more importantly they have a large pool of 30 Hit Points. Also, they have grenade weapons. This ensures no one dare bunch together to overwhelm this formation.

On each flank of the Shieldbearer, I placed Gungan Soldiers. They have a better defense but terrible Hit Points. My main interest was the stronger grenade, and if the front rank falls they can step up.

Lastly, we have the rear rank composed of three Gungan Artillerists. Now, yes, you can in fact just make everyone these for a few more points. They have good Defense AND 30 Hit Points, but the idea was to free up a few points. After all, we do have 9 characters waddling around together asking for a rocket to ruin their day. The extra range AND damage is a nice boon too.

Now, each Phalanx is 96 points each! That’s not too bad for 9 Grenade Attacks. You don’t even need good attack modifiers because you are making the enemy do all of the rolling. And, from what I understand of the game, you are just targeting squares so any imposing models don’t cause any attack penalties.

However, we like playing bigger games. So I made two Phalanxes. Naturally, we wanted to form one as the central doomsday grenade launcher, so we put Captain Tarpals right behind them. Now they get to throw 18 grenades instead of 9 per turn! We played so only the squad they were with would get this because its broken otherwise.

Now, I know having two formations of packed infantry is a bad idea in large games. So I remedied this with Jar Jar Binks, the most powerful character in the game.

How is he the most powerful character in the game? Oh, you know, he can deflect critical damage into enemies (or friends, keep him away from everyone). He has decent Defense and Hit Points, but with a 50% chance to just say no, and then kill someone else, he is rather durable! His tactic is simple: run straight into the enemy.

Lastly, I had a few points left to spend and wanted to keep pressure on the enemy so I brought three Gungan Cavalry on Kaadu. They have decent defense, a good hit point pool, and can provide moderate threat if it keeps moving. That plus a few extra Gungans left over formed another flank.

Now, for the actual games! My friend has a formidable Sith Empire and Mandalorian army. First one saw the Sith Empire take to the field.

He had a variety of nasty things including several dark Jedi and unique heroes, so I knew this would be a good test for mass grenades. The game started normally, moving units up. I made sure to bring the Shieldbearer first so everyone could accompany him protected during alternating activations. Both phalanxes moved up with Jar Jar and friends making a bombad bee line from one direction and the cavalry from the other.

Things went okay, until Sith Lightning took out the first Shieldbearer. This was unfortunate, but the grenade apocalypse was unforgiving!

A flamethrower droid did the other one in, but I managed to draw a ton of fire off of the Gungans for a while letting me kill those characters. I had to break up the formations until those went down, so I lost some of the early game protection I had hoped for. I was still able to make it work.

After they fell, it was simply a matter of mopping of infantry. His own shielded droids were being stubbornly difficult to kill, but if one grenade won’t do it, throw twenty!

After some strong rolls from my worthy opponent, the Gungans died. I did some early game things wrong, but I learned and was ready for the second one! Had we played with the proper shields there was no way he was going to be able to make it work, so I think we will be house ruling that from now on unless someone tells me otherwise.

The second game was against all of the named Bounty Hunters he had. Obviously this includes huge quantities of grenades, flamethrowers, missiles, and things that break the formation. I split them up where they could consolidate once the danger was passed. The Shieldbearers have excellent Defense for a non unique model, so they could still draw a moderate amount of fire.

Bounty Hunters we had Durge, Aura Sing, Boba Fett, Dengar, Jango Fett, and Zam.

Turns out Aura has this crazy ability to just shoot absolutely everyone with little damage amounts. That was a nasty surprise!

That wasn’t going to fly, so I nuked her into oblivion.

Jar Jar Binks (proxied as the supreme Chancellor because I don’t have 65$ to spend on him), began his reign of terror. Unlike the Sith Empire, the Bounty Hunters were struggling to harm him. And, because they are Unique models, did extra damage to themselves with their Bounty Hunter abilities.

Jar Jar simply ran from hunter to hunter, sowing fear, chaos, and confusion wherever he went. The WOTC creators nailed his movie persona perfectly for this game.

Many Gungans died to make this battle, but this time they were triumphant! I still do genuinely believe that even with the home brewed shield nerf the Gungans can make an incredibly powerful force to contend with. High Defense models are particularly susceptible to it, and anyone with heavy fire power quakes in fear when Jar Jar arrives.