This guide will discuss how to use the Hero transport X-34 Landspeeder. It’s had to cede the spotlight a bit to the A-A5 speeder truck, but it also gets a lot of helpful upgrades from that unit expansion. Frankly, it’s still one of my favorite units in the Rebel Alliance roster because of how it perfectly personifies the rebel’s fighting strategy: Fighting with salvaged civilian vehicles and equipment in a one-sided guerilla war.
Strengths
- Reasonably durable
- Very fast
- Very cheap
- Open Transport – Allows you to shoot with the character it’s transporting.
Weaknesses
- Low wound count
- Doesn’t have great weapon options built in, and weapon options can be expensive
- Open Transport – The enemy can shoot them back!
Overview
60 Points: Decent discount from its launch cost of 75, this is one of the cheapest units in the rebel arsenal, especially when taken naked. This is probably the greatest strength of the unit – whereas the Speeder Truck can get very expensive, this can be taken for a pittance. Particularly if you’re really only doing it to transport one Hero, you can bring 2 of them minimal footprint to your list.
Defense: White with Surge, like a lot of heavy vehicles. Like most heavy vehicles, it also has Armor. Armor 2 is generally sufficient for protecting you from many infantry weapons, but enough hits on a weapon with a lot of dice like a Z-6 might catch you off guard. At the very least it also gets Cover which gives it another point of protection. It only has 6 health, which can go up in smoke pretty fast. Unless the enemy focuses fires on it it can probably survive a turn or two of shooting if not more.
Offense: By default, only a sad 2 white dice with surge to hit. If you decide to pack it up with weapons you do get access to Arsenal 3, and can create a pretty nasty dice pool. We’ll look at the equippable weapons down below.
While technically not part of the unit, it’s worth remembering that the Hero you’re transporting also gets to activate and shoot. If you bring a particularly shooty Hero or Luke with Saber Throw it can also do some damage.
Light Transport 1: Open: In short, you can transport one model (so most Commanders and Operatives) and if that’s all you want to transport it’s a pretty good cheap alternative to the much more expensive battle bus. As stated above, the one being transported can also attack on their turn, which does open up some nice potential on shooty characters like Sabine, Cassian or Han. Since their movement is taken care of by the transport, it frees you up to take an aim or dodge and still get into position. There is a slight exception in that if the vehicle makes two or more moves you have to spend a whole activation to do one action. Since this is a speeder you may want to try and attack first before activating the transport.
The downside is that they can be shot at. They do get Heavy cover, which isn’t nothing, but enough concentrated fire can still chip off wounds so don’t get reckless about it. Try and move after they shoot so you can find somewhere to hide.
Speeder: Another significant advantage of the bus. You get to fly over Size 1 terrain and get a free move before or after your turn. The rules been significantly improved since the model debuted, where you needed to move at the beginning of your turn. In short this makes movement for your Hero significantly faster than if they had hoofed it across the field which can be key for getting to key objectives or sniping at an enemy unit hidden before legions of chafe.
Upgrades
This thing comes with a lot of upgrades! A pilot, 2 gunners, a hard point and a comms slot. It’s definitely valid to run this thing naked but if you kit it out it can become devastatingly effective.
Pilot
We’ve come a long way from the original release, since the Speeder Bus added a few more pilots worth examining.
Wedge Antilles
Up until recently I’d call it a pass. The pivot is nice since you can’t move in reverse and the hard point weapons require you to face the target. In any other situation you get enough free movement it’s not too hard to re-orient yourself to where you need to go. The addition of Field Commander is a massive boon if you want to run a Commander-less army, focusing on operatives and vehicles instead. He’s 5 points cheaper than Shriv so he can fill that roll much more easily.
Hotshot Pilot
Depends if you’re bringing weapons or not. If you’re going naked, don’t bother. 2 white dice isn’t worth it, but if you bring some extra weapons, worth looking at for the Sharpshooter so you can ping at stuff hiding in the grass far away, like strike teams.
Outer Rim Speeder Jockey
Cover 1, not so great since you already get it. It does stack and since you “only” have armor 2 its yet another shot to deflect away. It’s not bad, just expensive for what you get.’
Ryder Azadi
Increase movement by 1 for a turn, exhaustible. Not bad, when you really need to get somewhere quick you can take a free speed 3 move and then two more. He’s also tied with Wedge for the cheapest, so he makes a pretty good argument especially if you want to use it for Secret Mission.
Shriv Surrgav
The best pilot of the bunch, though comes at a premium. As a free action he can hand out a dodge token and optional suppression to whomever he is transporting, or a unit nearby. If you’re using this as a Luke or Sabine guided missle then Shriv is basically essential as he synergizes in such a way as to feel made for it. This is also great for R2, since the suppression triggers Inconspicuous and makes R2 effectively untargetable by ranged attacks while he’s in the speeder.
Crew
Four crew options here, two are weapons while two offer support.
A-300 Rifle Gunner
2 White dice and nothing else. Its only benefit is that it is only a single point down from the comically expensive 9 it used to cost. So it’s basically just an auto include as while you probably won’t be using the attack profile often (not unless you juice it up with something better) it’s essentially free and makes it ever so slightly less dismal.
Rocket Gunner
Red, Black and White with Impact 2. It’s expensive, but there has been an uptick in vehicles in the meta lately with Yoda-Sabers, dual AT-ST and AATs walking around. While it’s not the ideal pick it might be worth considering if you feel there just isn’t enough impact in your list. Otherwise the dice pool is a bit iffy (on its own) that you might want to pair it with one of the other weapons on vehicle or just look elsewhere.
Unstable R5 Astromech Droid
Free move or attack at the end of your activation, then potentially take damage. I’d take a pass on this one, with only 6 wounds you really cannot afford to just give your opponent some free damage like that, and you already have some crazy movement. There are some silly things you can do with the Ion gun though, if you want to double Ion something in one turn. You can also repair the damage with R2 if you bring him along.
Refurbished “Gonk” Droid
Shielded 2, if a bit shakey and prone to failure. I think this might be worth looking at due to how fragile the speeder is. It meshes well with the built in armor and cover, but does come at a premium. Add it if you can afford the points, otherwise just rely on terrain to block line of sight instead.
Hardpoint
2 weapon options here. Both are expensive and need to be weighed heavily, and both go on the front dashboard which means you need to point the speeder at the target to shoot them. This can be more of a problem than it seems, but since you can get a free move at the beginning of the activation you can move into position, fire then juke out of there.
Mark II Medium Blaster
A no-frills anti-infantry weapon. It has 4 black dice and nothing else going for it. Since you have Arsenal 3 it’s mostly used to stack up that dice pool with a decent collection of dice and maybe take out a few unprotected infantry.
M-45 Ion Blaster
Very expensive at 31 points but I think it’s definitely a lot more useful than it was. 1 Black and 4 white, it also comes with Ion and Impact 1. Like I said on the rocket launcher above, the proliferation of vehicles (and droids) in the meta right now means Ion is way more useful than it once was and I think you can make a much stronger argument for it than you could when this thing came out. Impact 1 is decent and pairs nicely with the rocket launcher in a weapons pool, although you’re paying almost as much in add ons as you are for the vehicle itself at that point.
Comms
Naturally, there are a lot of Comms upgrades. I’m not going to cover every one, just ones that can come in handy.
HQ Uplink
Speeders are almost inevitably going to drift out of command range, unless your driver is the only commander you got. Their job is to get into those far flung places you cant reach otherwise. With HQ Uplink you can keep the orders on them, and with the extra movement that frees you up to refresh it each turn. Excellent pick.
Long Range Commlink
The budget version of HQ Uplink. At half the cost it can let you get an order out from your “main” commander a little further back. Not necessarily as reliable but good on a budget.
Onboard Comms Channel
When you issue an order to the speeder your transported Hero also gets an order. Excellent if you have a way to guarantee you can get orders out to them reliably, and you’re transporting a high value character like Luke. At only 3 points it’s a steal but may be difficult to set up reliably.
Comms Jammer
Since you’re often ducking in and out behind enemy lines you can be a real disruptive presence. The downside is that range 1 is pretty dicey and might put you into melee range with something you really do not want to be that close to. Proceed with caution.
Hacked Comms Unit
Similar to Comms Jammer but benefits you instead, you can put an order on the speeder if an enemy in range 1 receives an order. Personally I’d stick to HQ Uplink for the guaranteed order as it’s going to be more reliable but this is much cheaper.
Linked Targetting Array
Naturally this is really only worth it if you have kitted it out with a lot of weapons. If you did well there is a very strong argument for this one since you want to make sure all those Impact hits get in there.
Strategies
Using the Speeder is a gambler’s choice. It’s fairly resilient with its Cover and Armor but will fall to concentrated fire. It is the fastest transport in the game though, which opens up options other armies simply don’t get.
The Hero Missile
The most obvious use for the speeder is to help get a Hero who wants to be close to the enemy there safer in style and comfort. Luke is the Gold Standard here, he relies almost entirely on melee to be effective but if he has to take the long way around he’s either taking a real long time to get there or putting himself at needless risk to run in. With the transport he can Saber Throw to do some really solid chip damage and as an interesting quirk he can do melee damage if you charge in with the vehicle despite not actually being engaged! With Shriv piloting keep juicing him up with dodge tokens for when he needs to get out.
Disembarking is a single action and is basically a free speed-one move, but you cant get into combat when you jump out, so you will be using his other move to Charge. Use any force powers you need like Force Push or Force reflexes before jumping in.
Luke is probably the best beneficiary of it but hes hardly the only one. Characters who have access to excellent Range 2 shooting are also in high demand. This includes Sabine, Cassian, Jyn and Han. Aside from Sabine, these character are delicate and put themselves at risk getting as close as they need to to fight effectively so by being able to do drive-bys they can maximize their potential and minimize risk to themselves.
Secret Mission
There is one other character you can bring along, R2. This can either be an intended goal or a useful side effect. R2 counts as being in the enemy zone merely by being in the vehicle so you can run over, drop him off then move him back someplace safe. It’s a lot of setup, and it’s cheaper to just try and play a deployment zone that benefits R2 rather than try and finagle it but you can create a situation where Secret Mission is basically guaranteed and that can win you the game.
Conclusion
The X-34 Landspeeder is still an excellent transport. As opposed to the party bus it can only transport one character, and they’re not nearly as safe as they are inside of the protective shell of the bus, but its a much cheaper option to get a melee or close-range shooting hero where they need to be while keeping them reasonably protected. If you have a need for speed and need to get your Skywalkers somewhere fast, take the landspeeder out for a spin.
