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General Sorin painted and photographed by Matthew of www.oldenhammer.com

Campaign

Well in the campaign, General Sorin is tricky to use. He relies upon positioning to get the most out of him. You mostly will use his Bombardment to make more powerful units attack out of turn. This can be pretty powerful with figures that have strong attacks, but if the rebels can control your powerful units with Stun, then his viability diminishes rapidly. Though his Advanced Firepower is good if you run Droids or Vehicles, it really doesn’t justify his cost of 8 Threat.

His Agenda Set includes Armored Division, which is actually decent. With it you can save 3 Threat for deploying a Vehicle. This brings down the cost for the new SC2-M Repulsor Tank to a measly 7 and you can use it once every mission! This can turn around missions quite fast. Explosive Shrapnel on the other hand is pretty situational. It is not a bad card, but it can be hard to trigger it in a way where it feels rewarding for the imperial player. If you have a lot of Blast available, it is a little better though.

To recruit General Sorin as Villain for your campaign, you need to win the side mission Fully Charged, which is included in his Agenda Deck. This mission requires map tiles included in the Return to Hoth expansion.

Skirmish

General Sorin basically serves as an Elite Imperial Officer on steroids. With Bombardment you can effectively counter Trooper lists. He is a bit hard to get in position sometimes because of his mediocre speed of 4. But his 7 Health combined with a black defense die make him really vulnerable to attacks that can pierce or spike a lot of damage. If you are comfortable with him weaving in and out of the area of engagement, you might be get your moneys worth out of him. But at a cost of 8, he will most likely not make the cut in many lists.

His command cards are … tricky. They do look pretty weak right now, but with that mentioned skirmish upgrade, at least his signature card Optimal Bombardment has the potential of doing great things. Imagine swapping out the “adjacent” with “within 3 spaces” and you know what I mean. Field Tactician is a bit more powerful than the Order ability from the Imperial Officer. Instead of 2 movement points, you get a full move out of the card. Still it is a hard sell for how tightly packed command decks are these days. And lastly Fuel Upgrade gives a slight boost to all of your Vehicles for one round. Until Vehicles really come into play, it is just not good.

The Skirmish Upgrade card The General’s Ranks is a bit odd. It can be good on General Weiss, an AT-ST or even the SC2-M Repulsor Tank, but the main problem is that you also need elite Imperial Officers to really make this card work. So at a cost of 2, you will have a hard time finding room for it in your budget.

The included skirmish map Climate Resarch Camp uses tiles from the core box and the return to hoth box expansion.

Update: With the release of The Grand Inquisitor pack, the skirmish upgrade Advanced Com Systems now enable Sorin to use his Bombardment on any friendly figure within 3 spaces. This enables him to stay back a lot better and thus makes him less likely to get swarmed before he can use his abilities more than once. Due to this, the skirmish rating of this pack is bumped from 1/5 to 3/5. He still is not overly powerful, but certainly something skilled players can use.

Model

This isn’t the model you are looking for. Once again, the art on his deployment card is much better than the model itself. Also his equipment and cloths are too bland to really stick out. Safe your money for something else if you are in it for the paint job.

Thanks to FFG Forum user tomkat364 for correcting me on the usage of Field Tactician.