I kind of wish they'd defined some additional sizes.  I'd like to have an official "skirmish" size around 400-500 and a medium-large size around 1200.  Maybe it will come later on...
I think they wanted to keep the standard size as small as possible to keep tournament rounds from taking too long.

Han model looks like Agent Scully doing steampunk cosplay.
Anyway...  looks like some cool stuff.  I really like how you can field the Commandos two different ways.  I think you can field both unit types out of a single box too!
For Imperials I'm expecting probably Scout Troopers w/ some sort of sniper option and whatever leader.  Maybe Grand Moff Tarkin although he seems a bit too similar to Veers in being a back-line support guy.

Han model looks like Agent Scully doing steampunk cosplay.
Anyway...  looks like some cool stuff.  I really like how you can field the Commandos two different ways.  I think you can field both unit types out of a single box too!
For Imperials I'm expecting probably Scout Troopers w/ some sort of sniper option and whatever leader.  Maybe Grand Moff Tarkin although he seems a bit too similar to Veers in being a back-line support guy.

Personally, I think you're about to lose two speeder bikes and I hope the amount of damage they did was enough to justify it.  Also, they'll have courage support from their commander in most cases so I don't expect a panic.
Instead of your opponent moving up and maybe not having anything in range to shoot at with some of their units, their entire force can probably move and shoot the bikes now.  Maybe even some of the short-ranged guys that definitely wouldn't have been able to fire can get in on the fun or their leader attacking in melee which is a super-nice bonus for them they weren't expecting to get.
Or am I misunderstanding something about your scenario?

They already have lots of "named" characters in X-Wing that the general public isn't going to recognize.  I expect they can do the same here, pick any minor officer mentioned in some obscure book and make them into the equivalent of a low-powered generic leader with comparatively weak abilities.

They already have lots of "named" characters in X-Wing that the general public isn't going to recognize.  I expect they can do the same here, pick any minor officer mentioned in some obscure book and make them into the equivalent of a low-powered generic leader with comparatively weak abilities.

They already have lots of "named" characters in X-Wing that the general public isn't going to recognize.  I expect they can do the same here, pick any minor officer mentioned in some obscure book and make them into the equivalent of a low-powered generic leader with comparatively weak abilities.

Seems strong against swarms where you could be doing quite a bit of damage for 2 points.

You guys may not be aware, but there are painting services that will paint your figures for a fee.  Either ones online that you can ship your figures to (you can even buy the figures directly to their address to save an extra shipping charge), or just local guys that will do this.  Ask around at your local game stores.
 
Yes, it's an additional expense, but it would cost more if they were pre-painted from FFG too.  At least this way you get a lot of input on what you want your custom painted guys to look like.

That's fine.  Different people have different criteria.  Mine can easily differ from yours.
 
Yes, we do have both an X-Wing and Armada Facebook group (as well as other games) and you can post there asking if anyone wants to meet up and play.  I've seen people do this.  Sometimes they are successful in finding opponents, and sometimes they are not.
 
For X-Wing though, you are not reliant on this.  Whether you asked in advance or not (and you can still do this if you want to arrange specific opponents), you know there will be players.  For Armada, you always have to ask as there is never anyone just playing pick-up that I've seen.  But, asking does not guarantee that you will find someone.  It is entirely too common that nobody will write back and the night will pass without a game being played no matter whether you're sitting at the store or at home.
 
For me, I cannot afford this.  I have a 5 year old son at home and this is my one night that I can get out and have some daddy time to play games.  I do not want to risk missing that.  After a whole week of looking forward to it and reading forums and working on new lists to try out, it would be disappointing not to get to play and then having to wait another week and then flip a coin to see whether I'll have a game or not.
 
If I was still single, my criteria would be totally different, as I would have the freedom to simply game on a different night or a different store.  I just don't have those options at this point.  Maybe in 2-3 more years I'll be able to teach Isaac to play and I'll be able to get in some games at home and be less reliant on finding opponents at the game store.  I also agree that pickup opponents come in different levels of quality, but the flip side of that is that sometimes you've got to try out new people to find out which ones are good ones.  Fortunately, X-Wing has a very standard point level so that specific concern doesn't really come into play.  I did have a slow start last week though when my opponent didn't have his list built yet but it wasn't too long of a wait and we were able to spend it talking about games so that's not so bad

RuneWars is going to make me actually drag out my BattleLore app and try it again.

So who would you be keeping up with?  Nobody, that's who.  There is no opponent with a bigger collection than you making you feel pressured to compete.  So yeah, feel free to pick up packs at your own pace.

Yes, this would be great too.
 
Just to add, the dial displays are awesome and they even work with TIE MkII.  I did notice that on pre-existing lists I had to delete and re-add TIE MkII before the dial changed but it works after that.  Anyway, it's a great tool both in design and actual play to be able to easily see what my opponent's ships can do.  No more must we wonder whether that thing over there can K-turn or not

Knowing what nonsensical slangy terms internet people like to use for certain lists has nothing to do with understanding game concepts or how to play with or against those lists.
 
 
 
 
Strategies like those apply to land based minis games.  Models there move in a certain way and have certain characteristics (like being able to block each other's movement) and the well known historical wargaming strategies are emergent properties of how the game works.
 
X-Wing uses a very different movement model, things don't block movement of other things, who you can attack works quite different, etc...  So while a few ideas may carry over to a limited extent, you pretty much need to throw out a lot of these ideas and learn what sort of maneuvering and concepts DO apply in fighter combat.  Right now you may be trying to "Cross the T" with armored knights which makes no sense because it's specifically a wet naval tactic.
 
Second point...  In ancients, medievals, etc... there really are little to no special abilities.  You can go from one game system to another, one nation's troops to another, and jump a couple centuries back and forth and things are going to be very much the same.  Archers act like archers, spearmen act like spearmen, nobody does anything unexpected and there is no such thing as a "combo" where using two things in conjunction with each other yields a disproportionately strong result.
 
That is not true in X-Wing, or really in most non-historical minis games.  Whether it's starships, fantasy, etc... most games these days have special abilities all over the place whether big or small.  Now in most of these games, the abilities are baked into the models and are relatively fixed.  You can field different models together to form combos.  Guy-who-buffs-shooting + guy-who-shoots = profit!
 
In X-Wing though, you can modify your models a LOT with different upgrade cards in addition to inter-model synergy.  This means that you can have two spaceships that use the same model but they behave super-differently on the table, this is quite opposite from historicals where a block of swordsmen is pretty much a block of swordsmen.  It's more like if you could imagine a one-on-one swordsman game where the base model was "Swordsman" but you could customize them into Miyamoto Musashi, Sir Lancelot, a Renaissance duelist, or a giant Scotsman with a claymore.  Start out the same, but end up drastically different.  And without understanding those differences, you cannot hope to know how to fight them effectively because moves that will help you triumph over one will get your ass kicked against another.
 
So what I would suggest is that you:
1.  Work on your list making.  Try to understand why people put certain upgrades on certain models and how they interact with each other, the pilot's ability, and the dial of that ship.  Try to improve the synergy of your lists.
2.  Work on understanding actions and PS.  What's better about high PS?  What's better about low PS?  How do you use each one to your advantage?  What actions go up or down in value depending on PS?  How does this relate to more flexible actions like Focus that can be used for attack or defense?
3.  Look at lists online.  For each ship in the list, work out why it's build like that, what was the designer trying to maximize about it?  Once you do that for each ship, how do the individual ships fit together into one harmonious whole?  Or if they don't fit, why not?  Until you have found at least a couple lists that make you say "THAT's dumb, it would be better like THIS", then you still have work to do.
4.  Then work on designing your own squadron yourself.  Make a first draft, then look for similar lists and see what they did differently.  Try to work out what the plusses and minuses are of your approach compared to theirs.  Feel free to use ships you like, just try to make sure the list "makes sense" overall.  It's better to fly similar ships all the time and know how to fly them well than to buy a ton of stuff you don't know how to use.  You're not trying to win Nationals so don't worry about being super-competitive.  At a local level, you can do well with a wide variety of well made lists that you're familiar with.
 
So now we arrive at by far the most important point of all.  After reading the above you're going to either be thinking:  "That's awesome, now I have a clear path and I know what I need to do!  I can't wait to start improving!" or you're going to be thinking:  "Screw that rubbish, that sounds like way too much work and I just don't think I'll enjoy that kind of study in order to get good at a game.  I'm going back to historicals."
 
And BOTH of these feelings are just fine.  Not every hobby is for every person.  I will never enjoy scrapbooking as much as my wife does, and she has no idea why I'd choose to spend an hour working on army list variants and be all excited to see how they do next game night.  Which feeling you have will tell you which what you should do.

So who would you be keeping up with?  Nobody, that's who.  There is no opponent with a bigger collection than you making you feel pressured to compete.  So yeah, feel free to pick up packs at your own pace.

So who would you be keeping up with?  Nobody, that's who.  There is no opponent with a bigger collection than you making you feel pressured to compete.  So yeah, feel free to pick up packs at your own pace.

So who would you be keeping up with?  Nobody, that's who.  There is no opponent with a bigger collection than you making you feel pressured to compete.  So yeah, feel free to pick up packs at your own pace.

So who would you be keeping up with?  Nobody, that's who.  There is no opponent with a bigger collection than you making you feel pressured to compete.  So yeah, feel free to pick up packs at your own pace.

I'd be pretty shocked if we weren't traveling around the world eventually.  Just not in the first cycle.

RuneWars is going to make me actually drag out my BattleLore app and try it again.

Also, even though IN GENERAL you can't play cards on each other, this is an LCG.  I would expect that eventually we will see a few cards that specifically say "You can play this card on other Investigators".  It's just an obvious thing to do.  Half the reason rules exist in LCGs is to create something a card can break

Also, even though IN GENERAL you can't play cards on each other, this is an LCG.  I would expect that eventually we will see a few cards that specifically say "You can play this card on other Investigators".  It's just an obvious thing to do.  Half the reason rules exist in LCGs is to create something a card can break

That's something, but only in a fairly vague sense.  What we'd like to be able to do is be able to crunch numbers to compare how many deck combinations this game has relative to other LCGs (most likely in a core-only configuration in order to make it apples-to-apples).
 
"Many cards" isn't precise enough for me to draw any conclusions.  And even if upgrade cards exist for a card, that doesn't mean those upgrades are in the core, they could come out in a later expansion, which make this even less accurate.
 
 
"At the beginning of a campaign, you have zero experience, so you have to build your deck without these cards."
 
Yes, this we already knew from earlier.  And I think we're actually somewhat in agreement based on your statement "We could argue that upgraded cards are also part of the deckbuilding process, but since you can't know for sure how many experience you will get each scenario, it's hard to build a deck with those cards in mind."  We may just be using different terminology.
 
 
Say a normal card in an LCG counts as one card for deck building variety because you can put in any deck you want to.  Now, how can we compare an upgradable card in Arkham Horror to that?  It depends on a lot of factors, most of which we do not yet know or understand well.
 
Now let's say that a particular upgrade card you want costs 1xp, it's cheap.  If a campaign is 6 quests long, I'd be able to put this into 5/6th of my decks.  Not in the deck for the first quest of a new campaign, but I know I'll earn enough xp to include it in the remaining 5.  A more expensive upgrade card might cost enough xp that it takes more time to save up for it.  Maybe it takes two quests to get enough, so I can theoretically put it into only 4/6ths of my decks.
 
But, there is also opportunity cost.  Much like out-of-faction cards in Netrunner, you cannot afford an unlimited number of these cards.  So it's not just a matter of having enough xp, I must also not have already used that xp on OTHER upgrade cards I want.  So the real availability of any given upgrade card is actually less than the 5/6 or 4/6 from above.  How much less?  We don't know, because we don't know enough about how much contention there will be for upgrade slots, or how much xp you earn per quest, or how many upgrade cards will be competing for our xp and what level cards we'll be interested in.
 
So basically what I was saying is that there are enough unknown and fuzzy factors involved that it's difficult to judge how much variety a new upgrade card adds to the game compared to a new level 0 card.  Hopefully that makes sense.
 
As far as "it's hard to build a deck with those cards in mind"...   Another thing we don't know is whether you can change your deck outside of 1:1 upgrades between quests.  If we can, then you don't have to build with anything in mind.  If we can't, some people will anyway because hey, it's co-op and nobody's there to stop you.  But let's say we can't and you don't want to bend the rules.  Even in that case, an experienced player will have a good idea of how much xp you typically earn per quest so I think you actually would be able to plan ahead fairly well.  You'd be thinking "OK, what I really want in this deck is a level X version of this card.  So I'm going to put in the level 0 now and I know based on the usual earn rates that I'll be able to swap in my preferred version for quest 2".  You might even have more detailed plans.  "If I earn only 3 xp I'm going to upgrade my Shotgun to a double barrel next, but if I earn 4 or more then first I'll replace my level 0 spell with the better one and do the Shotgun after the second quest".  Or if you're playing that campaign for the first time you might want to have backup plans:  "I have three upgradable cards in my deck right now, the Shotgun for combat, this book for investigation, or my cloak of shadows for evading.  Depending on what the first quest seems to emphasize, I'll upgrade whichever one first I feel is the best fit for this campaign".  Think of it as a type of mini-sideboard.

Ryad is awesome, she's the first TIE Defender pilot I go to.  Put her in the TIE/x7 with Juke and I promise you'll be happy with the results.

Ryad is awesome, she's the first TIE Defender pilot I go to.  Put her in the TIE/x7 with Juke and I promise you'll be happy with the results.