Im seeing it as a great opportunity to get people who would not otherwise play Armada to play Armada. I will end up getting a minimum of 2 copies. Minimum. I work in the industry now and an employee discount goes a long way to adding to my mountain of prack.

Does anyone not do this?

His squads where sitting on the station with vector. I would have been attacking obstructed into those squads. I don't think I could have gotten close enough to them with out them getting the jump(vector speed bump). I planned to attack hits bombers to draw them out but forgot the distance they could fly. This is one of the reasons I've been building demo a little strange lately. I use a Glad II with agent Kallus. Crazy, I know, but if you shove that thing at squads you do roll a lot of dice and you can ET to potentially artificially 2-arc squads.

Yeah I took a crazy fleet to this that leaned all the way on a rhymerball Sorry, Chris, but you are way off. My first match my ball got neutered by a Yavaris alpha strike with just 3 starfighters. Nuked Dengar and vader and my bombers were useless. My second match was against a dual ISD with a veritable rhymerball shredder squad compliment (pushed by flight controllers, with howl, 6 blues coming out of interceptors and 5 out of tie fighters, Vader and Dengar vapourized in 1 activation). If you lean on the rhymerball there are no lack of ways for an opponent to build against that. If your entire meta is Rhymerball just have a plan for rhymerballs.... I really don't get the sour grapes. If it's rock-paper-scissors and you decide to take away the rock, how does that make the game better? The lists the top 2 brought were nothing new and in fact one was very similar to a new variant I have of a list I call "old faithful" (you can see me talking about it many months ago). I see them as balanced lists that bring a lot of strengths to the table and were out of favour for a long while because of the DeMSU and TRC MSU BS. Was that era of the game what you are pining for? or is it the gencon special era where you were stupid for bringing any squadrons? At the very least now min/maxing is dangerous (as I learned at nationals) which I think is WAY healthier. 130 points of squadrons is great but when a well played 60pts of squadrons can neuter it then I don't see the problem.

Yeah Expanded launchers are great. As for the ACM thing up there, yeah guaranteed crits are often better, especially on MC30s. I know the arguments for ACMs and personally I do like them in 2 situations: 1) Where I can get a bunch of them on the same target 2) where I am also using decent amount of bombers The times I have fought against MC30s that were well flown (e.g. ones that did well and got away or traded for point value or greater) they come in and get their shots in and get out, they don't always have the luxury of swarming or trading multiple rounds of fire which is where ACMs shine, if they can drop 2-4 crits directly on a hull with APTs they can cripple or kill most anything (Dodona anyone?) and be gone before dying.

APTs deal out a crit card through shields and cost 2 points less than ACMs. Its not really advanced math ACMs are good in large numbers or when in conjunction with squads

When I play against people that lifeboat their commander it is 90% of the time completely naked otherwise and it is deployed almost last, in the opposite corner of where combat will happen or behind and perpedndicular. After that it runs away from combat at full speed or sits far away from combat at speed zero. Its silly to hunt it down while the rest of the enemy fleet takes your fleet on. If your opponent knows how to run a life boat, chances are extremely good you will not table them.

A couple of points: When wave 3/4 came out my FLGS got bought out 2 days later and they brought in a LOT, I know exactly 3 people that attend tournaments from my city and none of those people bought any of those ships... I also happen to know that the number of base games sold across Canada make the turnout at nationals and regionals look like a fraction of a percentage of the people bought into the game. Where do these people play? in groups of 2, 3 or 4 friends, with no interest in organized play or playing in stores. The expectation is that CC will bring in a BUNCH more players and hopefully a solid fraction will eventually become interested in OP

Yeah I guess I can see that. You devote the amount of manpower that is proportional to the expected impact on your business. Esoteric rules questions that ruin a small portion of one games (out of so many) fan bases' day is probably not a super high priority. I mean, percentage wise, how many Armada players out of the set of all Armada players really care about clarifying some of these things (maybe 5%? 10%?) and out of those how many would stop or reduce purchases because of it (0.01%? Like Lord Nelson and his rare ilk maybe?)

APT and standard crit with FCT is actually pretty clear if you follow the Attack resolution stack because the point where you "resolve critical effect" and the point where you resolve Standard critical effect are two clear and distinct steps with their own "first damage card" look at it this way, if you were to defer using the APT effect for some crazy reason and your damage gets through shields you would then resolve the standard critical effect when in the assign damage step, 2 completely different timings, whereas the XX9 critical effect has the SAME timing as the standard critical effect (which is where the confusion arises). APT and XX9 WOULD result in 3 crits total if triggered and damage through to hull I don't understand the delay for FAQ, personally. From the way I look at it, they wrote the card and therefore had a particular *intent* in mind, they spent a good long while playtesting it, released it into the wild and have had more than a month for all the interpretation problems to come up, lots of time to *clarify their intent* they aren't re-inventing the wheel just balancing the tires, right?

I think we all want an FAQ to soothe those burning questions. Wait, no, I NEED an FAQ. Like Oxygen.

I tried Vader the other day in an all-ship list. It wasn't bad TBH but the key was concentrating fire a lot and focusing fire. The list was 3 victory Is and demolisher (weird build with Kallus and Glad2 for 3 dice vs aces), vics 2 spinals 1 slaved, all with intel officer. The idea is to throw a bunch of CF and navs and use the demo as a flanker or a goad. Victories are pretty **** point efficient for dice and sturdy for the points as well. When you manage to queue a couple of CF commands in a row at the right time and you start throwing 5 re-rollable reds from a couple of overlapping fields of fire Vader starts showing his value. If you fly reeel guut victories close and start throwing gut punches and you end up with 4 blacks, 4 reds re-rollable and the spinal victories can often even add a side arc if you are lucky for a total of 6 blacks, 6 reds (rerollable) which rival the damage output of anything in the game. Flotillas get pretty screwed too w/intel officer and frequently un-ignorable amounts of red die damage. This list is similar to an ackbar list in that it will be vulnerable to bomber balls and can be fairly predictable which is where the Demo is a great "back stop" or anti-flank when you aren't using it as a mobile flanker of your own. I mean, it's OK, Victories are...cool...but it's limitations are well known. Vader is his own limitation, but I imagine his point cost was set given future roadmap for imperial ships including the arquitens, if the arq is rebel corvette levels of cheap, points wise, Vader would be OP in a arq swarm...

I had hand-foot-mouth as an adult, apparently people usually get it as kids (under the age of like 3 or 4) and it's a common North American childhood disease. I was born in Argentina and was there until 4. I can attest to how unpleasant HFM is, and the little pimple things that pop up all over your hands and feet and in your mouth are gross.

The MC30 is a lovely ship but I think anyone who knows how to use it well can use it well either first or second. The key is using it well! Takes a bunch of practice and craft unless you naturally take to it in your play style. I think its important to be very aware of what role you are expecting the ship to play in your fleet. If they have to do the heavy lifting, or if you use it to threaten a flank with its crazy speed.

I used him once in a liberty heavy fleet and I liked him (I don't play rebels much) and I have seen him used in MC80 turd lists to make them acceptably maneuverable.

That's odd, because I've been going to game stores for just over a year and have observed plenty of toxic behavior. Let's see, there were the loud conversations about how of course cosplayers are going to be groped who cares and anyway it's their fault for wearing those clothes. The omnipresent **** jokes. The omnipresent sexist jokes. The loud insistence that female characters are totally bull and if they're not bull they're totally bangable, the tendency for RPG sessions to rapidly go to Creepville whenever somebody decides that having sex with a bar maid is the thing to do. It goes on, and that's leaving aside the two X-Wing players who were straight up emotionally abusive to their girlfriends, in public. Now, this does vary. Of the two stores I hit with regularity, one is significantly more toxic than the other. It's not a coincidence that the store with the significantly less awful clientele hosts far more mixed-gender gaming groups than the other does. So when you say you've never seen toxic behavior, well. It's possible you live in a magical place free of the sort of behavior that creates a hostile environment. Far more likely is that you simply don't recognize what that behavior looks like. So to circle back around, Hastiator, to the extent that there's anything you can do it's to make it clear that toxic behavior is not welcome around you. Call out the **** jokes, call out the sexist jokes and if women ever do venture into gaming around you, well, it's just that little bit more welcoming for them. This will likely involve confrontation with people who have poor social skills and will react with hostility to being told that the things they're saying are not okay. It will, in all likelihood, never be easy and never be enjoyable, and your success will be very contingent on the behavior of store management; if they'll back you (or will intervene on their own), great. If they want to have a store where loud **** jokes are fine, well, that's that. But if you want to do something, that's pretty much it. Thanks for your input. I tend to watch out for as much douchey behaviour as I can and I'm never shy about calling people out on it. In my experience people who are a little insecure and immature congregate and seek out each others approval by being stupid and saying stupid things but as soon as it's made clear that what they are doing is toxic and unacceptable they can be managed...or discouraged from attending (my local gaming society has specifically barred certain people from attending). That being said, I know the entirety of the local Armada scene and those people don't exist in our group (can't speak for x-wing), I would not hesitate to bring my little daughters or wife to Armada nights or tournaments. I would love to see more people join this community and if they happen to be female I would gladly make it my mission to make sure they feel welcome.

My angle is that 1. I want more people to play 2. Women are clearly under-represented and therefore a target audience for #1 3. if there is an interest or a possible interest and it has been acted upon by someone female, they would have an insight into possible blockers we can watch out for as a community to help #2 happen so #1 can happen and everyone wins! Are women "less strategic"? I'll ask my wife as she kicks my ass in a strategic game that is NOT Armada. I would say she is less open to games that require direct conflict but some of the most devious strategic thinkers I have ever played or worked with in my life have had a healthy female representation.

Man, you are lucky, I wish my wife played Armada with me. She loves tabletop gaming but a very particular slice of it. I'm happy to settle for her tolerating me spending as much time as I do on it Armada (and money) A guy in our local meta actually noticed recently how heavily male the community is. I can only think of one female that is active in ours and this is apparently the case all over. I wonder if we can get any female armada community members to chime in on how we can encourage a bigger female representation in this great game?

I have to agree. And recently having been on both ends of zero squad heavy hitting fleet vs lots of squad fleets I have to say most setups without some sort of squad game are extremely vulnerable these days. I ran a crazy 2 x slicer tool flot, Devastator, Dictorbattery fleet that was just stupid (the 11 die front arc that vapourized a Liberty was fun) but my opponent had something like SIX Scurrgs. along with some pot-shots from his cap ships they made short work of my ISD and it was all downhill from there. Same when running my TB list vs zero or low squad lists. A bomber command or 2 and a bomber force you could semi-ignore to hunt down carriers is no longer ignorable. If you really want to run this I would suggest you strip the ships right down to the bare essentials of what you are trying to do and use the rest of the points on some CAP. Just take the quads and the title and the admiral and this leaves you enough points for 3 Awings and a small bid, if you keep your awings back and comit them once enemy bombers are committed they can save you a round or 2 of punishment and will be worth their points (if 33 points can neuter 130 points for a few key rounds its a win). If your opponent has no squads Awings can still front-hump enemy large-base ships and give you .75 average damage each with no response.

Haha! yes, this. I tried a swarm list once and if I wasn't bumping I was obstructing. I pitched the whole thing and went back to angry triangles like a civilized person should! Thats why that 13 flotilla idea is so ludicrous to me, It's hard to focus 1 target without getting in your own way with 7 bases, forget 13.

yeah exactly. they are fragile and once you start packing significant points into them with TRC and intel they become very attractive targets to threaten.

as OLP platforms?

yeah supression refit dicter is rolling 6 blue dice on a double arc, which is a good shot at a natural crit and with the title and scramblers can help survivability. put SW7 on the Avenger to make those blues 100% effective. I can see it working.

I actually played against a list with 2 TRC90s with intel officers on Saturday. I hate them. However, I was playing my TB spam list (3 gozantis with BC and a decked out interdictor with 7 tie bombers and Rhymer, Dengar, Vader and a tie advanced) and while my interdictor took way too much heat from such small ships my Tie Bombers made very short work of the corvettes, especially after they got hit by tractor beams and G8s leaving a corvette in range of several squadrons backed by 2 bomber commands (roll+reroll+reroll = hit/crit heaven). They are a great platform but I don't think they are "OP" the TRC/Intel combo is powerful but it makes for a 58 point ship which has severe fragility problems, for the same cost Imperials can field a Raider with APT and Intel (yes I know, raiders are harder to keep alive, but CF+Screed and intel off can potentially hit significantly more effectively than a TRC90). ISDs with gunnery teams and Interdictor control lists make CR90s quite balanced yet still very viable.

Once FFG sees how many campaigns they sell they will suddenly have had plans all along to make more of them lol