This effort is rendered especially pathetic when one realizes that X-Wing has a thread with over 1,500 pages... lol.

There are a lot of ways Jerjerrod's efficiency could have been addressed via various fixes. I don't really care what fix was used, but he certainly warranted a fix, in my opinion. But it's all moot, since the "1.5" pack didn't touch him. I suppose not that it matters much now... since we can all worry about whether or not Armada is a dead game (oh hey, remember when we didn't have to worry about that for like the past 6 months,... that was nice...). Who's got the time or energy to worry about the slapdash job done with "1.5" while we hold our breath to see what AMG has in store for the game after Asmodee's abruptly fired all the designers/developers. Silver lining, I suppose. But I'm skeptical AMG will have the ability or the interest to continue X-Wing, Legion, AND Armada as-is in their current forms. And on that list, I know which is the least tempting to keep, from a sales number...

No, because for basically the same price you can get an MC30, which hits substantially harder, is twice as fast, is more maneuverable, and is pretty comparable in survivability.

It would very much make sense to wait. Not necessarily because of the quality control issues, but because of the sudden and surprising way that Asmodee moved the product line to Atomic Mass Games. No one on these boards can say with any confidence whether or not Armada will continue in its current form or if AMG will drop it, push a new edition, totally retool the game into some spiritual successor. And since the lead designers of those games were "suddenly and unceremoniously" fired, odds are no one at FFG or AMG yet knows for sure either what the future holds for theses lines that are moving. For anyone new looking to get into the game... that seems like a really good reason to adopt a policy of "wait and see." As to Quality Control issues, this is just something that's been kind of perpetual across FFG product lines, but do seem more common over the past few years. In addition to these mis-centered fighter bases, missing fighter miniatures, and inconsistent Republic ship paint jobs, recent issues have included LotR LCG having cards printed with instead of the Spirit icon symbol, misaligned cardboard bases (e.g. the Armada Starhawk), ship pegs being backward in the X-Wing belabub fighers, crucial gameplay lines being left off of bases (e.g. the XWing CROC Huge ship, I think), XWing huge ship dials being misprinted in their release box, Shriv Suurgav being misprinted in the upgrade pack, and so forth, so these seem to be ubiquitous across most lines. I don't really follow Legion but I suspect those who do could point to some issues there as well. Are they more common now than they used to be? Dunno, but a few years ago FFG had a great reputation as one of the best in the biz when it came to Quality Control and parts replacements, and now the Asmodee stance is "take it up with the retailer you bought from," which from what I've anecdotally heard has been much less ideal for players/retailers affected by this thus far.

Lately, I'm primarily a Jerjerrod player myself, actually. Nevertheless, I am objective enough to acknowledge that he's way too efficient for what he offers to ISDs/SSDs. It'd be nice to have more meaningful decisions, in either the form of deciding which admiral to use or when deciding whether or not to use Jerjerrod in any given round. As it stands now, those are generally no-brainer decisions. For a single damage, which is absolutely insignificant to ISDs/SSDs he offers the value of double Navigation dials without even having to worry about things that shut down Nav Commands (e.g. Raid Tokens, Slicer Tools, etc.), so there is literally no counterplay available. And more often than not, you can use the double-clicks from that 1 Damage to generally swing quite a few attack dice in your favor (either by arc-dodging an enemy or preserving your own front arc on target or both). So it's often "take 1 damage to avoid a pile of dice or gain a pile of dice," which will always then pay out net returns in the damage attrition race.

I'm shocked Jerjerrod didn't have an errata: Small Ship: 1 Damage Medium Ship: 2 Damage Large Ship: 3 Damage Huge Ship: 4 Damage It's pretty absurd he acts as free Super-Duper Nav commands for ISDs and SSDs for 1 measly damage point.

Hey player, player put away that DTT now, Give me slots on my corvettes, but leave me the Nevoota Bees, Please. Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. They printed LTTs, and filled up a binder spot. (Ohh-bop-bop-bop, ohh, bop-bop-bop)

Yea, it's good, but Evade will pretty easily shut down any attempt to YOLO an APT/ACM black crit through at long range or medium range. Still, against certain targets, it's pretty dope. Related: I do wish this game had differentiated its use of "dice pool" into two terms: one term referring to the dice you gather before rolling dice and one referring to the dice you've already rolled. Both things being "dice pool" is a little confusing, and it's weird you can add/replace dice sometimes before rolling but typically otherwise only after rolling. This causes a lot of confusion in my experience, especially for new players, and we can just look up at even veteran players here who didn't realize you could add the Black at long range via Swivel. And it's amazing to me how many players give me conflicting answers when asked "so when I roll a Salvo attack, do I roll my printed rear arc regardless of range OR only the dice from my printed rear arc that would be in legal range?"

Not a bad list. Well, other than it costs as much as a PS5, heh.

Yea, but the refresh requirement isn't that big of a deal? You keep the Focus token until you refresh the Swivel-Mount Cards, so it can benefit all six rounds of the game even if you never ready it. And for ships that plan on using it, I think that's the point. Still, would Spinal not just be better to preserve the opportunity to also dual-arc, for 1pt more? Probably.

Maybe? Sometimes cash cows get old and produce less and less milk, and it can be worthwhile to replace it with a new, younger cow. At the same time, games tend to only bleed players and profits as it's life continues to age. The most profitable time for most expandable games (very rare exceptions like Magic excluded) tends to be at the beginning of it's run. There are several reasons for this: the "new hotness" excitement and buzz the game is a novel set of puzzles and discoveries, and is not yet a "solved" game (communities tend to be more communicative early in a game's life rather than later, because there's simply less and less interesting stuff to talk about) players view the game with rosy glasses of potential fun, they haven't yet had a chance to realize things that can steer from the game, like realizing that the gameplay doesn't resonate with them, that there's not a sufficient local community to get it to the table enough, or that they've grown bored of the game's repetitiveness player $'s tend to be spent front-loaded in their relationship with a game... they need to buy up a starting point for the game, later on they can just splash expansions here and there to their large collection etc So, for most expandable games, it's most profitable time is it's first year or two of release. Very very few expandable games last five years. Only the rarest smash hits can persist for a decade or longer.

These are wonderful!

This does help keep it in perspective. Imagine being handed the reigns to a seven year old game that you've never played and being told that you're now in charge of balancing and designing it. That you have to appease players who have been playing this game for almost a decade, and that you need to do this by offering new and novel things to them, curating a balanced competitive meta, and repair any broken elements of the game. Yikes. I don't envy anyone over at AMG. This sort of daunting task would sure make scrapping those games and launching new original games in their stead a lot more tempting... because then you don't have to play catch-up with a community of players who have nearly a decade's head start on understanding the game...

I can at least understand where @DarthRulesLawyer is coming from. In the past two months, I've (digitally) played ISD Lists at least seven times against a variety of (quality) opponents and (quality) lists. I won all seven games without losing a single ISD. It does feel a little "unfair" to cut through an opponent's fleet with speed-demon ISDs, kill a few squishier targets, and win despite having a pile of damage cards on a 140+ pt ship... for which effort my opponent scores zero points. What makes playing against ISD lists frustrating (or any large ship, really) is that you have to either entirely ignore the ship with your offensive output OR have a dedicated plan to pour everything into it ... but if you come up even one damage card short on that gambit you score nothing for all your troubles. This is exactly why large ships utterly ruin Rebellion in the Rim and get house-ruled out ... because if you can't kill them you can't beat them, no matter how much damage you pour on. So large ships are real points-lockboxes, which is a really common tactic in X-Wing (prevent opponent from scoring points by hiding them in very hard-to-kill ships and get threatened ships out of the fight before they bleed points), and it's much harder to keep things alive in X-Wing than Armada and yet even X-Wing awards half points for any half-dead ship.

Very much this. Have theory-crafted quite a few lists now and gotten fleets onto the (digital) table a couple of times: I agree with your assessment. The new factions feel and play very much like what we already have, which isn't surprising given that the factions are basically: + Victory-class + CR90 + Rebel Squads (Republic) + Assault Frigate + Nebulon + Imperial Squads (Separatists) Also, probably best to keep Clone Wars games as clone wars factions against other clone wars factions, as there's no way they can (yet) compete with the Galactic Civil War era factions. They are just far too limited, and it doesn't help that Clone Wars factions are built entirely from a foundation that is the spiritual analogue to four of the worst and least-used OT Faction ships in the game... Final Hot Take: Commander Obi-Wan Kenobi is very bad, at least at the moment. In practice, he's unlikely to to function much more differently than Admiral Motti, except that Obi-Wan's "bonus HP" can be shut down by locking or stripping the Redirect token. If the Venator has two Redirects Obi-Wan will become much more tempting, but as of now it's Bail Organa all the way.

Yea, what @ForceSensitive said. I confess I may very well be missing something here... but a living rules reference and fluid point values that are updated on regular basis (e.g. not printed on cards) seem like two quite different things? Is there some reason to think the former is a necessary and incremental step to get to the latter? Seems like, if FFG had wanted to move Armada to the X-Wing 2.0 model of points-updates several times a year, they would have kept the points value off the cards in the 1.5 Upgrade and Clone Wars releases?

This is likely true, but Asmodee/FFG has always had trouble keeping Armada well stocked and available, even well before Corona. Searching these forums will reveal stock and availability issues going years back. It's just the nature of these sorts of games with lots of expansions (e.g. the Lord of the Rings LCG). FFG will reprint things in batches and roll them out, then they'll go out of stock again until the next reprint. So patience or a willingness to hunt things on the secondary market are sort of required and come with the territory.

And I'm pretty sure that most of the disappointed folks' have been saying things like "I'm bummed that nothing was done to buff binder fodder cards to nudge them toward playability." No one is complaining about the stuff that was fairly costed? So what's the relevance?

I picked up two Republic Starters, and the Acclamators in both are a very stark white with almost no wash, and the maroon line down the center is inconsistent and obscures a lot of the detail under it. It's gonna take a fair amount of after-market painting effort to salvage them, in my opinion. Easily my least favorite Armada paint job--even worse than the original MC80 runs. I agree that I really hope the Venator and Pelta get a different paint scheme... because this light scheme just didn't work in practice. I haven't picked up any Separatist stuff personally, but the bit of it I've seen looks really good, at least.

This really feels like a false dichotomy.

This would be easier to understand if Armada was a living game with regularly revisited and readjusted points updates where the points-values were not printed on cards (e.g. X-Wing 2.0), as this allow for a 2-3 times per year points update. But this is Armada, and this is the one and only time points have been revisited in the game's five-year life (and it really feels like what we got was a response to a meta that's now two years in the past). Since printed points-values were kept on the cards, it's hard to imagine a "wait and see and then adjust again in the near future" justification is really applicable. Do any of us really believe that FFG would have been willing or able to drop another updated upgrade card pack with new point costs in another year or two (or that players would have embraced and accepted buying their upgrade cards a second time in as many years)? Though this is all moot now with Asmodee pulling the rug out from under FFG, of course, who who knows what the future holds. I also simply cannot accept that adjusting the under-costed stuff will make the over-costed stuff get played. That's nonsense. Cards that were binder-fodder were binder-fodder because of their own innate cost-to-value ratio (even if no other Ion Upgrades existed, people still would almost never drop 10pts on NK7s and would just leave the slot empty and use those 10pts more efficiently elsewhere...). And I don't think those of us who are disappointed and puzzled by these sorts of justifications that have been offered are irrational "post-truthers" refusing to be logical. But you guys do you and dismiss and insult the playerbase however you want, I guess?

But it'd be a colossally dumb move to rerelease every upgrade card in the game in a new format, encourage new and old players to buy this by making a few changes here and there, and THEN change to a points-free format in the near future. The opportunity to go points-free on cards (which X-Wing has been doing for almost two years ago) was with the release of the card upgrade pack... and they didn't. Which suggests they weren't planning to go that route in the future, either. Though, the big wildcard now is AMG ... who knows what the future of Armada holds now?

And weren't all the Starhawk arc lines messed up on one side of the cardboard? Does anyone know if that has this been rectified in the latest reprintings that have just now been hitting store shelves?

There are a lot of "dead" games that still have active (or, at least, not deactivated) forums here on the FFG site. I would not expect FFG to shut this forum down either (though doesn't all of the 'real' Armada discussion happen on Facebook, Discord, and Reddit anyways?).

Eh, Shriv just recognized that the 1.5 changes were making torp ships hot garbage, so he was trying to be ahead of the meta curve.