Yep, but the new wording on Engine Techs (if correct) is also an "after moving" thing, not a "while moving" thing. It is phrased not as something to do when you actually overlap (which obviously comes first) but something to do when you've finished your maneuver if you overlapped. The Demolisher change doesn't feel too bad. It is a little bit of a nerf, but it also helps with in-game decision-making; you no longer have to worry about whether you'll get your post-maneuver shot and so whether to take a second attack first. The big nerf is to last-firsting with a Demolisher, getting 3 solid attacks in and then running. Instead you'll have to get 2 attacks and either run, hoping to get a shot on the other side, or ram and stay. Admonition also doesn't feel like too much of a nerf given the changes to Evades - letting you discard them for extra effects. Mostly it does feel that black dice ships took a big hit (See, how do you like it, black-dice ships?!); APTs, ACMs, External Racks, Ordnance Experts, Demolisher, Admonition, even Avenger all getting nerfed, plus the boost to close-range defence via evades (although I guess that also helps MC30s and non-Iden GSDs a bit).

Thanks for this. That new Engine Techs wording seems a little clunky. I get what they're trying to do (prevent double-ramming with Engine Techs), but for that shouldn't the second line be simply "While executing a maneuver, if you overlapped a ship..."? As it is, both parts have the same timing ("after you executive a maneuver") so you could choose to resolve the first part before the second part, and ETs anyway. Unless I am missing something. Afterthought: is it too much to hope that we are getting some new timing rules on maneuvers? Something like "fully resolve anything to do with overlapping a ship or squadron first, then anything to do with overlapping an obstacle, then any other effects"? Also, it seems Avenger also got nerfed: "While attacking, you may exhaust this card. if you do, the defender cannot spend more than 1 exhausted defense token during this attack."

Asmodee UK's website has all the Armada Clone Wars stuff listed as "New Release" but also "Sold Out", and they don't sell directly to the public (same with the new Legion, Arkham Horror and Lot5R releases). With the Starhawk and now this, I'm guessing we need to get used to chaos and delays with things - a side effect of the various interesting choices the British public have made over the last few years.

They might combine the Rules and Card Pack articles as they are related? Although I'm not sure what would go into the Card Pack article - they can't cover all the cards. Perhaps they'll mention a couple then link to a new Errata Reference file with all the (new) cards.

The UK's Legion releases seem to be about a week or two behind FFG ones; the lockdown probably isn't helping. UK retailers seem to be giving 11 December as the release date; hopefully that means things will arrive before Christmas and we won't get another Starhawk situation. Except Clone Wars has just appeared on this week's New Releases page on AsmodeeUK's website, so maybe we will be getting them this week.

It seems like a good way to "fix" Strategic Advisor (at the cost of more complicated rules). Advantages: it doesn't take up an officer slot, it isn't dependent on one ship, you can use it multiple times a turn, you don't get pointless "Strategic Advisor, Strategic Advisor" activations for the first few rounds. Disadvantages: only works if you are out-activated, can't use it to delay too much near the end of a round, may need to conserve tokens for when really needed. On the consecutive-activations rule, I think that might be a bit boring if it were allowed. You could get one player passing 2-3 activations at once (particularly if they only had the one ship). This way they have to have at least some activation padding. It feels like a way to reduce the advantage of high activations, but without completely breaking it in the way Pryce did, or being boring like SA.

Thinking about pass tokens some more, Imperial 2-ship is officially dead? Without Pryce there is no way to last-first with only 2 ships or, in general, to use pass tokens to last-first given any number of ships. If you are first player, you have to activate first, then the 2nd player activates, and now the 1st player can pass if and only if the 2nd player has at least two unactivated ships left. If the 1st player does pass, then they must go on the next activation and the 2nd player has at least one activation after that. Even if the 2nd player had only one ship, 1st player activates first, 2nd player can then pass (as one unactivated ship left each), 1st player must activate their second ship, 2nd player gets the last activation. Which sounds like a fun way of setting things up. You can use pass tokens to delay a bit during the early rounds, but generally not enough to overcome the advantage of high-activation lists.

To be pedantic it looks like that last line, while true, isn't quite right. It looks like pass tokens are going to be quite complicated, with different rules for 1st and 2nd player. First player can use a pass token if they have fewer ships left to activate than the 2nd player. Second player can use a pass token if they have at most the same number of ships left to activate as the 1st player. So when it is your turn to activate, you need to go through the checklist of: if 1st player, have I already activated? Yes. Do they have more ships left than I do? Yes. Did I use a pass token last "activation"? No. I can spend a pass token. if 2nd player; do I have more ships left to activate than they do? No. Did I use a pass token last "activation"? No. I can spend a pass token.

Statement from AMG about OP in 2021. It's not hugely confidence-building that each of these announcements is just a separate page on their website, but they probably haven't had long to work on it. As with everything else they have put out so far, there isn't anything particularly solid there, but it looks like they are at least planning to do some OP events in 2021. I know FFG said they'd try to get some OP Kits out for late 2020 (I've been stuck inside since March so not been looking out for them), so maybe we will get one last bit of FFG OP stuff before AMG takes over properly. At least the pandemic gives them some space to get up and running. I feel kind of bad for the OP people at FFG. I know they'd put a lot of work into getting a new system up, with new distributors/manufacturers for Armada OP, with plans to launch that this summer... and now they've had a pandemic and the whole team being moved/shut down. Still, looks like AMG has some fun ideas for Armada OP. Or, at least, some fun ideas about ideas for OP.

But is an exhaust; so no double-arcing. If the same goes for APTs Gladiators, MC75 Ordnances and MC30s aren't going to be happy.

Nice to know the Republic will start with a way to get Fleet Support upgrades (if just one per list). Also some more ways to spread out Command Tokens. Room for Engine Techs and an Offensive or Defensive Retrofit, but only one redirect and evade. The anti-squadron on the Armed one is interesting.

There are probably a few rules wording changes that would be helpful, to tighten them up a bit. It would be great if they fixed the Advanced Gunnery/Gunnery Team interaction; they're stuck the way they are with the current rules, but it would be nice if one or both got re-worded so they stacked. It might make Advanced Gunnery a reasonable objective...

So... how about 6 Delta-7s including all 4 uniques, with 4 points to spare? I see the uniques all lost Dodge (which makes sense as they have Defense Tokens) - and I like how most are focused on helping other squadrons. Apart from Anakin, of course, who just ignores all the rules.

From the rumours and statements going around, they did give some of the people the opportunity to move to Washington to work for AMG, but some people understandably weren't willing to do that.

Not that surprising; there's a chance the people at AMG only just found out this was happening as well, so wanted to put out something quickly without knowing much. FFG's official US release date is 4 December, it was updated a bit ago. International may be a bit later (the UK retailers have it for 11 December). Given Armada is staying within Asmodee, I doubt this changeover will affect anything until after Q1 2021 wave of Clone Wars stuff (which FFG's Armada team should already be finished with). It might slow down the new Rules Reference and online stuff if AMG want a say in that, but that would seem like a very ... courageous thing for them to do.

All this analysis on Hyperwave Signal Boost is based on the current rules, so is completely academic until we get to see the new rules next month. Feel even freer than normal to ignore it all. I went much deeper into this than I was expecting... There aren't that many upgrade cards where you can have more than one in the same fleet, and they have the same timing. Aside from set-up cards (like Proximity Mines) the obvious ones I can think of are Reinforced Blast Doors and Targeting Scanners. Targeting Scanners has a FAQ to confirm you can use multiple copies on the same attack. With Reinforced Blast Doors I don't think it comes up very often, but I suspect it has generally been taken as given that you can resolve RBDs on multiple ships in the same round. Unfortunately, neither is a "when" timing but the "when" wording is pretty similar to the "while" wording. The wording/timing on Hyperwave Signal Boost is: During the Squadron Phase, [timing] ... when it is your fleet's turn to activate squadrons [timing], you may exhaust this card [trigger] to choose a number of unactivated, friendly squadrons at close-long range up to your squadron value [effect]. This turn [timing], activate each of those squadrons [effect]. While attacking [timing], each of those squadrons with AI are treated as if activated by a {squadron} command [effect]. So... we can see why this is a bit complicated. The effect is triggered by exhausting the card in step 2. The timing window for doing so is "when it is..." and so it "occurs at the moment that the specified event occurs." Based on the analogy with RBD and Targeting Scanners, each card has a separate effect, so their timing windows happen one after the another. Given that, I don't see any reason why you couldn't exhaust multiple copies of this card in the same fleet, during the same timing window, and choose more than one set of squadrons. The important part of resolving the effect of the card is in step 3, which tells you to activate those squadrons this turn. I guess the question is if that means activate "only" those squadrons and no others. If so, you could exhaust two copies of the card, but would only get the benefit from the card. Of course, you could then exhaust a second copy during your next activation turn. But I don't think that is obviously in the text. Given that, I don't see any reason why you couldn't get the benefit from two sets of squadrons in one squadron activation turn. I'm not sure that is necessarily the intent, but I think it is what the card says (a clarification would be nice, eventually). The other questions are to do with whether the HSB squadrons are in addition to the normal 2, or instead of. I can see it being read either way, depending on how you interpret "This turn" - whether it is just a timing thing, or if it overrides the normal "this turn" thing for activating squadrons. If you only had one squadron in HSB range and you used that, could you activate 2 squadrons normally as well, 1 other, or no others? I think the simplest way of ruing it is that a single HSB activation replaces the squadron activation turn. So you get to activate one set of HSB squadrons and no others. The second easiest would be that they are cumulative, so you can activate as many sets of HSB squadrons as you can (provided you exhaust all the cards first) and two more without the HSB AI bonus. But ... I'm open to other interpretations in between.

So does anyone know where AMG is based? It looks like it was set up by Asmodee a couple of years ago as a dedicated miniatures design studio, with Marvel Crisis Protocol being a test game. Its website just refers back to Asmodee NA for everything, it isn't listed on Asmodee's corporate list of companies, so it may not even be its own company just another trading name for Asmodee NA (although presumably it is incorporated somewhere). The address given on the latest Crisis Protocol FAQ is Asmodee's NA address - which is where FFG's buildings are, and the Asmodee careers page has a job opening at AMG, also in Roseville (although the job page itself says it is in Washington). The point of all that is to say that this might not be a new organisation taking over as much as an internal restructuring, with people possibly staying in the same buildings, just under a different corporate structure and with different branding, as part of Asmodee consolidating all its companies by type of game rather than by licence or history. Which may mean not too many changes in how things work, just a bunch of changes in how everything looks (new website, new forum, new social media accounts, new packaging etc.). So perhaps nothing to get too worked up over... yet.

I wonder how this will work from the online side of things? Will FFG still be hosting their website, their news articles, the FAQs and so on? Will we have to get used to an entirely new website? Will the content all be ported across? More importantly, what happens to the forum? At the moment AMG's website doesn't seem to have any community stuff, and is dedicated to just the one game. Will the new Rules Reference be managed by FFG at first, and then AMG, or will AMG be taking over everything from now?

The Haor Chall Prototype has the potential to be able to attack a lot of times per round if I am reading it correctly. Any time an enemy ship or squadron at distance 1 moves it gets an opportunity to attack. With the new Intel squadrons won't be moving around each other quite as much, but still any time a squadron tries to run away, or if you stick it on an obstacle in the middle of an enemy squadron swarm and they try to move, there are opportunities to attack. Plus it works on ships as well, which would include things like Engine Techs moves, or Rift moves and so on. Think of it more like Moralo Eval, less like Jendon.

The reason these are not clarified on the card is that they are included in the rules, with the same rules applying for all the Objectives that have additional forces. The main rules for Controlling Additional Forces are on pages 2-3 of the RitR booklet. To answer question 1: Question 2 (and 1) is answered in the latest FAQ, page 11: So the answer to both your questions is Yes, and note that the bonus squadrons also count for the understrength bonus.

Dooku looks wonderfully frustrating, particularly for squadron-reliant fleets. On the other hand, the opponent knows what raid commands are coming, just not when. Dooku + Surprise Attack = 6 rounds of raid tokens! Signal Boost is an interesting idea; I think it may take a while for players to get used to all the kinks (it happens during any of the player's squadron turns(?), and they get to activate as many squadrons as they can instead of just 2, and they activate normally - not rogue like Hera - just get the AI bonus). Question: is this in addition to the normal squadron activation or instead? The "This turn,.." part suggests it is, and it sounds like it is intended that way, but it doesn't specify that it replaces the normal turn. For two points I get the feeling Tide of Progress might be stapled to Munificents. Or would if the other title wasn't also pretty fun? But a refreshing (ish) Med Team, that works on "Ship" damage cards; potentially a lot of damage saved if it receives Structural Damages. Main issue I see for now is getting command tokens on the Munificents to refresh all these lovely things, given the lack of Comms Net flotillas.

Yes. The line from the Rules Reference tells you that you may spend command tokens at the appropriate time to resolve a command. It doesn't say you can't also spend tokens at other times to trigger or pay for card effects. You can only resolve each command once per turn, and then only with a Dial, a Token, or a Dial+Token, but you can spend as many command tokens as you like. Lira Wessex is another good example of this - if you had her on an Executor you'd probably want to save up a bunch of Repair Tokens to spam when the critical hits start coming in (particularly if you plan on flying through asteroids). Disclaimer: may all change next month.

There are a few from the 2019 OP kits; top 16 for the Nationals, winner for the Regionals, and (I think) for the worlds champion and finalist. But obviously there aren't that many of them out in the wild.

They did that last week, so I guess that means we are getting the Munificent-class article on Monday. Extrapolating inappropriately, that probably means articles on 23 November and 30 November as well, maybe one for the Squadron packs, and one for the Upgrade Card Pack and rules changes?

I think canonically Acclamators have only appeared as a Rebel ship (the Lodestar, Hera's post-Endor flagship), not an Imperial one.