Every time I play with or play against units that deal Raid tokens, it feels disappointing. Last time was the first game with Count Dooku against Bail Organa, who happens to be a hard counter. The possibility to get rid of Raid with tokens and dials are so plenty and often you can even ignore them at all. Even worse: If the ship has already a Command token of the same type as the Raid token it is dealt, the effort is nearly meaningless.

A few minutes ago a thought crossed my mind, how Raid could be a little less ignorable. What if Raid token would count towards the limit of Command tokens a ship may hold. Every Raid token meaning one fewer Command token would be an annoying side effect, making even unimportant sorts of Raid tokens a bit of a problem. Command-1 ships can be really in trouble holding a Squadron-Raid even if its no carrier, it wouldn't be able to hold any Command tokens at all. Not only that you would have to discard your Command token the instant you receive the Raid, it would be the only way to discard a dial, to get rid of one or more Raid tokens. Same if Command-2 or -3 ships is dealt 2 or more Raid.

What do you think? Does Raid need any buff at all? Would that suggestion be a good way to give it a little more of importance to the game play? Or all too powerful?

I think we should wait to see how Dooku and the increase in token needs plays out before drawing any conclusions... 😉

A ship may have up to two raid tokens of the same type.

This means going hard on raid is more likely to cost someone a dial or use of the command that's been raided and thus more likely to yield a meaningful benefit to any player going hard on raid while going light on raid will only yield a light benefit (enemy gives up a token).

As a bonus the Mandalorian Gauntlet would actually be worth something.

It's not a little buff tho. It's a massive one.

1 raid shuts down tokens on small and badly hurt command 2s.

Not a great move now that Dooku is a thing.

Keep in mind that Bail dials are gained and not revealed, so they can't be discarded to clear raid tokens. Though they can be tokenized for countering Nav/eng raids. But if Dooku goes for eng/nav he'll throw out more tokens then bail can clear, arguable making him more of a hard counter to Bail then Bail is to him.

I dunno. There's LOTS of token passing, generating, conversion upgrades out there. Ahsokha alone can basically reducs raid to only cost 1 token of any kind to get rid of for multiple ships.

The problem is that any command you're trying to strike with raid is generally one that said ship is trying to apply a lot which typically means they have a dial and a token lined up. By extension that means raid is usually only going to reduce a ship to using only it's dial. That means raid's effect is limited to reducing squad activations by 1, reducing speed change by 1, removing 1 shield rengeneration or shift or not rerolling one dice. These are negatives but creating a situation where they're going to be meaningful negatives requires a lot more than just a raid. You have to be in a position to actually leverage the fact that you've raided someone which requires positioning. Add to that the token passing and generation abilities of lots of upgrades and maybe you could make a case for raid influencing enemy activation order but this is getting to be a lot of work for a mechanic that in and of itself is difficult to setup, quick to remove and very prone to failure depending on how you're delivering the raid effect. By and large there's not enough reward for the risk and complexity involved.

TLDR: It doesn't generate enough benefit in and of itself and it's hard to leverage it into a larger one.

25 minutes ago, Garrett17 said:

TLDR: It doesn't generate enough benefit in and of itself and it's hard to leverage it into a larger one.

Would you say that a buff to the delivery platform would suffice to follow this logic through? What about a commander who does fleet wide raid?

Raid's value primarily comes from how much trouble it's going to cause your opponent that you can make use of.

With damage upgrades, the equation is usually easy. I do more damage or he prevents less.

With raid, it's difficult to know what benefit you're getting for what it does because a lot of that equation rests on the composition, maneuvering and token generation/retention/passing abilities and activation order of the opponent. If I want to raid an unactivated large ship for a squadron command and it's not carrying a token that can be ok, but if anyone nearby passes one to him before he activates, i only eliminate a token and I've often subjected a raiding ship to danger for my trouble. I could try to put off my raid until after all nearby potential token passers have gone but playing the activation timing game like that gets tricky and I'm imposing on my own activation order freedom now to deliver this effect.

Dooku bypasses this but he's limited to going off at the start of the ship phase which doesn't help with a lot of the of potential ways there are to get rid of raid.

To be meaningful, I think raid should have either a small effect over time but that is hard to get rid of or a large effect that is only brief but is something you can really leverage if you can act quickly on it.

Agree that it is hard to quantify the effects of raid. ISTM that the least popular commanders and upgrades are those which don't have a straightforward measurable improvement (or extra damage or a.crit) but offer a strategic gain rather than a tactical one (raid, commanders like Konstantine).

I would like to see the Gauntlets fixed and a bit more raid stuff happening but I am not sure about enhancing the individual raid effect. I have a feeling that Dooku will cut a bloody swathe through a large number of fleet archetypes with his raid powers. I would like to see how that pans out before any changes to the mechanism.

Raid is a very delicate mechanic:

It doesn't improve your fleet, as much as it destroys the ability of your opponent's finely crafted fleet to work.

If raid gets much better, the game becomes quite the chore for the opponent. A NPE if you will.

Yeah and that's one of it's central problems. It's honestly a hard mechanic to expand without overdoing it.

I think raid has it's place against small support ships but not really against anyone else (which admittedly can be kind of effective in disrupting an overall enemy fleet relying heavily on support ships)

I think Dooku actually reduces the ability to change the rules around raid without making it overpowered. Dooku basically increases the usefullness of raid because he can affect so many people at a time with it but since that benefit is linked only to him, whatever alterations you make to raid Dooku stands to benefit too much from.

Remember that if all bail is doing is countering dooko, thats your 28 point commander spent for the game, you arent getting any extra value out of him.

What about obi vs dooku? Or mothma vs dooku? You can probably manage to keep a key ship operating with comms nets etc but beyond that it can get a lot harder.

Raid may be delicate but at the moment it is far from useful. There’s a reason why you hardly ever see a gauntlet squadron at the table. (That‘s a pity, mandalorians would be so popular now!) How often do you see Kanan and Captain Rex? Jyn Erso, anyone ever? It’s plain stupid in most cases to discard Iden Versio, because you gain nearly nothing from dealing Raid tokens and gain so much from her card effect. Even Count Dooku is very easy to counter because he must openly declare the three Raid tokens he will deal during the game. And there are not only Commander Upgrades like Bail, Thrawn and Garm, but there are plenty of other upgrades that grant or modify Command tokens. They are so very useful that you will find them in most fleet builds anyway. Think alone of Comms Net, Hondo, Ahsoka. And that will become even more widespread with upgrades that need Command tokens to recur. As @Garrett17 wrote in most cases it‘s not worth the effort to deal Raid tokens at all. And I would bet, that even Dooku will be only niche and widely outclassed by Kraken. The reason is, that he doesn‘t help his own fleet and against most fleets he won‘t have enough impact. Raid looks good at the paper only.

In my eyes Raid could be interesting if it would have a reasonable chance to affect an opponent‘s fleet. (It‘s strange not wanting it to have an impact because it would be against the opponent‘s chore. When you play against Sloane and watch your Defense tokens melt, that isn‘t less destructive! Or when your enemy may choose 1 of 4 damage cards to be dealt openly, that can hurt really bad. Dooku like any commander needs to have the potential to affect the game or it will be a lame duck like Admiral Konstantine.) For that Raid needs a buff or it should be redone completely. I know it‘s very unlikely to happen any time soon. But I find it interesting to think of a way it could be done. Maybe not so much of a topic for players focused on competitive play. But who likes to theory crafting about game mechanics a bit is invited to give it a thought.

I need to refine this idea more (you guys can help!)

What if raid took the command values and cut them in half?

Easiest are squadron and repair;

4 -> 2 3 -> 2 2->1

Nav - You can only change speed?

CF - You HAVE to take away a die. ( obstruction+ raid = -2 dice).

Then this system would only allow dials to get rid of raid. Any tokens help the ship be useful after the dial gets used. Any extra dials can be used.

I have used rex in an odd build on a float and with Kanan. Once more than 1 raid was on the ISD it became very annoying to get rid of. Speaking of Kanan what if is ability was raid off the bat and kanan's gets a 1 raid auto for spending a die with ink?

2 hours ago, Triangular said:

How often do you see Kanan and Captain Rex?

Kanan rolling a double accuracy cost me a game in a Prime last year. Had he gotten off one raid I would have shut down my opponent’s Sloane 2.5 ship list.

Raid has always been useful, but hard to leverage. With the new mechanic requiring tokens to refresh key upgrades, and commands like CF required to use upgrades like GT, forcing your opponent to use a token to clear a raid can destroy their entire strategy. For example, ISDs really want GT almost every round, but don’t really want or need a confire dial every round. Raiding an ISD multiple time with CF raid tokens will make it hard for the ISD to shoot two targets out of its forward hull zone.

I’m excited about the changes to raid. Time to break out my Rex/Kanan/Jyn list again.

Nose Punch Says Hello.

18 hours ago, Triangular said:

Count Dooku against Bail Organa, who happens to be a hard counter

While on paper this may look to be the case, someone choosing Bail would gravitate to ships that rely on multiple command dials for maximum effectiveness. Furthermore new upgrades seem to be gravitating more towards needing tokens or commands to use or refresh, which raid hinders. Thus I'd rather see how the next few waves unfold.

Part 1 of a 2-part article on raid: https://armadaihaveyounow.blogspot.com/2020/12/you-dont-know-power-of-raid-pt-1-game.html

Maybe one of the issues is that applying raid to CF doesn't affect the ship's ability to fire twice.

It would be nice to be able to apply raid to a defence token as well as a dial.

13 minutes ago, flatpackhamster said:

Maybe one of the issues is that applying raid to CF doesn't affect the ship's ability to fire twice.

It would be nice to be able to apply raid to a defence token as well as a dial.

And how do you clear a defense token raid without it being either trivial or crippling?

Sounds like a bad idea, since defense tokens are already a limited resource and heavily countered by accuracy.

I would wait and see before suggesting nerfs. Several top tier cards and many new ones now require tokens to refresh. This is going to tax token generation. Adding another command token burden on top of that with raid may be effective now.

Until we see some sort of meta stability or at least patterns form, I don’t see suggesting a change as helpful

I will guess that raid isn’t going to be particularly viable for empire or GAR. They don’t have a good way to apply consistent raid pressure. At least not yet.

10 minutes ago, Church14 said:

I would wait and see before suggesting nerfs. Several top tier cards and many new ones now require tokens to refresh. This is going to tax token generation. Adding another command token burden on top of that with raid may be effective now.

Until we see some sort of meta stability or at least patterns form, I don’t see suggesting a change as helpful

I will guess that raid isn’t going to be particularly viable for empire or GAR. They don’t have a good way to apply consistent raid pressure. At least not yet.

Buff is what's suggested.

At any rate, of the old cards, only ECM and Slicers have the new cost to refresh. So outside Seppi/GAR it's not very common. Enough to matter, just a little.

Just now, Green Knight said:

Buff is what's suggested.

At any rate, of the old cards, only ECM and Slicers have the new cost to refresh. So outside Seppi/GAR it's not very common. Enough to matter, just a little.

My bad on typing the wrong one.

Also, in hindsight, I should have written “requires tokens or commands to keep using”

Gunnery teams requires a confire command. Engine techs requires a navigate command. ECM an engineering token. Any 2 of those were popular on quite a few ships. At a minimum, that’s an extra command token those ships would want per turn, most turns now. That doesn’t include any new upgrades down the line that become popular that would have a token burden somehow.

It seems like armada 1.5 will require you to build around not having enough tokens or build around having a token generating engine running. Dooku seems to way to jam that token engine up

5 hours ago, Green Knight said:

And how do you clear a defense token raid without it being either trivial or crippling?

Sounds like a bad idea, since defense tokens are already a limited resource and heavily countered by accuracy.

It doesn't have to be a fancy mechanism. You could just exhaust it as part of the raiding of the ship. Raid happens, raid token applied, spend a defence token dependent on the type of raid - salvo for CF, brace for engineering.

It was just a thought of a way to make raid a smidge more effective without being overpowered.