Both the Phantom and the Defender have been avoided to date. The former has a cloak, a mechanic that we haven't attempted to deal with it, and the latter is a super-fighter, which, in order to faithfully represent, has to be OP, and costed to match. I would imagine when we finally build it (the Defender), it will be fairly similar to the ARC-170, extremely powerful, but also extremely expensive. Offhand I'd say you're looking at a 14-15 pt squadron, non-unique, packing along the lines of Speed 4, Hull 5, AS 2B2K+, Battery K, and potentially Escort for good measure.

For the Phantom, I did have an idea after seeing your request which is as follows:

Hull: 3

Speed: 3

AS: 3B

Battery: B

Cloak: If you have not attacked yet this round, you do not affect enemy squadrons and enemy ships and squadrons cannot fire on you.

Cost: At least 13

The astute commander will note that this wording allows a Phantom as part of a fleet with more squadrons than its opponent to never be attacked except by Counter. The even more astute commander will also note that this fighter, in doing so, cannot engage bombers, the traditional TIE role, only attack them, and cannot use Squadron Command except to move, wasting (in my opinion anyway) the entire point of a Squadron Command. You are welcome to try this, although I expect it may need a fair bit more work. This also isn't a rule easily applied to a full starship attempting to cloak, but we shall see.

Also, that cloak action means that if your opponent has few fighters than you, you basically have a free black die battery you get to fly around the board and ships can't scare it off with their antisquadron armaments, or lock them down with fighters. In oherwords the cloak action takes the current rules for fighters and breaks them in half.

Both the Phantom and the Defender have been avoided to date. The former has a cloak, a mechanic that we haven't attempted to deal with it, and the latter is a super-fighter, which, in order to faithfully represent, has to be OP, and costed to match. I would imagine when we finally build it (the Defender), it will be fairly similar to the ARC-170, extremely powerful, but also extremely expensive. Offhand I'd say you're looking at a 14-15 pt squadron, non-unique, packing along the lines of Speed 4, Hull 5, AS 2B2K+, Battery K, and potentially Escort for good measure.

For the Phantom, I did have an idea after seeing your request which is as follows:

Hull: 3

Speed: 3

AS: 3B

Battery: B

Cloak: If you have not attacked yet this round, you do not affect enemy squadrons and enemy ships and squadrons cannot fire on you.

Cost: At least 13

The astute commander will note that this wording allows a Phantom as part of a fleet with more squadrons than its opponent to never be attacked except by Counter. The even more astute commander will also note that this fighter, in doing so, cannot engage bombers, the traditional TIE role, only attack them, and cannot use Squadron Command except to move, wasting (in my opinion anyway) the entire point of a Squadron Command. You are welcome to try this, although I expect it may need a fair bit more work. This also isn't a rule easily applied to a full starship attempting to cloak, but we shall see.

Whats a K die?

B = Blue or Black?

K is the typical Black Ink color designation, which is why if you have ever prepared something for printing you may have seen colors presented as CMYK values (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, BlacK). "K" is a much better designation as it cannot be mistaken for Blue, which is going to be a common pairing with black dice in future expansions based on the ISD, Raider, and MC30 stats.

K means black, whereas B is blue. I can write it out in the future, but I was on my phone, and wasn't interested in courting any more spelling errors than I had to.

To "Just Break Cloak Early", well you certainly could. Once you break cloak though, you're just an expensive TIE fighter, and just as prone to dying. In order to engage fighters, you would have to attack them before they more, giving them the chance to attack back, since cloak resets at the end of the round. And sure, you can have a free blue die zooming around the board poking starships, but a fair number of Phantoms would be required to pose a serious threat, just like with TIEs. If you take enough 12 pt fighters to be a serious threat to starships, and still have more squadrons before those fighters than your opponent, I want to know what he is running. Just Tycho? (Guy near me is fond of this when he's short on points.)

No matter how we do cloak, if we even do do it, it's going to be gimmicky and it's going to break the rules. It's a godforsaken cloaking device on a starfighter. What we're left with then, if we're set on developing it, is trying to find a way to balance the power of that ability without making it game-breaking. If you think about the way an active cloak would have to work,or even the way modern passive stealth works, shedding that when you attack but being able to reset it or maintain it otherwise makes sense. As I wrote it, it is a powerful tool for a careful commander, but also something a clever commander himself could counter and deal with. You certainly don't have to use the ability, these are custom cards after all, and you are more than welcome to supply your own ideas for the Phantom. This is the best I've come up with to date, the definition of best being near balanced and playable. It's (relatively) short and to the point, making it moderately future-proof, and if at some point a new mechanic imbalances this, we can return and reassess. As it is, this is the idea, and just that, an idea.

I tested the Gozanti and GR-75 yesterday in a rebel convoy scenario..

It worked great. The GR-75 was the objectives and all three got through but the escorting fleet got slaughtered.

The two Gozantis made a good showing - both equipped with Repair bay Cargo upgrades. In the first part of the battle they provided support for several fighter squads and kept Howlrunner alive later they used squadron commands guiding bombers in on the GR-75 and in the end they attacked the GR directly with guns.

Lessons learned:

The Gozantis are great as is - they are flexible, cheap support ships with limited capabilities.

The GR-75 seems a bit thematically overpowered. It can go head to head with the Gozanti at close range and win as the GR-75 has one more redirect and one more front shield it is more survivable up close. My suggestion is to either completely remove all blue dice or leave it with only side attacks - removing the front and rear arch. This way will mostly only be able to perform one attack and it cannot have the same target in two archs at once.

As to Auxillary ships as a ship size:

I think that they cannot in any way work on small ship bases. They are simply much smaller than say a GSD or Nebulon using the the small ship base size. I have mounted mine on smaller (about 2/3 meaurements of a small ship base) bases made out of polystyrene boards. The alternative would be using them on squadron stands - but then they would in effect be a token and not a ship.

So to make them function within the game and thematically i have made these rules that we use:

Auxillary ships:

Auxillary ships move after all normal ships have moved in a new step between the Ship step and the Squadron step .

In order not to allow auxillaries to give a lot more activations in the ship phase and also to make them more nimble and able to react on the movements of the big ships (This rule works well)

Auxillary ships and overlapping: If an auxillary ship overlaps a regular ship the Auxillary ship is dealt one face-down damage card as per normal rules while the regular ship takes one damage. If an Auxillary ship overlaps another auxillary ship both ships are dealt one face-down damage card.

In order not to encourage a number of suicide GR-75. Also small ships make small dents.

Auxillary ships use maneuver dials as normal but can not store command tokens. They can only use the command dials directly.

Tokens makes them at bit too effective with some commands such as Squadron and engineering when using the repair bay upgrade. Thematically they have a very small crew (12 on the Gozanti) and should not have as efficient as command or crew a bigger warship such as a CR-90 or Raider.

Making a new step just for a few ships doesn't seem practical imo. Auxillary ships can work in the squadron phase I think or make it so you have to activate all ships or a certain number of ships before Aux ships in a ship phase setup? It seems too complicated.

It works fine. the rules structure for this modification is already in place. Making a rule demanding that you activate a number of ships before the auxillaries is in effekt the same rule but one that needs you too keep track of activations. Other alternatives is to activate aux. ships in pairs or activate them in the squadrons phase as suggested.

Wow, lots of activity, hard to keep up.

Let's see:

-While I agree auxiliary ships are probably too small for the available bases, I'm just not ready to break my mission statement (see page 1) and write new game rules. In the future? Who knows, maybe. But for now they'll stay on a Small base. Obviously you're more than welcome to do as you wish with them in your games, but any tweaks or adjustment I make to the stats will be with the intention of making them balanced as Small ships.

-Both RBK and RUB shorthands are perfectly clear to me, and much quicker to read than writing it all out. So as far as I'm concerned, please continue using it

-I wasn't planning on making TIE Defender or Phantom cards (I still don't, but I don't have a great track record at sticking to my plans), so hadn't given them much thought. The Defender is fairly straightforward - just a better Interceptor. The Phantom probably needs a Cloak keyword (coupled with Grit or Intel), indeed, but I wouldn't make it as radical as GP suggests. Possibly something along the lines of "While defending, the attacker rolls 1 less attack die". Which, when hiding in an obstacle, becomes 2 less dice... or virtual immunity from those pesky A-Wings. Anyway, something for the future. Back to CIS now!

Wording for cloaks should be:

Cloak: This squadron may not be attacked until it's slider is set to the 'activated' side.

Wording for cloaks should be:

You will notice that I do not often use the word "should", nor do I take others very seriously when they do

Cloak: While unactivated, treat this squadron as obstructed from all attacks.

Cloak: While unactivated, treat this squadron as obstructed from all attacks.

That was my first thought. But I reworded it to make it stack with obstruction by ships and obstacles. Which makes cloak pretty useful in general, but extremely useful when there's somewhere to hide. It also makes positioning more (rather than less) important.

Anyway, here's the CIS officer lineup:

And a bonus Republic officer (I'm going to need suggestions for more; I'm having difficulty finding decent artwork for any):

Diablo, I think Gunray looked good. Trench seems situational but powerful. He worries me lol.

Senator Lott Dod is almost too good now that large ships are in the game. He could easily prevent 8+ damage by discarding him. In the reality of a game with so few turns of effective fire, he may be a little too good.

Diablo, I think Gunray looked good. Trench seems situational but powerful. He worries me lol.

Yes, he's probably #1 on the suspect list now

An alternate wording I was considering let you choose 1 token only, rather than all tokens on 1 ship. But then again, commanders are supposed to be powerful, aren't they? Most (all?) others have a more moderate effect that applies to all ships. This one has a more focused effect - stronger, but it only applies locally. Balanced? Hard to tell. It's highly situational, as you said. It will be fairly useless against swarms of Peltas and Consulars, and almost as weak against Obi-Wan. But it can help focus fire a Venator down fast .

Senator Lott Dod is almost too good now that large ships are in the game. He could easily prevent 8+ damage by discarding him. In the reality of a game with so few turns of effective fire, he may be a little too good.

That's another one I stared forever at, and tried to tone down by adding further conditions (only on rounds 1-3, or only if you have not yet activated, stuff like that). In the end I just decided to cost it pretty highly for now. The most relevant comparison I could make was Admonition, which 4 times per game lets you cancel an attack die: generally speaking, that's going to be 6-8 damage, even if spread from multiple attacks... but it's cheaper, and works against everything. Whereas Dod can be easily avoided by making multiple smaller attacks instead. Admittedly it's probably more balanced against the Republic (which has few hard hitters) than against Rebels or Imperials. And more valuable on a Providence than on an MC30c. Anyway, definitely another prime candidate for playtesting.

So far FFG has used key word effects that are easy to fit into the framework of the rules even if the keyword isn't an exact match for the Canon.

To that end, a simple rule that represents Cloak is probably a better option than a more complicated, yet "accurate" effect. If it is your desire to have an accurate effect, I recommend finding a way to simplify the wording and game play aspects to be keeping with current keyword effects.

Back to the CIS. I like where you went with the "throw away officer" tactical droid. I still would like to see at least on CIS admiral with a selfish effect. I think it would offer a very interesting play style by forcing players to walk the line between most advantages & self destructive. Just my 2 credits though.

As for admiral/officer effects:

Officer- allows a single ship to have 2 Modification upgrades.

Admiral- causes Brace tokens to reduce damage by half, rounded down.

As for a droid control ship upgrade, i think it needs to be unique, so players can't stack droid control ships.

Droid Control- may activate its full squadron value of Droid squadrons with a squadron token. If destroyed, remove its squadron value of friendly droid squadrons from play.

Seems long, but squadron & droid will be represented by an icon.

Thoughts

Diablo, I think Gunray looked good. Trench seems situational but powerful. He worries me lol.

Agreed, if you add "at medium range", it still remains dangerous, but can allow avenues of escape for the smaller, faster ships... If Trench is used by player 2.

Thoughts on an Admiral that allows a Counter for capital ships. This may be better as an upgrade or title though.

You could - theoretically - borrow and 'Upgrade' Needa... At the start of the first turn, Discard '2' Defense tokens for a Scatter token...

It is still crazy on a Ship, though

The thought of a large ship being able to scatter takes my logic meter all the way up to WTF.

The thought of a large ship being able to scatter takes my logic meter all the way up to WTF.

Scatter incoming fire, perhaps?

Its not that much different than Dodging a Large Ship with an Evade ...

You could - theoretically - borrow and 'Upgrade' Needa... At the start of the first turn, Discard '2' Defense tokens for a Scatter token...

You could - theoretically - borrow and 'Upgrade' Needa... At the start of the first turn, Discard '2' Defense tokens for a Scatter token...

Once a game it's bad enough, but 7 times? Hell no

Oh no, I was looking at a Unique Officer card, not anything else , My wires are so crossed at the moment...

I think I'll just let you guys work things out...

Even on an unique officer like Senator Dod, a Scatter token could potentially yield one use each round, with an additional use on the 6th for a grand total of 7. Granted, this is the theoretical maximum and unlikely to happen in practice... but you're still looking at 4-5 uses on average, where one is already bordering on broken

Playtesters wanted

I will agree, playtesting would be needed...

In My Head , it worked out not much different than a Double-Brace overall... The same amount of Dice cancelled in the long run ... And it cost you 2 of your Prexisting Tokens (so it could theoretically replace a double-brace), and its perfect fodder for Accuracies and Intel Officer .

::shrug::

I barely get enough regular Armada games in that Playtesting is something I leave to someone without a Toddler to look after full time

I hear you. I wish I could test my own freakin' cards once in a while, too.

Well get your first drafts done and I will put it on the table. I am simply going to use CIS and Republic admirals with Rebel & Imperial ships this week just to try their effects.

I'm not sure that Trench needs a range limit, or if he does, he only needs a moderate one. Long range from the flagship, which would incentivize that player to play aggressively, or medium range from a friendly ship seem appropriate, if we decide to go that route. I still like the idea of a cheap, weak droid commander for the CIS forces, but it is an idea I am willing to shelve for now.

Gunray and Grievous both look good. Grievous is a challenging commander to use, what with the CIS inclination to evade tokens, especially on the Commerce Raider, but I like him as he is. For Dooku, was the wording intended to also relieve friendly ships of a command token, thus justifying his fairly low cost, or just reduce dials like Relentless across a whole fleet? Right now he does the former, and I wanted to be sure that was the intent.

I'm not incredibly worried about Lott Dod. Twelve points is quite a bit of points. I would be surprised to see that on any ship other than a flagship, and to do that you're giving up other useful abilities like General Kalani. I'd leave him as is unless playtest wildly proves my instincts wrong.

I really like the Droid Control Ship idea, especially the unique part, and the idea about removing squadrons from play, although I might ask how the squadrons remove are selected. By FFG convention its the Republic/other player but we can hash that out when we get there.

If you're just looking for officers to carry abilities, that's easy. Pellaeon for one was a captain during the Clone Wars, and Captain Rex and Commander Cody and other clone officers were known to command starships from time to time. Even just nameless Clone Captain, Clone Lieutenant, etc. seem reasonable to me.

I still like the idea of a cheap, weak droid commander for the CIS forces, but it is an idea I am willing to shelve for now.

For Dooku, was the wording intended to also relieve friendly ships of a command token, thus justifying his fairly low cost, or just reduce dials like Relentless across a whole fleet? Right now he does the former, and I wanted to be sure that was the intent.

I really like the Droid Control Ship idea, especially the unique part, and the idea about removing squadrons from play, although I might ask how the squadrons remove are selected. By FFG convention its the Republic/other player but we can hash that out when we get there.

If you're just looking for officers to carry abilities, that's easy. Pellaeon for one was a captain during the Clone Wars, and Captain Rex and Commander Cody and other clone officers were known to command starships from time to time. Even just nameless Clone Captain, Clone Lieutenant, etc. seem reasonable to me.

It doesn't help that I despise the art style of TCW. Anyway, this one I can live with: