Alright, so, if there's one thing I've noticed from reading the various battle reports from the GenCon tourneys, it's that the points-system of scoring winners can be exploited to create wins (which we saw extensively with the no-squadrons builds). Now, I know the points system has been an integral part of this game since the onset, but maybe we've lost something with it?

I think we could certainly have a different game on our hands if we removed the turn limit, and fought to the last man. After all, real battles rarely have a time limit, or a referee who steps in and determines the winner. Sure, there can be objectives, such as capturing enemy information or destroying particular targets, but those "victories" are generally rather hollow if your entire fleet is destroyed in the process. The no-squadron builds would more than likely be at a disadvantage in such battles.

There certainly is a good place for objectives in the game, of course. The Rebels rarely fought battles that were to the death; they hit and ran, accomplishing their objectives and then running away once more. You could make more scenario-based battles that could be much more entertaining. Perhaps the Rebels have to capture information from an Imperial space station, and the Imperials have to drive off the thieving Rebel scum. Or the Imperials have discovered a moon base of the Rebels, and are coming to destroy the base, and the Rebels have to fend them off till the people on the base can escape (which would give a 'real' turn limit that makes sense).

Of course, these scenarios wouldn't work well for tournament; creating missions that are balanced from one round to the next would be difficult.

Thoughts?

No!

to the pain

also, real battles all have time limits they're just longer than 6 rounds (ask napoleon during his russian campaign). Regardless, it doesn't matter because gameplay > fluff, and seeing as how killing all the things is what no-squadron builds strive to acomplish anyway it seems counter-intuitive to establish a no round limit.

also, the point of objectives is not to be balanced. It's to give the player without initiative an advantage in exchange for not having initiative

Nothing is preventing you from fighting to the death, unless you're in a tournament situation. Although in real life, few forces fight to the death.

The objective of a battle is very seldom to totally annihilate the enemy. Objectives play a big role in wargames, especially those dealing with larger engagements like armada.

My only thoughts would be, how does one provide enough turns to allow, say an escape, yet still give the one preventing the escape a reasonable chance to stop it?

If you provide enough time to allow an opposing player to stop it, then you still provide that player a chance to simply destroy the defending fleet which brings us back full circle... which is, it's often better, if possible, to table the opposing fleet as opposed to doing the mission.

If you're talking about tournament style play: It is useless to resist. There's no point in bellyaching about it.

But tournament style play is not the be-all end-all. It's just easier, quicker, more seductive. If you want more lore in your games (unlike ficklegreendice, who hates lore and calls it "fluff"), then you're going to have to get creative; but that's the whole point of going for lore in the first place - the chance to have added fun by activating your creative neurons to produce endorphins for you.

Now all you'll need is other people who are willing to step away from the tournament style in order to get the same sort of endorphins going and enjoy it with you. Otherwise, it's just DIY, and it's said that too much DIY will cause blindness.

If this topic is meant to be a brainstorming activity, what if the objectives included an exit condition (specific to each objective) which allowed one side to "retreat" from the battlefield and take 4 tournament points but the winner receive the full 10 points (and calculate the MOV the same as now)?

(I concur with those above, for a tournament gameplay > fluff/lore)

@Fickle-

Yes, okay, if you want to say the changing of seasons is a time limit, perhaps. But that was an entire war, not a simulated naval battle like what we're dealing with here. Unless otherwise specified, there aren't any real factors that would limit how long a battle could take. So, the 6 turns thing is somewhat arbitrary.

@DarthSidious

-Yeah, I understand. That's why I'm suggesting it here: I've had more fun with "Deathmatch" fights than anything. Even if I'm losing, it's fun to make a good account of myself and take as many enemies down with me as I can. Of course, you could always concede the match at some point or another, simulating retreat or surrender.

@Squark

In real life battles, the objective is usually to gain ground. Historically, anyway; modern day tactics are more complicated do to having a stateless enemy. In order to gain ground, you have to remove enemy forces from it. That's done by killing them, making them surrender, or having them run away. Having "To the Death" battles would bring that mentality to the game a bit more. In the current game, it's hard to do that, since we're predominantly going after points, and not battlefield domination. That's what I'm trying to say.

@Reiryc

The scenario we've played, and had some fun with, is basically like this: The Space Station is placed on the edge of the Imperial's deployment area. The Rebels have to get one of their ships to stop (so, speed 0) within a certain range of the Station (We tried range 1 to begin with, but found it rather difficult to actually do that, so we used range 1-2 to make it a bit easier). The next turn, when that ship is activated, roll a die for it (still experimenting as to which die to use). If you get a hit, then your "boarding team" has been successful in getting the information and returning to your ship. If not, then they've run into some kind of problems. After you've gotten the data successfully, that ship has to make it off of your starting table edge (showing they've successfully gotten away). We're continuing to experiment with this scenario of ours and balance it out, but it's pretty fun thus far.

@Mikael

I'm not bellyaching about the tournaments. I was using the tournaments as a point of reference for the game because of the number of list builds, battle reports, and good data that we've seen recently because of the tournaments going on at GenCon. Friendly play usually doesn't build for the ways to exploit the game, where that's generally the point of tournaments.

@All

This post was mostly for thoughts and brainstorming on some potential ways to play the game outside of tournaments, not within them. I guess I needed to clarify that more.

I was afraid squadrons would be the torpedoes and missiles of Armada.

One of Armadas signature defense with units is that Armada has damage mitigation with tokens and damage recovery. Squadrons have none of that unless you take an Ace.

The devs need to take another look at X-wing as they should have seen the value of damage mitigation through autothrusters and C-3PO. Now while the objective system does mean that loosing a cheap unit should not count as hard of a MOV as X-wing does but a of now squadrons are looking very weak and easy points for the opponent.

Point fortresses are big in X-wing because they secure the MOV. They either need to inflate the objectives so that loosing a squadron won't matter unless it is close. But still if a squadron can't provide a good role in list without having risky drawbacks they are not going to be played. In the metagame average units are considered poor choices.

Actually I would love to see missions or even objectives based upon the concept of the rebel fleet. Obviously a successful raid where they don't lose their ships would be a good day for them. It wasn't like they had manufacturing to replace losses at a rate that the Empire did. Yes, that's fluff, but I think it would be an interesting way to add more objectives in.

And since objectives are part of the game it's kind of naive to think they wouldn't consider adding more of them.

@DarthSidious

-Yeah, I understand. That's why I'm suggesting it here: I've had more fun with "Deathmatch" fights than anything. Even if I'm losing, it's fun to make a good account of myself and take as many enemies down with me as I can. Of course, you could always concede the match at some point or another, simulating retreat or surrender.

Sure. I guess if you're looking to do missions or campaigns, though, you may want to consider a 'forced retreat' mechanic.

@DarthSidious

-Yeah, I understand. That's why I'm suggesting it here: I've had more fun with "Deathmatch" fights than anything. Even if I'm losing, it's fun to make a good account of myself and take as many enemies down with me as I can. Of course, you could always concede the match at some point or another, simulating retreat or surrender.

Sure. I guess if you're looking to do missions or campaigns, though, you may want to consider a 'forced retreat' mechanic.

Turn 6 is sort of the force retreat.

Points are a necessary abstraction of the value of infrastructure and people. In a war, the perceived value of your units and of securing your objectives are ever-changing. As a commander, you are constantly weighing the merits of both when deciding your path to victory.

Choosing to fight to the death is a decision that acknowledges that attempting the complete destruction of your enemy's assets to bring about a decisive result far outweighs the need for a strategic, long-term advantage represented by objective cards.

It occurs, however, that your enemy has his own opinion on how to win the war and may decide not to fight you to the death. He, too, has weighed the value of his own units and the situation and may decide to avoid your units lest he gives up points needlessly.

Declining to give combat should always be an option in any wargame. It is not as entertaining but it is an option every commander should consider and is a vital part of Armada in my opinion.

Read about real naval battles like Jutland and see if you still hate time limit.

I think the Tourney scoring might need another look, but more because squadrons. There isn't enough data to really say yet.

Next wave will start the real game.

My friend and I played unlimited deathmatches when we first started. After a few games, we scrapped that and tried playing as intended, with the objectives and 6-round limits. It was much more fun.

Primarily because, what we found was that deathmatches grossly favoured the fast ships. They could control when the engagements began and ended. Basically, the rebels (usually) would zip in, try to kill at least one ship, and then race away hopefully without dying. Then I (ahem, they : ) would sprint out of range, maintain that range while all the rebel ships healed up, and race back in to try to kill another ship.

If the imperials were getting the better of the current engagement, the rebels would just run away, heal up, and try again. The imperials would heal up at the same time, of course--but the whole point was the imperials had less damage. Now everyone is even again...

I'm not saying deathmatches are horrible, I'm saying that's how most of our games went when we played--and tactically, there's no reason not to play that way. All of our games were long, similar, and thus quickly grew relatively boring. ; )

@IndyPendant

Hm, I wonder if you guys should give Deathmatches another try once Wave-II is released. The Raider would even up the speed differences between the two factions a great deal, methinks.

Most battles are traditionally not fought to the death.

Plus, as has been mentioned, the Nationals topping lists are made to table their opponent. So making a "to the death" situation in tournament play would actually probably reduce the effectiveness of squadrons. As it is, squadrons can help support objectives, or provide area denial for objectives that wouldn't matter in a deathmatch scenario.

@Viratin

Admittedly, we played our deathmatches even before Wave 1 was released, so it was very much huge slow imperials vs fast fragile rebels (at 300 points per fleet, but still).

However, all I see happening with Wave 2 deathmatches is that each fleet would be required to have at least one, and preferably two or three, fast nimble ships to prevent the other side disengaging at will. Which only serves to limit build options.

Don't get me wrong, deathmatches can be fun, and my friend and I have talked about giving them another try--but as a change to mix things up from the regular games. I don't think either of us have any desire to go back to playing deathmatches all the time.

Once again (shocker! ; ) FFG seems to have known what they were doing when they included objectives and six-round limits.

Here's a bit of a question: How are people finding Opening Salvo's 50% VP for 1 Damage card? Does that change their games at all?

The ongoing 'light' campaign I've been doing has focused on the usual missions with a few special scenarios thrown in, but the mechanical part that's differed is that we added in 'Disengaged' and 'Crippled' conditions. That is to say, Disengaged ships are vessels that voluntarily leave the table and are removed; crippled ships have lost more than half their hull points. In both cases, the VP awarded is 25%. (making opening slalvo prop the points up to 75% with 50%+25%)

Part of the problem I've seen is that fighters give up points quite easily, but ships cling to them like a miser. The hope is that prying away a few pitiful VP we can ease some of the potential burden that 'tapping' fighters by making it easier for ships to give 'em up too'.

You know: it's either that or give fighters their attacks after a move vs. ships, but letting your opponent modify the roll by calling for a reroll to represent the rushed pot-shot nature of the fighter in question; but that does make the Superior Position mission even more fighter-tastic. -shrugs- Those are still more the issues that I've seen, where as I just find deathmatches unengaging.

@Independent

See, in my mind, it's not "limiting", it's "realistic". You'd have to have a mix of larger line ships, smaller ships, and squadrons, in order to create a well rounded, effective force. It makes you have to think of your fleet as complimentary parts. But, that might be more prevalent once we hit the 400 point basic size; it's going to be harder to just spam things at that size (hopefully).

What do people think about lowering the victory point values for fighters? do you think this would change things at the tournament level?

I have no experience with competitive play for armada.

I've only played to the death in my first six or seven games... Just to get a feel for it. The objectives just don't seem that interesting.