Problem of Squadrons and Theme

By R2-EQ, in Star Wars: Armada

Posted at

Okay, I'll go ahead and put in a dissenting voice here: I don't particularly want squadron upgrade cards. I think it will shift too much focus to the squadrons and off of the ships. The named pilots already have special abilities that distill all of their individual complexities into one or two lines of special ability, and I think that's plenty.

I'd much rather have squadron patches implemented as ship upgrades, like Independence and Flight Controllers.

Lando in the Falcon should definitely get squadron command and Rogue, though. :)

Seconded. This is Star Wars: Armada. If you want to focus on the minutiae of Starfighter Combat, Star Wars: X-wing is alive and thriving. Another unique pilot for each ship might be nice, though.

One other thing I forgot in my previous post regarding the B-wing's speed: Aside from the X-wing games, the B-wing is usually depicted as slower than the Y-wing and X-wing. The real anomaly is the Tie Bomber, which probably should be speed 2 or 3, but I imagine it's speed 4 for game balance, since it'd be pretty useless with those stats at that speed. Also, it'd be so cheap you'd be able to field over a dozen of them and still have room for some Tie Fighters.

Edited by Squark
Posted at

750 pts, sounds phenomenal. What size did you use for the battlefield? Approximately. Thx!

It was a standard 6X3 Contested outpost scenario: 6 Imperial capital ships and 22 Imperial Squadrons versus 7 Rebel capitals and 20 Squadrons. It was a fun slug-fest that ended in annihilation rather than a time-out.

I'll make a Tl;dr bit right here: I like R2-EQ's ideas a lot because they ascribe to my preconceptions regarding theme, but I don't actually think they're game-changing without Grit and Intel also in play.

Observations at 750 points:

At 750 points the squadrons basically worked how I expected. Armada remains Armada, it didn't bog down much and it certainly didn't break. I don't suspect that the addition of Rogue-esque rules would have significantly altered the outcome much, either. Something like Han's 'Shoot First' rule would have been more telling and likely more problematic to game balance than the proposed upgrade card changes.

That said, we're talking about almost double the points of a standard Wave 2 game, and 2.5 times that of a Wave 1 match, with an additional heavy emphasis on snubfighters. The numbers involved made the game play differently compared to what I've experienced at 300 points. The 'alpha strike furball' mentality just didn't work. There wasn't enough commands to go around, too much realestate was taken up by enemy fighters, smaller blocking ships with forward fighter screens made the attempt less profitable, etc. Instead, there were 3 very distinct 'waves' of fighter attacks occurring over 6 turns (Turn 1,2, and 5). Squadron commands didn't cover every activation, but with the way that waves worked, it still wasn't as static as the Western Front scenario that I feared it could become. Neither of us wanted to test out how potent AA fire could be (I found out after relaxing my fighter discipline and falling into a trap, a Raider inflicted 15 damage in one turn and put a whole 'flank' on the defensive).

I suspect that with a low fighter numeracy, Rogues and Group commanders would be far more useful because there's simply more physical space that has to be covered in order to shoot. At standard point values and with ship-oriented tournament MoV builds in mind, the proposed upgrades and Rogues likely pose a greater risk and seem like too great a change to the core rules. That is, it's the 'scary swing away from ships' that people suspect will cause the focus to shift. With 400+ pt. games and more fighters, I think they would see significant drops in terms of their effectiveness. There was never more than once or twice when I really felt I needed an independent squadron in turns 2-5, and an Adar Corvette outright solved those problems for me which allowed key relocations. We both still had to make use of a few careful Squadron commands to make key players shine.

I'm no expert, the only experience I've got is 1 tournament and probably about 125-150 games played, but what seems like a fair supposition is that the relative worth of different rules and ship types depends heavily on the scale and relative composition of the games played. Obvious? Probably. Now I'm just waiting for a full wave 2 release so 1K games can become a 'thing' here. Maybe I'll toy around with these Group commanders while I'm at it :)

Edited by Vykes