So what's more important.....more dice thrown at a fleet as a whole or less but very focused damage. The ships that encapsulate these paradigms are:

Throw heavy, throw wide ( more damage output, less focus):

assault frigates with gunnery team ( ackbar) 12 dice down range ( but only 6 per ship)

Mc30 scout frigate with gunnery team (ackbar) 14 dice down range ( again split between two ships

Focus down one at a time ( less dice but all on one ship):

MC80 defiance ( none ackbar) aiming for the double arc, potential 11 dice all at one ship.

MC30 torpedoes with expanded launcher ( none ackbar) double arc, potential 10 dice all at one ship

So what are people seeing as the most effective way forward more dice or more focus ?

I feel the answer is fairly simple

Only in one mission do you get points for a ship you've Injured but not Killed...

Ergo, 11 times out of 12, its best to have focused firepower that actually destroys enemies rather than just wounding them.

How you attain that is subject to many different thoughts.

Because even the 1st list could be considered "Focused firepower" if you're all unloading at the same target... So its as much tactics and placement for target choice as well as list design.

At the same time if you are throwing 6 dice twice a turn at 2 ships over 4 turns. . . .

I feel the answer is fairly simple

Only in one mission do you get points for a ship you've Injured but not Killed...

Ergo, 11 times out of 12, its best to have focused firepower that actually destroys enemies rather than just wounding them.

How you attain that is subject to many different thoughts.

Because even the 1st list could be considered "Focused firepower" if you're all unloading at the same target... So its as much tactics and placement for target choice as well as list design.

I think we ( mainly) all agree that the focused killing of ships quickly is a fundamental of winning in armada. How to do this is as you noted complex. My specific question was on one small facet of this complexity....the type of ship people are Choosing to focusing down and kill the opposition quickly. With the fundamental choices being ships that are effective at splitting large amounts of damage between two targets ( ships that take gunnery team) and those that deliver significant damage but to only one target ( generally) MC30 torpedoes frigate, Neb b etc).

I have been playing lists of ships that deliver to mainly onto one target ( doddona commanded MC30 torpedoes, defiance etc) but I'm thinking of moving to an ackbar AF mk2 dominated list.

I prefer to do mass damage, but that's because I'm not trying to destroy you in so far as I want to strip your shields for the firesprays to destroy you. In that regard the smaller Dice pool available to a ISD|RDR|RDR list can be mitigated with ACM's to poke holes via their redirects.

As always, depends on the fleet

Akbar and isds hurling fistfuls of dice scale HARD with gunnery

Cr90s and stuff obviously cannot, so focus fire

Obviously one wants to have two or more ships focus their fire on one target ship, for at least two turns.

Gunnery teams just gives you the added flexibilty to hurt a secondary ship in the same fire arc, where you can have maximum dice in each attack,

This can soften up that secondary target sufficiantly, so that immidiately the primary target has been destroyed, you can quickly switch focus to finish off the secondary target in the same or following turn.

It's better to completely destroy a ship for the points and the fact that it starts to give a tactical advantage ; Obviously, you get less return fire, so you gain more board control. It's only one less ship the enemy has to activate so you get more activation advantages. It's better to focus everything you have on taking down the ship rather than spreading damage all around.

Even in a critical list with Dodonna, critical effects that you can choose are nice but more often than not not sufficiently deadly enough and still too random to build a strategy around.

Both are legitimate goals, but I do think you need to pick one and lean hard into it--and not just in list-building, but in your tactics and your turn-to-turn decisions in-game.

For example, if you're trying to punch through shields and deliver hull damage fast, you're looking at XI-7's, APTs, and single big hits like ISDs and MC30s. In these situations, it's often important to shut down defense tokens directly (Home One, Intel Officers, accuracies, etc). One of the advantages of this kind of strategy is that you can often leverage upgrades more efficiently, as it costs less to put one Intel Officer on one ISD than 6 of them on 6 Raiders. The disadvantage is that, in order to guarantee shutting down those defenses, you often need those upgrades, whereas other builds might be less hurt by their absence.

On the other hand, if you're trying to spray a ton of damage all over the place, it's important to pump out the damage--and **** the defenses. This tends to be a hallmark of MSU lists and fighter lists: overwhelm defenses by taking lots and lots of shots and mitigating brace not by shutting it down but by forcing it to be worth 1, maybe 2 mitigated damage each time it's used. The advantage of this kind of list is that it's very hard to counter defensively for this reason; conversely, though, it's pretty inefficient to add lots of goodies onto those shots.

Anyway, that's my opinion...