I'm just going to say I am excited about Wave 3. And it is because of how much I love the ISD.

I have often said that if they named Armada the way they named their other Star Wars Mini game it could have been called, Star Wars: Star Destroyer.

There is just no Armada scale ship as iconic as the Imperial Class Star Destroyer. And I love it in the game, but it does have a few flaws.

The biggest flaw I find when I play ISDs is that I simply don't have enough activation. We all know that sometimes you want to navigate and engneer, etc. This becomes a bigger problem for me when I go Fighter heavy. When I have a lot of squadrons I always want to activate squadrons. Even squadrons with rouge do better when they are activated by ships. And an ISD is pretty good at activating squadrons, but if it is doing that, then it isn't doing something else, for me it is usually navigate of engineering. The other down side of ISDs is just that you don't have that many ships to activate, having few activation means you have fewer options about how to activate them. Sometimes you want your opponent to move first, force him to move into your firing arcs before you get to pound the crap out of them with the ISDs big guns. But that is hard because if you are playing ISDs you just can't afford that many ships.

The Gozanti seems fix both of these problems. I can have an ISD or two and still have more activations that my opponent (or at least not that many fewer). I can also let my Gozanti handle activating my fighters.

Yep. I think this was a key addition given the activation meta that seems to be developing, just as it allows you to still get those big ships on the board without it being a foregone conclusion that you will be out activated. Yes, a swarm could still run these guys to pad their own activation counts, but given how ineffective they are anti ship it could actually prove detrimental to the purpose of the list.

The announcement came early enough, that I no longer want to buy another 2 cr90's and 4 raiders.

FFG dropped the ball a bit

I'm also looking forward to them as escorts for the ISD. Sure, they won't add a ton of oomph to the list. But they're cheap enough that I can add activations and ships without having to cut the squadrons to the bone. And Bomber Command Center makes me drool.

Not only do they add activations + let you take fleet support, but you also get a cheap source of squadron commands. It will definitely make the game more exiting.

I know for rebels I'm thinking Raymus Antilles on a flotilla with the comms network to be able to hand off a squadron token every turn while it's controlling fighters. I think there's going to be a lot of

mini-meta's popping up from these.

gozantis (gozantii?) repairing Motti ISDs is gonna be really interesting. Or a 0 speed Devestator on an Outpost with no defense tokens with 4 gozanti just repairing it while it launchers 8-9 blue dice with SW-7s

I know for rebels I'm thinking Raymus Antilles on a flotilla with the comms network to be able to hand off a squadron token every turn while it's controlling fighters. I think there's going to be a lot of

mini-meta's popping up from these.

Sorry, but...

[RANT]over use of "meta" as a buzz phrase is bad enough, but "Mini-meta"...?! [/RANT]

Ok. Out of my system now!

A good point though, there should develop a number of local and global paradigms

;-)

I, for one, welcome our new flotilla overlords.

All joking aside, I think this is dead on target. I think the flotillas will likely have more impact on the game than anything else we have seen so far, and I will make the following predictions:

• Squadrons being able to be pushed cheaply, with a bomber command center, will finally make it points efficient to consider a max squadrons build.
• Flotillas acting as blockers / cheap delay activations / copious sources of squadron alpha-strike against Demolisher means that rush lists that demand to go first are no longer going to be an effective enough archetype that it's a foregone conclusion they dominate 80% of matchups.
• Well balanced lists are going to become more viable, as the diversity of lists within the meta will expand far more than a mere addition of 2 normal ships would indicate, so internal synergy and player ability are going to become more important while external choices vs. the meta / tournament field will become less important.
• Steven and Drunk Tarkin will flip flop on these things and/or what upgrades to take on them at least 4 more times in the next six months.