As the title asks: I know that it means Gladiator ship with Demolisher title and some other ships, but what does the acronym actually stand for De M.S.U.

Thanks in advance

It stands for: Demolisher, Multible Small Units.

The idea is using the Demolisher with either 3 or 4 raiders and/or 1 additional Gladiator. It can be something of a pain to play against.

I honestly hate this name. It's like an in joke for war gamers while the rest of us sit puzzled. And it sounds terrible. 5 ship demolisher is just as descriptive.

Also it doesn't tell at first glance the key component. That the small units are maximally upgraded for combat ability.

Anyway. Just an opinion.

The De in DEMSU stands for Demolisher. But it's the MSU part that's really important.

MSU stands for "many small units" and is a term that originally comes from other miniatures games, particularly those where a unit can be comprised of multiple miniatures. Players in these games sometimes find that by splitting their forces up into numerous units just large enough to be effective, they can sometimes gain an advantage when against a few large units.

In Armada, MSU lists take the form of lists of mostly smaller, cheaper ships capable of taking powerful upgrades. This is typically paired with a numerical advantage and a significant point bid to ensure that they are both the first and last player to activate. This allows players to move a ship into combat after all enemy ships have activated, and at the start of the next turn make their attacks and escape to another location before being shot back. This will also result in many ships unable to target more than one enemy ship at a time, preserving the MSU fleet by dividing the enemy firepower.

See, this is why we should just call the list a Clonisher. Everyone knows what that means.

MSU is pretty clunky to begin with. Games of this type have been around for quite a while, and swarm has always been a pretty basic and accurate word to describe the principle of using numerous but smaller and weaker units. Multiple small units sounds like someone decided to turn the terminology of the game into an engineering textbook.

And here I thought it was maximum ship upgrades so you could have a DeMSU in a build with an ISD and a bunch-o-squadrons. I guess I should've asked haha.

See, this is why we should just call the list a Clonisher. Everyone knows what that means.

Except the Clonisher is the ship not the list. Same as Qs Landmonition.

MSU works fine as a definition in Armada. The change is that it refers to low-cost, high efficiency ships that maximize damage output per point.

MSU ships that are notably valuable:

• Demolisher (duh) and Gladiator-1 Star Destroyers with APTs or ACMs
• TRC-90s
• Raiders with APTs, ACMs, or Expanded Launchers
• Salvation Nebulon-B with Slaved Turrets or TRCs
• MC30 Torpedo Frigates with APTs

All of these ships combine potential fireower on par with much larger ships with a cheap cost.

To build on CactusMans point.

Lets take a look at two ships:

Ginkapo's Ackbar MC30:

MC30 Torpedo frigate:

Enhanced Armanent

Lando Calrissian

PT's Motti ISD:

ISD I:

Intel Officer

Ordnance Experts

The MC30 fits into the MSU bracket whilst the ISD does not, and for a very simple reason. The MC30 build costs 77pts, whereas the ISD costs 121pts. However, the MC30 comes with the same firepower as the ISD! So whats the cost? The Hull point. An ISD can take a severe beating, an MC30 cannot.

MC30

Cost: 77pts

Full power broadside: 3 red, 2 blue, 3 black (Ackbar enhanced)

Hull: 4

ISD I

Cost: 121pts

Full power front arc: 3 red, 2 blue, 3 black

Hull: 14 (Motti enhanced)

This is how Multiple small units work. Individually they can hit as hard as the larger counterparts, but they also crumble much faster under a serious attack.

All good points, however in my mind MSU is characterized not by the heavy hitter itself but by other ships in the mix, so as long as thee are heavy hitter or two (Demo, Mc30, ISD etc) and 3-4 small cheap units it is MSU.

All good points, however in my mind MSU is characterized not by the heavy hitter itself but by other ships in the mix, so as long as thee are heavy hitter or two (Demo, Mc30, ISD etc) and 3-4 small cheap units it is MSU.

Actually no.

This is the thing that has been misunderstood over time. Using cheap activations to boost one or two high threat ships is not MSU. For it to be a true MSU, every ship must be capable of delivering a high damage output on its own.

The original Clon, Demolisher, 4 Raiders had every ship armed to the teeth. Every ship was capable of trading itself for anything up to a VSD or sometimes higher. That is what made DeMSU so powerful.

Simply running Demolisher with 4 raiders for activation advantage is not DeMSU because the threat is singular. You have to force your opponent to concentrate on multiple threats.

With all due respect, your list is not MSU. Your list is focused entirely around two high threat ships, at the detriment of the rest of your fleet. In any MSU fleet you should be able to take out any individual ship and still bring a lot of firepower to the table. Take an ISD from your list and its not a good list anymore. Take a MC30 from mine and there is still loads of firepower to play with.

We do need a proper name to describe the single or dual threat lists with activation padding. I think it might be unique to Armada because of the alternating activation mechanic.

MSU works fine as a definition in Armada. The change is that it refers to low-cost, high efficiency ships that maximize damage output per point.

On the one hand it does. Those of us who have been here a while know what it means. Language is often functional, which means when a community settles on a word that gets the job done, it doesn't go create new terms. I'll continue using MSU and DeMSU because that's what everyone else uses in the community. I'm just saying that as a choice of words, its an awkward choice.

On the other hand, it still really isn't that much different from the word swarm. A swarm would still typically refer to low-cost, and all builds need efficiency if they're going to be competitive.

Working fine in the case of a definition would mean that people can readily grasp it. I remember months ago having to poke around quite a bit to figure out what MSU and DeMSU meant because people threw the term around a lot and in ways that made it impossible to grasp from context. Clearly, if we've got a forum poster that felt he had to ask, and then at least one other forum poster who admitted that he didn't know what the term meant prior to this thread, the meaning is not obvious. Whereas for a term like "swarm," people coming to the game are going to be familiar with the concept. From there, the term can be further clarified and extended as needed: e.g. Corvette Swarm, Raider Swarm.

As a community, even some definitions aren't entirely clear. We've got Biggs remarking that we should just refer to it as a Clonisher and another poster commenting that Clonisher is the ship rather than the build. We had a threat immediately after Clon's victory in which someone coined the term Clonisher and others had to chime in on precisely whether it referred to a specific layout on the ship, Clon's specific build, or to the general concept of the build. This was about 4 people in total sharing less than a page of posts. Or take Ginkapo's Landmonition, when in the thread that followed in the wake of Q's victory, I got Mothmontion out of it, partly because Q himself posted said he liked it.

TLDR: The lesson here is be careful with how you use forum-gaming lingo. New people may not grasp it. You may be using a word that you think has a clear definition, but the community doesn't.

Swarm doesn't match the term that MSU means, though it generally does lend itself to a group of cheap ships.

Let's go back to the original heyday unit that defined MSU: Games Workshop's Blood Angels Space Marines, circa 5th edition

In the Blood Angels special army composition, you could take Space Marines with jump packs, rocket packs that let them launch from place to place around the battlefield. However, Blood Angels could choose to leave these behind instead, for an armored transport for free, or an even more heavily armed transport with reduced carrying capacity for a steep discount. As you can probably guess, they were designed with the idea of a rapidly deployed strike force in mind, immediately moving forward and contesting objectives before the enemy even had the opportunity to act.

Players realized, however, that by minimizing the number of models in a unit, they could quickly stack up bonuses and special weapons. Soon, Blood Angels were leading the competitive meta by fielding a cheap unit of 5 models, with a specialist weapon, a heavy weapon, and a heavily armed transport for such a cheap price that they could reliably max out their field allowance for basic troops and have lots of points left over for fielding additional unique units and characters. Those small units were fully equipped to take on much more powerful units for a fraction of the cost, and enemy forces had to target each unit separately, which might be broken further into the units and their tank transports.

In Armada, the DeMSU list or other MSU lists follow the same trend: Cheap, powerful units capable of doing as much damage as a fully upgraded ship of much higher points cost. As noted above, Clontrooper's original DeMSU list functioned not by finding some additional improvement to Demolisher, but instead by fielding powerful Raiders that could deal almost as much damage.as a Star Destroyer front arc.

The hallmark of an MSU list is first and foremost fielding undercosted units in great numbers that each match or exceed the combat capability of a much stronger ship. MSU works just fine in armada when applied to that general concept.

Verg, you missed out the special mention to Ard who has been speaking in numbers for ages now and still completely ignored. Anyone know what I mean by 80/30/30? Thought not.

All good points, however in my mind MSU is characterized not by the heavy hitter itself but by other ships in the mix, so as long as thee are heavy hitter or two (Demo, Mc30, ISD etc) and 3-4 small cheap units it is MSU.

Actually no.

This is the thing that has been misunderstood over time. Using cheap activations to boost one or two high threat ships is not MSU. For it to be a true MSU, every ship must be capable of delivering a high damage output on its own.

The original Clon, Demolisher, 4 Raiders had every ship armed to the teeth. Every ship was capable of trading itself for anything up to a VSD or sometimes higher. That is what made DeMSU so powerful.

Simply running Demolisher with 4 raiders for activation advantage is not DeMSU because the threat is singular. You have to force your opponent to concentrate on multiple threats.

With all due respect, your list is not MSU. Your list is focused entirely around two high threat ships, at the detriment of the rest of your fleet. In any MSU fleet you should be able to take out any individual ship and still bring a lot of firepower to the table. Take an ISD from your list and its not a good list anymore. Take a MC30 from mine and there is still loads of firepower to play with.

We do need a proper name to describe the single or dual threat lists with activation padding. I think it might be unique to Armada because of the alternating activation mechanic.

I think this is a good example of how definitions can be unique to a single person. Although Ginkapo describes well how several different lists function, this definitely feels like imposing a personal viewpoint on the term MSU. That's probably going to happen in a game where terminology is not settled.

As someone who's expertise outside of the forums is language, word meaning reflects community usage, not just one person, but the broader community consensus. My understanding of the term MSU is basically PT109s. And if you ask me to describe how the community most frequently uses the term, PT109's understanding covers it. The early responses to the original poster back this up as well. MSU just means multiple small units. It doesn't say anything about their build, type, or quality, though thecactusman has a pretty thorough list above of what typically goes into most MSU lists.

At the very end it, Ginkapo acknowledges that we do need proper names to describe the difference between padding lists for a big threat or two versus having every unit be a threat. That's a fairly significant point. I'm not sure we've got a single term yet that captures that. I'd personally characterize Ginkapo's list as starting to veer away from really being MSU. The activation count is just four instead of five, and the heavy hitters are decked out a bit more than you'd expect. After all, there's a reason we have to specific DeMSU: the Demolisher is usually decked out to the point that it hits well above the capability of all other units in the list. Once you start getting a lot of points on a unit, it starts needing its own designation. I like Ackbar Star Destroyers, Ginkapo's own coinage. So here's the question: Are there builds like Ginkapo that hover in this middle ground of being able to hit hard in their own right across four activations? I honestly tend to see a heavy hitter or two followed by the supporting units. Most units in that middle price range just don't hit hard enough.

Read Cactus' latest post.

That is the historical reason why mine and Clon's build are MSU builds, and PT's is not. Now if we actually had a name for PT's build, or the Demolisher with 4 unupgraded raiders, or dual MC30 lists, then we wouldnt be having these terminology issues. But alas we dont.

I'm kind of waiting on one of the veteran gamers to coin a term from another game they used to play...

Verg, you missed out the special mention to Ard who has been speaking in numbers for ages now and still completely ignored. Anyone know what I mean by 80/30/30? Thought not.

;80/30/30 is certainly clear. The first time I saw it in a thread, I didn't have to consult any extra material or go write a forum post asking what was meant, and I've not seen anyone else do likewise. That's just dropping MC off the unit designation and specifying exactly what is in that list. That's no different than someone writing GRRRR, or IGR. This happens a lot. We've got few enough units that just designating them says quite a bit about the list already.

And let's just speak for ourselves. You may ignore him, but I'd be surprised if the community completely ignores him.

Read Cactus' latest post.

That is the historical reason why mine and Clon's build are MSU builds, and PT's is not. Now if we actually had a name for PT's build, or the Demolisher with 4 unupgraded raiders, or dual MC30 lists, then we wouldnt be having these terminology issues. But alas we dont.

I'm kind of waiting on one of the veteran gamers to coin a term from another game they used to play...

Cactus' post went up just a bit before I finished that one. (Ah, for cross-posting!)

Cactus, thanks for the enlightening historical read. That actually makes a lot of sense.

As a scholar of words and language, l can say that lots of words can shed their historical origins fairly quickly, which is what I see in how people use MSU on the forums. I suspect a few use it just like Ginkapo and Cactus, but many are going to be completely unaware of Games' Workshop' Blood Marines or any part of the gaming legacy there.

As for characterizing PT's list, we've already got a term used in this thread: swarm. It trades out activation advantage and any participation in the squadron game to pile on the activations and have two very hard hitting ships at the core of the build. The beauty of the term swarm is that you can add words to it to clarify what kind of swarm. The language stays simple.

As someone who is NOT a veteran of multiple miniatures games, I'm glad someone finally cleared up what the dickens DeMSU actually stood/stands for. My personal expertise leans far more naval history and naval technology, so when I see an activation padded list built around only one or two heavy hitters, I mentally refer to it as a SAG, or Surface Action Group, a large warship set up to do most of the fighting, plus a screen of lighter ships to help out and defend it. Similarly I class squadron heavy builds reliant on carriers (something I as an Imperial who won't shell out for half a dozen Raiders am prone to running), I refer to them as CSGs, or Carrier Strike Groups, for obvious reasons.

True definitions for the uninitiated:

MSU: Making Sh*t Up

DeMSU: Definitely Making Sh*t Up

I personally love to MSU.

Did anyone actually mention this actually useful piece.... or am I theonly one who remembers it exists?


https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/188636-glossary-of-armada-slang-abbreviations/

Did anyone actually mention this actually useful piece.... or am I theonly one who remembers it exists?

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/188636-glossary-of-armada-slang-abbreviations/

I went looking for it and couldn't find it. Thanks for finding it and posting it!