I'll call out:

1. Objectives give a nice flavor + conditions to each game.

2. Pretty much everything about a space battle is in the game, from snubfighters to stations, plus some terrain effects.

3. Great looking Star Wars game. I can't help but want to drive an ISD every time I play Imps and XWings every time I play Rebels.

I'm fond of the lack of defensive dice. There is damage mitigation, but it's mostly your choice and not random.

I like the slower pace and deeper thought than X Wing affords you. You only get 6 turns to make things happen.

I love the bigger ships. I mean I like fighters and the old PC games, but I always wanted another version of Rebellion.

Catching someones Demolisher in my ISD 2s front arc when I have first activation.

1) triangles

2) more triangles

3) quoting Ackbar on almost any manouver ....

1. It's the real deal when it comes to full scale epic battles in the Star Wars universe. X-wing match ups can be somewhat un-Star Warsy in terms of the team setup and scale. Armada makes you feel like you are in a Star Wars film setting like the Battle of Endor.

2. It's based on best guess player judgement and rewards sound planning and is therefore immensely tricky and prone to enormous gaffs. Like flying a ship off the map, or like I just did - getting my ISD stuck on an asteroid and bashing into a MC-80 while my own Interdictor then starts bashing into my ISD. Or landing my glass cannon perfectly into the front arc range of an ISD...

3. It creates a story of great success or tremendous disaster in which the unique characters play important roles. I'm really looking forward to Biggs who'll bring some much needed longevity to the likes of Wedge and Luke!

1. Capital ship combat that balances unit complexity with simplicity of play.

This isn't like Attack Wing, where the ships only move and internal mechanics come down to which upgrade cards you have on your ships. Nor is this like Starfleet Battles, where painstaking detail is put into energy allocation and weapon mode operation to bog down gamplay considerably. So we still have big spaceships, but there's enough to do with them even without upgrades. This makes the game interesting without being tedious for gamers at my level.

2. Defense Mechanics granting a sense of choice.

I think the one thing that killed my enthusiasm for X-Wing when Armada came up was green dice. There was little in the way you could do to controll survivability in X-Wing. This is by design, not just to encourage high-mobility on fragile ships, but to prevent cards like Biggs from getting out of control. But in my case, I got too sensitive about how long my ships were living and it really got me down to watch fighters die like flies in the first engagement because the dice weren't cooperating. Armada, by contrast, treats damage as a resource allocation subgame that gives the player a lot of choice. Even with accuracy skewering potential, cards like ECM and Motti are means to enhance your defense.

In Armada, when a ship goes down, part of why is because of decisions I've made on when to blow defense tokens. It's not a death handed to you by the dice gods.

3. Beautiful miniatures.

I've loved models and miniatures work ever since I was a kid, starting with toy versions of the U.S.S. Enterprise (and when they weren't available, the model kits my parents built for me and I ended up destroying). While I love models, the practical portion of my brain wants something to do with the pretty ships I own. What better a solution than a miniatures game where my ships live and fight as entities?

Carrying forth with the quality in X-Wing, FFG doesn't disappoint by giving us high-quality miniatures.