Ordnance experts, leading shots and spinal arnaments

Slap all 3 on an ISD-I with Vader and Devastator and let's go!

Ordnance experts, leading shots and spinal arnaments

Spinal Armaments? Who replaces Spinal Armaments?

And who does OE and Leading Shots replace? Certainly not Vader, who lets you reroll reds at range.

You're kind of reaching here. My point stands. Every admiral serves the function of offloading upgrades of one kind or another to one ship. That's why the flotilla lifeboat is a thing: you can sequester away your fleet-wide upgrade in the corner while pushing your combat ships into danger for lower potential loss.

You have stumbled onto my personal belief that is not backed by evidence.

Motti, Mothma, Garm and Tarks make up for poor planning/flying rather than adding anything. Its part of the reason I am better on vassal than a table as precision flying is far easier,

So yesterday, I (2x Guppy + 3 Floats) went to the Cary, North Carolina Regionals at Gamer's Armoury (shout out to Scott for TOing... it's a clean and friendly store --- I would say well-stocked but they had A booster box of SW Destiny that sold out before dice were rolled at 10am...like, c'mon... LOL).

This is the story with Destiny everywhere right now. It was an issue on FFG's end. The fact that they still had one box by saturday is impressive.

You have stumbled onto my personal belief that is not backed by evidence.

Motti, Mothma, Garm and Tarks make up for poor planning/flying rather than adding anything. Its part of the reason I am better on vassal than a table as precision flying is far easier,

I think the distinction you're looking for is that Ackbar, Vader, Sato, etc directly contribute to offensive power, and that an offensively-focused fleet is inherently better than a defensive one because killing stuff > surviving. This isn't a distinction limited to admirals, though: i can't look at Shmitty's data right now, but I'm pretty sure all of the top upgrades are offensive in nature.

That said, that doesn't invalidate defense. ECM is still a nearly-mandatory upgrade for large ships. Motti is still dominating tournaments in terms of popularity. It's more of a cost-center vs profit-center discussion: some cost may be necessary, but a good player will be successful by finding ways to minimize how many points he has to sink into defenses in order to maximize his fleet's offensive power. Incidentally,I think of the fighter game the same way: fighters are a necessary cost associated with maximizing the profit that my bombers provide me. I win by identifying the minimum cost in fighters that I have to include in order to maximize my bombers' effectiveness, or by finding alternative, cheaper ways to do this.

So yesterday, I (2x Guppy + 3 Floats) went to the Cary, North Carolina Regionals at Gamer's Armoury (shout out to Scott for TOing... it's a clean and friendly store --- I would say well-stocked but they had A booster box of SW Destiny that sold out before dice were rolled at 10am...like, c'mon... LOL).

This is the story with Destiny everywhere right now. It was an issue on FFG's end. The fact that they still had one box by saturday is impressive.

Haha... was being sarcastic... I was amazed that they had some boosters for sale!

ECM is still a nearly-mandatory upgrade for large ships.

I'm actually starting to waiver on that. With squadrons becoming more and more of the primary threat, ECMs are less and less necessary to me. My latest B-Wing madness builds with the MC80c do not take ECMs in favor of spending the points elsewhere. Should I be taking ECMs, or are Defiance and Ahsoka Tano a better investment for a Garm build?

ECM is still a nearly-mandatory upgrade for large ships.

I'm actually starting to waiver on that. With squadrons becoming more and more of the primary threat, ECMs are less and less necessary to me. My latest B-Wing madness builds with the MC80c do not take ECMs in favor of spending the points elsewhere. Should I be taking ECMs, or are Defiance and Ahsoka Tano a better investment for a Garm build?

ECM is still a nearly-mandatory upgrade for large ships.

I'm actually starting to waiver on that. With squadrons becoming more and more of the primary threat, ECMs are less and less necessary to me. My latest B-Wing madness builds with the MC80c do not take ECMs in favor of spending the points elsewhere. Should I be taking ECMs, or are Defiance and Ahsoka Tano a better investment for a Garm build?

Same here. At Worlds I ran ISD2 without ECM and didn't miss it in any of the games.

I actually agree, but going down that rabbit hole would've detracted from the topic at hand.

ECM is still a nearly-mandatory upgrade for large ships.

I'm actually starting to waiver on that. With squadrons becoming more and more of the primary threat, ECMs are less and less necessary to me. My latest B-Wing madness builds with the MC80c do not take ECMs in favor of spending the points elsewhere. Should I be taking ECMs, or are Defiance and Ahsoka Tano a better investment for a Garm build?

Same here. At Worlds I ran ISD2 without ECM and didn't miss it in any of the games.

Just as with squads, the perfect number of defensive upgrades is just enough. So learn to play with zero dammit.

ECM is still a nearly-mandatory upgrade for large ships.

I'm actually starting to waiver on that. With squadrons becoming more and more of the primary threat, ECMs are less and less necessary to me. My latest B-Wing madness builds with the MC80c do not take ECMs in favor of spending the points elsewhere. Should I be taking ECMs, or are Defiance and Ahsoka Tano a better investment for a Garm build?

Same here. At Worlds I ran ISD2 without ECM and didn't miss it in any of the games.

Just as with squads, the perfect number of defensive upgrades is just enough. So learn to play with zero dammit.

I have a feeling with CC, ECM will be coming back when Imps get that free Acc from Jonus.

I've held off on posting here for a couple of days. I wanted to get my bearings on the board and look at a few ideas.

First off, Ice and Reinholt have great thoughts as usual. Schmitty's contribution was spectacular, well-written, and thorough as well. Ginkapo's been his perceptive and witty self that we've come to know and admire. Ard, I know in person, and always commands my respect. Great contributions to the entire discussion.

Activations have always been important in this game, so we definitely were getting this back in wave-2. Flotillas have just made it easier to drift to two particular extremes:

1. Squadron lists are now more efficient because we're less Rogue depending with the Flotillas that you're already taking for activations to boss around those squads.

2. Ship-Damage-Activation lists (Clonisher style for sure, but anything that depends upon at least 2 heavy hitters and uses activations to stall out for them).

That gives us the two cores to the meta, I think. There's variance between what ships you take, what squads you take, and so forth, but a list seems to move in one direction or another.

That does make it tough because it is hard to counter both ends of that meta very well with something other than one of those two poles. I'm certainly experimenting. There are probably some good counters out there. I think the regional season will see people experiment from regional to regional as they see the lists posted, the results, and get some ideas on what might counter it.