19 minutes ago, BrobaFett said:

This is the point I disagree with most. We pretty much established in that last threat that it is in fact relatively easy for a team on the ropes to come back in CC. You just decided that it just makes for a not fun game, and thus you threw out the pathway laid out for you in the structure of the campaign to launch a comeback. Just because coming back means licking your wounds for a round and rebuilding instead of blindly throwing your battered fleet full force into a superior defender and getting tabled time after time doesn't mean it's impossible.

Do you have a link for that thread? I'm looking for ideas because I just don't see how. When imperials own all but one repair yard, and all have 500 point highly optimized lists, whereas we have one 450 and two 400 point lists (with the possibility of one being a new starting list). What can we do to easily get back in it?

No offense, but you haven't really offered any substance to your arguments. We say these scenarios are clearly imbalanced unless you take specific lists to minimize the imbalance, and your response is essentially "trust me, it's fine." Okay, but how?

Lets see our CC campaign in Denmark is going as following

1st Round:

Hyperlane Raid: Empire victory at Duro, Empire base built

Show of force: Empire victory at Sileria

Independent Station: Empire victory at Forvand

2nd Round:

Normal 3x Objective mission: Rebel (attacking) victory at Polanis, Rebel presence

Base Defence Fighter Wing: Rebel (defending) victory at Nubia

Hyperlane Raid: Empire victory at Plympto

3rd Round:

Show of force: Rebel victory at Phemis

Hyperlane Raid: Empire victory at Plympto, Empire base built

Base Defence Fighter Wing: Rebel (defending) victory at Nubia

4th Round:

Nebula or Independent Station: Rebel (defending) victory at Forvand, Rebel presence

Base Defence Fighter Wing: Rebel (Attacking) victory at Corellia, Empire base destroyed

Normal 3x Objective mission: TBD, Froz (This game is a experienced Rebel player VS a newbie Empire player, so go figure)

Score:

Rebels 6 campaign points

Empire 1 campaign points

Notes:

The first round was played with 3x experienced Empire players VS 3x experienced Rebel players, one Empire player was only there as a substitute.

Round two to four was/ is being played with 2 experienced Empire players + 1x newbie player VS 3 experienced Rebel players.

The first Rebel Base defence victory was a close run affair, with a 2 point victory margin.

The second Rebel Base defence victory was a comfortable victory

The Rebel defence of Forvand in round four, was a mass slaughter of Empire Sqds and ships, Rebels loosing only 2x sqds. Biggs Ball of death.

The Rebel attack victory on Correllia, was part dumb luck separeted by a millimetre, when Jerjerrods Gozanti flagship was one shooted by Home One broadside at extreme medium range, resulting in one Aquitens bumping an AF2 = damaged VSD bumps Aquitens = a secound VSD bumps damaged VSD and kills off damaged VSD. Had Jerjerrod not died the Empire would have won defending Corellia, having only lost 1 VSD and a 3-4 Sqds in exchange for one AF2 and 8 Sqds, that second VSD dying in a trafic jam, was a very awkward way in loosing not alone Corellia but perhaps the whole CC campaign.

Thing is FFG is making an asymmetrical campaign out of what is actually designed to be more or less a symmetrical game.

Campaigns like these I see often fall under the trap I call "win all battles, but lose the war". The build that wins all the battles not just standard but in the campaign tends to have little or no effect on the resources in the campaign and then those that play the map and resources and avoid all battles with the invincible army wins the game.

Now while the concept is not that bad it calls into question do you even need to play a match for each campaign maneuver? If winning every battle doesn't help you why not just play the campaign with noting more than a dice roll instead of a match?

1 hour ago, BrobaFett said:

This is the point I disagree with most. We pretty much established in that last threat that it is in fact relatively easy for a team on the ropes to come back in CC. You just decided that it just makes for a not fun game, and thus you threw out the pathway laid out for you in the structure of the campaign to launch a comeback. Just because coming back means licking your wounds for a round and rebuilding instead of blindly throwing your battered fleet full force into a superior defender and getting tabled time after time doesn't mean it's impossible.

In our two campaigns, and they're 2 player (4 fleets) not 3/6 player, we've found it hard to recover following some early losses. Imps 4-0 first campaign, Imps currently 2-0 in this one (we swapped sides). So I'm also curious as to how people fair when their mid 400 range scarred fleets go up against relatively untouched 500s.

We think offering the rebel player the option of doing Show of Force might go some way to help. Similarly Imps with Hyperlane Raid.

You are correct, I am skipping over my evidence cause it was already set out in the previous thread regarding this topic. You can read the discussion here:

Read the discussion, but for the benefit of all, here are the bullet points. Note that because some people complain Imperials are too strong and other complain Rebels are too strong I will not address those points as they are purely personal opinion right now. The following are true for either side if they fall behind early.

-You start at 400 points, and end at 500. This feels huge on the table, but even at 400 vs 500 pts you are never more than 1 or 2 rounds of points behind your opponent. The goal should be to get to 500 points as soon as possible while taking as few losses as possible.

-When you are behind you get 2 assaults meaning 2 games you can lose without any adverse effects on your overall campaign. Sending your strongest fleet to defend while you turn 4 hyperspace retreat your assaults allows you to preserve those fleets and lets you use your upgrade points to close that gap.

-Early on prioritize upgrades over unscarring. It is better to go into round two with all ships scarred but your fleet total at 475 and then just spam repair, run away, and hyperspace out to use your now-in-surplus points to cap at 500 and begin unscarring at the end of round two.

-Monopolizing repair yard control only plays in if you have scarred ships, as those points cannot be used to put upgrades on. If your opponent controls vastly more yards then point 2 and 3 become even more important as you will need to make those yards irrelevant fast by building up to 500 so you can levy upgrade points to refit. Once you have hit 500 points, refit becomes moot because there will be plenty of points to use to refit for both teams from the excess upgrade points.

- If you reach a point where you do not feel you can physically win by points you can still have completely even odds of winning by declaring the all out assault. Provided you have followed point 2 and 3 and each player has a 500 point fleet, even if they are scarred (losses don't matter since winner wins, even if the ships are blown up).

Counter arguments to all of these points is that this makes for 1-2 rounds of boring games and they would rather play aggressively, go for big next-to-impossible hail Mary wins like attacking Correllia while behind 100 fleet points and against the strong base defense objectives, and then complain that it didn't work.

Hyperlane Raid is an issue, it's designed poorly. Some other problems exist in the structure and way that CC plays out. But as far as imbalance goes in the actual structure of the game I pin on lack of creativity and ability to play the long game.

I figure most people just don't want to take responsibility for not having a strategic mindset. Armada has been all about winning the battle in front of you but now people are being forced to think in a much larger sense.

It is also worth noting that you only need to win by one point, not like tournaments, where you need big wins to stay up in the top.

In the first round, the game is solidly in favor of Rebels thanks to solid ships that already often want to use only one key upgrade, such as the TRC-90 and GR-75s, along with several excellent generic squadrons like the YT-2400 and Lancer.

Things should balance back out, but there is no good reason why a properly kitted out Rebel fleet can't take a base on campaign turn one.

3 hours ago, BrobaFett said:

You are correct, I am skipping over my evidence cause it was already set out in the previous thread regarding this topic. You can read the discussion here:

Read the discussion, but for the benefit of all, here are the bullet points. Note that because some people complain Imperials are too strong and other complain Rebels are too strong I will not address those points as they are purely personal opinion right now. The following are true for either side if they fall behind early.

...

Hyperlane Raid is an issue, it's designed poorly. Some other problems exist in the structure and way that CC plays out. But as far as imbalance goes in the actual structure of the game I pin on lack of creativity and ability to play the long game.

Thank you for the link, that was an informative read! I don't blame you for not wanting to rehash all of that, you stated your case well and frequently in there.

I'll take some solace in the fact that thread is confirmation that I'm not crazy, and other groups have found themselves in the same position we're in.

I guess my frustration stems from the fact that the two sides entered the campaign with different mindsets and reconciling the two is difficult. I read the rulebook and thought "oh cool a narrative campaign, this'll be fun." We had no access to ANY of the new objective cards and did everything up to and including round 1 blindly (I discovered the Armada wiki after round 1, and man, what an amazing resource!)

Our imperial counterparts, on the other hand, studied, prepared, and optimized extremely well. While the asymmetry can be appealing from a narrative aspect, it's also very abuseable for people looking to approach from a more "build to win" mindset.

So now we're 2/3rds of the way through round 2 and we're beset by fleets spamming skilled first officer (of which the 3 imperial players own exactly 0 copies of, collectively, but they've printed about 10 copies) while we're running with the collections we own.

And now I'm reading that all is not lost, when I play my hyperspace raid later this week I should just avoid my opponent for 4 turns and flee. He's got a 30 minute commute to the shop and I haven't played armada in 6 months (prior to my blowout loss last week) and I think we both really would prefer to play rather than game the game.

So what's a nerd to do? Abandon the narrative and try to compete with tournament level of optimization lists? Say "**** it" and play how I want to an accept the foregone conclusion? Say "congratulations you set yourselves every possible advantage you could and it worked" and drop it to play other games? I really don't know.

I was hoping it would have the same asymmetrical-yet-balanced design that Star Wars: Rebellion impressively pulled off, but instead it seems to have been designed in an "unbalanced, but try to have fun anyway" sort of way. Kudos to those that succeed in that endeavour, but it just comes across as poorly thought out and rushed game design to me.

I agree that it makes things less than ideal, but like anything, its 90% attitude. Going into it black and white like there isnt any way to make the best of it is dooming yourself to have it happen. I give an example of how that doesn't have to happen in the other thread.

Also, it's likely that a campaign will go 6 or 7 rounds if not more. We are talking about one maybe 2 games of 6 that are less than ideal. It hardly sinks the whole game to spend one round to make sure you get 6 more good ones.

Also, I would be WAY more upset about the Imperial Grand Admiral abusing his familiarity with a brand new project to stomp on "n00bs". If you are only 2 turns in, ask for a complete reset treating these last turns as practice to build familiarity since he gave himself an unfair advantage. Or if they are going to be rules nazis, tell them to shred the proxy SFO since rules go both ways.

What, pray tell, is a proxy SFO? That sounds both intriguing and delectably shredable.

15 minutes ago, Sekac said:

What, pray tell, is a proxy SFO? That sounds both intriguing and delectably shredable.

Skilled First Officer

http://starwars-armada.wikia.com/wiki/Skilled_First_Officer

13 minutes ago, Sekac said:

What, pray tell, is a proxy SFO? That sounds both intriguing and delectably shredable.

Proxy = not-legitimate component, like a printed-out card

SFO = Skilled First Officer

And yeah, it sounds like your problem is not an imbalance in the campaign, but that your team went into a new game without having read the rules ahead of time (regardless of whose fault that is), and both teams came in with different expectations of what sort of game you were playing (thematic lists vs. optimized). Sounds like a discussion to be had between the teams. CC works best as a beer-and-pretzels experience, not a hyper-competitive one.

All that said, Armada is much more about the skill of the guy at the table than what he has on the table. It doesn't matter if the other guy's teammate built him some super-optimized silver bullet of a list--if you know how to fly yours and he doesn't, you win.

So, get better at flying yours, learn how to use it against whatever they have, and go whoop them. Or, be whooped by them, but have fun and make sweet pew-pew sounds while you're doing it either way.

8 minutes ago, Yipe said:

Skilled First Officer

http://starwars-armada.wikia.com/wiki/Skilled_First_Officer

Totally should've figured that out on my own...

The corellian campaign is horribly imbalanced. Just because our imperial team built three bad fleets and selected all the worst star systems we are being flogged. Go figure. Totally broken.

(sorry. We just lost saberhing and I don't know how we are going to get back into the fight at this point!)

There's definitely an imbalance in our current campaign (currently 8/8 wins for Imps in 3 rounds with 1 game to play) but there are several reasons for it:

1) Player Skill - We recently ran a league so if I use the end league placings as proxies for player skill (which is not entirely accurate but does tie in reasonably well with Regional and store champ results) then we had, based upon faction preference, Imperials as players 1, 2 and 5 vs Rebels as 3, 4 and 6. However all first round games were close.

2) An early lead and/or loss of a base - Imperials won all first round games (but all close) and took over a Rebel Repair yard base and it's set them up for each following round as the rebel fleets have ended up that many points behind needing to spend resources (of which they have had less) to unscar rather than upgrade.

3) Hyperlane Raid - Played this in the first round and, even though the Imperial player played the objective properly, it proved too difficult to take down ships (some bad dice rolls didn't help) when they are intent on running past you. It was Sato with MC30, AF2, Salv, 2xGR75 vs Tarkin with ISD2, 2xArq, Goz. Both Arq's were able to get away (despite 1 taking 2 Salv front arc's and 1 side at medium/close range ending on 2 hull, and the other Arq taking several volleys/rams from the AF going down to 1 hull twice before getting away). The Goz and Salv died for an Imperial victory and 40 resources to 20. If he had just had larger ships it would have been impossible to take them down in time.

4) Large vs Small ships and not playing optimised fleets. Large ships who can survive definitely benefit when compared to small ships which are more likely to die. We tried to keep a bit more generic and not optimised fleets so there was no CR90 swarm whereas every imperial fleet had an ISD. I think this hurt the rebels who tend to rely on those optimised smaller ships.

It doesn't feel to me that the mechanisms for helping the side falling behind to catch-up are strong enough. Trying to totally avoid conflict is difficult especially vs speed 3 enemy ships and/or fighters. Also Hyperlane Raid isn't easy enough to get resources from compared to Show of Force.

The greatest "imbalance" in the CC will always be player skill.

Pit a strong team vs. a weak one and watch what happens.

The rest is debatable, but I've yet to find any imbalances of game-breaking proportions.

So for maximum enjoyment: try to get teams as even as possible.

And if a veteran gets pitted against an inexperienced player, by all means go for the win, but make it fun and educational.

1 minute ago, Vae said:

There's definitely an imbalance in our current campaign (currently 8/8 wins for Imps in 3 rounds with 1 game to play) but there are several reasons for it:

1) Player Skill - We recently ran a league so if I use the end league placings as proxies for player skill (which is not entirely accurate but does tie in reasonably well with Regional and store champ results) then we had, based upon faction preference, Imperials as players 1, 2 and 5 vs Rebels as 3, 4 and 6. However all first round games were close.

2) An early lead and/or loss of a base - Imperials won all first round games (but all close) and took over a Rebel Repair yard base and it's set them up for each following round as the rebel fleets have ended up that many points behind needing to spend resources (of which they have had less) to unscar rather than upgrade.

3) Hyperlane Raid - Played this in the first round and, even though the Imperial player played the objective properly, it proved too difficult to take down ships (some bad dice rolls didn't help) when they are intent on running past you. It was Sato with MC30, AF2, Salv, 2xGR75 vs Tarkin with ISD2, 2xArq, Goz. Both Arq's were able to get away (despite 1 taking 2 Salv front arc's and 1 side at medium/close range ending on 2 hull, and the other Arq taking several volleys/rams from the AF going down to 1 hull twice before getting away). The Goz and Salv died for an Imperial victory and 40 resources to 20. If he had just had larger ships it would have been impossible to take them down in time.

4) Large vs Small ships and not playing optimised fleets. Large ships who can survive definitely benefit when compared to small ships which are more likely to die. We tried to keep a bit more generic and not optimised fleets so there was no CR90 swarm whereas every imperial fleet had an ISD. I think this hurt the rebels who tend to rely on those optimised smaller ships.

It doesn't feel to me that the mechanisms for helping the side falling behind to catch-up are strong enough. Trying to totally avoid conflict is difficult especially vs speed 3 enemy ships and/or fighters. Also Hyperlane Raid isn't easy enough to get resources from compared to Show of Force.

Lots of good points here. Mirrors many of my own experiences.

This is what we're doing to remedy this in our latest campaign:

1. We aim for even teams. We have 3 reasonably skilled players and two fresh ones (they are coming along nicely), plus me. We've put 1 freshman on each team - and given them 20 pts extra to build with from start. For my own part I have every intention of winning my games, but I'm conscious of the fact that we all want to have fun, so I'm not going for the jugular every time.

2. We've banned 1st round base assaults. It just swings the balance too much, both if you get lucky and take out Corellia or whatever, or get bled dry in the process. From round 2 base assaults are fair game.

3. We've tweaked this a bit. Rebels get a victory token for each imp ship left in the imp deployment zone at the end of the game. So if the Imp wants to turtle, he can sort of still do that, but not by setting up at speed 0 in a corner with ISDs hiding behind a Rhymerball.

4. We're trying to make fleets that are fun AND effective, without necessarily being optimized for tournament style events. We're using every kind of ship there is (except raiders - I opted to take an Interdictor instead, so there was no room). Each Imp players either has 2 large ships, or 1 large, 1 small. Plus some supporting smaller vessels. Rebels have taken MC80s, except Ackbar who favors an AF with MC/CR mini-swarm.

As for catching up:

If a side does really well, it will soon reach 500 pts. To catch up, make sure the weaker side DOES NOT fight battles to the death, especially with scarred ships. Back away. Then take a round where weak fleets pretty much try to avoid combat by hypering away. Unless game balance is TOTALLY screwed at this point, the underdog fleets will be back at nearly the same level as their opponents.

If not, then you're probably too deep already. Surrender and start afresh.

6 hours ago, Sekac said:

Totally should've figured that out on my own...

I have to ask a lot as people on forums today seam to like to abbreviate everything, sometimes it is really confusing when they use real abbreviations for something else. If you do not use the real world accepted abbreviations you might not know that you are even doing this. I had to ask in one why people were talking about carbon copying all the time (cc) and was told that they were talking about The Corellian Conflict, after that I was like well I can see that, but even now when I see the cc I still think carbon copy first, I just have to take a second to remember that for what ever reason they are just using their own abbreviation. I also have to say that this (using something that already has an established meaning) is a pet peeve of mine, that started when I was in collage and had the young ladies trying to get the school to accept that the yellow ribbon was to be used for women awareness there, when they asked me to sign the petition and I informed them that it was already being used for the troops (at least in the US, and this was pre-9 11) they got very upset with me and called me a liar, and stormed off, but like I said that kind of started my pet peeve. So if I offended anyone, by pointing out that some things already have meanings sorry about that.

There was a list of common abbreviations.

Unfortunately we can't sticky posts, so you have to search for it.

I'm seeing some extremely anecdotal evidence as to why the CC was poorly designed or way out of balance. Per usual I disagree with the masses of this thread, no surprise there but I think it's hilarious and facepalm worthy that the community has wanted assymetrical games of Armada and are now complaining about assymetrical games of as Armada.....

1 hour ago, Tirion said:

I'm seeing some extremely anecdotal evidence as to why the CC was poorly designed or way out of balance. Per usual I disagree with the masses of this thread, no surprise there but I think it's hilarious and facepalm worthy that the community has wanted assymetrical games of Armada and are now complaining about assymetrical games of as Armada.....

It's easy to forget that the voices of the internet are not all from one mouth. Some may have asked for asymmetry and others are responding to it. It's not necessarily hypocrisy.

Also, there's a right way to do asymmetry and a wrong way (admittedly the right way is harder to pull off). You can balance an elephant against an equal weight of peanuts, but it's hard to do if you just guess how many peanuts you'll need.

And that's what it feels like FFG did here. The Show of Force/Hyperlane Raid problem is purely bad game design. You don't even need to play the scenarios to realize how bad it is. There is no reason whatsoever that killing a defenseless station is twice as rewarding as killing an ISD after playing directly to its strengths. It's just poor design.

Some are willing to excuse poor design because there are some long game self-correcting mechanics, and strategic options to overcome their poor design. I am not. They simply chose not to balance the rules and put the oneness on the players to have fun despite the poor balance. That's great IF (and only if) all of the participants are on the same page. If they're not, then it's an easily abuseable ruleset and not very much fun.

Add to that the poorly worded rules resulting in the A or B methods of choosing bases, and the "attacker gets initiative, oh wait no he doesn't, he's just automatically first player" issue. Seriously, FFG? How do you not even know what initiative[\i] means?!

It's awesome they created a campaign and fun can certainly be had, but to me it just comes across as a series of blunders born of apathy.

Right. We're at the 'it's all bad design' stage. I'm betting one of my unused vsds that for the most part this is all anecdotal. And that the loudest mouths have rather limited experience with the campaign. Or has anyone managed a handful of full campaigns already?

Caveat: I'm no fan of Hyper Raid. To me it seems too hard. Or maybe Show of Force is too easy.

9 minutes ago, Sekac said:

It's easy to forget that the voices of the internet are not all from one mouth. Some may have asked for asymmetry and others are responding to it. It's not necessarily hypocrisy.

Also, there's a right way to do asymmetry and a wrong way (admittedly the right way is harder to pull off). You can balance an elephant against an equal weight of peanuts, but it's hard to do if you just guess how many peanuts you'll need.

And that's what it feels like FFG did here. The Show of Force/Hyperlane Raid problem is purely bad game design. You don't even need to play the scenarios to realize how bad it is. There is no reason whatsoever that killing a defenseless station is twice as rewarding as killing an ISD after playing directly to its strengths. It's just poor design.

Some are willing to excuse poor design because there are some long game self-correcting mechanics, and strategic options to overcome their poor design. I am not. They simply chose not to balance the rules and put the oneness on the players to have fun despite the poor balance. That's great IF (and only if) all of the participants are on the same page. If they're not, then it's an easily abuseable ruleset and not very much fun.

Add to that the poorly worded rules resulting in the A or B methods of choosing bases, and the "attacker gets initiative, oh wait no he doesn't, he's just automatically first player" issue. Seriously, FFG? How do you not even know what initiative[\i] means?!

It's awesome they created a campaign and fun can certainly be had, but to me it just comes across as a series of blunders born of apathy.

Should HR have some some sort of mechanic to prevent turtling? yup, outside of that I see no issues with this campaign. I also don't see how people are confused with the initial base placement. Without reading gymnastics it's clear, there is also only one option that resembles balance.

When you have some saying rebels are too good and others saying imperials are too good the debate imo ends itself.

@Green Knight

I completely agree with you.... On this

So you agree that killing a stationary and defenseless station is twice as hard as killing an ISD? Because that is mathematically false.

Your opinion might be that it doesn't matter in the long game and that's fine. That, to me, doesn't excuse objectively identifiable poor balance.