2 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

So 360 movement of squadrons in armada is simplistic and unrealistic and boring and causes a ballooning of efficiency to matter. Something I was very unhappy to hear seeing the unveiling of the game.

Curious. The way squadron are handled was the most important thing tjat sold me on the game, because it feels so right.

Remember the XWing games, where you would do a bombing run against an ISD for example? You start in a nice formation with your wingmen, get one or two shots of until the Interceptors pounce in and it all develops into a huge ball of dogfighting squads. It's every man and fighter for himself, no formations, a big pile of chaotic fighting, no possibility to get meaningful bomber shots at the ISD without being killed instantly, and most certainly no squadron-based facing because you have no idea where exactly your wingmen are anyway... Until one side emerges more or less victorious. It just feels right in Armada.

Also, since you compare to WoWarships, keep in mind that the biggest carrier today is barely longer than the size of a Neb. We sometimes forget how frickin' gigantic these star destroyers are. All of my home town is about the size of an ISD, that's a thought that sets my perspective straight when I forget. 360° freedom of movement is exactly right for a group of 10 m fighter with huge thrust to weight ratio in their engines on that scale.

2 hours ago, RocketPropelledGiraffe said:

Curious. The way squadron are handled was the most important thing tjat sold me on the game, because it feels so right.

Remember the XWing games, where you would do a bombing run against an ISD for example? You start in a nice formation with your wingmen, get one or two shots of until the Interceptors pounce in and it all develops into a huge ball of dogfighting squads. It's every man and fighter for himself, no formations, a big pile of chaotic fighting, no possibility to get meaningful bomber shots at the ISD without being killed instantly, and most certainly no squadron-based facing because you have no idea where exactly your wingmen are anyway... Until one side emerges more or less victorious. It just feels right in Armada.

Also, since you compare to WoWarships, keep in mind that the biggest carrier today is barely longer than the size of a Neb. We sometimes forget how frickin' gigantic these star destroyers are. All of my home town is about the size of an ISD, that's a thought that sets my perspective straight when I forget. 360° freedom of movement is exactly right for a group of 10 m fighter with huge thrust to weight ratio in their engines on that scale.

I must say, there is a simplicity in the design at least. I believe to many it could be a wonderful thing about the game. (I'm not that against it. But I think it could have been developed from the start better. I'm more worried about squadron inefficiency.)

I don't. Is this an old computer game? Usually "Xwing" as a game denotes the FFG miniature sister game to this one. In that game there is a huge deal MORE maneuverability considerations. Even agile ships and easy to fly ships ahve to consider things like rocks. In this game, squadrons LOVE rocks. (I hate it. It totally doesn't make the rocks blockers, it makes them funnelers. And it makes no sense. )

That also depends on how you play. In Ace Combat and in real dogfighting, a well-trained pilot should know where their allies are. Orientation, like Ender's Game. In Xwing and in real life, you can pull off things like a Thach weave and you practice these maneuvers when playing online with a team or by yourself in Xwing. I've pulled it off on many occasions to great effect. (in Xwing, on a 2D scale).
You can also read about squadron formations and bombing formation tactics of airfighters in WWII. I think you'll find its a lot more refined than the mass scrum you believe it to be. (WoWarships has some great videos informative videos btw)

2nd: In Ace Combat vs DSC, there is the known problem of how easy you turn in Ace Combat. You can do knife-edge turns and higher degree turns that would ever be possible in real life, mainly based on pilot-handling of G stress. In ace combat you can do 90degree and sharper turns. Literally going past the 90 degree knife turn if youd like. In real life, I think pilots are limited to a yaw/bank of 20 degrees. A commcercial jet is usually handled within only 4 degrees of variation from straight.

Armada sits on a sliding scale anyways, which puts your distances out of proportion for a CR90. But I will agree that's a large amount of space. But let me ask you to provide numbers for this: What is the turning radius of a modern jet, even flying at low speed?

The assumption here is that Star Wars combat is modeled after WWII, with space being something like air. So, evne if these starfighters could actually move (they can't, lack of vector thrusting and only one direction output means tight turns are actually physically impossible), telling me they have huge thrust to weight ratio of wathever is just a huge assumption of other factors of flight.
And commonly in the OT CANON, you see fighter smashing into huge ships, into rocks, into whatever while trying to fly around large ships. Under duress, its not that easy to maneuver.

That said, both WoWs and Armada chose this format of movement, which is economical for simplicity. However even Wows has a prep-area to allow attack runs and directional issues and acceleration and deceleration values of the squadrons, they do not technically float free. They're just very very close to it. In Xwing, you'd never be allowed to do this, as the tightness means you're often left with the wrong angle on a shot.

And for your Nebulon: No fighter jet gets even close to doing a 180 turn within the confines of a Nebulon/carrier distance. Its horrendously larger.

I disagree with the assertion that Armada squadorn movement is even close to any sort of realism. Its been simplified for the sake of game simplicity.

Ok. An ISD II costs 170pts and comes with 4 Tie Interceptors. These squads cannot be traded for others.

Issue resolved.

Happy?

5 hours ago, Ginkapo said:

Ok. An ISD II costs 170pts and comes with 4 Tie Interceptors. These squads cannot be traded for others.

Issue resolved.

Being facetious, in my experience, never solves anything, only inspires conflict.

This resolves nothing.

As a matter of fact, raising the price of the ISD to force players to take a single type of squadron makes even less sense.

Command 3: Included in cost
"We're fully crewed sir, navigation teams, weapons teams, flight coordinators, all 5000+ crew and the consumables for 6 years are fully staffed and supplied"
Engineering 4: Included in cost
"We've got engineering teams on standby and all necessary tools and materials are on boardand ready at a moments notice".
Squadron 4: Pay extra
"Whoa whoa whoa hold the **** up fast Eddie, you don't just get a fully staffed and operational squadron bay, you gotta fork over the extra 3 million creds to their union leaders first".

How about a more logical system:
1.)(collective fleet Squadron value)x(10)=(allowance for squads up to 100 points) or just (100 points squadron allowance).
2.)(Squadrons are purchased bare, no abilities/titles/ ace pilots) and have a new cost reflective of such:
Tie Fighter-7
Tie Interceptor-9
Tie Advanced-10
Tie bomber-8
Firespray31-10
yv666-12
Aggressor Assault-10
Jumpmaster5K-7
Vt-49-17
Lambda-10
Tie Defender-14
Tie Phantom-9
3.)(upgrades to these squads come from fleet point total as they are more than the standard unit.)

( Though I took the time to find an accurate base value for each squad, I haven't had the time to sort how the abilities work, but my rudimentary thoughts are:
-Aces slot (pilots specific to ships can be added at a cost yet to be established)
-maneuverability slot (swarm/counter/counter 2)
-training slot (Escort/bomber/snipe)
-comms slot (relay/intel)
-veteran slot (rogue/grit)
-heavy can be taken by select ships as a cost reducer.

4.(even excluding #2 and #3 and allowing the current squad stats and abilities would more sense than not including any at all).

12 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

I'd love to see objectives matter more

I think the real problem is the objective selection is quite small.

Red: AG or MW. PS is also good but dangerous vs APT.

Yellow: CO, VIP, FA, and HA. I think yellow is the most wide open because fleets can adapt the best for them

Blue: SC, SP. These are picked most because of deployment. Simply put, they are just good.

Obviously, people will pick different things based on what they want to do. But if I'm ever unsure of what to pick, it's almost always MW and SC because they are the easiest to play.

We need better objectives that create harder choices. Blue is the weakest IMO, because what do you really lose? A bomber fleet will take SP as first or second because they can place their bombers in the middle of their fleet and then adapt to where the opponent deploys, and then score some points as well. MF, IS, SR, and SN can all be manipulated by Strategic, and that means those fleets likely have a hefty squad investment as well.

If we had a blue objective that was something like "If a squad ends a movement at range 1 of a debris or asteroid, it suffers 1 damage." that would force carrier fleets to pick yellow or red, which would put them at a disadvantage.

9 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

But let me ask you to provide numbers for this: What is the turning radius of a modern jet, even flying at low speed?

I haven't finished reading everything here, but just wanted to get this out there (specifically, check out the J turn maneuver starting at 5:10):

6 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

I haven't finished reading everything here, but just wanted to get this out there (specifically, check out the J turn maneuver starting at 5:10):

I haven't been following this particular discussion in the thread but my goodness how cool is this footage! lol

2 hours ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Being facetious, in my experience, never solves anything, only inspires conflict.

This resolves nothing.

As a matter of fact, raising the price of the ISD to force players to take a single type of squadron makes even less sense.

Command 3: Included in cost
"We're fully crewed sir, navigation teams, weapons teams, flight coordinators, all 5000+ crew and the consumables for 6 years are fully staffed and supplied"
Engineering 4: Included in cost
"We've got engineering teams on standby and all necessary tools and materials are on boardand ready at a moments notice".
Squadron 4: Pay extra
"Whoa whoa whoa hold the **** up fast Eddie, you don't just get a fully staffed and operational squadron bay, you gotta fork over the extra 3 million creds to their union leaders first".

The reason this is the way it is: the logistics of warfighting is not fun or awesome. There are no sweet choices to make in picking what kind of hydrospanners your repair crew uses. If there were, the price of an ISD2 might be 100 but you'd have all kinds of awesome reverse power couplers you could choose to buy. But because that's boring as ****, it's abstracted out of the game.

Picking the kinds of fighters you want in your Star Destroyer, on the other had, is awesome, so you have all kinds of choices to pick from for that. Like Gink said: they could have just abstracted out the cost of the fighters and charged 170 points for a pimped out ISD. But instead they gave you options, up to and including forgoing squadrons entirely.

And, hell, if you are into upgrading your space wrenches, there's always Engineering Teams.

13 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

The reason this is the way it is: the logistics of warfighting is not fun or awesome. There are no sweet choices to make in picking what kind of hydrospanners your repair crew uses. If there were, the price of an ISD2 might be 100 but you'd have all kinds of awesome reverse power couplers you could choose to buy. But because that's boring as ****, it's abstracted out of the game.

Picking the kinds of fighters you want in your Star Destroyer, on the other had, is awesome, so you have all kinds of choices to pick from for that. Like Gink said: they could have just abstracted out the cost of the fighters and charged 170 points for a pimped out ISD. But instead they gave you options, up to and including forgoing squadrons entirely.

And, hell, if you are into upgrading your space wrenches, there's always Engineering Teams.

and yet...





So if we do have to pay to upgrade those crews as shown (crews that are clearly already on board at base cost, since it would be impossible to move/shoot/target/coordinate/ect... without them) why aren't 4 tie fighters included with the ISD IIat 120 cost with an option to upgrade them?


Again, it doesn't really make sense to do it that way.

4 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

why aren't 4 tie fighters included with the ISD IIat 120 cost with an option to upgrade them?

FFG didn't balance the game to work like that.

It's an interesting concept though to have specialized ships that already have a fighter loadout that cost different points.

4 minutes ago, Undeadguy said:

FFG didn't balance the game to work like that.

It's an interesting concept though to have specialized ships that already have a fighter loadout that cost different points.

I'd kind of like it that way. 120 base gets you 4 basic ties, squad upgrade cards could change the type of fighters and would scale in cost off the squad value..

32 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

I'd kind of like it that way. 120 base gets you 4 basic ties, squad upgrade cards could change the type of fighters and would scale in cost off the squad value..

The only problem being the entire game would have to change for this to work.

Just now, Undeadguy said:

The only problem being the entire game would have to change for this to work.

Well that is how I started this thread ;D

58 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

why aren't 4 tie fighters included with the ISD IIat 120 cost with an option to upgrade them?

*152 cost. And that's why: to leave the option open of whether you wanted to take them. I'd rather be soft forced into taking those points by the bomber threat than hard forced by the price of my ship.

But, that's just preference. If you'd prefer to pay more and just have the squadrons included, that's a fair opinion too.

7 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

If you'd prefer to pay more and just have the squadrons included

No no no... I'm saying they should be included, like every other essential crew member on board at the same cost. 120 ISD II, 4 ties

1 minute ago, Darth Sanguis said:

No no no... I'm saying they should be included, like every other essential crew member on board at the same cost. 120 ISD II, 4 ties

But... balance?

Maybe I'm just not following something, I did read through this pretty fast.

5 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

But... balance?

Under the assumption that a similar formulae is applied to all other ships.

MonCal Command/Assault, 3 X-Wings
Assault Frigate, 2 X-Wings,

Etc, etc, etc.

9 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

No no no... I'm saying they should be included, like every other essential crew member on board at the same cost. 120 ISD II, 4 ties

But the "crew" is abstract, and is represented through the command dial. Which is why ISDs react slower than a CR90. But each ship can equip certain teams to a ship, which is giving form to the abstract crew.

1 hour ago, Darth Sanguis said:

and yet...

[Snip]

So if we do have to pay to upgrade those crews as shown (crews that are clearly already on board at base cost, since it would be impossible to move/shoot/target/coordinate/ect... without them) why aren't 4 tie fighters included with the ISD IIat 120 cost with an option to upgrade them?


Again, it doesn't really make sense to do it that way.

So all our problems here vanish if we include regular engineering teams as given and simply call the upgrade card "Veteran/Experienced Engineering Team"?

6 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Under the assumption that a similar formulae is applied to all other ships.

MonCal Command/Assault, 3 X-Wings
Assault Frigate, 2 X-Wings,

Etc, etc, etc.

Sure, this would be fine if squadron command scaled directly to ship cost, but...

Anyway, I guess it's a dramatic enough change that discussing it in terms of the current game as it exists is kind of pointless anyway, so... meh.

13 minutes ago, RocketPropelledGiraffe said:

So all our problems here vanish if we include regular engineering teams as given and simply call the upgrade card "Veteran/Experienced Engineering Team"?

If your ship has an engineering value... they were included... you're playing extra to upgrade them.... basically all those teams (maybe not flight controllers as they would merely keep ties from crashing into each other) are an absolute must to fly a ship, so they are there, and their abilities are represented through the values on the ship (enginering,command,speed, yaw, dice, shields) everything it seems except squadrons which despite having a value and is therefore supposed to be included in the cost. have no crew.

23 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Under the assumption that a similar formulae is applied to all other ships.

MonCal Command/Assault, 3 X-Wings
Assault Frigate, 2 X-Wings,

Etc, etc, etc.

This

15 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

Sure, this would be fine if squadron command scaled directly to ship cost, but...

Anyway, I guess it's a dramatic enough change that discussing it in terms of the current game as it exists is kind of pointless anyway, so... meh.

also true... but I can dream... right?

Look at it this way then: You get the freshly trained academy pilot team with their unarmed transfer shuttlecraft included with the ISD. If you want the better stuff that can actually do things, like those shiny TIE Fighters, that is extra.