Since we occasionally have an enterprising soul compose a terminology guide to frequently-used acronyms in Armada, can we get a community-based agreement to what names should be given to a few things in the game that don't have official names? What do we call the different groupings of unique squadrons? Or the new upgrades like Boarding Troopers and Boarding Raiders? Or the multiple ships cards that come in each expansion pack?
In a bigger discussion, I've been thinking a lot about the design decisions that FFG puts into when to use game jargon and when not to. As trivially obvious as it is to say, keywords do a lot for a game. Besides simply saving time when repeating a common mechanical effect, terms explicitly grouping similar game effects together is essential in letting effects interact with each other. They formalize common-sense ways to think about the game. For example, the game can include effects that trigger on "Bomber" and "non-Bomber" squadrons. Therefore, I think there are a few places in the game where a lack of terminology is a perplexing omission at best, and a design limitation at worst. This comes as a fairly stark contrast to Imperial Assault, where fairly minor attributes of different units are often included as keywords, and upgrade cards reference these keywords liberally.
By definition, these cards don't have official terminology that the game engine recognizes as mechanically meaningful, so I can't refer to them by any formal name. By common sense it's easy to recognize "boarding party" cards, "ship types," and "ace squadrons," but we don't have an official term. Using a term from linguistics, what do you think make sense as game terminology for the "natural classes" of the following:
- Squadrons that are unique, have defense tokens, and are named after characters, such as Luke Skywalker, Major Rhymer, and Boba Fett? Right now, we often call these "aces," but that's also a term for the next one. We also used to just call them "uniques," but that doesn't quite suffice now that there are two clear groupings of unique squadrons.
- Squadrons that are unique, don't have defense tokens, are priced exactly 1 higher than the non-unique version, and are not named after specific individuals? Now, we tend to just call these "new CC squads," but that's unlikely to work once any others get released.
- Upgrade cards, from Wave 6, occupying both the Offensive Retrofit slot and the Weapons Team slot, including the word "boarding in the name," and thematically related to landing troops on-board. Currently, the community likes to call these "boarding parties" or "boarding actions," but neither of those is a game term and no other game mechanics can cleanly interact with these upgrades.
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Ship cards and squadron cards that represent the same in-universe capital ship or fighter type. For example, what is an X-Wing in Armada, besides the name of a type of squadron, and a meaningless bit of text on the cards of Luke, Wedge, and Biggs? Aren't they really just four different squadrons that share no explicit grouping in the game? What is a Victory-class Star Destroyer, besides the name of an expansion pack and an icon that enables the titles Warlord, Corruptor, and Dominator? Right now, the community calls the ship cards "versions" or "variants" of the same ship, and squadrons don't have an agreed-upon name.The RRG (p.10) talks about ship type as a high-level term, and ship icon as a piece of information on a ship card, so that's a start.
For example, a future box set could very plausibly introduce new "CC-style" squadrons like a unique one-point higher version of Z-95s and TIE Defenders. A few different fan-made narrative campaigns play with RPG-like mechanics for "ace" squadrons. A thread right now has awesome ideas for new "boarding party" upgrades. Rebalancing titles could come in the style of X-Wing's 0-cost titles that specify "Nebulon-B Frigate only," if that phrasing were a valid game term.
Edited by Nostromoid
I really have no idea what you are trying to say here? I mean Luke is a unique X-wing squadron in Armada much like Luke is a unique X-wing pilot in X-wing. For X-wing they have rookie and red squadron as generics. As for Armada, they are just X-wing. I a;ways had some issues with Armada's cataloging system for squadrons in Armada, It doesn't allow for generic squadrons to be upgrades, they are all supposed to be expendable cannon fodder as far as Armada is concerned. For the Victory it is a Victory. A Demoloshier is a GSD, but most people simply say Demolosher for 2 reasons, one it is the most common title for GSD, and two well nearly every GSD in a demolisher, but you can have a GSD that isn't demolisher and it would just be called GSD.