I think 4 may have been minimum but I think we may be heading towards 5 minimum.

I think we're definitely at 5 minimum currently. Some people may argue 4, and I saw some 4 activations make it to the top of regionals this last cycle, but I feel like you're going to be battling uphill with 4 activations.

5 is definitely the current magic number. It's a good number too. You can still get some heavy hitters without watering down the fleet.

5.

I can make a decent fleet with 4, but 5 is far better.

1 more than your opponent, but only 1 more.

Or 3 or more less than your opponent so they have wasted a lot of points on empty activations.

Just now, Ginkapo said:

1 more than your opponent, but only 1 more.

Or 3 or more less than your opponent so they have wasted a lot of points on empty activations.

Having one more, only allows one ship to go after they have finished.

Inversely having 3 less, is not wasted empty activations for your opponent, unless they only have 1 ship that does anything.

5

A lot of people run 2 ships that deal damage and 3 flotillas. I prefer 3 attack ships and 2 flotillas.

1

You know.

Cause you need at least 1.

2 if I am going to choose hyperspace assault.

Only 2. Both ISDs

In my experience, 4 is the minimum. I'd recommend 5 in most cases, but you can get by with 4.

Eighter you dont care for number of activations. In this case you can use 2-4 ship lists.
But with 4 ships you might lack the "tanky" ones.

But as soon as you depend on activations, you will need 5. Only 4 activations means that the player with the GSD or MC30 and 5 activations force you into being player 1 and play his missions, or he has as well a good bid and will choose player 2 and double tab you.

4 Ships is currently the worst number of activations you can pick (imo).

One if it's a good one.

55 minutes ago, TheEasternKing said:

Having one more, only allows one ship to go after they have finished.

Inversely having 3 less, is not wasted empty activations for your opponent, unless they only have 1 ship that does anything.

Only one ship can go first. Having than required spare activations is ineffective expenditure of points.

I've a had a good measure of success with 4. 5 or 6 can make it easier but to me tends to make the match a little bland.

I run 2 for fun and win with that list more than not.

For regionals I brought 4 and never felt like people who brought 5 had a real one-up. 5 is most certainly not necessary.

No minimum at all.

Out activating your opponent diminishes greatly in value after the 3rd turn.

Whatever number you take should be chosen with a purpose. Don't take 5 if you don't have a solid plan to use them.

Threat weight > activation count.

My tournament fleet is 4 and works perfect.

And I went second successfully a lot. When playing mc30s or demolisher I just left unactivated Rhymer squads near the target, meanin if they get in range I bomb them with 100 pts in squads or positioned flotillas to protect the ISD from close range double arcs.

Trying to hit a minimum activation is good, but like shmitty make sure each activation does something. No ships in my fleet were padding, they each had something to do every single turn.

You can make things work with 3.

This may be heresy, but what are you trying to do?

For me, things like activations and bids are the last consideration in list building because they're inherently a function of the fleet. Do you care if some of your ships go too early? If not, then why bother activation padding? If so, then it makes sense on a core level to go for it, but even then the real question is "how many activations do you need to pass?" Typically you'll have one big turn (and possibly a second smaller turn) where you want to go as late as possible and on all others, the board state will dictate it for you making an activation advantage somewhat transient in nature.

Initiative bids operate on the same principal. If you have missions that all give you a firm advantage and a way to abuse first activation, then why bother?

Activations are a function of purpose, so what is the purpose?

3 hours ago, MasterShake2 said:

This may be heresy, but what are you trying to do?

For me, things like activations and bids are the last consideration in list building because they're inherently a function of the fleet. Do you care if some of your ships go too early? If not, then why bother activation padding? If so, then it makes sense on a core level to go for it, but even then the real question is "how many activations do you need to pass?" Typically you'll have one big turn (and possibly a second smaller turn) where you want to go as late as possible and on all others, the board state will dictate it for you making an activation advantage somewhat transient in nature.

Initiative bids operate on the same principal. If you have missions that all give you a firm advantage and a way to abuse first activation, then why bother?

Activations are a function of purpose, so what is the purpose?

You should be posting more with such eloquent logic like this.

Imperial Assault had a similar problem with activation spam which was causing a negative impact on the game. The solution was to allow passing on activation if the opponent still had a larger number of activations left. This small changed fix the problem and allowed a more variety of lists to come out, that is until everyone got their hands on Jabba.

12 hours ago, Ginkapo said:

Only one ship can go first. Having than required spare activations is ineffective expenditure of points.

Only one ship can go first, but activation advantage is not all about going first. If you're only about the last/first, yes, X+1 is the right number of activations, and sometimes that's the right way to play it. But a well-designed and well-played high-activation list has a plan to leverage a large number of excess activations in ways other than the obvious last/first.

My Worlds list was specifically built to pivot low-commitment early activations (Slicer Tools and ICB) into good situations late in the turn for my excess activations. I sliced off nav commands and ICB stripped tokens to force targets into late-activated MC30 arcs.

If you know exactly where the adversary is going to be at the end of the round and have the maneuverability to position in such a way that you can exploit it, you've effectively got multiple ships activating first.

1 minute ago, Ardaedhel said:

Only one ship can go first, but activation advantage is not all about going first. If you're only about the last/first, yes, X+1 is the right number of activations, and sometimes that's the right way to play it. But a well-designed and well-played high-activation list has a plan to leverage a large number of excess activations in ways other than the obvious last/first.

My Worlds list was specifically built to pivot low-commitment early activations (Slicer Tools and ICB) into good situations late in the turn for my excess activations. I sliced off nav commands and ICB stripped tokens to force targets into late-activated MC30 arcs.

If you know exactly where the adversary is going to be at the end of the round and have the maneuverability to position in such a way that you can exploit it, you've effectively got multiple ships activating first.

Agreed. I don't dispute that the value of additional activations tends to decrease a bit after turn 2 or so, but it's still valuable and ships waiting to "catch" enemies still enjoy it. If all you're trying to do is last+first then the value drops dramatically, though.

You can certainly play 4 (or even 3... *shudders*) ship fleets just fine even against 6 or 7 ship fleets but you need to be very cagey with your maneuvering. You can't be lackadaisical about your ship positioning and you can't neglect to consider what the other guy is going to do with his superior number of activations. if you can keep that in mind and play accordingly, you can do fine. I don't often find most players do so when presented with that kind of problem, but good ones certainly do.

I've got a 6-activation Ozzel DeMSU fleet that in wave 5 has been doing quite well for itself competitively but when it gets slapped down it usually loses to a 4- or 5-activations fleet with a large ship with Gunnery Teams used by a competent opponent. A single big quality activation can level the playing field quickly.

To be clear: I'm not saying you must have multiple excess activations or anything like that. I'm saying it's possible to build and play in such a way as to take advantage of multiple excess activations.