1 hour ago, RedPriest said:

Ha! Reminds me of the Milton Bradley Axis & Allies where a pile of transports defending on 1s from a d6 are more cost effective to gunning down attacks than the actual capital ships

Starting I think in the Anniversary Edition of the global level versions of the game transports ceased having a attack or defense value. If they are in a sea zone with enemy warships or warplanes and no escorts they are removed from the board. They also can not be used as fodder to protect your warships. They can only be chosen as casualties if there are no other eligible units.

11 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

Starting I think in the Anniversary Edition of the global level versions of the game transports ceased having a attack or defense value. If they are in a sea zone with enemy warships or warplanes and no escorts they are removed from the board. They also can not be used as fodder to protect your warships. They can only be chosen as casualties if there are no other eligible units.

Yup. Really glad they changed that. It was silly.

I was trying to remember what all the flotilla nonsense reminded me of and BAM, there it was.

Large ships are not dead. The MC80 variants aren't the most common, but tournament data shows they're doing fine when they do show up, and the ISD seems to be a powerhouse. It's just all medium-large ship lists that are suffering- Sprinkle a few flotillas into a list, and you can easily support a large ship.

While it's too early to say for certain, I think the proposed change would actually hurt large ships, because they would no longer be able to get the cheap activations they need to compete with MSU lists (Although with the demolisher, Riekan, and TRC nerfs, those might fall out of favor).

17 hours ago, TrozOz said:

Have flotilla's activate in the squadron phase rather than the ship phase while keeping all of their other rules the same

I suggested this here a while ago to a group who were trying out a "pass" rule. The main complaint brought up at that time was that it's not Flotillas specifically, but cheap ships that are the problem. Someone suggested that all it takes is a cheapish ship to show up that is not a flotilla and the problem returns. They were specifically thinking of Hammerheads, as they had been announced and we knew they would be cheap, but we didn't know how cheap yet. As it turned out, the cheapest one was still twice as much as the cheapest flotilla.

I still think this is a pretty good solution to cut the cheap flotillas out of the activation situation and it reduces their strength with relay.

Slicer tools would need errata as well though.

But there is also this:

2 minutes ago, Squark said:

While it's too early to say for certain, I think the proposed change would actually hurt large ships, because they would no longer be able to get the cheap activations they need to compete with MSU lists (Although with the demolisher, Riekan, and TRC nerfs, those might fall out of favor).

6 hours ago, Frimmel said:

Starting I think in the Anniversary Edition of the global level versions of the game transports ceased having a attack or defense value. If they are in a sea zone with enemy warships or warplanes and no escorts they are removed from the board. They also can not be used as fodder to protect your warships. They can only be chosen as casualties if there are no other eligible units.

6 hours ago, RedPriest said:

Yup. Really glad they changed that. It was silly.

I was trying to remember what all the flotilla nonsense reminded me of and BAM, there it was.

Agreed. Great analogy!

Some of the Axis and Allies nonsense was that it was in the nature of the game to have a fairly cheap reliable unit on which you could take hits. In land battles, this is plainly enough the infantry. That made sense from an historical perspective because you ended up with large armies of infantry, and then tanks/aircraft in support of the infantry. And in later editions, artillery to raise the attack value of some of your infantry. The trouble in the early variants is that you really needed transports for shucking units across water, but you also needed a unit that could take hits for your navy. Technically you could have done this with subs in those early variants, except that once you had the navy situation cleaned up, you really wanted those transports for influencing the land situation. So although you could buy them for that purpose, you really wanted to be able to switch immediately to shucking infantry. It took until the later variants before we got destroyers and eventually a cruiser/destroyer distinction that allowed for you to buy them cheaper, to influence the outcome of naval battles. And not being able to take transports as hits in naval battles was really required to make the battles more historically reflective.

In any event, let's see how the new changes play out, especially with a whole new wave thrown in there as well.

I am against this change also. I agree with most of the above, but a further point that has not been mentioned yet is that forcing flotilla to activate after other ships really hurts the timing of some flotilla upgrades. Slicer tools, repair crews, comms net and Suppressor are now either much harder to pull off, less valuable to pull off and/or don't provide any benefit until the next turn.

9 hours ago, Vergilius said:

Some of the Axis and Allies nonsense was that it was in the nature of the game to have a fairly cheap reliable unit on which you could take hits. In land battles, this is plainly enough the infantry. That made sense from an historical perspective because you ended up with large armies of infantry, and then tanks/aircraft in support of the infantry. And in later editions, artillery to raise the attack value of some of your infantry. The trouble in the early variants is that you really needed transports for shucking units across water, but you also needed a unit that could take hits for your navy. Technically you could have done this with subs in those early variants, except that once you had the navy situation cleaned up, you really wanted those transports for influencing the land situation. So although you could buy them for that purpose, you really wanted to be able to switch immediately to shucking infantry. It took until the later variants before we got destroyers and eventually a cruiser/destroyer distinction that allowed for you to buy them cheaper, to influence the outcome of naval battles. And not being able to take transports as hits in naval battles was really required to make the battles more historically reflective.

In any event, let's see how the new changes play out, especially with a whole new wave thrown in there as well.

Don't forget there was also the change to Battleships to allow them to take a hit and stay in the battle and then be repaired but that was before the transport change. Cruisers were also added to the global level games in the Anniversary Edition along with the transport change. It is one of the best changes in the most recent versions.

If your Fix is going to involve multiple erratas of multiple semi-related cards to have them even make sense, as described...

Its not a "Simple" Fix.

Its a Fix, don't get my wrong.

Just not a "Simple" one.

Let's see the trickle down effect of what has gone through before we go crazier? Some of these problems compunded over time, they are small things adding up (particularly Rieekan), so small changes can likely correct it as well.

I'd wait until the FAQ changes trickle down first, but my "simple" fix would just be a fleet building rules change where the number of flotillas a fleet can have must be 1 fewer than the total non-flotilla ships the fleet has. It goes along the same theme as existing fleet building caps we already have, like squadrons can only be 1/3 of total points. Flotillas would still have their same individual utility and activation timing, but their ability to pad activations would be restricted. They would have to be used as intended as a supplement to the main fleet, rather than encompassing the main fleet itself.

An alternative rules change I like would be that flotillas don't count as remaining ships when determining if all of a player's ships have been destroyed. That would simply create a potential risk of getting tabled even with flotillas still in play if you go flotilla heavy in your build.

Look, I have been a vocal critic of the activation race that has been created in the game, and I will say this:

1. It is clear the designers are paying attention to the game, and have ideas about core balance issues that are occurring.
2. The FAQ is a positive in every way. Every single change is a fix to something that was too good for the points that one was paying for it. Some of them (Rieekan, Demo) were also key things deforming the meta.
3. If there are remaining problems, they will be addressed. We had plenty of pre-FAQ data, and it was very clear that Rieekan and flotilla spam in general were just a bit too good (partially to power the activation race). Will this FAQ tone it down? I am neutral on that (more testing needed), but I am very positive that if Worlds and Euro Championships are again dominated by more flotillas than all other ships combined in the top 10 fleets, we will see additional action from FFG.

It's too early to say right now, though. I want to see how things will play out, I want to see if this tones down relay, and I want to see how a certain upgrade in wave 6 impacts things. Right now, I think the right move is to be calmly neutral, and wait for more data. I would say that to all "sides" of the debate, because until you have some solid testing, it's easy to make things worse, not better.

FFG did the right thing with an incremental change. Let us see what comes next.

Pass rule fixes the problem. The new FAQ might have made it not necessary. If the problem of 5+ activation is needed to be competitive maybe FFG will look at a pass rule. I still have a 6 ship heavy squdron list I'm playing that was not effected by the FAQ so maybe more is needed.

Wait and see tho a lot of crutches have been hit hard maybe new list will rise making 5+ ship list no longer viable. I hope