I've seen quite a few posts about changing the Armada system in various ways since I first started visiting the forums 6-7 months ago. Many of them concerned about activation advantage or the power of 1st player, initiative, and bidding wars so on and so forth. While I don't have a problem myself with Armada's system, I have thought about one particular change that could be very fun.

I am very curious what it would be like to run a game of Armada similar to X-Wing.

In X-Wing the Phases break down as so:

1.) Plan

• Players secretly choose maneuvers.

2.) Activation

• Each ship moves according to the chosen maneuver in order of lowest value to highest.

3.) Combat

• Each ship performs an attack in order of highest value to lowest.

4.) End Phase

• Player perform any necessary clean up.

In Armada the Phases work like this:

1.) Command

• Players secretly choose commands for their ships

2.) Ship

• Starting with player 1, players take turns activating ships.
• Ships attack then move in the same phase.

3.) Squadron

• Starting with player 1, players take turns activating remaining squadrons.

4.) Status

• Players refresh defenses and upgrade cards at this time.

My idea, is relatively simple, and should maintain all the rules already in the game. The ship phase of Armada will be broken into two sub-phases, similar to X-Wing, as so:

1.) Command

• Players secretly choose commands for their ships

2.) Ship

• Combat Phase
  -Players take turns revealing commands and performing their 2 attacks in order from lowest command value to highest
• Movement Phase
  -Players take turns moving ships from highest command value to lowest

3.) Squadron

• Starting with player 1, players take turns activating remaining squadrons.

4.) Status

• Players refresh defenses and upgrade cards at this time.

I feel this could significantly alter the way Armada is played, and while there's nothing wrong with the standing system I think it may be interesting, if not fun, to examine this game with an alternate system of activation.

-Determine Initiative & 1st/2nd player as normal
-Deploy ships/squads as normal
-Use objectives as normal
-During activation ships with tied command values will alternate activations starting with player 1 until no more ships with that command value remain.
-All ships of one command value must activate before the next highest or lowest value
-If a player has no ships of the current value being activated they cannot activate a ship of the next higher/lower value and must wait for all ships of the current value to be activated first.

Anyone willing to give this a test sometime?

Definitely! I think the ship attack order should be from highest to lowest and moving from lowest to highest tho.

20 minutes ago, Visovics said:

Definitely! I think the ship attack order should be from highest to lowest and moving from lowest to highest tho.

I had originally made it that way, but I feared that would too heavily favor Large ship builds, for instance, my current favorite list to run Dual ISD no squads Has an ISD at 179 points and an ISD at 150... and it's a pulsetap... it would wipe almost any build lacking command 3 ships by turn 4

Consider the following:

Player 1 (me) has 2 ships and 6 squads

Player 2 has 5 ships 8 squads

Player 1 has An ISD II at 174 and one at 153 Both of command 3 and 6 tie fighters

Player 2 has an MC30 at 125 an mc30 at 78 2x GR75s at 30 and a GR at 24 with 3 Xs, 2Ys, 2 HWKs, and Wrexly

Player 1 would be able to attack with both his ships, and then after everything that was left attacked the small ships would be forced to move before the large ships, allowing the large ships to choose who they'll kill at the beginning of the next round, because they activate first.


With this, the smaller, less harmful parts attack first then and get the small advantage of moving after the large ships.