4 hours ago, ISD Avenger said:

This is already true of quite a few cards no? Skilled first officer only comes in the Liberty pack right? And SFO is a valued card. I play empire. What am I going to do? Buy 3 liberties? Nope.

True, but it's that much more egregious when the card is in a $100 expansion instead of a $40 one.

As far as FFG's traffic record with huge ships goes.... (TLDR: spotty record, but positive trend)

The GR-75 came with several decent X-wing pilots (And 2 mediocre ones), one Astromech that became a staple card two waves later (after y-wings gained that ability to use it twice in a turn), 3 mediocre-bad astromechs, and a bunch of copies of a mediocre torpedo that got reprinted in the wave directly following the GR-75. Overall... R3-A2 becoming a staple was probably not anticipated- I don't think btl-A4 Y-wings were in playtesting at the time development of the rebel transport was being tested. So as designed, the transport didn't contain anything too important unless you had to have everything.

The CR-90 contained 4 crew cards. I doubt any of them were intended to be competively viable. Leia proved to be grossly overpriced in standard play, while Han has occasionally seen use to augment another upgrade (Although frankly, Ezra is only one point more and a better fit on the ship that uses Han+FCS in most cases). As for the remaining upgrades... 3P0 was a gimmick card based around "Never tell me the odds", and R2-D2 offered a strong but conditional effect that the developers probably assumed the Falcon couldn't get much use out of against Tie Swarms. But the developers overlooked how powerful 3P0 could be on a native 1-agility ship, and then the Tie Phantom killed off the Tie Swarm. Suddenly, the Cr-90 was being mocked as $60 for C-3P0 and $30 for R2-D2. But hey, it came with a free Blockade Runner model! Frustrating, but probably not intentional. But FFG learned from the financial performance and reception of the ships, and got greedy...

The raider. This is where people got angry, and justifiably so. The Raider contains 4 copies (each) of the two cards necessary to run the Tie Advanced if you want it to do anything more than be an unmanueverable tie fighter with two extra shields... At nearly twice the price of a Tie Fighter. Given that this is Vader's ship we're talking about, a lot of people were upset. The new Tie Advanced Pilots were interesting but ultimately not exceptional, but there was one last card... Emperor Palpatine. Nearly three times as expensive as C-3P0 and taking up a second crew slot, but with the guessing taken out and able to work on anything. Palpatine proved to be just as underlined as 3P0, and this time, FFG knew what they were putting out, since they advertised the original Palp Aces build in the release article. A lot of people were upset.

The Gozanti seems to have learned from the Raider' s mistakes, though. It came with four new Tie Fighter Pilots. The Tie Fighter had already gotten buffed by Crack Shot, so these new pilots were more about fun options and combos than fixing a bad ship. Wampa working so well with Palpatine was annoying, though. The expansion also came with one crew card that could be used on non-huge ships, but Agent Kallus proved to be fun and useful but far from mandatory.

Finally, we have the... Scum transport. It came with 2 new general upgrades, but the non-gimick one was released in another expansion not long after. It also came with new pilots for the Scyk as well as a title that allowed you to fly them without a cannon while not being completely overpriced. Important for the Galaxies fans who positively adored their scyk, I suppose (All twelve of them*), but the Scyk was not the most iconic ship scum had, the light scyk has not made a huge competitive splash, and FFG has previously buffed the out of the box scyk via errata. There were also two crew cards for standard play, both of whom have prove fun but not made a serious competitive splash.

So, given the last two releases, I don't think FFG would put another Palpatine or Tie/x1 in an SSD expansion.

*I kid, galaxies fans, I kid. Seriously. Put down your torches and pitchforks)

10 minutes ago, Squark said:

True, but it's that much more egregious when the card is in a $100 expansion instead of a $40 one.

No. Not really.

It's still well within the price range for a pre-painted miniatures game.

1 hour ago, Democratus said:

No. Not really.

It's still well within the price range for a pre-painted miniatures game.

Admittedly the only non-FFG miniatures games I've played are 40k and the WOTC collectible FOG tie-in games for Star Wars and D&D. And while it is true that 40k units sometimes have warhead options that aren't available in the model's spruce (e.g. Space Wolf troops with meltaguns or flamers, tactical squads with lascannons), necessitating bits trading or the purchase of another kit, I don't believe GW has ever had one of those components released in a lot that is twice the cost of their standard model range and illegal in standard play. And GW sets customer friendly practices at a pretty low bar...

Depends on the era. "illegal in standard play" certainly existed with GW for a good long while (ie, Apocalypse only) and they certainly had wargear and unit options themselves that were illegal in standard play... And with Codexes in Flux, you quite often got situations where you did have a unit like that.

For one, the Farseer on Jetbike was one of them. As they removed the Jetbike option from Farseers, but kept them in Apocalypse.

With a Codex Changeover, you also had the full Seer council, which had warlocks with Singing Spears that were replaced with Witchblades - but you could still purchase the Ulthuan Seer council box - at an inflated metal box price at the time......

Now, admittedly, they're kinda more "anything goes".

But the GW comparison falls a little flatter when you consider the history involved.

3 hours ago, Squark said:

True, but it's that much more egregious when the card is in a $100 expansion instead of a $40 one.

There's a lot more quoting and discussion I could do on the subject, but this one is easiest and I better get some work done... Do you think the SSD would only be $100? There's been a ton of discussion of what it would have to look like, but I'd wager a fair bit that it would be larger than any of the X-Wing Epic ships and come with a fair bit larger price tag.

14 minutes ago, IronNerd said:

There's a lot more quoting and discussion I could do on the subject, but this one is easiest and I better get some work done... Do you think the SSD would only be $100? There's been a ton of discussion of what it would have to look like, but I'd wager a fair bit that it would be larger than any of the X-Wing Epic ships and come with a fair bit larger price tag.

I don't care what the price is, I want one and would buy it instantly.

6 minutes ago, Darth Lupine said:

I don't care what the price is, I want one and would buy it instantly.

Different strokes for different folks. If we didn't all have different opinions and feelings, this would be a pretty boring game (and a pretty boring world, I'd imagine). I *might* buy one at $100 if it looks really cool...

3 minutes ago, IronNerd said:

Different strokes for different folks. If we didn't all have different opinions and feelings, this would be a pretty boring game (and a pretty boring world, I'd imagine). I *might* buy one at $100 if it looks really cool...

If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking.

1 hour ago, IronNerd said:

There's a lot more quoting and discussion I could do on the subject, but this one is easiest and I better get some work done... Do you think the SSD would only be $100? There's been a ton of discussion of what it would have to look like, but I'd wager a fair bit that it would be larger than any of the X-Wing Epic ships and come with a fair bit larger price tag.

Going much bigger than the Raider would make the model rather impractical- The Huge ships in X-wing already rather unwieldy. A larger SSD would probably make more sense as a playmat intended for a special game-mode.

Making the ssd the size of the x-wing raider works nicely as it expresses a good variance in size with the isd. Until...

Add in the Raddus and Resurgent and you now have a muddied sliding scale. Not sure you can really show an appropriate difference in scale/size when you add them into the mix. Isd is, what, 8" for 1.6km ship. Maybe 9.5" - 10" for a resurgent class of 2.9km. Then you toss in the ssd at a max 13" (based on existing epic ship sizes) to represent a 19km behemoth. It just doesn't seem large enough, even on a sliding scale. To me, it would need to be 15"-18" minimum to look even close enough to right aesthetically. And the rest of the discussion lives in another chat from a long, long time ago...

Ideally, we need the Resurgent Class Star Destroyer and the Raddus to come out at about the same time. Dreadnoughts and Super Star Destroyers can also come out... but the Raddus should be somewhat bigger than a single Resurgent. Raddus is probably the biggest ship the rebels are ever going to get, unless you add in the Annihilator, an executor class Super Star Destroyer that was stolen by (mostly good)Pirates after the Battle of Endor. (Canon).

The new Mandator 6 dreadnought would be great though. Not as big as a Super Star Destroyer... but still huge.

Really going to need a sliding scale if they ever try to do all these ships.

To throw something else into the discussion - so far the FFG models have been pretty dang nice and although I don't play epic X-Wing, the 4 huge ships I bought look awesome in the bookshelf in my cube at work... if Armada does have a similar game mode as Epic XWing, you just might be able to find buyers for the model(s) if you only want the cards.

Also, I for one am content if Thrawn was the "something big" because I think that whole expansion throws so many new cool elements into Armada that it's a big deal.

5 hours ago, Squark said:

Going much bigger than the Raider would make the model rather impractical- The Huge ships in X-wing already rather unwieldy. A larger SSD would probably make more sense as a playmat intended for a special game-mode.

gawd if they ever do a 6 foot mat that would be a pretty perfect print for it.

Mel made this so it gives some scale for the ISD compared to the some larger ships including the FO SD and Dreadnought and the SSD.

That is a super generous sliding scale Mel used haha

3 minutes ago, codegnave said:

That is a super generous sliding scale Mel used haha

Yes, but I'd be fairly happy with that amount of a sliding scale if FFG went for it.

2 minutes ago, Animewarsdude said:

Yes, but I'd be fairly happy with that amount of a sliding scale if FFG went for it.

Me too, though id have nowhere to store it!

6 hours ago, codegnave said:

Me too, though id have nowhere to store it!

A first world problem I would be only too happy to have!

On 22/12/2017 at 8:19 AM, The Jabbawookie said:

But how many people will really want the model/a second model without the cards? When cards are a lot of the appeal (and I agree, they likely would be here,) people will gravitate towards just buying a new one.

I've bought components from box breakers or guys who just wanted the models for display.

It happens.

Mandator-IV Dreadnought. Want it. Need I say more?

FFG, can you hear me? It's big and it has nasty powerful weapons....

Maybe if we're lucky we'll get a release for Christmas ( 2018 )