Just now, Drasnighta said:

You see, I've looked at that sort of thing... But in the end, I find it can't reliably kill 3 enemy flotillas to make it "worth its points".

Mostly because detaching it for flotilla hunting duty means I'm thusly lacking that firepower in the main battle, and it tends to mess up my activation order for that main battle, too...

My greatest success with Flotilla Hunting was a General Organa fuelled Flotilla itself... Since it could use a single Engineering command to strip its Damage cards from Face-ramming enemy Flotillas...

Ive had great success with that build, a couple games it took out 3 Gozanti's.

I could also use it as a objective ship or as a really fast and manouverable "go pick up tokens" ship, didnt have to worry about obstacles or obstruction.

With intel officer and trc also makes a nice raider or arquitens hunter.

27 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

That's me Though I'm not refuting so much as questioning lol

Specifically relay in this quote.... how is relay being abused outside it's original design?

to quote FFG,

"What will you do with your Wave V squadrons? Will you use their new abilities to run bomber wings with ships that need to hold back at distance?"

Relay was designed to activate squads where ships wouldn't be safe to do so. Is there a way to abuse this?

I want it nerfed because I don't like it. Just as simple as that lol

25 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

Super Pickle: Correct on both counts. Definitely uses flotilla padding. Relay is there, though usually largely because it's attached to Strategic, which of course enables this kind of list.

Strategic and flotilla padding are critical components of this list, we both agree here I think.

26 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

Sloane: There are very different ways to build for Sloane, so it's pretty hard to make an empirical assessment here. But based on Tokra's data (which, I don't have the lists, and can't speak to how he made his categorizations), it looks like 2/5 top Sloane lists had flotilla padding (so @Tokra-style builds rather than QF-centric ones). He doesn't report anything about Relay/Strategic, but anecdotally I've only seen it be worth including in a QF-less Sloane build, for a number of reasons I won't get into here, so it's reasonable to speculate that Lambdas were only present in 2/5.

I don't disagree, I think this archetype of list is less about Relay, Strategic, and flotilla padding than any other "top" list. Jendon is very common and I've always seen his Relay get used to tremendous effect. I'm also curious where you're getting this "2/5 top Sloane list" data. Where is this? I must've missed it.

30 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

Yavaris: No idea, not enough data here. The mere inclusion of Yavaris does not characterize any particular archetype right now, partly because it's so flexible and partly because it's main archetype (Rieekan Ace Holes) is still in flux after The Nerfening. Four of these 22 lists are reported to have Yavaris, and none says anything about Relay/Strategic or flotillas. Probably, they all include at least one BCC platform. I've also seen Jamming Fields making a resurgence, so maybe that's in some too. Beyond that, there's really no basis in this data to conclude that all four include 3+ flotillas.

Disagree quite a bit here on an anecdotal basis since I have no access to this "data" you're referring to. I'm mainly referring to the popular Gallant Haven + Yavaris build where you see 3 flotillas and 2 VCXs. In my opinion not only is this the most optimal configuration for the Rieekan Ace Holes build, but it's also one of the "top" lists. In my experience being able to abuse the Relay from the 2 VCXs is a huge boon for Yavaris and the 3 flotillas can play the run-away game without having to worry about being in range of squadrons. Not only that, but FCTs with the Strategic is also a huge strength for this ship configuration.

8 minutes ago, GalacticFister said:

Strategic and flotilla padding are critical components of this list, we both agree here I think.

I don't disagree, I think this archetype of list is less about Relay, Strategic, and flotilla padding than any other "top" list. Jendon is very common and I've always seen his Relay get used to tremendous effect. I'm also curious where you're getting this "2/5 top Sloane list" data. Where is this? I must've missed it.

Disagree quite a bit here on an anecdotal basis since I have no access to this "data" you're referring to. I'm mainly referring to the popular Gallant Haven + Yavaris build where you see 3 flotillas and 2 VCXs. In my opinion not only is this the most optimal configuration for the Rieekan Ace Holes build, but it's also one of the "top" lists. In my experience being able to abuse the Relay from the 2 VCXs is a huge boon for Yavaris and the 3 flotillas can play the run-away game without having to worry about being in range of squadrons. Not only that, but FCTs with the Strategic is also a huge strength for this ship configuration.

I'm talking about Tokra's summary that was referenced in the post you were responding to.

Which shows Rieekan aces showing up twice, once with an MC80 and once with a Pelta. The Pelta list probably had three or four trailing flotillas; the MC80 one likely would've suffered if it brought more than 2, but I can't say for sure. Regardless, Rieekan aces showed up twice in 22 top-table lists, neither included GH from what I can see, and the archetype overall is definitely showing a decline since the nerf. Those two Dodonna Yavaris lists are probably similar Dodonna bomber lists, so let's call it 4/22. It's certainly still strong, but nowhere near the juggernaut it was at 2017 Worlds.

Everybody's talking about jamming and this is the only way i can imagine it!

A few thoughts on solutions.

Actiation advantage & first/last. Add a rule

• The last ship to activate in a turn may not be the first ship to activate the following turn unless it is the only ship left in a player's fleet.

This won't be a problem if you are second player or first player (without an activation advantage). If you are first player and have an activation advantage of more than one then the first/last can still happen but the more common one ship advantage would reduce the frequency in games. It would also slightly tone down BT Avenger.

Relay - Change it to extend a ship's squadron range if the Lambda/VCX is within activation range of the ship. Eg close-medium from ship to relay (boosted comms can improve this) then normal relay range on top of that.

Yavarris - not really needed in my opinion but a gentle tweak would be to limit it to 2 squadrons a turn so no Ray Antilies or stored or comms net token to get three double taps.

5 hours ago, geek19 said:

But to actually answer your Relay and 1st/Last concerns: is that significantly affecting play so much that entire lists and tournaments are shaped around those (to the extent that Rieekan aces was, I mean)? I'm not sure it is, but I think when we start collecting Regionals data (someone put up the @Baltanok signal!) We can see?

Will track on upcoming regionals. Store champs showed relay appearing about 40% imp, 25% rebel. Imp top finishers were only 29% but winners are always a small sample size.

I can't separate strategic from relay. Doesn't appear to be OP to me, but we'll see what happens at regionals. (Imps taking it more may be because of the superior relay squad, but that's speculation on my part.)

6 hours ago, Undeadguy said:

Well I'm running 6 activations and winning consistently with no squads. And the MC30 swarm experiences the same thing.

I'm also really ******* tired of playing games and facing down an MC80 or ISD and a bunch of flots (not to cut down anyone who is running that), but it's just not fun anymore.

In regards to Relay, I think that's total BS. Freaking hate it. I want a nerf out of spite more than anything.

And ramming needs to be nerfed with ET. Exhaust ET when you overlap ship. That's just gamey.

Hmmm....I think I can see the problem, here.

Quote

I'm running...no squads.

I...Freaking hate [relay].

I dunno, there. Kinda feels like if relay gets nerfed, you'd have an issue with 'Rogue', next? OTOH, some of us love that the game can feel a bit like WW2 carrier battles, with swarms of fighters taking the lumbering battleships down.

And relay is so easy to break - the relay squadrons tend towards being fragile, and are SLOOOOW, which is a real problem. If you leashed them to their carrier (which can usually outrun them easily enough), it would completely defeat their point.

If - ***IF*** - tournament results seem to point to an actual game-balance problem with relay (and I haven't seen anything like that), then a far more subtle nerf could be done that would have much the same effect of reducing its impact without crippling it. Simply prohibit squadrons with 'Relay' from being themselves activated by squadron commands. Those squadrons are then limited to movement in the squadron phase, and cannot combo in an attack then (which might mean Jendon needs a price reduction), or they could attack and not move...letting their charge wander away from them. They also lose ship-based squadron buffs, including buffs to firepower and/or speed. But they retain the critical ability of letting you make decent use of your squadrons at distance from the rest of your fleet.

3 hours ago, Drasnighta said:

You see, I've looked at that sort of thing... But in the end, I find it can't reliably kill 3 enemy flotillas to make it "worth its points".

Mostly because detaching it for flotilla hunting duty means I'm thusly lacking that firepower in the main battle, and it tends to mess up my activation order for that main battle, too...

My greatest success with Flotilla Hunting was a General Organa fuelled Flotilla itself... Since it could use a single Engineering command to strip its Damage cards from Face-ramming enemy Flotillas...

I run the Home One title consistently. I love seeing flotillas across the table.

I tend to lose my own to (apparently) Dras-style counterplay. Mine mostly die to ramming

My own experience with activations has been funny.

At one stage 3 ships was normal, 4 seemed like a lot. Then we went to wave 5 and it seemed you needed 4 min and 5 if you wanted to be competitive.

At present we seem to be on 6 ships to be competitive. So of course we are seeing 7 ships creep in. Lots of flotillas are being bought.

I would ask where will the madness end? But then our nationals was won by double mc80 ackbar with mon squads 2 flots.

I'm coming to this thread at the end of my day and sort of responding to all of this, so bear with me here.

Number of Activations has always been a key mechanic in Armada. Yes, at some of the early stages, 3 or 4 activations seemed normal. To my mind, the emergence of the Clonisher in wave-2 really put the power of activations squarely in the mind of everyone. I don't think there are limits on this, in that if you do run 6 or 7 activations, they tend to be small ships that can either be shredded by squadrons easily or pulverized by really big ships. Any changes to flotillas strictly speaking don't really affect this mechanic, and I don't think this mechanic is going away. Good or bad, right or wrong, its a fairly key mechanic as to what it means to be Armada.

I am in the "relay should still be in range of the activating ship" camp, though, as it makes it too easy to play a diffuse list. Although strategic is powerful and gets used in a lot of different places, I think for the cost you have to devote to the squadron to get versus what you could invest those points into in other squadrons, the trade-off is fair, and provides a fairly important counter dynamic to the squadron game and list design more generally. So I like what it does for list-building more generally and for the strategic depth of the game.

Beyond that, I remember seeing a comment about flotilla spam being boring, and I'd tend to agree with that. I seem to always end up with at least 2 flotillas, and I frequently find myself coming back to 3 flotillas as a way to get more activations. What we've got are a ton of factors that work in favor of flotilla spam. One of the big ones is relay, so just having a relay adjustment that brings flotillas a bit closer to the action introduces a more commiserate risk/reward. Beyond that, I am not at all sure I've seen enough data more broadly or gotten a big sense in my own experience about changing anything else.

I have always lagged behind in activations compared to the larger community. I ran 2 for a long time before flotillas and then moved up to 3 by default.

For our CC campaign, I’m starting with 4and I feel like I wasted too much on flotillas. Though intellectually, I get that my chosen fleets really wants 4minimum and 5 more conveniently.

Just now, Vergilius said:

Good points, #classicben

I think you've kind of outlined around the thing that actually concerns me every time I see some of these overly heavy-handed nerf ideas floated: the game is mostly fine, and the fact that we see very diverse fleet archetypes at the top tables is testament to the fact that, if there are balance issues, their impact on outcomes is relatively minor compared to all the other factors like matchups, player skill, luck, and so forth. Every element of the game is in tension with every other element, and counters keep each other in check at a very fine level.

If you nerf flotillas so hard that they're not worth bringing anymore in most matchups, yeah you might achieve the intended first-order effect of tuning down the boring activation padding, but what will be the second- and third-order effects? I can tell you some of them, because I remember Wave 2:

DeMSU will run rampant and unchecked because nobody will be bringing the strongest ubiquitous counter to the Demo triple-tap (a flotilla blocker)...
which means the extinction of any archetype with a major keystone ship...
which means no more large ships at all, no heavily-upgraded medium ships, even less utility from support ships, and completely untenable carriers...
which means all swarms all the time and no carrier-based squadron lists.

This is obviously an exaggerated, overly-dire illustration. But if you get too wrapped around the axle over relatively minor balance issues, it's easy to lose sight of the problems that the bugaboo du jure was introduced to solve or counter in the first place, and you run the risk of precipitating a positive feedback loop where each successive "fix" breaks two more things by applying too-heavy nerfs.

This is why I tend to err on the side of "we're all fine here" in most of these discussions. Not because I think the game is perfect by any means, but because I think it's in a pretty **** good state, and am reticent to significantly alter the fine balance FFG has struck by introducing major systemic changes. I don't think any of the frequently-raised issues with the game are significant enough to warrant the risk of the potential consequences of nerfing squadrons or flotillas into the dirt, for example.

Again, not saying the game is perfect or that there aren't probably good fixes that could be introduced. I just generally counsel caution.

/rant

That got a lot longer and rantier than I meant, heh. Sorry.

Good point though. Without flotillas to even out activations we go straight back to gencon special and clonisher builds because any amount of bombers wont help because they will get out activated until the carrier is dead.

4 hours ago, xanderf said:

Hmmm....I think I can see the problem, here.

I dunno, there. Kinda feels like if relay gets nerfed, you'd have an issue with 'Rogue', next? OTOH, some of us love that the game can feel a bit like WW2 carrier battles, with swarms of fighters taking the lumbering battleships down.

And relay is so easy to break - the relay squadrons tend towards being fragile, and are SLOOOOW, which is a real problem. If you leashed them to their carrier (which can usually outrun them easily enough), it would completely defeat their point.

If - ***IF*** - tournament results seem to point to an actual game-balance problem with relay (and I haven't seen anything like that), then a far more subtle nerf could be done that would have much the same effect of reducing its impact without crippling it. Simply prohibit squadrons with 'Relay' from being themselves activated by squadron commands. Those squadrons are then limited to movement in the squadron phase, and cannot combo in an attack then (which might mean Jendon needs a price reduction), or they could attack and not move...letting their charge wander away from them. They also lose ship-based squadron buffs, including buffs to firepower and/or speed. But they retain the critical ability of letting you make decent use of your squadrons at distance from the rest of your fleet.

I have some observations on this. My argument against Relay as it's understood ISD that it makes the only relevant counterplay full squadron domination in return. Because of the way squadrons work with relay, it allows the enemy to play without real counterplay to the carriers themselves. Even in the movies where squadrons frequently fly and fight lightyears away without carrier support, it is still important that they place the commanders in danger. That cannot and does not happen with a decently flown flotilla relay list.

1 hour ago, thecactusman17 said:

I have some observations on this. My argument against Relay as it's understood ISD that it makes the only relevant counterplay full squadron domination in return. Because of the way squadrons work with relay, it allows the enemy to play without real counterplay to the carriers themselves. Even in the movies where squadrons frequently fly and fight lightyears away without carrier support, it is still important that they place the commanders in danger. That cannot and does not happen with a decently flown flotilla relay list.

I think you are remembering a different "Star Wars" than I watched. Vader was the only Imperial commander of any significance I can recall being anywhere near a fighter battle. Usually the TIEs were just...sent off on their own on patrol, or into that asteroid field, or around the Death Star, etc.

And he's the only commander we have in the game that even climbed INTO a fighter! I mean, Leia? Dodonna? They were both listening with concern to radio chatter they had no interaction with, on a moon on the opposite side of an entire planet from the space battle. Mon Mothma? She doesn't seem to have even been at any of the major battles at all (sure, she gave a few briefings before a fight, but then disappeared before any action started).

The degree that squadrons rely on ships in this game feels...a bit odd, really, compared to the movies.

10 hours ago, xanderf said:

the relay squadrons tend towards being fragile, and are SLOOOOW

What? They're some of the toughest squads in the game, and I know the Empire shudders at taking a speed 3 squadron, but that's par for the course in the Rebellion.

Really confused by this one.

17 hours ago, Undeadguy said:

I think Relay, ramming (forgot to add that) and activations should be nerfed in some manner because you can abuse/exploit them outside of their original design. BT Avenger I really hate, but if you fix activations you soft nerf BTA.

I agree on Relay, but I always get a chuckle when ramming and activations get mentioned in the same breath for fixes. Activation padding is definitely a thing, but of late I've seen it having diminishing returns. Most lists seem to be fine in the 4-5 activation range. Still, I completely understand the complains. I hate how ubiquitous the flotilla has become.

However, if you actually want to do something about flotilla activation padding, ramming is already a legitimate solution. Flotillas are explicitly designed to be vulnerable to ramming. Yet you want to nerf ramming because...it annoys you? A ram spam list has won exactly one Regional, did it with a fairly low point total (wasn't it only 21 points), did it at a venue with fairly low turnout, and that was prior to the Rieekan nerf. There is zero legitimate justification behind changing the ramming mechanic from a balance perspective and in fact may cause a further imbalance in favor of flotillas. Stop trying to take away my ET ramming. I like pancaking flotillas.

25 minutes ago, Truthiness said:

Activation padding is definitely a thing, but of late I've seen it having diminishing returns. Most lists seem to be fine in the 4-5 activation range.

Local meta most fleets are running 2-3 activations and still beating lists with 5-7. I've been having a giggle with 2 Mc80 and 2 ISD lists.

12 hours ago, xanderf said:

Hmmm....I think I can see the problem, here.

Sorry but that's just not true. My squadronless fleet has faced Relay once so my dislike for Relay and the fact I run no squads are unrelated.

I hate Relay because I've abused the **** out of it.

42 minutes ago, Truthiness said:

I agree on Relay, but I always get a chuckle when ramming and activations get mentioned in the same breath for fixes. Activation padding is definitely a thing, but of late I've seen it having diminishing returns. Most lists seem to be fine in the 4-5 activation range. Still, I completely understand the complains. I hate how ubiquitous the flotilla has become.

However, if you actually want to do something about flotilla activation padding, ramming is already a legitimate solution. Flotillas are explicitly designed to be vulnerable to ramming. Yet you want to nerf ramming because...it annoys you? A ram spam list has won exactly one Regional, did it with a fairly low point total (wasn't it only 21 points), did it at a venue with fairly low turnout, and that was prior to the Rieekan nerf. There is zero legitimate justification behind changing the ramming mechanic from a balance perspective and in fact may cause a further imbalance in favor of flotillas. Stop trying to take away my ET ramming. I like pancaking flotillas.

I dislike ET ram because you can abuse it. It doesn't need to win consistently, or be the number 1 fleet. It's gamey because you can spend 47 points to deal 2 undisputed hull damage to any target you want. That's half an MC30. It's a broken mechanic and just because you enjoy it doesn't mean it should be allowed. That's equivalent of me saying Rhymer shouldn't be nerfed because I'm having success with it.

More importantly, it's simply not fun to play against. You have no reaction to it. Especially when you play Madine and can whip a speed 4 CR90+RBD+ET into a ship and ram it.

3 minutes ago, Undeadguy said:

Sorry but that's just not true. My squadronless fleet has faced Relay once so my dislike for Relay and the fact I run no squads are unrelated.

I hate Relay because I've abused the **** out of it.

I can't say I hate Relay but I know that it's easily abused because I do it too. I don't see anything wrong with requiring the relay squad to be in range of the activating ship and think that would solve everyone's complaints about it.

So I have to feel that the game is in a really good place now. However if activation remains an issue my solution would be to hand the player with fewer ships initiative and do away with point bids or retain it when there is a tie in the number of activations. This still gives an advantage to the player with more activations in that they will have scope to activate multiple ships after the other player but the layer with fewer ships will not be first lasted putting a crimp on things like avenger or demo.

20 minutes ago, Megatronrex said:

I can't say I hate Relay but I know that it's easily abused because I do it too. I don't see anything wrong with requiring the relay squad to be in range of the activating ship and think that would solve everyone's complaints about it.

I honestly think everyone would agree Relay should be in range of the ship activating through it. If we don't have 100% consensus, it's pretty close.