Just now, ricefrisbeetreats said:

Flavor does not equal rules. Sometimes flavor has to give way to ease of gameplay.

I agree. I'd much rather have a balanced game instead of letting theme ruin the game.

I just think the mechanics in some cases create for weird mental images of how they work.

Just now, Undeadguy said:

Well it is just a game mechanic. It seems silly Vader can remove titles from ships as well, but that's the game we play.

I like my mechanics representative if not descriptive.

So nothing wrong with thinking that Darth Vader is an illegal street tagger, painting over signs with his own signature "Rebelz Suxorz" or whatever is just enough out-of-hip-style to be grossly inappropriate

But to me, after long periods of time, I see little quirks and foibles and modifications creep up into established protocols and systems... Yavaris is Yavaris because no-one does things the way the crew of Yavaris does it, based on Yavaris' systems. Further flavour addition to that is the why they do it that way. Perhaps Yavaris, when it was a young ship just cutting the teeth on its name and was a generic barebones old Nebulon-B Frigate, it was forced into numerous fighter engagements... So the crew just started getting better at fighter coordination... Which bred in some system changes and modifications to allow those things to grow in capability essentially organically. That's what makes them unique.

As a corrolarry to that, perhaps Salvation was forced to rely on its long range front battery a lot in its Ship-Youth. Perhaps it gained an experiemental weapons power flow system, or an enhanced targeting system... Perhaps it was a systems glitch that was otherwise un-reproduceable (a lot of Data in Star Wars seems to be stored rather than copied, after all)... Again, a subject of random chance and growth, and then evolution.

You'd not only have to transfer (or completely retrain) crew to operate in the same way, they would have to operate in the same systems with the same history to produce the same results... The very fact ships are named gives us an emotional connection to them. That means we empathise with them, and in some cases, we sympathise with them.

And to me. Darth Vader goes to the beating everliving heart of what makes these ships unique and then violates it... Not just destroys the ship, but cripples its identity and makes it routine... Takes from it all that sets it apart from its peers, and leaves it whimpering in mediocrity...

That sounds like Vader to me.

Just now, Undeadguy said:

I agree. I'd much rather have a balanced game instead of letting theme ruin the game.

I just think the mechanics in some cases create for weird mental images of how they work.

Oh, for sure. I just remember doing play testing and reporting for different game systems. There would be pages of rules so they could have the most accurate and realistic system that, honestly, wasn't very fun to play.

"Complexity is the currency with which you buy depth", as they say.

Ideally, you buy a lot of depth with just a little bit of complexity. I think Armada's movement rules are good example of that.

But there's always a tradeoff - more depth always requires more complexity, even if it's just a little bit, so the deepest well-designed systems are necessarily more complex than the shallowest. (Not the most complex - that moniker belongs to the most poorly designed systems. A bad game can make anything complicated). Every game has gotta decide where on the spectrum it wants to fall.

But, the best outcome is that different games exist, landing all along that spectrum! If you want to simulate simultaneous land/air/space battles with artillery and logistic support, then you probably play Battletech or something. If you want something you can pick up and play with a group of friends who are all new to it, you grab a board game. (Although probably not Twilight Imperium...) Armada falls somewhere inbetween, and each scratches a different itch.

I imagine the crew is a large part of what makes a ship unique. Salvation has a crack captain and gunnery team that know their ship's systems inside and out.

Then Vader goes on a murder-spree and the ship just isn't the same without the old team together anymore.

I agree with Dras. If you take everything literally you will never connect with the game lore.

What is doing Motti? How his presence makes ships tankier?

Leading shots? Why the **** they let you "restart" your attack?

DTT? Are we choosing between light flashes and removing the one we don't like?

I am able to connect with all those mechanic though lore just cause I don't take them literally. In its most ridiculous level: ships don't through dice.

However back to what matters:

What is doing Vader on a Raider?

8 minutes ago, ovinomanc3r said:

However back to what matters:

What is doing Vader on a Raider?

Anything he **** well wants...

3 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Anything he **** well wants...

Lol

Now I only need to gain the points from whatever Vader destroyed.

19 hours ago, jp82729 said:

Gets to be unnecessarily complicated, but at the very least, it seems like there should be different damage applied depending on the colliding ship sizes. For example:

Large x Large - deal both a face down damage card

Large x Medium - deal both a face down damage card

Large x Small - deal a face down damage card to the small ship, and deal one damage to the large ship (can be applied to shields if any remain)

Large x Flotilla - no damage to the large, deal one face up to the flotilla

I have two issues with this.

First, I could see it severely changing builds. With a distinct advantage to ramming or being rammed in a larger based ship would mean a shift towards larger ships overall. More mediums and large ships just flown at full speed with an effort towards ramming everything smaller. People on the receiving end of this would ditch smaller ships to avoid such effects.

Secondly, there are a lot of physics problems that would need to be considered. Your system may seem ok at first glance, but in reality it's not any better. In fact, once you start down this path, you might have even more people upset about the outcomes.

Mass is only part of the equation, speed or momentum is also a major factor. A CR90 running head long into the front of an ISD also traveling at full speed is going to be a completely different outcome (far more damage to both ships) than an ISD at speed 1 tapping the rear of a CR90 at speed 4.

Mass also has some interesting issues. A small ship could possible escape with relatively minor damage where as the larger ship could suffer much greater damage. Why? In a glancing blow type situation the smaller ship would simply bounce with minor damage due to the fact that it's easier to adjust the direction of momentum of a smaller mass ship. While the larger mass of the larger ship is harder to redirect meaning heavier damage.

Armor is another factor not being considered. How thick is the armor of an ISD? How structurally solid is the ISD? Does the CR90 have more armor or a stronger structure system? You could have a smaller ship designed for impacts and a larger craft with relatively paper thin armor.

Where they collide is also important. A Hammerhead smashing into the hanger bay of a larger ship would do far more damage to the larger ship. We can see how important the target of the collision is when the A-Wing does critical damage to a super star destroyer. Obviously the A-wing is way smaller. While the A-wing was destroyed, and based on size the damage to the SSD was minor in comparison. If you ditch the idea of relative comparison however, the A-wing does way more damage to the ISD than the A-wing sustains.

And now that we are trying to realistically model damage, why aren't we realistically modeling how ships would deflect off each other, or get stuck together?

I'm not saying your idea is bad, just saying it starts to open up a can of worms. And FFG loves to play with worms. Take a look at Garel's Honor. We have a simple collision damage system, and we have 1 card that modifies it. Complicate that damage system (multiple charts of what happens when ships of each size collide with each other size) and FFG would be able to release many more cards that create new exemptions. If your goal of making ramming more realistic is to reduce ramming occurrences, it could very well backfire. More people would be willing to ram with larger ships, and then FFG would create all kinds of exemption cards that make ramming more appealing to smaller ships. You could end up with a very complicated game of bumper boats.

19 hours ago, Undeadguy said:

Well it is just a game mechanic. It seems silly Vader can remove titles from ships as well, but that's the game we play.

You got a very good explanation by Drasnighta for it.

No game is perfect but I'm actually really happy with the game at the moment. Im hoping FFG have learned from the mess they have made of X Wing and continue to make the right choices for Armada.

On 10/27/2017 at 4:58 PM, xanderf said:

1. Okay, seriously, where ARE all the fighters coming from?
   Only really a problem for the Empire, as most Rebel fighters have hyperdrives, but seriously - so many squadrons of TIE Interceptors flying with a handful of Arquitens? HOW?! And especially for adapting the game for campaign rules - *oof*, it'd be nice to have had some kind of stat on the ship cards for some of the 'fluff' elements. (Number of squadrons embarked, for example.)

it gets easier if you think about a "squadron" as just a handy term, and that each base of fighters represents the actual number of fighters modeled on it, instead of a group of 12+. it also makes more sense that a single VCX, YT, Lambda, etc would replace 3 TIE's or [letter]-wings than one light freighter/shuttle replacing a dozen of them. it also helps make the Heroes make more sense.. Luke Skywalker and 2 wingmen getting some special ability makes more sense than luke skywalker and 11 regular pilots. it also helps explain why the heroes would by flying seperately.. Luke, Biggs, and Wedge each with wingmen flying around separately just would mean that Red squadron has broken up into separate combat elements.

6 minutes ago, mithril2098 said:

it gets easier if you think about a "squadron" as just a handy term, and that each base of fighters represents the actual number of fighters modeled on it, instead of a group of 12+. it also makes more sense that a single VCX, YT, Lambda, etc would replace 3 TIE's or [letter]-wings than one light freighter/shuttle replacing a dozen of them. it also helps make the Heroes make more sense.. Luke Skywalker and 2 wingmen getting some special ability makes more sense than luke skywalker and 11 regular pilots. it also helps explain why the heroes would by flying seperately.. Luke, Biggs, and Wedge each with wingmen flying around separately just would mean that Red squadron has broken up into separate combat elements.

I don't disagree.

The only problem with that thinking is that there are people out there who want to have an Imperial Star Destroyer with their full compliment of squadrons, and can't actually represent that in the game...

... let alone have two ISDs and their full compliments...

It also begs the question as to why there is only a single "Rogue Squadron"... When, with that thinking, there should be 3-4 Rogue "Elements"

There's just no definitive right way because it wasn't deisgned to be definitively one way or another, I feel.

there is Luke and Wedge, who are the leaders of Rogue squadron, which gets you 6 of the 12 when deployed. the "rogue squadron" element would be the less well known, but still elite, pilots.. like Nrin vkal, ibitsam, Plour, etc. and since Rogue Squadron usually had a high turnover, you take on a generic Xwing element to represent the newest pilots. or you take Biggs because why not?

there you go. the 4 Xwing hero's are all from Rogue squadron, or its predecessor Red squadron, in the canon (and the EU). so why not let them combined be that squadron, instead of splitting them up into 4 different ones?

the other fighter types generally have 3 'hero' versions (2 pilot name, 1 unit name) so tack a 4th generic version onto those and you have your historic squadrons.. which given all the named pilots came from the named units for their type, actually fits rather well. (the generic is to represent the fact most squadrons have some degree of new or less experienced pilots in them)

Right now, my only complaint with the game is a simple one from the games initial release.

Why do Vader and Luke have escort?

I get it, the Advanced and X-Wing have it, but in both cases they relied on OTHER ships to tank for them, Black squadron for Vader, and Biggs and Wedge for Luke.

15 hours ago, Gadgetron said:

Right now, my only complaint with the game is a simple one from the games initial release.

Why do Vader and Luke have escort?

I get it, the Advanced and X-Wing have it, but in both cases they relied on OTHER ships to tank for them, Black squadron for Vader, and Biggs and Wedge for Luke.

Ever since the Mithel incident, Vader hasn't trusted anyone to escort him!