Cannot Get Your Ship Out! January Articles

By geek19, in Star Wars: Armada

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working now, thanks :)

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1 minute ago, Marzaums said:

working now, thanks :)

good, no idea what happened earlier

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Great article! One of the tips I've been giving people asking for advice on fleets for regionals is to at least play stuff you've played a lot, ideally a list you've played many times against a variety of other lists. If I were break winning down to four areas - list building, play skill, dice luck, and matchup - then I would probably put list building as number 2 or 3, but definitely not 1. Play skill by far is the most important, and you can't work on your play skill if you're constantly playing completely different lists because it becomes hard to judge some losses for the biggest factor of those four.

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15 minutes ago, comatose said:

You can't work on your play skill if you're constantly playing completely different lists because it becomes hard to judge some losses for the biggest factor of those four.

This. My game play has markedly improved when I stopped list hopping every week or so. And or bringing untested lists to tournaments...

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21 minutes ago, TaeSWXW said:

Speaking of bids - is there a record of Regionals bids so far this season?

I was wondering if @Baltanok could do averages, but to my knowledge there is not one of those just yet. I'd be very curious about that, given how high some of the bids were that I saw in Indy.

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46 minutes ago, Snipafist said:

I was wondering if @Baltanok could do averages, but to my knowledge there is not one of those just yet. I'd be very curious about that, given how high some of the bids were that I saw in Indy.

Overall, the average bid was in the 4-5 range. Mountain View and ND were on the high end, I'm thinking around 8ish?

But that's average. There were lots of 0bids, and usually at least one bid in the high teens per regional. Highest bid I saw was 28. Oh, and there didn't seem to be a strong correlation between bid and result.

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1 hour ago, Baltanok said:

Overall, the average bid was in the 4-5 range. Mountain View and ND were on the high end, I'm thinking around 8ish?

But that's average. There were lots of 0bids, and usually at least one bid in the high teens per regional. Highest bid I saw was 28. Oh, and there didn't seem to be a strong correlation between bid and result.

Did a little extra crunching:

Capture.JPG

Doesn't tell us much since I missed the fleet compositions on the first run and I was (too lazy/feeling too guilty about not working) to go back and add them.

We can plainly see that the max bid goes up for the top 4 but the average top 4 bid isn't significantly higher than the average for top 8.

What is interesting is that both Rebels and Imperials have a spike in bid size for second place. Furthermore, Imperial bids seem higher across the range while Rebel bids are higher just in the top 4. I'd also feel confident saying that Imperial bids are generally higher than Rebel bids.

Anecdotally, the bid size definitely seems to be regional. Seeing how big they were in Fargo leaves me feeling confident that anyone playing at the FFGC will need 10+ if they really want first player.

Edit: could all just be bunk though. We're working with a pretty worthless sample size.

Edited by TaeSWXW
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13 minutes ago, TaeSWXW said:

Did a little extra crunching:

Capture.JPG

Doesn't tell us much since I missed the fleet compositions on the first run and I was (too lazy/feeling too guilty about not working) to go back and add them.

We can plainly see that the max bid goes up for the top 4 but the average top 4 bid isn't significantly higher than the average for top 8.

What is interesting is that both Rebels and Imperials have a spike in bid size for second place. Furthermore, Imperial bids seem higher across the range while Rebel bids are higher just in the top 4. I'd also feel confident saying that Imperial bids are generally higher than Rebel bids.

Anecdotally, the bid size definitely seems to be regional. Seeing how big they were in Fargo leaves me feeling confident that anyone playing at the FFGC will need 10+ if they really want first player.

Edit: could all just be bunk though. We're working with a pretty worthless sample size.

Does bid tell us anything about winning and losing though? Just curious

Posted at
5 minutes ago, geek19 said:

Does bid tell us anything about winning and losing though? Just curious

My gut feeling is that the bids we're seeing are more aligned to the list that won and not a factor in winning-losing. The Rebel median for winners was 0 after all and if I recall correctly most of those are GHY-type builds.

Imperials on the other hand rely on BTA or Demo which are greatly boosted by first player, thus higher bids.

I really think it comes down to getting the bid you need for the list you're building. Seems like a basic conclusion but if you're bringing a last-first'ing list you need to secure that bid. If you can win as a second player then it looks like you can show up with no bid and be okay. #duh

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Garm had no bid because bids are for chumps without Defiance and good Second Player objectives

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1 minute ago, BiggsIRL said:

Garm had no bid because bids are for chumps without Defiance and good Second Player objectives

That's how I design my fleets, yup.

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12 minutes ago, geek19 said:

http://cannotgetyourshipout.blogspot.com/2018/01/monster-truck-madness.html

Quick writeup for Monsta Trux for Thursday. Happy Shipsmas Eve, everyone!

Obligatory shoutout to @GiledPallaeon who will be running the Vassal Monster Trucks tournament. Please pass along your experiences with Monster Trucks so we/he can make any adjustments necessary to the format. At it's heart it's goofy, of course, but it should be goofy that's reasonably fair. The margin of victory parameters getting doubled seems easy to do for tournament points, for example, but objective points get weird.

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1 hour ago, Snipafist said:

OH MAN MONSTER TRUCKS IS GOING TO BE SO MUCH FUN. It would be a shame if someone went and wrote an article about flotilla spam and why it's bad to harsh that mood.

I have to agree. It is a hard decision to balance the activation advantage economy. I like the sound of Flotillas can't be Objective ships or pick up objectives. Most wanted has been dominating the red objectives for the most part. Relay also needs that slight nerf/tweak to be at range of a ship so they have to be close or their relay squads aren't doing much.

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I'll give you a like for your lengthy rant, but the only thing that screams at me from that data is not to bring 2+ large or 2+ medium if you wanna win anything.

I'm the old man telling you to get off my space station ya noobs. Gigidy gigity git gud. Start using the tools the makers gave ya and thank them. Poppin' flotillas is like shooting womp rats in my T-16 back home. Flotillas so not concern me, dudes.

(In all seriousness, my thoughts are that the tabling rule and simple relay fix are what are needed now. That would be a HUGE change. Don't go pushing too hard on this. A super-nerf done quickly isn't what this game needs. We need slow love. Slow, passionate love.)

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12 hours ago, Snipafist said:

[...] It would be a shame if someone went and wrote an article about flotilla spam and why it's bad to harsh that mood. [...]

Great article! I would like to add another problem to those described by you:

Flotilla spams are not merely activation padding. Flotilla spams are also activations that way more often than other ships lack a specific timing and are therefore very, very easy (in fact boring) to play. I think we can agree that the activation game of armada contributes a lot to its tactical depth . Especially in the early game quite often all normal ships like to be activated as late as possible. And here we see hard decisions in the activation order. Hard decisions that contribute so much to the depth and fun of the game.

Flotilla spams on the other hand are sooooo easy! You simply postpone the one (sometimes two) activations that really matter by flotilla activation padding. Then the big hit comes. In late game, the big bang comes first, the unimportant flotts last. An universal recipe for flott spam use. However, the existence of a viable universal recipe is in itself a flaw! In this aspect of the game, there are no more real decisions to make that are specific to the match you are playing at the moment. The activation part of the game which is meant to be a core contributer to its tactical depth has (to some extent) de facto been neutralized .

Edited by Darth Veggie