How important is activation advantage in Legion? I haven't played enough to know yet, but atm I'm thinking not as important as it is in Armada. With so many long range weapons waiting to activate can backfire if your unit gets suppressed or loses too many minis to make it effective.

I think its more important to issue orders wisely and maybe even build so you can have better control (i.e. better odds) of what rank you pull from the bag.

Interested to hear people's thoughts on this.

On a related note, I've built several rebel lists (not played them all yet) and they have all ended up with 8 units. Just wondering if people are getting similar results or having more or less. Also how does this compare to imp builds? I'm guessing rebels will typically have 1 or 2 more activations due to their units being cheaper.

I agree that it's not as important as in Armada because it is somewhat mitigated by command cards. Yet if you can play your command hand wisely, having a healthy dose of activations does help a lot. In many cases, especially in early game, you want to go last to protect your valuable piece or just lure the enemy into disadvantageous position. That said, most of builds I theorycrafted had around 7-8 activations, but the one I ended up playing had 9 (Luke, 3 ATRT, 5x troops with various upgrades). I believe 8 to be standard, with higher activation list being infantry spam, and lower vehicle-focused. Also it seems beneficial to take 5 small units over 4 with extra trooper.

For the beginning, it's going to be easy to game activations. 3 AT-RT, Luke, and 6 troopers is really easy to abuse. You have 2 3 order commands, so you can give orders to the 3 AT-RT. Luke and the squads go in the bag, and now you have almost full control of your activations. You pull a trooper and you have 6 options. Or you can pick an AT-RT. So long as Luke is in Cover, you should be fine.

Once we get more Heavy units and Spec Ops, it will change the activation pool.

Imps can do it better. Vader, AT-ST, and 4-6 Stormtroopers. Always issue commands to the AT-ST and Vader, and now you can activate anything whenever you want.

Equipped corps units seem to be coming out to ~70-80 points, support at ~90 and leaders and vehicles in the 200-250 range. So it's not all that surprising to me that activation counts are really only affected by whether or not you're running heavy vehicles. The other units are all roughly even trades unless you're taking naked corps.

1 hour ago, Undeadguy said:

For the beginning, it's going to be easy to game activations. 3 AT-RT, Luke, and 6 troopers is really easy to abuse. You have 2 3 order commands, so you can give orders to the 3 AT-RT. Luke and the squads go in the bag, and now you have almost full control of your activations. You pull a trooper and you have 6 options. Or you can pick an AT-RT. So long as Luke is in Cover, you should be fine.

Yeah I was thinking along those lines - something extra to consider when list building.

In Armada having activation advantage means that you can always move last or your ship A after you opponents ship B. You can't do that in Legion as easily. Being able to move before you shoot means you don't need your opponent to move into range. And Legion has the standby action. All of these factors, I would say activation advantage isn't as big of a deal. But then the power level discrepancy be expensive and cheap units isn't as big of a deal.

However having more units to activate does allow you to move something last if you give it an order. Of course moving it first the next round will be a bit harder.

All in all the activation game in Legion is more complex that in Armada.

It matters certainly. Command cards help, but its still beneficial to be able to activate a model without reprisal and potentially activate it again the next turn before your opponent. I also think it will be important to start appreciating Dodge and Ready tokens to mitigate this. The latter is pretty easy to play around due to the prevalence of Range 3 but when you take into account compulsory moves and scenario, its a pretty important way to get work out of units that have to activate early.

4 hours ago, Undeadguy said:

For the beginning, it's going to be easy to game activations. 3 AT-RT, Luke, and 6 troopers is really easy to abuse. You have 2 3 order commands, so you can give orders to the 3 AT-RT. Luke and the squads go in the bag, and now you have almost full control of your activations. You pull a trooper and you have 6 options. Or you can pick an AT-RT. So long as Luke is in Cover, you should be fine.

Once we get more Heavy units and Spec Ops, it will change the activation pool.

Imps can do it better. Vader, AT-ST, and 4-6 Stormtroopers. Always issue commands to the AT-ST and Vader, and now you can activate anything whenever you want.

Return of the Jedi activates 2 units and Luke, not any 3 units. AT-ST+Vader is easier, but still only has 3 cards that can activate both units (New Ways to motivate them doesn't work on vehicles). 3 turns might be enough to get a decisive advantage, though.

22 minutes ago, Squark said:

Return of the Jedi activates 2 units and Luke, not any 3 units. AT-ST+Vader is easier, but still only has 3 cards that can activate both units (New Ways to motivate them doesn't work on vehicles). 3 turns might be enough to get a decisive advantage, though.

Right, should have checked who gets activated haha

Not at all important, yet sometimes very important.

In Armada because you had to shoot move the ability to waste an activation was important as you could force your opponent to come to you. After which your opponent just had to wait and hope. Legion allows you to perform many combinations of actions on your activation. I think for the most part Legion is the opposite of Armada, you can activate your two AT-STs and not feel like they are vulnerable for eternity.

I also have found that the changing deployment zones can be trouble for some armies, the last thing some armies want is to deploy in opposite corners. You can be as cleaver as, yet those AT-RT's way over there will have to go into the random pool unless you have long range communicators.

Other times you may find you wish you had managed to draw a different token than you did.

I've only played 2 full games as the empire so far. In both games, I've had 2 fewer units than my opponent, so two fewer activations. I have no experience with Armada, but I'm noticing a significant disadvantage in relation to the objectives with fewer activations.

My opponent has had an easier time putting pressure on my troopers close to objectives with multiple ATRTs and the air speeder, which frees up his troopers to focus on objectives.

Maybe I'm just terrible at making good enough use out of Vader and the ATST, but I'm finding myself at a disadvantage so far with 2 fewer activations.

I think the action economy is going to be more important than activation economy.