56 minutes ago, CaribbeanNinja said:

I've only ready the first post, so I'm not sure anyone has mentioned this.

The reason I play is fun . Armada has always been fun for me and my friends. The differentiation of "casual" and "competitive" is interesting to me, as I don't know a different set of actual rules for each. I've only played the actual 300 then 400 then CC rules. There is always a chance that fleets have bad matchups. It is part of the game IMO.

The minute you start trying to come up with two fleets to engage each other beforehand, I think that is a different game altogether.

Fun should be the reason anyone plays. That being said, there is something vaguely disappointing when you invest 40-60 points in anti squad upgrades, anti squad fighters, intel, escort, etc then a significant number of your matches don't have any fighters. Most fleets with any amount of anti squad tech could easily outbid just by not counting the cards they are unlikely to use.

Best example is IG-88. He is an excellent fighter, but if your opponent doesn't have any squads, you just spent all those points for an a-wing. Hence, very few fleets run him.

The only real two options are to either penalize no squad play, or to encourage squad play.

5 minutes ago, AdmiralYor said:

Fun should be the reason anyone plays. That being said, there is something vaguely disappointing when you invest 40-60 points in anti squad upgrades, anti squad fighters, intel, escort, etc then a significant number of your matches don't have any fighters. Most fleets with any amount of anti squad tech could easily outbid just by not counting the cards they are unlikely to use.

Best example is IG-88. He is an excellent fighter, but if your opponent doesn't have any squads, you just spent all those points for an a-wing. Hence, very few fleets run him.

The only real two options are to either penalize no squad play, or to encourage squad play.

Part of fleet building, and reading your area in my opinion. That part is still very fun to me. And if you do bring IG-88. Heck yeah for you, but you do need a plan in the current no squad meta we're seeing.

2 hours ago, AdmiralYor said:

Best example is IG-88. He is an excellent fighter, but if your opponent doesn't have any squads, you just spent all those points for an a-wing.

an untouchable one that you don't need to command ?

2 hours ago, AdmiralYor said:

Fun should be the reason anyone plays.

I do it for money. You cannot imagine how dissapointed I feel. ?

Thanks for all the replies and kind suggestions, i really enjoyed reading them. Something i realized while doing so is that i am just more of a tactician than a strategist and that i also dont really like to invest much time into a game beyond the actual playing time.

Its why i enjoyed (and still do, if i can find a player) the old Star Wars Miniatures Game from WOTC so much. Yeah it was balanced crappy IF you played it competitively (at the end of the games run there were like 5 competitive squads) and some combinations were quite broken but for casual games, scenarios and openly constructed matches its one of the coolest games ever in my experience. You just sit down, choose a map and squad and then the game is completely decided by tactical decisions since firing solutions, cover and unit interactions pretty much decide everything. That is if you have a balanced squad to begin with, but thats easy to achieve since pretty much all the figures are on the same powerlevel except for the 5% that were considered "meta" and tournament-playable. So basically, from a "competitive" point of view the game was complete horseshit but for "casual" play it gave you immense amounts of freedom since pretty much every figure in the star wars universe exists and all the gameplay is decided by actual tactical decisions. Of course there was squadbuilding, but there was no customiziation at all which allowed to you really get to know your units.

Something that i learned from a lot strategy games now is that true tactical competition only starts when both players perfectly know each others units and capabilities, something which is very hard to achieve in Armada, since every unit can be customized and you never get a sense of true mastery of certain units since every matchup is completely different. Thats cool from a totally different perspective but it puts more focus on unit selection than on unit mastery. When both players really know their forces and also know the opponents forces, thats when the mind-games start and true competition gegins IMO. And thats what i find interesting.

In too many games of Armada i have a feeling of "I need to pratice more, i didnt see this coming" or "I should have looked up how to counter A or B". I feel like still being in the phase of getting to know each unit (since there are endless combination possibilities) and it never seems to end ? Its probably because i have the intuitive approach to try to get to know all the stuff in order to be able to take all tactical factors into consideration. But i should probably just focus on a few specific ships or fleets. But then you just get stomped on a tournament because you didnt know how to counter A or B. So experience is incredibly important in this game and plays a much bigger factor than smart decisions.

So to some extent (!) i really dislike that experience trumps clever intuitive thinking so much. Yeah i know, like with all things experience and practice make up the biggest part, but i dunno. Maybe thats not what i want to be the BIGGEST factor in a tactical game? I wanna feel like Thrawn, when he used a cloaked ship to fire "through" a planetary shield. I want a mindgame where both players have to outsmart their opponent because their forces are on par, not a pretty much predefined outcome that is just a result of fleet composition, pregame choices and experience. Armada feels much more like a strategy game that for the bigger part is decided before combat begins and much less like a tactical game.

56 minutes ago, >kkj said:

In   to  o many g  ames of Armada  i have a fe  eling of ...., i di  dnt see this com  ing  "

I’m pretty much the same. A couple years ago I posted a thread about the game not “clicking” with me because I couldn’t figure out what elements were dictating the outcome. I would win or loose and have no idea why. Might be an interesting read for you.

So I think something that should always be mentioned when these sorts of discussions come up is how player psychographics influence both our perception and experience of these games and also how it influences the way we think about and communicate those experiences.

This article ( https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-revisited-2006-03-20 ), even though it's discussing Magic: The Gathering, holds up for pretty much any game. Different players want different things from games, and it can be very difficult for players coming from different psychographic archetypes to effectively communicate to one another about a game because of how different the perspectives are. I'm somewhere between a Tuner Spike and an Analyst Spike (generally your quintessential tournament players are Spikes of one kind or another).

The discussion of why Spike plays is pretty bang on for me:

"So why does Spike play? Spikes plays to prove something , primarily to prove how good he is. You see, Spike sees the game as a mental challenge by which he can define and demonstrate his abilities. Spike gets his greatest joy from winning because his motivation is using the game to show what he is capable of. Anything less than success is a failure because that is the yardstick he is judging himself against."

For players from other perspectives, it can often look like all we (Spikes) care about is winning (hence WAAC as a term) but really it's often more about what that win is indicative of rather than the victory itself. In a similar vein, someone coming from the position of Johnny, who want to use the game as a form of self-expression, can often find their concerns being dismissed because the players from different perspectives don't relate to them on a fundamental level.

1 hour ago, >kkj said:

Thanks for all the replies and kind suggestions, i really enjoyed reading them. Something i realized while doing so is that i am just more of a tactician than a strategist and that i also dont really like to invest much time into a game beyond the actual playing time.

Its why i enjoyed (and still do, if i can find a player) the old Star Wars Miniatures Game from WOTC so much. Yeah it was balanced crappy IF you played it competitively (at the end of the games run there were like 5 competitive squads) and some combinations were quite broken but for casual games, scenarios and openly constructed matches its one of the coolest games ever in my experience. You just sit down, choose a map and squad and then the game is completely decided by tactical decisions since firing solutions, cover and unit interactions pretty much decide everything. That is if you have a balanced squad to begin with, but thats easy to achieve since pretty much all the figures are on the same powerlevel except for the 5% that were considered "meta" and tournament-playable. So basically, from a "competitive" point of view the game was complete horseshit but for "casual" play it gave you immense amounts of freedom since pretty much every figure in the star wars universe exists and all the gameplay is decided by actual tactical decisions. Of course there was squadbuilding, but there was no customiziation at all which allowed to you really get to know your units.

Something that i learned from a lot strategy games now is that true tactical competition only starts when both players perfectly know each others units and capabilities, something which is very hard to achieve in Armada, since every unit can be customized and you never get a sense of true mastery of certain units since every matchup is completely different. Thats cool from a totally different perspective but it puts more focus on unit selection than on unit mastery. When both players really know their forces and also know the opponents forces, thats when the mind-games start and true competition gegins IMO. And thats what i find interesting.

In too many games of Armada i have a feeling of "I need to pratice more, i didnt see this coming" or "I should have looked up how to counter A or B". I feel like still being in the phase of getting to know each unit (since there are endless combination possibilities) and it never seems to end ? Its probably because i have the intuitive approach to try to get to know all the stuff in order to be able to take all tactical factors into consideration. But i should probably just focus on a few specific ships or fleets. But then you just get stomped on a tournament because you didnt know how to counter A or B. So experience is incredibly important in this game and plays a much bigger factor than smart decisions.

So to some extent (!) i really dislike that experience trumps clever intuitive thinking so much. Yeah i know, like with all things experience and practice make up the biggest part, but i dunno. Maybe thats not what i want to be the BIGGEST factor in a tactical game? I wanna feel like Thrawn, when he used a cloaked ship to fire "through" a planetary shield. I want a mindgame where both players have to outsmart their opponent because their forces are on par, not a pretty much predefined outcome that is just a result of fleet composition, pregame choices and experience. Armada feels much more like a strategy game that for the bigger part is decided before combat begins and much less like a tactical game.

I relate to this comment on an emotive level in regards to my current experiences with X-Wing 2.0, where my inexperience is easily my greatest barrier.

If I've read you correctly though I do disagree in a lot of ways. You contend that in Armada unit selection is more important than unit mastery because of the variability and customisation available for every single unit. You also note that you don't like to invest much time into a game beyond the actual play time, and that overall you feel as if experience trumps smart decisions (the idea that you want to feel like Thrawn and out smart your opponent rather than have a game determined by fleet composition, pregame choices, and experience).

I would argue that the majority of top players have a mastery of the units and their capabilities, even if they don't run a specific unit often they will know what it is capable of and how it likes to play. Unit selection undoubtedly plays a role in Armada, it reflects ones wider understanding of the game state and where the meta is situated, but when the rubber meets the road unit mastery is both present and extremely important.

Really the crux of my point can be summarised by the fact that you seem to hold experience as distinct from smart choices. I would argue instead that experience facilitates smart choices, and that experienced players are generally playing smart (which is why they win a lot).

Funnily enough, I think your points about not wanting to spend time thinking about the game when you're not playing it and how experience shouldn't trump clever thinking is in a lot of ways at odds with the thematic point that you want to feel like Thrawn. Thrawn is a genius, but a large part of his genius is the result of experience. Thrawn spends the majority of his time thinking about space combat even when he's not actively engaged in it. That's why he is so good at what he does, and that's why he is able to deliver master strokes of strategic and tactical brilliance - because his battlefield intelligence has been crafted by experience and constant effort.

This article I wrote a while ago tried to capture the thought processes behind smart Armada ( https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/pick-your-battles-a-thought-system-for-star-wars-armada/ )