Enough silence about Armada!
To bridge the gap until we get the SSD, you find below a link to a PDF containing my excessive Epic Play rules. You can print it and place it under your christmas tree 😉

I know: not as good as the real deal, BUT it is a lot more than our esteemed FFG gives to us…

So, maybe you can have some Armada epic matches until the real epicness comes.

What follows is from the introduction of the document. Anything else is in the PDF.

Why Epic Play Rules?

Star Wars: Armada is a game that is developed for matches where each player has 400 fleet points for fleet building. However, who has not dreamed of fielding a true armada?
Increasing the point limit to a higher value than 400 points seems to be the natural solution. But because the game is optimized for 400 fleet points this creates many imbalances:

Most importantly, the asymmetry of first player and objective play does not cope well with increased fleet points. This is the case for several reasons. First, the advantage of the first player decreases with higher points, because most likely the higher amount of plastic in the play area creates several conflict zones. The advantage of the first activation helps in only one of them. Second, some of the objectives are marginalized by the higher point fleets. Whereas 75 points for a successful intel sweep are great in standard games, they are barely worth mentioning in a 1500 point game. Although, these two aspects cancel each other out to a certain degree, the entire first player/objective asymmetry becomes at best pointless. Third, some objectives become even ridiculous: if two 1500 point fleets try to score victory tokens from one tiny station, the game becomes a parody of itself, full of unintentional ramming.

Two other aspects of the game that do not scale well with increased fleet points are deployment and maneuvering finesse. As experienced players of Star Wars: Armada know, avoiding enemy fire, circling the enemy fleet, or concentrating your forces in a tight spot are a challenging and rewarding aspect of the game. Although the game is played in a 3’ x 6’ play area, the tactics of game demand quite often to avoid large parts of that play area and to focus on other parts. This is less possible the higher the fleet points are increased: so much plastic is in the play area, that deploying and maneuvering the entire fleet around certain parts becomes impossible. An important aspect of the game dies.

The following three key components of the rules inside this document aim at balancing all these issues:

First, the first player/objective asymmetry is removed by using the optional rules of alternating the first player

Second, this is combined with the rules of the All-Our-Offensive of the Corellian Conflict expansion. However, both of these components have their own biases: alternating first player has the drawback that the player who is second in round 2 and first in round 3 has the traditional most important activations. On the other hand, the All-Out-Offensive has a strong second player bias: he can deploy reinforcements after the first player and has more reinforcement points. Who has played Raddus, knows what an enormous advantage that is. By combining these two rule sets, their biases even each other out: although the player who is first in round 3, still has the most important activations, the opposing player has several deployment advantages, but thanks to the alternating first player rule not as radical one as in the All-Out-Offensive. In addition he has an objective advantage; but that leads us to the next point.

Third, although the first player/objective asymmetry is removed from epic play, the use of objectives is not. Because the multitude of objectives contributes profoundly to the tactical variety of the game, dropping them altogether would be more than a step too far. Therefore, only the standard objectives are removed from epic play and new ones are introduced that fit better with variable fleet sizes of epic proportions. But because the asymmetry is gone, now each player has his own objective to fulfill in an epic play match.

Interested in these Epic Play Rules? Click here: https://1drv.ms/f/s!ApmEjFRn6W9Pg8FoM7sMZce2kDn0IA