I personally like the Kuat better. any time I take the cymoon (or any red dice heavy ship) they seem to think that it is a ship tickle fight not a battle.

I'm partial to the Kuat as well. A native Defensive Retrofit, as well as multiple valid options for dice rerolls really make the Kuat an enjoyable ISD. The only thing I tend to miss on it is the Turbolaser slot....

I really enjoy the Cymoon. I run it with Tarkin, intensify fire, an Arq with trcs, an instigator raider (the standard build), and 2x assault Gozantis to get consistent red dice pings at long range

18 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

This is precisely backwards from my preference, impressive!

Before cards like Jerjerrod or Minister Tua, I might have agreed, but now there's no reason to not go for Black-Dice throwing murder machines. It's not like an ISD, with its bag base and its capability for Speed 3 with Jerry turns, is ever gonna have to spend more than a round at long range pointlessly sniping away. And once you're up close... well the Kuat and the ISD1 hit worlds harder. Oh, did I mention they are cheaper, too?

I know I am a outlier, but I almost never go above speed 1. I have never once used Jerjerrod, or Minister Tua.

8 hours ago, CDAT said:

I know I am a outlier, but I almost never go above speed 1. I have never once used Jerjerrod, or Minister Tua.

Nothing wrong with any of those things, depending on what you're flying. But, if you want to start cramming your front-loaded ISDs down your enemies' throats and obliterating ships, Speed 3, Jerjerrod, and Tua can work wonders if you want your ISDs to be the focus of your list (obviously Tua only applies to the ISD-1 or Demo ). Not only do things like Speed 3 and Jerry make it hard for your opponent to keep their assets safe, it also means after you pulverize some of their list your ISD can just easily zoom away, making it nearly impossible for most lists to bring it down or win on points.

Part of the big strength of large ships in Armada is that they do not bleed MoV, so if they get away with even 1 Hull remaining your opponent has scored nothing off a ship that may have nearly half your points tucked inside it. A lot of times I see less experienced players crawl their large brawled into a scrum and kill some stuff, but then they don't get that ship out of there. They keep it in the scrum and give the opponent an actual chance to bring it down and flip the script on points destroyed. What really good ISD or MC75 players do is they identify what target(s ) of their opponent they need to obliterate, and then they just run away with their large expensive ship(s) after they've done so, denying the opponent an opportunity to even up the points spread. The 6-Round Turn Limit is large ships' best friend in this game, since if you're going to take down an opponent's large ship you pretty much have to plan on having at least 3 Rounds of sustained combat against it (depending on lists, of course). If the large ship uses its speed to avoid most threats for 2-3 rounds of the game... well the opponent's path to victory just got a whole heck of a lot narrower.

5 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Nothing wrong with any of those things, depending on what you're flying. But, if you want to start cramming your front-loaded ISDs down your enemies' throats and obliterating ships, Speed 3, Jerjerrod, and Tua can work wonders if you want your ISDs to be the focus of your list (obviously Tua only applies to the ISD-1 or Demo ). Not only do things like Speed 3 and Jerry make it hard for your opponent to keep their assets safe, it also means after you pulverize some of their list your ISD can just easily zoom away, making it nearly impossible for most lists to bring it down or win on points.

Part of the big strength of large ships in Armada is that they do not bleed MoV, so if they get away with even 1 Hull remaining your opponent has scored nothing off a ship that may have nearly half your points tucked inside it. A lot of times I see less experienced players crawl their large brawled into a scrum and kill some stuff, but then they don't get that ship out of there. They keep it in the scrum and give the opponent an actual chance to bring it down and flip the script on points destroyed. What really good ISD or MC75 players do is they identify what target(s ) of their opponent they need to obliterate, and then they just run away with their large expensive ship(s) after they've done so, denying the opponent an opportunity to even up the points spread. The 6-Round Turn Limit is large ships' best friend in this game, since if you're going to take down an opponent's large ship you pretty much have to plan on having at least 3 Rounds of sustained combat against it (depending on lists, of course). If the large ship uses its speed to avoid most threats for 2-3 rounds of the game... well the opponent's path to victory just got a whole heck of a lot narrower.

I always find it interesting how different this game plays depending on the location, in our local area there is one rebel player who I beat about half the time, all the other players I beat almost all the time (he and I are the local best for each faction, but this may be a case of small fish/smaller pond). What we have seen is that the less experienced Empire players run in at speed three and get killed does not matter how tough their ships are, they have a hard time getting away from the TRC-90, and even with Jerjerrod they have a hard time out maneuvering them. On the Rebel side they almost never bring any large based ships, the best players run the MSU (TRC-90's), and the less experienced normally use lots of Mk II (a good solid ship, that is so ugly).

Now one of the other things that probably makes a difference is that we do not play tournament play here. We do play objectives but with fleets of 150 to 600 points per player, we also do a fair amount of multi-player.

15 hours ago, CDAT said:

I always find it interesting how different this game plays depending on the location, in our local area there is one rebel player who I beat about half the time, all the other players I beat almost all the time (he and I are the local best for each faction, but this may be a case of small fish/smaller pond). What we have seen is that the less experienced Empire players run in at speed three and get killed does not matter how tough their ships are, they have a hard time getting away from the TRC-90, and even with Jerjerrod they have a hard time out maneuvering them. On the Rebel side they almost never bring any large based ships, the best players run the MSU (TRC-90's), and the less experienced normally use lots of Mk II (a good solid ship, that is so ugly).

Now one of the other things that probably makes a difference is that we do not play tournament play here. We do play objectives but with fleets of 150 to 600 points per player, we also do a fair amount of multi-player.

Fascinating. Being a Gladiator specialist, I almost never go below speed three. I've won two store championships and am considered the top local Imperial player. We usually play tourney standards at 400, but we have done all the way to 1500 and my style still holds. Very interesting to see how different localities have different modes!

17 hours ago, CDAT said:

I always find it interesting how different this game plays depending on the location, in our local area there is one rebel player who I beat about half the time, all the other players I beat almost all the time (he and I are the local best for each faction, but this may be a case of small fish/smaller pond). What we have seen is that the less experienced Empire players run in at speed three and get killed does not matter how tough their ships are, they have a hard time getting away from the TRC-90, and even with Jerjerrod they have a hard time out maneuvering them. On the Rebel side they almost never bring any large based ships, the best players run the MSU (TRC-90's), and the less experienced normally use lots of Mk II (a good solid ship, that is so ugly).

Now one of the other things that probably makes a difference is that we do not play tournament play here. We do play objectives but with fleets of 150 to 600 points per player, we also do a fair amount of multi-player.

Yea, this is very interesting. Nothing you've noted really reflects our local experience, at either casual gatherings or all the way up through Regional Tournaments. It's especially interesting that your area views the AFKmkII as a go-to "good solid ship." I literally cannot recall the last time I saw anyone use a AFmkII, and they are largely viewed to be just outmoded ships around here... in large part because they don't have anything special going for them. They're a sort of "jack of all trades, master of none" style ship, and as tabletop games tend to reveal to us it's much better to be a min-maxed option with a dedicated role over something that's vanilla across the board... because your generalist isn't going to be doing all the things, but it's paying for its capability to do all the things. For instance, as long-ranged Ackbar snipers, they used to be popular, but once the MC30 came out it pretty much dethroned them from that role. They used to be a good squadron-pusher, but flotillas came along and do it so much more cheaply while giving you more activations. Et cetera.

( NOTE : the one and only exception to this is the Galant Haven title, which gives the ship the special and unparalleled role of mitigating squadron damage, and it was in fashion with some Rebel squadron players, but even then I haven't seen the Haven on the board for a long time. Likely because as things like MC75, Raddus, and BT- Avengers have become so popular, it's a huge liability to have the bulk of your fleet bunched up and anchored to the predictable Gallant Haven , which has relatively mediocre defense for its cost and can be easily wiped off the board... heck a BT-Kuat- Avenger can practically one-shot it ) .




And I think what this reveals is the difference of degree to which Armada is a "solved game" in different areas. Your group plays only casual games with points values ranging from 150 all the way through 600. Whereas around here, folks play in lots of tournaments and outside of CC pretty much treat every casual game night as an opportunity to try out some new potential tournament-list. As a result, in our area we have a much more "stale" meta with clear go-to archetypes and a much larger pile of ships/squadrons/upgrades that are largely viewed as unviable.

Cymoon to kill small ships. Kuat to kill big ships.

What fleet are you facing? If in doubt bring both.

On 3/14/2019 at 10:46 AM, xanderf said:

3x Kuat, OE, ExR, RBD + Motti = brawla-time!

Can you really fit 3 of them in a 400 pt list this way? I know what I'm trying now

I just put this fleet together in fleetbuilder and it fits. I am going to try this out in my next game

On ‎3‎/‎19‎/‎2019 at 6:40 AM, Kylemcph240 said:

Can you really fit 3 of them in a 400 pt list this way? I know what I'm trying now

I just put this fleet together in fleetbuilder and it fits. I am going to try this out in my next game

On the flagship, you'll probably want to make sure you have Commander Gherant in the crew slot. And swap out RBD for ECM. Makes it enough tougher to kill that the enemy doesn't go for it as the easiest way to drop your fleet 9 total hull pts...

On 3/17/2019 at 11:03 PM, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

For instance, as long-ranged Ackbar snipers, they used to be popular, but once the MC30 came out it pretty much dethroned them from that role. They used to be a good squadron-pusher, but flotillas came along and do it so much more cheaply while giving you more activations. Et cetera.

Didn't Ackbar pretty much come out together with the hmc80 and mc30 in wave 2 at the same time, though?

When flotillas came along though it gave way to the 3+2 Haven Yavaris build, but yeah as you also mentioned with the vulnerability and decline of Haven in lieu of large ships (and Yavaris nerf) flotillas have kinda taken over as the cheap and quick carrier. With the popularity of max squads/no squads though they often become either cheap activations or support carriers to the larger carriers.

13 hours ago, Muelmuel said:

Didn't Ackbar pretty much come out together with the hmc80 and mc30 in wave 2 at the same time, though?

They did.