4 hours ago, Spectre8174 said:

Swear we kinda are cursed in up state NY. Kinda are all spread out.

And where are you, Spectre?

Yeah I'm in the Albany area. We play at Zombie Planet on Central Avenue. We're trying to get a RitR campaign going.

Haven’t put Hondo on the table yet myself, but he looks bloody amazing!

2 hours ago, Cpt ObVus said:

And where are you, Spectre?

Rochester

Now that isn’t very far away at all. I was in Rochester just yesterday!

I don't know if the squad cap will help much with games being finished on time. In a recent tournament, my first opponent had five ships and 6 squads. I had four ships and no squads. We were done with the game with 30 minutes remaining. My second opponent had five ships and 4 squads. This game only went 4 rounds. My third opponent had four ships and 6 squads. The game finished in time. Handling the squads didn't take the most time in any of these games; it was analysis paralysis when deciding which ship to activate. The second game in particular was painfully slow, but like I said squads had nothing to do with it. Every time my opponent would shoot something he'd be explaining how many dice he had for the attack and holding up the dice to show me. He was kinda young (maybe high school) so I didn't want to be rude but by the end I was trying to hurry him up a bit.

I know that squads do slow me down, though, which is partly why I'm going squadless for a while. But as I said, it's mostly taking too long to think about things. And my opponents are nice people who don't want to hurry me either (even if they move faster than I do).

21 hours ago, Grathew said:

Personally I think the easiest way to get around the squadron issue is to go to 600 point sector fleet. It upps the squadron points from 134 to 150, a change of 16, but there would be another 184 points for ships. It also would provide the numbers needed to get a solid flacking force on the table. Or provide enough activations to threaten large squadron investments through overwhelming firepower.

As for the length of game issue: I find running high squadron activation fleets with enough squadron commands to get squadrons killing eachother, or stuck battling it out instead of moving for position, speeds up gameplay nicely.

The issue with this is that all players are different. People play at different rates.

20 hours ago, EbonHawk said:

I feel if they wanted to do anything to the squadron game just Ace cap... Boom done.

If a fleet can only hold 2 (or 3), that's biggs/jan and then generics (can't take biggs and wedge/luke/jan etc), or sontier / howlrunner and generics (can'r have all of MMJ). It stops big ace balls giving loads of perks, makes picking squadrons more tactical, and means if you've brought only a few that big ace ball isn't eating through you.

ATM both sides can also drop 4 scatter aces minimum, more for imps... just having loads of these out makes the squad game take forever. So yeah to me capping the amount of aces one can hold at 400 would be an interesting idea!

I actually feel like an ace cap wouldn't be all that needed now that we have access to stuff like Reserve Hangar decks for Imperials. I personally think it would hamper the meta more than improve it. And I am speaking as a player who doesn't play much with squadrons, rather than against them.

17 hours ago, Cpt ObVus said:

We’re not occasional players. At least, many of us aren’t. We’re frequent players. We are very precise, though. I’m trying to speed that along.

As to the Ace cap idea... I really hate that idea. It would mean we’d see the “best” aces even more often, the “worst” ones hardly ever. If I’m limited to only three aces (or whatever) per list, there’s just zero chance I’m wasting a slot on Black Squadron, for example, whereas now, there are times when I go, sure, let’s throw him in.

Ace capping without lowering the squadron cap in general also means more generics, and since they’re cheaper, that actually means MORE squadrons, which I think exacerbates the problem.

I dunno. We played a few Sector Fleet games at 600, and the 25% limit on squads seemed a better proportion to me. Doesn’t seem a popular idea here. No big deal.

I feel like the 25% works better in Sector Fleets because you have more points to work with. You can pose a bigger threat to carriers and the like if you have more points for ships. While I think 600 points is a blast to play at, I think the current point rules we have in place are just fine for tournament play. I also dislike that you use RitR as an example for your squadron play example. 250 points per side with NO squadron limitations in RitR in how much you bring doesn't seem like the best anecdotal evidence in your favor.

Your argument with the medium/small groups doesn't seem right. If I invest a full 130 points in squadrons to your 50-80, then yea I expect to stomp them. Part of the game is handling situations like that. While you can prepare for a number of things, you can't prepare for everything. I made a list with 60ish points of squadrons, but do I expect them to survive against a swarm of squads double it's value? No I do not. I expect them to delay (Hopefully successfully) the ball until I can hammer their carriers or what ever else they have in their fleet.

In this game of tactics, you have to weigh out what you invest in, and how to go about using it. If I just threw 60 points of squads at the enemy ball, they are going to die fast and without purpose. Think tactically.

4 hours ago, TallGiraffe said:

The issue with this is that all players are different. People play at different rates.

I actually feel like an ace cap wouldn't be all that needed now that we have access to stuff like Reserve Hangar decks for Imperials. I personally think it would hamper the meta more than improve it. And I am speaking as a player who doesn't play much with squadrons, rather than against them.

I feel like the 25% works better in Sector Fleets because you have more points to work with. You can pose a bigger threat to carriers and the like if you have more points for ships. While I think 600 points is a blast to play at, I think the current point rules we have in place are just fine for tournament play. I also dislike that you use RitR as an example for your squadron play example. 250 points per side with NO squadron limitations in RitR in how much you bring doesn't seem like the best anecdotal evidence in your favor.

Your argument with the medium/small groups doesn't seem right. If I invest a full 130 points in squadrons to your 50-80, then yea I expect to stomp them. Part of the game is handling situations like that. While you can prepare for a number of things, you can't prepare for everything. I made a list with 60ish points of squadrons, but do I expect them to survive against a swarm of squads double it's value? No I do not. I expect them to delay (Hopefully successfully) the ball until I can hammer their carriers or what ever else they have in their fleet.

In this game of tactics, you have to weigh out what you invest in, and how to go about using it. If I just threw 60 points of squads at the enemy ball, they are going to die fast and without purpose. Think tactically.

The reason I brought up our RitR campaign was only to illustrate that more squads = slower game. Not in every single case is that going to be true, but it’s a pretty simple statement that having more pieces to move will generally slow a game down.

As far as the whole point I was attempting to make about medium squad balls and max squad balls and all of that, you’re missing my point entirely. I understand that—generally speaking—the player who invests more of their list in squadrons should usually win the mini game. That’s obvious. My point was that throwing 80 points of squadrons against 134 is a losing battle, as is 80 v 100, but it’s far less asymmetrical. I’m betting a 100 point cap would encourage more “balanced” (medium fighter coverage) lists, the logic being that if I bring 80 points of squads and I hit a max squad wing at 134, I probably just wasted 80 points for almost no effect, but if the worst my 80 will face is 100, I’m still likely going to lose that battle (as I should, with a smaller investment), but at least I got some strategic value out of slowing down the opponent’s bomber attack.

The “magic ratio” of squadron points to total fleet points is fairly arbitrary. The only reason it’s 1:3 is because that’s what they happened to settle on. I’m pretty sure if they had decided on 1:4 early on, the game would not be substantially changed, except the average game would have been slightly faster.

There are upper and lower limits to these numbers, but they’re sort of nebulous; I think we can all agree that 33% is pretty close to the mark for squad points per fleet, but what’s too much? 40%? 50%? And what’s too little? 25%? 15%?

I just think a slightly smaller cap (25%) seems better. Most people here seem to disagree, and that’s fine. But I also want to reiterate that capping the number of aces really rubs me the wrong way. If we’re looking to curb the number of aces in games, I’d much rather see a rule like, “no more than 50% of your 134 squadron points may be spent on unique squadrons (67 points for Standard Armada).” I don’t like THAT, either, but it’s slightly less likely to make a huge swath of aces suddenly useless.

If the choice is between leaving things as-is and an ace cap, I’m all for as-is.

You’ve made a lot of assumptions about game design there, and quite a few negative ones.

Especially “Arbitrary”.

Not knowing the process doesn’t mean the process doesn’t exist.

The part to remember is, from a design perspective, this is how Armada is intended.

Rules changes to account for breaking from the base intention of Armada results in a game that is no longer Armada.

And that’s fine and all...

But observations if says game become increasingly more difficult to relate back to Armada.

As a core concept, every factor of the game has been balanced upon it - arbitrary basis or not - abd thus it cannot be readily dismissed,

For every observation of more components (squads) increasing game time, there’s an observation that it’s more analysis paralysis increasing it, and I have plenty of competing observations stating that more ships increases it too...

Everyone wants a say in how thw game is run and played to our preferences.

in short, we only have such a say in what we play at home : on the larger scale, consistency is needed and that only comes from the designers 😉

1 hour ago, Cpt ObVus said:

The reason I brought up our RitR campaign was only to illustrate that more squads = slower game. Not in every single case is that going to be true, but it’s a pretty simple statement that having more pieces to move will generally slow a game down.

As far as the whole point I was attempting to make about medium squad balls and max squad balls and all of that, you’re missing my point entirely. I understand that—generally speaking—the player who invests more of their list in squadrons should usually win the mini game. That’s obvious. My point was that throwing 80 points of squadrons against 134 is a losing battle, as is 80 v 100, but it’s far less asymmetrical. I’m betting a 100 point cap would encourage more “balanced” (medium fighter coverage) lists, the logic being that if I bring 80 points of squads and I hit a max squad wing at 134, I probably just wasted 80 points for almost no effect, but if the worst my 80 will face is 100, I’m still likely going to lose that battle (as I should, with a smaller investment), but at least I got some strategic value out of slowing down the opponent’s bomber attack.

The “magic ratio” of squadron points to total fleet points is fairly arbitrary. The only reason it’s 1:3 is because that’s what they happened to settle on. I’m pretty sure if they had decided on 1:4 early on, the game would not be substantially changed, except the average game would have been slightly faster.

There are upper and lower limits to these numbers, but they’re sort of nebulous; I think we can all agree that 33% is pretty close to the mark for squad points per fleet, but what’s too much? 40%? 50%? And what’s too little? 25%? 15%?

I just think a slightly smaller cap (25%) seems better. Most people here seem to disagree, and that’s fine. But I also want to reiterate that capping the number of aces really rubs me the wrong way. If we’re looking to curb the number of aces in games, I’d much rather see a rule like, “no more than 50% of your 134 squadron points may be spent on unique squadrons (67 points for Standard Armada).” I don’t like THAT, either, but it’s slightly less likely to make a huge swath of aces suddenly useless.

If the choice is between leaving things as-is and an ace cap, I’m all for as-is.

A number of friends and I tried a 100 point cap limit and found it lacking. It no longer has the oomph to punch through medium wings and bomb ships. Completely neutering a fleet archetype is not the way to get a few of your local players to play faster.

As others have said, if you take 80 points vs 134 you really shouldn’t expect to win a straight up squad battle. But if you play smart, take their alpha on your ships so you don’t lose any squads, and then counter with your squads and flak you can put a serious dent in an enemy wing and take out a few key pieces to buy you time to rush and kill the carriers. You are 54 points up in ships, use them to table your opponent

34 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

You’ve made a lot of assumptions about game design there, and quite a few negative ones.

Especially “Arbitrary”.

Not knowing the process doesn’t mean the process doesn’t exist.

The part to remember is, from a design perspective, this is how Armada is intended.

Rules changes to account for breaking from the base intention of Armada results in a game that is no longer Armada.

And that’s fine and all...

But observations if says game become increasingly more difficult to relate back to Armada.

As a core concept, every factor of the game has been balanced upon it - arbitrary basis or not - abd thus it cannot be readily dismissed,

For every observation of more components (squads) increasing game time, there’s an observation that it’s more analysis paralysis increasing it, and I have plenty of competing observations stating that more ships increases it too...

Everyone wants a say in how thw game is run and played to our preferences.

in short, we only have such a say in what we play at home : on the larger scale, consistency is needed and that only comes from the designers 😉

I don’t know that I’ve made very many negative assumptions at all... or really any, actually. Perhaps there’s a better word than “arbitrary,” but all I meant by that was that the designers picked a ratio during the design process. I don’t mean to imply that the 1:3 ratio was apropos of nothing and untested; I’m betting they thought about it all very carefully, and arrived at 1:3 as a ratio that works well and makes for a fun game.

I absolutely agree; 1:3 for squads works fine. I’d even go so far as to say it works very, very well!

I’m merely wondering aloud whether 1:4 might not, at this stage of the game’s maturity, work better. I am personally inclined to think it might. Most of the field here seems to disagree, and once again, that’s fine. One of the many, many things I really love about Armada is that the game is overall very well designed. I’m having a lot of fun with things as they stand.

2 minutes ago, Cpt ObVus said:

I don’t know that I’ve made very many negative assumptions at all... or really any, actually. Perhaps there’s a better word than “arbitrary,” but all I meant by that was that the designers picked a ratio during the design process. I don’t mean to imply that the 1:3 ratio was apropos of nothing and untested; I’m betting they thought about it all very carefully, and arrived at 1:3 as a ratio that works well and makes for a fun game.

I absolutely agree; 1:3 for squads works fine. I’d even go so far as to say it works very, very well!

I’m merely wondering aloud whether 1:4 might not, at this stage of the game’s maturity, work better. I am personally inclined to think it might. Most of the field here seems to disagree, and once again, that’s fine. One of the many, many things I really love about Armada is that the game is overall very well designed. I’m having a lot of fun with things as they stand.

Essentially, any change to that core level rule changes any and all design ratios (ie, our points system) from that point onwards... Including every Squadron Enhancing and Squadron Detrimental upgrade in existance.

That's what makes it a pain in the *** to even consider, even though a lot of people consider it a "simple" change...

1 minute ago, MandalorianMoose said:

A number of friends and I tried a 100 point cap limit and found it lacking. It no longer has the oomph to punch through medium wings and bomb ships.

Thank you. That’s helpful information. My group is usually too busy with Standard lists to play around with alternate rule sets, so I was hoping to hear more responses like, “Yeah, we tried that and it sucked,” or “We tried this and it was much smoother,” or whatever.

It’s also difficult to get a handle on this sort of thing because we all tend toward different styles of squad play, and not everyone in the group likes to break out of their comfort zones. So other experiences are valuable.

4 minutes ago, Drasnighta said:

Essentially, any change to that core level rule changes any and all design ratios (ie, our points system) from that point onwards... Including every Squadron Enhancing and Squadron Detrimental upgrade in existance.

That's what makes it a pain in the *** to even consider, even though a lot of people consider it a "simple" change...

Oh, please don’t think I thought this was a “simple” change.

But just because something is complicated doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about.

5 minutes ago, Cpt ObVus said:

Oh, please don’t think I thought this was a “simple” change.

But just because something is complicated doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about.

"Worth Talking about" is very relative in and of itself.

I mean, we're not the design team. We're not even the Playtesting Team.

As long as people are aware they're mostly shouting into the Void here, that's fine.

But quite a few people don't , and thats where conversations get... Prickly.

For the most part, these are all conversations that have been had before in the context of the games history, too... The fact that the conversation itself, and the underlying reasons why people feel the need to have the conversation itself, hasn't gone away - is somewhat telling, to me.

I've done extensive personal playtesting with the Calgary Group. We've played every factor and version of the game that FFG has come up with (we even had a Take the Station based Tournament Once. That was Nuts!) and many changes at to what we could find both here and in our own minds...

And in the end - for all its flaws, Core-Armada is the best we've got without investing into a massive overhaul, which, honestly, after the somewhat public debacle* that was XWing 2.0, we're probably not seeing here anytime soon... And most likely not in the same format, either...

*Public Debacle in that although I am sure it was carefully though out and fairly well engineered, there was still gross public pushback to purchased things being invalidated

Im all for a Squadron/Ace cap - anecdotally I’ve always felt the games which had squadronless fleets vs squadronless fleets are far more enjoyable to watch and play (especially compared to the opposite)

However alternatively; I think something like a mix of...

-Half points for getting aces down to half health

-Spending a Con-Fire dial on a squadron attack adds one die against all squadrons in that arc rather than the one (could make this a upgrade card, rather than a errata but I’ve always felt spending a Confire dial on a squadron attack to be... well, pointless)

-...just more ship upgrade cards that target squads/Aces

... would improve the game experience; without needing a Armada 2.0 overhaul.

Mass squadrons have been shown to win considerably over their taking-percentage for two years and shows a marked increase over every single cut form top50% to top25% to top8 top4 top1 (data).

Medium and small squadron balls are completely worthless especially considering the marked decrease in efficacy over the same top-cut trajectory (Data again).

Squads are multiplicative, simple focus fire, and gain more power simply based on how many there are until a certain point (the noted sector fleet squadron command limiting factor). They are poorly designed due to the math of their multiplicative effects, the lack of meaningful interaction between them to anything else, and are their own best counter. Not only that but they have considerably easier play than the level of accuracy needed to fly actual ships and simply encourage blob math.

Many posters here are completely ill-at-ease at finding any part of their beloved game available for criticism, and have extraordinary ability at ignoring what simple data shows over two years.

Because of the graph of power of squads vs ships, one reckons that 120 or 125 pts for 400pts would be more balanced. (an ace cap could help also, but generally things like bomber command still make squads multiplicative, and squads are still their most effective own counter).

Yet, one can argue that at 200pts, the lower amount of squads and the reduction of that same multiplicative effect means that a large base ship half-scoring rule is needed or a suggestion to up to 75 pts to again simulate the efficacy of 134vs400. A Yavaris type list has no chance vs a ISD 3-4 firesprays except with the help of half-scoring rule, and reduces the game to stupid simple try and blow up the big thing or lose.

2 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

Because of the graph of power of squads vs ships, one reckons that 120 or 125 pts for 400pts would be more balanced. (an ace cap could help also, but generally things like bomber command still make squads multiplicative, and squads are still their most effective own counter).

An 'ace cap' on the surface won't help sufficiently. After all, things like Intel, Snipe, Swarm, and Strategic are PLENTY fiddly and none of those require an ace to be present.

If the default for generic squads had been no keywords? And only aces had keywords at all? Then I think we'd have a very different story - generic squads then would be indeed quite a bit speedier. That ship is LONG sailed, though.

15 hours ago, xanderf said:

An 'ace cap' on the surface won't help sufficiently. After all, things like Intel, Snipe, Swarm, and Strategic are PLENTY fiddly and none of those require an ace to be present.

If the default for generic squads had been no keywords? And only aces had keywords at all? Then I think we'd have a very different story - generic squads then would be indeed quite a bit speedier. That ship is LONG sailed, though.

I agree somewhat with the essence of your argument which is, if I understand it correctly, that implementing an ace cap would have limited value in making a game faster.

However I think it would reduce complexity because you're having to calculate fewer variables. Swarm is an easy one to keep track of, because it doesn't affect a blob. Ditto snipe and Strategic. They require measuring but they aren't affecting a radius of other squadrons, just one squadron (or objective token in the case of strategic). Do you see what I mean?

At the moment someone turns up with 8 aces, all of whom interact with each other, often all affect each other (instead of affecting just one other), and all have their own superpowers that you have to keep track of. So you want your squadron A to be within 1-2 of B, within 1 of C, outside 1 of D and beyond range X of enemy squadrons E-J and then blah blah blah and your head melts.

So an ace cap would reduce that number of variables. It wouldn't get rid of it, but it would trim it down. Here's the from-my-head list of squad keywords that affect multiple things in a radius: Intel, Grit, Relay, Strategic, Escort.

It's likely that of those four keywords, three will be apparent on one, or perhaps two, squadrons in a typical game. Grit might be on more if you've gone Full Rogue. The only real constant one you always have to keep track of is Escort and that can affect multiple squads.

It may because I am a bear of very little brain, but I find that the complexity of the rules in Armada is at about the limit of the number of variables I can keep track of. I think a game reaches a point where its elements are better run by a computer program than by people and Armada for me is close to that point. The more complex the rules, the fewer people can play it and it degenerates in to Spreadsheet Wars. That's great for the people in the world who LOVE spreadsheets and can't get enough of 5 million rules about what goes where and when and how, but I and plenty of others would just like to make spaceships explode while making noises and quoting films we've seen a thousand times, and we're willing to commit to SOME complexity but not so much that the game loses its joy.

A modest increase in game speed would be a side effect of the reduction in complexity, IMO, and faster games would be beneficial for everyone who has commitments outside Armada.

But at 100 points, I'd have to drop my 19 Z-95s down to 14!

On 2/10/2020 at 12:56 PM, Squark said:

Honestly? There's enough accretion and early mistakes in the game it might be time to look into a 2nd edition or at least a 1.5 revision. The clone wars release would be a perfect time for that, actually. However, doing such a thing without messing too much with components would be tricky. Armada's still doing fine, but I don't know that it could make it through the backlash X-wing 2.0 got initially.

X-Wing needed a 2nd Edition because fundamental, core rules and components needed changing. I guess I don't know what you have in mind, specifically, but as far as I can see, Armada could probably just get away with a rules update, and not have to reprint/convert all the components.

I do hope that the renewed focus on Armada with the Prequel stuff brings a comprehensive, continuously-updated Rules Reference like X-Wing has, though.

How about increasing the cost of some or all of the "aces"?

On 2/10/2020 at 6:24 PM, Rocmistro said:

Yeah I'm in the Albany area. We play at Zombie Planet on Central Avenue. We're trying to get a RitR campaign going.

My brother went last week. Said he got ritr and a few of his own ships.

On 2/10/2020 at 6:40 AM, Rocmistro said:

Hey @Cpt ObVus where in central NY are you? We don't have a competitive Armada scene as such anymore, but a few of us are still hanging around the Albany area.

On 2/10/2020 at 9:13 PM, Spectre8174 said:

Rochester

On 2/10/2020 at 1:30 PM, Cpt ObVus said:

Ithaca area!

I've been playing SW Armada for a couple years now but when I moved to Utica, NY I couldn't find anyone to play with... not even my housemates . Would you all be interested in meeting right in the center a.k.a. Utica or one of the surrounding cities/towns ? I know of a game shop in Herkimer or potentially Whitesboro. I really want some friends to play with. My brother just bought me the Super Star Destroyer (One of the most beautiful ship models I've owned) for my brithday but I can't really field it against my gf seeing as a standard game FP value is 400. I'm actually thinking about setting up a nice game shop in New Hartford consumer square. Hypothetically speaking would anyone travel to New Hartford to play at a cafe/game shop? Currently surveying what the consumer profile looks like.

Kind regards.

On 2/14/2020 at 3:43 AM, flatpackhamster said:

I agree somewhat with the essence of your argument which is, if I understand it correctly, that implementing an ace cap would have limited value in making a game faster.

However I think it would reduce complexity because you're having to calculate fewer variables. Swarm is an easy one to keep track of, because it doesn't affect a blob. Ditto snipe and Strategic. They require measuring but they aren't affecting a radius of other squadrons, just one squadron (or objective token in the case of strategic). Do you see what I mean?

At the moment someone turns up with 8 aces, all of whom interact with each other, often all affect each other (instead of affecting just one other), and all have their own superpowers that you have to keep track of. So you want your squadron A to be within 1-2 of B, within 1 of C, outside 1 of D and beyond range X of enemy squadrons E-J and then blah blah blah and your head melts.

So an ace cap would reduce that number of variables. It wouldn't get rid of it, but it would trim it down. Here's the from-my-head list of squad keywords that affect multiple things in a radius: Intel, Grit, Relay, Strategic, Escort.

It's likely that of those four keywords, three will be apparent on one, or perhaps two, squadrons in a typical game. Grit might be on more if you've gone Full Rogue. The only real constant one you always have to keep track of is Escort and that can affect multiple squads.

It may because I am a bear of very little brain, but I find that the complexity of the rules in Armada is at about the limit of the number of variables I can keep track of. I think a game reaches a point where its elements are better run by a computer program than by people and Armada for me is close to that point. The more complex the rules, the fewer people can play it and it degenerates in to Spreadsheet Wars. That's great for the people in the world who LOVE spreadsheets and can't get enough of 5 million rules about what goes where and when and how, but I and plenty of others would just like to make spaceships explode while making noises and quoting films we've seen a thousand times, and we're willing to commit to SOME complexity but not so much that the game loses its joy.

A modest increase in game speed would be a side effect of the reduction in complexity, IMO, and faster games would be beneficial for everyone who has commitments outside Armada.

What about something simpler and not points cap related.

For every Ace squadron, you must take X number of generic squadrons (X being up for debate).

This would still allow key combos, but not cause the superpower stacking that can turn into the analysis paralysis as previously mentioned.