Act II begins with an attack over Atollon.

Strategy Session:

First Battle:

Second Battle:

Third Battle:

Round 3 Wrap-Up:

The Pivotal Battle (Climactic):

Campaign Wrap-Up Video:

Yeah!!!

46 minutes ago, GenCurtisLemay said:

Yeah!!!

We’re glad that our videos can create that level of excitement. Next uploads will be Tuesday and Friday.

Thanks guys. I used to live up in Northwest Indiana. If I still lived close I’d have to try to get a game in with you.

The battle for the Outer Rim continues over Mygeeto.

FFG should make a social app to help players find each other. Finding someone to play is hard. Finding a common time to play is the next hardest. Your lucky to be able to play so much.

1 hour ago, Draconis80 said:

FFG should make a social app to help players find each other. Finding someone to play is hard. Finding a common time to play is the next hardest. Your lucky to be able to play so much.

John and I have some level of difficulty setting up our play time. We have radically different schedules and there are times that we have to cancel our arranged filming times.

Having said that, I agree - we are lucky that we live relatively close to each other and have 2 Local groups that play Armada. Perhaps that is something we could do via our community and help create a player list to help Admirals find other players.

Wow. I thought the Imps might pull that one out. A couple of unlucky fighter rolls away. great video guys.

9 hours ago, GenCurtisLemay said:

Wow. I thought the Imps might pull that one out. A couple of unlucky fighter rolls away. great video guys.

Thank you! The battle was fairly close and the final score does not really reflect the story. I hope the next battle is just as close.

You guys rock.

1 hour ago, Aahz 1 said:

You guys rock.

Thanks, man! Glad you are enjoying our videos.

Ken's Imperial Fleet attempts to combat the growing threat in the Outer Rim by hunting down John's Rebel fleet.
The final climactic battle begins now!

Ken and John discuss the campaign overall and give our thoughts about how we would proceed for our second run through.

I haven't gotten to the wrap-up yet, but I finished the climactic battle.

I really enjoyed this series! No amount of thinking about something this complicated compares to playing it, and there's not a lot of examples of that out there for RitR, certainly not in minute-by-minute detail. Looking forward to your reflections on it as my friends and I start our RitR campaign (first battle later today!).

I also appreciated the fun atmosphere and good humor, even as it turned out pretty lopsided. I haven't watched anything else of yours, so maybe it goes without saying that you guys seem like good friends to begin with, but I think we'd all have forgiven Ken if he had tilted a bit more... we've all been there. 😰

21 hours ago, hobbesque said:

I haven't gotten to the wrap-up yet, but I finished the climactic battle.

I really enjoyed this series! No amount of thinking about something this complicated compares to playing it, and there's not a lot of examples of that out there for RitR, certainly not in minute-by-minute detail. Looking forward to your reflections on it as my friends and I start our RitR campaign (first battle later today!).

I also appreciated the fun atmosphere and good humor, even as it turned out pretty lopsided. I haven't watched anything else of yours, so maybe it goes without saying that you guys seem like good friends to begin with, but I think we'd all have forgiven Ken if he had tilted a bit more... we've all been there. 😰

Thanks, hobbesque. We both appreciate your kind words and we're glad you enjoyed our series. It was a lot of fun for us to play and showcase to everyone. My goal with this series was to relearn how to play Armada and figure out all of the tricks John had learned over an eighteen month long period in which I didn't play any Armada and he went to tons of tournaments. I hope that I showed some level of improvement over the course of the 11 battles we had.

The Imperials got beat down, however there were a few things both strategically and tactically that I took out of the campaign that have me itching to get back to the table. We were due to begin the second campaign in April, unfortunately the COVID-19 Pandemic put a stop to that. Restrictions have finally lifted today and we are already making plans to bring back Armada very soon.

Good luck with your campaign, we would be very interested to know how it turns out and what your thoughts on how tokens, systems and fighters are. Check out our campaign wrap-up with you buddies, it may be interesting as we are incorporating at least 2 of our thoughts into our next campaign.

Good luck!

I watched your wrap-up and shared some of your insights with my group during our discussions. I tend to like to tinker with house rules, but other people reasonably wanted to see how it went before we made any changes. We decided to play almost exactly RAW for the start , and agreed to discuss any other changes after Act I (although we did keep the tournament rule with respect to flotillas, on the theory that it prevents degenerate cases with many rogue squadrons and is a mercy rule otherwise).

Having seen the first 2 rounds (of 2 battles each), "Crippling" is definitely something I'm going to push for. This is partially self-interested, in that I'm flying mostly alive-or-dead smaller rebel ships, but it's also come from watching the greenest player almost blow up the other Rebel player's one big ship two games in a row. As I think one of you said, if you get a ship past half hull, especially a large one, you've done more than half the work of killing it and deserve some credit.

It was Ally tokens, however, that forced even the most change-conservative of us to discuss things mid-Act! Informed by your experience, I advised that our first attack be against Nal Hutta, and our second against Mandalore, using the first ally token to secure the second. Seeing the Ally token in action* convinced people that we should nerf it ASAP before one side having both those locations tipped things further. The Ally-haves were at this point in favor of more severe nerfing than the Ally-have-nots; we all quickly settled on "things added to your fleet via Ally token count towards providing the other admiral understrength bonus XP and upgrade rewards" because it was an easy change to make (we applied it retroactively to the other player of the first Ally battle).

Then we discussed/theorycrafted for a while about how to change what it actually adds, trying to balance it with the other tokens, balance it Rebel-Imperial, and generally making it interesting. We eventually settled on EITHER 1 ship with up to 1 upgrade worth 50 or fewer points (calibrated to include both Raider types but exclude TRCR90's) OR 30 points of non-unique irregular squadrons (calibrated to exclude two YT-2400s). Thoughts being: small ships are way more risky to add because they're way more vulnerable, and you don't necessarily want the biggest # of points because it counts towards understrength; ship plus upgrade opens up a variety of interesting options for both sides (none of which, that we could think of, obviously better than the others); two YT-2400's (or to a lesser extent, two Firesprays) are so obviously good addition to any fleet that we wanted to rule it out if there was any hope of Allies not being the coolest token always and forever.

We'll see how it goes!

*To brag a little, I used it to get VCX's, yoink the Recruit Ally objective token out from under the enemy Star Destroyer, which made me feel clever and also got me 45 points of objective-Ally Lancers. 😄

17 hours ago, hobbesque said:

I watched your wrap-up and shared some of your insights with my group during our discussions. I tend to like to tinker with house rules, but other people reasonably wanted to see how it went before we made any changes. We decided to play almost exactly RAW for the start , and agreed to discuss any other changes after Act I (although we did keep the tournament rule with respect to flotillas, on the theory that it prevents degenerate cases with many rogue squadrons and is a mercy rule otherwise).

Having seen the first 2 rounds (of 2 battles each), "Crippling" is definitely something I'm going to push for. This is partially self-interested, in that I'm flying mostly alive-or-dead smaller rebel ships, but it's also come from watching the greenest player almost blow up the other Rebel player's one big ship two games in a row. As I think one of you said, if you get a ship past half hull, especially a large one, you've done more than half the work of killing it and deserve some credit.

It was Ally tokens, however, that forced even the most change-conservative of us to discuss things mid-Act! Informed by your experience, I advised that our first attack be against Nal Hutta, and our second against Mandalore, using the first ally token to secure the second. Seeing the Ally token in action* convinced people that we should nerf it ASAP before one side having both those locations tipped things further. The Ally-haves were at this point in favor of more severe nerfing than the Ally-have-nots; we all quickly settled on "things added to your fleet via Ally token count towards providing the other admiral understrength bonus XP and upgrade rewards" because it was an easy change to make (we applied it retroactively to the other player of the first Ally battle).

Then we discussed/theorycrafted for a while about how to change what it actually adds, trying to balance it with the other tokens, balance it Rebel-Imperial, and generally making it interesting. We eventually settled on EITHER 1 ship with up to 1 upgrade worth 50 or fewer points (calibrated to include both Raider types but exclude TRCR90's) OR 30 points of non-unique irregular squadrons (calibrated to exclude two YT-2400s). Thoughts being: small ships are way more risky to add because they're way more vulnerable, and you don't necessarily want the biggest # of points because it counts towards understrength; ship plus upgrade opens up a variety of interesting options for both sides (none of which, that we could think of, obviously better than the others); two YT-2400's (or to a lesser extent, two Firesprays) are so obviously good addition to any fleet that we wanted to rule it out if there was any hope of Allies not being the coolest token always and forever.

We'll see how it goes!

*To brag a little, I used it to get VCX's, yoink the Recruit Ally objective token out from under the enemy Star Destroyer, which made me feel clever and also got me 45 points of objective-Ally Lancers. 😄

Both John and I are glad to know we've had a positive impact on the campaign. Playing through an Act and seeing how things work for your group is the best way to check things out. We did play with the Ally Token additional forces counting toward XP and understrength for our campaign. It is still too powerful - at least in our opinion. It looks as though you guys agreed with our assessment that it wasn't enough.
We essentially came up with a similar situation regarding fighter squadrons - 45 points was too much (hence why we suggest adjusting the limit to 2). 30 seems about right.

Our thought behind a Flotilla with 1 upgrade plus a squadron was to provide the team with the ally token and interesting strategic choice. A flotilla is an extra activation and potentially useful for token manipulation in game. As we play with the "tabling" tournament rule, neither choice gives you a way to keep your fleet on the table longer. The real question is: Can the player get more utility out of a flotilla and a squadron or two squadrons. In your concept: With 50 points, you get both Raiders and the Gozantis. On the Rebel side you seem to have CR90s, GR75s, and the Hammerheads. Slightly more choice for the rebels, so we're both curious to see how your second act goes with individuals possibly picking ships over fighters. More data is always good when developing solid house rules. 🙂

Let us know how it works - we will be starting production on the next RitR campaign soon.