What would be effects if the following rule was added? Would it make armada better or worse?

Rule: The last ship to activate in the previous round may not be first ship to activate this round unless it is the only ship that a player could activate this round.

I've considered this as a house rule, but I don't get to play enough to implement house rules.

I would change the rule to only affect a player if they have more ships than their opponent. Maybe if they have the same number of ships they could do it... maybe.

Why do you think a rule like this would be necessary?

4 hours ago, Garrett17 said:

What would be effects if the following rule was added? Would it make armada better or worse?

Rule: The last ship to activate in the previous round may not be first ship to activate this round unless it is the only ship that a player could activate this round.

I tried this several years ago, as an experiment.

It works very well indeed.

HOWEVER, many of the rules and upgrades that exist, are not designed with this rule in mind, so you get a cascade effect where you'd have to go back and revise other rules/card effects.

But in isolation, if implemented much earlier in Armada's life-cycle, I feel it would have been a great rule.

(but before you get too enthusiastic: it's still possible to pseudo-last-first, you just need 1 more activation)

9 hours ago, bkcammack said:

Why do you think a rule like this would be necessary?

Because the last-first activation carries overly extreme advantage.

Examples off the top of my head

• Demolisher triple tap
• Ships last-firsting effectively move at double speed or more.
• Squadron range effectively doubles if carriers goes last-first so A-wings, Defenders and Inerceptors get a real move range of 10 (maybe 12 if you can FCT them both times) and the carriers get double speed as well.

A bit extreme no?

I'm a big believer that games should be played and not gamed. Last first IMHO offers advantages that are really about gaming armada rather than playing it. It's legal, but it seems like a game flaw to be taken advantage of rather than an effect the designer's were trying to enable. i'm guessing the pass tokens in the upcoming dial pack are meant to address this somehow.

It sounds a fine rule to fix the last-first problem, except that is only has an effect when the first player has precisely 1 more activation then the second player.

I'm curious to see if Armada 1.5 changes anything in this area. The biggest issue I have with the current system is that the second player can't chase down a speed 3+ first player ship, even if starting /finishing the turn nearly touching their rear.

2 hours ago, Garrett17 said:

Because the last-first activation carries overly extreme advantage.

Examples off the top of my head

• Demolisher triple tap
• Ships last-firsting effectively move at double speed or more.
• Squadron range effectively doubles if carriers goes last-first so A-wings, Defenders and Inerceptors get a real move range of 10 (maybe 12 if you can FCT them both times) and the carriers get double speed as well.

A bit extreme no?

I'm a big believer that games should be played and not gamed. Last first IMHO offers advantages that are really about gaming armada rather than playing it. It's legal, but it seems like a game flaw to be taken advantage of rather than an effect the designer's were trying to enable. i'm guessing the pass tokens in the upcoming dial pack are meant to address this somehow.

This is the counterbalance to the 2p advantage of favorable objectives, though.

3 hours ago, Garrett17 said:

12 hours ago, bkcammack said:

Because the last-first activation carries overly extreme advantage

In order to get a last/first you generally have to make a number of sacrifices in building your list. You need a fairly large bid to guarantee 1st player, you need to run ships that are lean on upgrades and/or low in price, and your black-dice ships generally only get a 1 or 2 really good shots off per game. Combined with ceding the objective to 2nd player, you’re often at a bit of a disadvantage, generally, except for the ability to last/first.

If last/first was an overly extreme advantage you’d see MSU (or at least LMSU) dominating, which you don’t.

Even if this rule was put in place, you still have people getting a pseudo last/first, either with one more activation, having their powerhouse ship go 2nd to last, or having a 2nd ship in position to go first.

The other way to get a last/first is with Activation Officers, like SA, Bail, or Pryce. Bail and Pryce telegraph exactly when they are going to do their thing and SA takes an important slot. But they are also the easiest ways to overcome the disadvantage you put yourself at when trying to get a last/first. I’d rather to see those three removed from the game than place a hard restriction on being able to last/first.

1 hour ago, scipio83 said:

This is the counterbalance to the 2p advantage of favorable objectives, though.

I think going first is already advantage enough. Last first is only available anyway if you go first AND out-activate so going first doesn't always mean you necessarily get this benefit.

53 minutes ago, bkcammack said:

In order to get a last/first you generally have to make a number of sacrifices in building your list. You need a fairly large bid to guarantee 1st player, you need to run ships that are lean on upgrades and/or low in price, and your black-dice ships generally only get a 1 or 2 really good shots off per game. Combined with ceding the objective to 2nd player, you’re often at a bit of a disadvantage, generally, except for the ability to last/first.

If last/first was an overly extreme advantage you’d see MSU (or at least LMSU) dominating, which you don’t.

Even if this rule was put in place, you still have people getting a pseudo last/first, either with one more activation, having their powerhouse ship go 2nd to last, or having a 2nd ship in position to go first.

The other way to get a last/first is with Activation Officers, like SA, Bail, or Pryce. Bail and Pryce telegraph exactly when they are going to do their thing and SA takes an important slot. But they are also the easiest ways to overcome the disadvantage you put yourself at when trying to get a last/first. I’d rather to see those three removed from the game than place a hard restriction on being able to last/first.

Well a large bid to guarantee first player isn't a sacrifice if it buys a lot of advantages. A bid of 16 sounds dramatic but think about it. You could buy one more tie defender or double the speed of 2 or 3 other Tie Defenders and an un-blockable alpha strike for the same cost. That's not really a sacrifice. You're just implicitly buying "upgrades" instead of explicitly buying them.

The pseudo last-first thing may be a concern but I'm willing to bet that last-firsting with a surplus of 2 activations is pretty rare and the power dispersion between ships would be more likely to make any single ship in such a fleet far less powerful and by extension a lot less able to abuse last-firsting

I'm not sure how I feel about SA, Bail or Pryce. I find these are silver bullet solutions that only work when you bring them which means you're fine if you do and you're screwed if you don't which starts making them auto-includes which I don't think is healthy for the officer slot or for the game at large.

As for MSU domination, I could be remembering wrong but wasn't rebel MSU very much a thing before SA/Pryce/Bail? They're less so now but that's because of potential silver bullets out there which again I don't like. They emphasize luck in your match-ups rather than strategy on the table.

Two-ship relies entirely on last-first and as it stands, I think(?) it’s largely been solved in competitive play. Demo was the reigning first/last terror before that, and it doesn’t rule the tourneys either.

It certainly is *strong,* but with things like the SSD and Starhawk, I think first/last is probably at its nadir as a strategy.

Salvo helps an awful lot with Demo, at least.

What if you were running an SSD?

25 minutes ago, TallGiraffe said:

What if you were running an SSD?

That depends. If you're running an SSD chances are you're probably outdeployed. That means something like a demolisher will get to pick the best possible attack angle from the start. If that players goes first and last and has engine techs he might be able to run right to the tail of the SSD and start triple tapping.

I've never seen this done, I'm just ballparking in my head but this strikes me as quite doable (and quite bad for the SSD).

Many ships' only chance to get out alive is to last-first. Tell me, how you want to play around an SSD or ISD or HMC80 with small ships if you have to sit out a full shot?

I think last-first was a necessary evil with the design of the game as it is/was. Enough people complained enough though that we got things like Bail/SA/Pryce, passing turns, skewed objectives, and now a revamp of the system that we still need to see. Maybe that will change the state of the game enough that small ships can have more impact than activation fodder. But going by the announced upgrade changes it seems that bigger activation = better activation is what ffg and influencers are still going for.

11 hours ago, Rimsen said:

Many ships' only chance to get out alive is to last-first. Tell me, how you want to play around an SSD or ISD or HMC80 with small ships if you have to sit out a full shot?

Well I've got two thoughts on that off the top of my head:

1) If you're last-firsting you have the benefit of full information on every other ships movement during the round and you double your own speed and firepower. Because of this, the last ship in a round always gets a good chance of being the best entrapping ship on the board. This information advantage, especially over multiple turns, should be going some way to making sure you don't put yourself in a position where last first is your only chance of survival unless you were specifically planning to last-first at medium or close range into a high-firepower arc. Most ships in the game can take one moderate to strong shot before being destroyed (barring accuracied flottillas and raiders which are generally not supposed to be putting themselves in that position to start with especially the raider which is supposed to be a fragile ninja/sudden-strike craft). So in a sense, as the last ship to move if last-firsting is your only chance for survival that may be because you set that situation up yourself or you got outmaneuvered.

2) You're not sitting out a full shot, you're giving the player you're shooting at a chance to respond which is the case in any other two activations except a last-first (and potentially a Bail/Pryce scenario).

Although last-firsting isn't quite the terror it used to be I feel like it still discourages experimentation because it's often still too big a power advantage to simply hope you won't run into it when you build a fleet. Bringing SSDs and Starhawks obviously helps, but then I don't always want to play an SSD or a Starhawk.

Sloane with 2 Aces last/ first with Pryce is still killer. ISD II or I with 5 squads (ExHB or Hondo) puts out 10 blue, (14 with Mareek/Jendon, ) and optimally, the ISD itself with an additional follow-up of 16 die, and Avenger to lock down those pesky Defensive tokens. 30 die back to back that works against every ship outside of Agate, and even then....bye bye.

Dayum.