Does anyone have experience fielding big point sinks in Task Force matches? A Starhawk MkII, for example, or a kitted-out ISD-II... a ship that takes up a significant percentage of the 200 points allotted. If so, what was your experience?

I've only played one or two Task Force matches to date, and the most expensive ship in one of those matches would have been a mildly upgraded VSD-II. So I'm curious to hear how expensive, tanky, powerful ships fare in these smaller matches, especially when they are mostly unassisted.

This question came about when I began thinking how fun it would be to field a Lucrehulk in a Task Force match (based on my assumption that it will cost somewhere in the range of 170-180 points, splitting the difference between a Starhawk and Star Dreadnought Prototype). My very next thought, however, was that this might actually be a terrible idea. It would be a big fat target with limited maneuverability and almost no help.

So I turn to you Armada community! Curious to hear your thoughts. But I do see potential for ships in the 150-200 point range in the future, especially if the game expands into the sequel trilogy (no comments, please!). Being that Task Force rules allow you to field a fleet without having to account for the cost of a Commander, that could result in some interesting scenarios.

Starhawks in 200 point games (like RitR) are NOT FUN.

Proof of what Biggs said.

I've played a couple of 200pt games. Not using RitR rules, so normal commander plus any upgrades you could afford.

200pt Starhawk under Agate is essentially unkillable. If you bring anything that isn't a 200pt Starhawk, you lose if anything at all gets killed (barring points from objectives). Dull and annoying.

ISDs and MC80s are less of an issue in the same way, but turn the games into trying to keep it alive vs trying to kill it. These are weaker if you limit ships to only one, non-unique upgrade.

My locals now use the 'no large ships' rule, with the result that games are more varied and fun.

This is all solved with my original task force rules you know.
all of it.

If your opponent field a large...

Bring lots and lots of bomber.

Or interdictor, Lambda & Moralo. Eat his as*.

Just make larges count for half points once at half damage. It helped our RitR a lot.

5 minutes ago, Church14 said:

Just make larges count for half points once at half damage. It helped our RitR a lot.

For my own curiosity, how did that work out for you? Also, what led your group to move to large ships only using crippled rules?

25 minutes ago, Fraggle_Rock said:

For my own curiosity, how did that work out for you? Also, what led your group to move to large ships only using crippled rules?

It helped. For us, a lot of larges at 200 points lose shields and take hull damage, but rarely die. So it made the fleets with larges give up more points than they otherwise would have.

in dead seriousness, we used the larges at half health count for half points because I thought I head read it in the rule book for RitR. We were three campaign rounds in before I realized my mistake. I told the guys and everyone said They wanted to keep the rule.

So it sounds like my original intuition was somewhat correct (that is, a ship like the Lucrehulk would do very well... perhaps even better than a Starhawk ), but perhaps at the expense of engaging game play. Interesting. I wonder what data FFG has been able to collect on this, since to my knowledge, none of the official tournaments use the 200pt format. It seems like Larges (particularly really tanky ships like the Starhawk and presumably forthcoming Lucrehulk ) might benefit from a nerf in this particular format?

8 hours ago, AdmiralOldOwlz said:

If your opponent field a large...

Bring lots and lots of bomber.

Or interdictor, Lambda & Moralo. Eat his as*.

I don't think asterisks are edible, what with being a grammatical figure.

As for lots of bombers, when you can at max take 6 of them (and that's with no support squads at that point), it's quite the ask to have them drop a tanked-out large running Engineering commands. I feel Interdictor is likely even worse, as the large will hint it down and destroy it, especially on a 3x3 where even good deployment is at best only saving you for a round of engagement. In 400pts those tactics are fine but they suffer in smaller scale battles.

One thing that I have found while playing our RitR campaign, is that while scoring “crippled” ships, you may be more likely to plot Engineering commands for rounds five and six.