Armada 101: working your way up from starter box games tips and reminders

Last Thursday we had two new players in for Armada (our local community continues to grow, which is always a good thing), and being the odd man out, I assisted them with rules and fleet building and such for their first non-starter box game. They had many questions and made numerous mistakes (which is normal and nothing to be ashamed of) and it prompted me to think of many pieces of advice and clarifications for players in similar situations where they're starting to come to grips with "regular sized" games. So without any further ado, let's get to some general-purpose reminders/tips/clarifications for new players!

Run, run, run, jump! I can be a backpack while you run!

Mailbox/Q&A Post #1

I received some questions from someone going by firedogee on the Armada reddit forum that I'd be happy to answer. If anyone has any shorter questions, we'll be collecting them and responding on occasion and grouping them into a mailbox/Q&A index (off on the right, so many indices!). The question was:

any chance you can cover "worst case scenarios" that new players find themselves in such as: 1) all of my command dials are set to engineering yet all my ships are about to fly off the play area, 2) I have all bomber squadrons and they keep getting swarmed, 3) at setup my ships are setup too wide and now some of my ships don't get involved in the action, 4) My ships keep running into stuff (or each other), 5) I always seem to end up in the front arcs of ISDs (or side arcs of MC80/MC30), 6) I have no idea how to choose upgrades or objectives based on the commander I want to use, 7) Why can't I just ram my opponent into submission?

I'll do my best to answer those in order, but don't be surprised to find longer answers to these in their own articles in the future.

Armada 101: faction breakdown

This is the second post (the first being my post on what I consider to be the core features/selling points of the game) of what I hope over the long run will be a series of posts I like to think of as "the basics" or "Armada 101." Stuff that people considering Armada or very new to Armada can make use of in terms of just grokking the basic elements of the game before they dig into something even more detail-oriented, like a squadron or ship analysis.

This time around, I'd like to answer a question I get from many new players: which faction should I choose? Some players intend to use only one faction (for example, John plays only Rebels) and others would like to focus on one over the other (for example, I'd say I'm about 90% Imperials 10% Rebels). Focusing on one faction can also make Armada more affordable, especially earlier on. I do come across the occasional "splitsies" player who do manages to more-or-less evenly play both sides but in my experience such people are a rarity.

First and foremost, there is no "bad" faction. Both Imperials and Rebels can field competitive fleets and have a great variety of competitive builds. Both can be fun to play as well, so there's no "good, but boring" faction either. The two factions do have tendencies in their designs, though, that differentiate them from one another and can appeal to players of different temperaments. I'd like to discuss at least some of those features with an eye towards helping new players decide which faction seems like it would appeal to them most. I would like to note that all comparisons are made as of the writing of this article, so as of wave 5.

Why play Armada? What makes it unique?

This topic was our very first request received for an article topic and for something so elementary I hadn't even considered it. Given we're focusing on articles for newer players, this kind of article is for the newest of the new players: those who haven't even played Armada yet!

So, what would I consider the defining elements of Armada as a miniatures game?