Imperial commander review: General Tagge

All right let's finish off the Imperial side of teeny-tiny wave three with a commander review of General Tagge!

You may remember him as "the only person on the original Death Star that took the Rebels seriously."

"We're just out getting our hourly steps. I swear, Fitbit is more demanding than Lord Vader."

Rules
General Tagge's rules got a little more complex in 1.5:

• You choose the round tokens after deploying fleets. This means if Tagge isn't on the table at that point, he literally does nothing.
• So don't put him on your Hyperspace Assault ship is what I'm saying. 
• The round tokens can't be consecutive, so no rounds 4 and 5, for example.
• This sucks, but we'll talk more about why soon.
  
• Each of your ships recovers a single discarded defense token at the start of the rounds you chose.
  
• If your ship has 2+ discarded defense tokens, then you'll need to choose which one to return. 
• It triggers at the start of the turn, so prior to any ship activations or command dial decisions.

Discussion
Even with his slight 1.5 improvement (where you get to choose the two rounds rather than being locked into 3 and 5), Tagge remains a difficult commander to use well but I feel like there's something there for someone who wants to really dig in deep and struggle it out with him.

The first issue is choosing your rounds after fleet deployment. You'll want to set the first round for the round after you expect the two fleets to start getting serious punches in. Typically this will mean round 3 or round 4. The issue with the non-consecutive round requirement is you'll then naturally want your next recovery round to come as soon as possible, but you can't do the round immediately after your first. So you go for the consolation prize of round 5 or 6. By that point it usually won't make a big difference. Sometimes it will, of course, but it's not a reliable assumption that a ship that's been in combat for 3 rounds won't already have its fate decided by the time Tagge comes back from going out for smokes - giving a defense token back to a ship that was already going to survive isn't a meaningful difference; neither is a doomed ship getting a token back too late going to change things in most cases. So effectively you're looking to make Tagge's first use a good one and his second use will hopefully be all right but that's a problem for end-of-the-game you.

After that, you need to try to set the game tempo correctly so Tagge isn't firing off prematurely or too late. Your opponent clearly is going to be keen on disrupting this tempo to trip you up so generally it pays to be aggressive rather than passive if you can help it.

The final major issue with Tagge is while token burnout is definitely a factor in most games of Armada, your opponent gets some control over it. Accuracy icons and opponent attack decisions can make Tagge tough to use well - if your opponent focuses down one ship at a time (which he should be trying to do regardless) and/or stops you from spending your defense tokens, then Tagge can do little and sometimes even nothing when he triggers. It helps if you have a means of spending your own defense tokens for other ends, but there aren't a lot of upgrades that allow you to do that - at this point just Turbolaser Reroute Circuits and to a lesser extent Reactive Gunnery. Upgrades that encourage overuse of defense tokens, like Expert Shield Tech, or can allow you to spend those tokens regardless of accuracy results, like Electronic Countermeasures, also make the list.

Ships
With all those issues laid on the table,you've got a few options.

Gozantis are fine support ships for just about any Imperial fleet, but you can expose them to a bit more long-ranged danger (be careful!) with Tagge around to bring the scatter token back.

Arquitens can get use from Turbolaser Reroute Circuits, they're happy to use Expert Shield Tech, and they've got a defensive retrofit slot for Reactive Gunnery if you want to. They're swell with Tagge.

Gladiators can be used very aggressively and have one evade, brace, and redirect, making it fairly easy to overspend in the right/wrong circumstances, allowing Tagge to do you a solid and bring back something you need to keep ticking. You'll want Minister Tua for Electronic Countermeasures, especially with Demolisher, but it can help prolong the life of one of the strongest glass cannons in the game.

Imperial-class Star Destroyers, namely the ISD-II and Kuat, both bring a defensive retrofit slot for ECMs as well as a pretty self-contained package. If you really want to go all-in on Tagge, you can use Needa and Turbolaser Reroute Circuits on the ISD-II or the Devastator title on either. Devastator gives you the option with Tagge of drastically overspending your tokens, even when unnecessary ("oh, you attacked but did no damage? Guess I'll contain, redirect, and brace!") for the extra Devastator goodness with Tagge being able to pull you back from the brink when/if you go too far.

Super Star Destroyers can be trading shots round 1 with the right deployment, so they're in no danger of missing out on Tagge's round 3 trigger and they appreciate anything that relives the strain on their defense tokens from being ganged up on. The main issue is making Tagge worth it over other commanders, in which case I'd recommend Tagge here for an SSD focusing on durability.

Fleet building
You've got several options above to work with for ships and you can generally use no squads, light squads, or moderate squads. Tagge doesn't do enough for carriers or squadrons (he does literally nothing for squadrons) to justify heavy squadrons when you have better commanders for that.