Checking it Twice: Starting the Turn

So it's been a bit of time, yes.  Sorry, job got me busy and then it's been a crazy week of trying to cobble together a fleet for last Saturday's store championships (hey look I had writeups done too!) followed by my other usual weekly activities and then next thing you know it's been almost two three weeks since you did a real article.

He's so disappointed in me! This sucks!

Anyways, the start of the turn!

Learning from losing

On a similar note to my recent article on tilting, I've been wanting to write a short article about the value of losing.

Well, that sucked. Anyone want to come up with a dangerously complex plan to save Han?

Tournament structure

This article should be relatively short, but it's important for those who are looking to get into playing Armada more competitively at tournaments. It's a quick review of the tournament rules for Armada. You're welcome to familiarize yourself with the tournament document on the Armada FFG site, but I'll largely be breaking down the items that are important for you as a player. There's a lot of language in the document about the responsibilities for the event organizer and such, but we'll ignore those for the sake of focus and brevity. This article is current as of 7/26/2017 and refers to the tournament rules which go into effect today (with very minimal changes to the previous version) and likely won't need much amending (FFG sticks to the basics for their tournament rules pretty consistently), but like the rest of the articles here, I'll update it when/if it's necessary due to changes. Onward!

The Chewbacca pulling-arms-off meta is fierce!

Wave 6 article updates 7/25/2017

The Raider article has been updated to discuss External Racks (which are amazing with Raiders and I now consider their default kit) and to talk a bit more about Flechette Torpedoes.

The VSD article has been updated due to the VSD-I getting access to External Racks, the Quasar displacing the VSD-I as the cheapest Flight Controllers carrier ship, and the VSD-II getting access to Disposable Capacitors and re-opening the "heavy VSD" build as a viable option again.

The ordnance upgrades article now includes a portion about External Racks.

Pastimes Store Championship wrap-up

So John and I went to the Pastimes store championship on Saturday and came away with first (for me) and second (for John). Our store, Fair Game, did pretty well too, with our friend Matt getting third and our up-and-comers Jack and Colin getting sixth and eighth. Out of twelve people, that's pretty good! John already wrote about his experiences (in three different articles), I'm gonna condense mine down to one.

Pastimes always has lots of space and Ron provides great event support!

Store Champs Round 2 Fight!

Alright it's go time.  Round 2 I got Kevin, and he had a Dodonna Doom Pickle.  DOOOOOOOOM!

Objects in space mirror may be closer than they appear.

Store Champs 2: Round 1 Fight!

So it was time to take this list out, see what it can do.

Why did it have to be Sloane?!

Second Place shwag

Second again! Write-up tomorrow, but shwag pic!

Store Championships II: Leia Boogaloo!

So it's another Store Champs today, and I decided that it was time to start my newest quest/obsession: making Leia a Thing! See, it's in caps so it's totally real.

No lie, Empire Leia might be my favorite Leia. What can I say, competence is attractive!

Tilting and you

I've been meaning to write about this for a little while as for some people it can be a very important subject: let's talk about tilting.

Pictured: Kylo Ren on tilt and his opponent just waiting for this bad experience to be over

Wave 6 early impressions

Hey I just wanted to make a short post to kind of explain where we are regarding wave 6 and what we're doing with articles.

In short, we're playing games and getting a sense for it but new articles and article amendments will wait for at least a little while until we have some more play data. I don't want to jump the gun too early before I at least have a decent gut feeling about whatever and I know John feels similarly. Don't worry, as when we update we'll let you know what was updated. This has been the major reason why articles have slowed down a bit - we want to be fairly confident in our assessments before we post anything "official."

Don't worry, though, we've definitely got some articles planned. John's still pursuing his checklist project and I've got another big article on deployment in my to-do pile(this time on ship deployment) as well as a few other ideas percolating. Oh, and we're hitting up another store championship this upcoming Saturday so I'd expect at least some discussion of how that went, too!

For now, we've been playing and observing games and below are my shoot-from-the-hip impressions so far of wave 6. John, if you've got anything to add/correct, please chime in!

Checking it Twice: Deployment!

As I had mentioned, we're going to start with deployment.  Let's jump right into it.

Props to these guys, I just write about fake war on my Star Wars blog.

Q3 2017 tournament kit contents!

 Look what showed up today: the Q3 2017 tournament kits. Many shiny things were inside!

Quick discussion on Admiral Sloane

Not a commander review just yet (I don't generally like posting full-fledged reviews of things until I have some experience with them to work out all the kinks and have some reality smash into all the fanciful combo elements my brain comes up with that don't tend to actually work), but I've seen a lot of talk about Admiral Sloane lately given she's coming out in 2 days.

Still too cool to look at explosions

Checking it Twice: First Steps and Initial Thoughts

Well, in our last post, I talked about why I was creating this whole checklist and what I hoped to accomplish from this.  For this to be of ANY worth to ANYONE, we'll need this to be short enough to memorize.  To turn this math style, I'm hoping to end up with something like SOH-CAH-TOA, where through repeated use and incantation, it helps you figure out how to use it correctly.

"You're in a triangle, Feeny!"