Sunday, February 2, 2020

Wave 8 upgrades: flag bridge

Added to the offensive retrofits article but also posted separately here. As usual, any updates are going to be made in the "real" article, not this one. Let's talk about the one new offensive retrofit in wave 8, Flag Bridge:

Is that scrub behind me still looking at explosions? Amateur.
Flag Bridge gives any ship with the right qualifications a fleet command slot, but with some serious qualifications:
  • The ship must be medium or large (sorry small ships and SSDs).
  • The ship must be your flag ship.
  • It's a Modification, so that might inconvenience your upgrade plans.
  • The equipped ship can't use any command tokens to resolve a fleet command.
    • This means if the ship already had a fleet command slot (like a Cymoon), you can give it Flag Bridge for a second fleet command, but then you can't use command tokens to feed either of the fleet commands.
The kneejerk reaction to Flag Bridge is "why would I ever use this?" but I honestly think it's got legs. It's zero points, so unlike the similar CR90 Liberator title, you're not spending extra points to get the fleet command, just your Modification slot and your offensive retrofit slot. Sometimes that's a tough ask, but I find fairly often you're not doing much with either. The downside, of course, is your fleet command becomes a one-shot affair: discard it to use it and it's done. The upside is you don't need to spend points on a command-token system to feed the fleet command, so instead of the fleet command costing X points plus Y points spent on whatever other things you're using to feed the fleet command, it's just X points.

That said, a one-shot fleet command isn't something you can strongly build a fleet around, but for 5-6 points, I'll happily use a one-shot fleet command like Intensify Firepower, Take Evasive Action, or Entrapment Formation in a ship-heavier fleet or All Fighters Follow Me for the alpha strike in a squad-heavy fleet.

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