Invisible Hand upgrades added, articles updated

I've updated the Separatist-specific upgrades article and the Separatist officers article with new content from the Invisible Hand/Providence pack. This includes the two new fleet commands (Hot Garbage Landing and Jedi Hostage), Thermal Shields, BORT the rocket droid, TI-99, and Tikkes. Toot toot it's time to board the Tickles Token Train!

"I live underwater, have no idea what a train is, and my name isn't Tickles."
"Glad to have you on the train, Tickles."
*sigh*

The ion cannons article now has Point Defense Ion Cannons too. Finally, don't forget to catch John's recent article on some early wave 10 rules issues.

Coming up in the next week or so I hope to release the Admiral Trench and General Grievous articles as well as the Providence article itself. After that will be updates to earlier Separatist articles now that there's new toys for them to play with. We'll be doing this as wave 10 slowly arrives in the US with everything Republic coming out in May and the Recusant showing up sometime in June (hopefully early June).

Ion cannon upgrades: she blinded me with science!

Time to finish off our weapon upgrade reviews with the ion cannons!

Now you too can make little "blep blep" noises.

Separatist-specific upgrades

We're trying something new with the release of Clone Wars and that is separating out all the non-officer upgrades that are only available for a specific faction into a separate article. Previously, we left those options in the relevant article (so the Darth Vader boarding team is in the boarding teams article, for example), but with 4 factions now available, our concern is that upgrades that can only be taken by one or two factions will eventually come to clog up the articles covering upgrades available to everyone and should have their own separate repositories. We've already done this with officers, now we're expanding it to an article for (faction) officers and (faction) other upgrades.

If there's an upgrade available to multiple, but not all, factions then we'll cover that upgrade separately in different articles. For example, Swivel-Mount Batteries is available only to Clone Wars factions so we'll have a writeup for it in the Separatist article (right here) and the Republic article, perhaps with differing opinions given both difference in author opinion as well as difference in how a specific faction can make use of that upgrade.

I guess what I'm trying to say is "welcome to Robot Land!"

Wave Ten Rulings!

Eric and I are aware we have ship articles and commander articles to do, but until we have product in hand we're going to wait.  Easier to get good pictures that way of the upgrade cards instead of the "definitely not filmed in the theater" copy of the latest Avengers movie (we get the good scans for you guys!).  But I do want to get into 3 specific rules interactions that keep popping up on the Discords (speaking of, join us there!).  Eric is out with his wife and son today, so grab your water wings, John is wading into rules discussions!

Eric and me looking for our wave 10 stuff

Public service announcement: list and ship build critiques and upcoming wave 10

A short update and a request on behalf of John and me: please don't ask us to critique your ship builds or fleet lists. It's not that we don't care - honestly, we're flattered at how much trust the community has in us. It's that we just don't have the time to make it a thing we open the floodgates to in addition to running the blog, enjoying our other hobbies, and living our regular lives. There's also the practical matter of we need a lot of information to really make a good critique, such as how competitive your meta is, what types of fleets are popular, what models and upgrades you own, what the rest of your fleet is like, what types of things you're comfortable running at this point, etc. etc.

In short, we're flattered you trust us with your fleets but we don't reliably have the time to help. If you would like input on your fleet lists/ship builds, I'd recommend the Star Wars Armada subreddit, the Armada Facebook group, or the Steel Strategy discord server.

"I value you as a coworker, Fish Todd, but I'm not reviewing any more fleet lists for you. So please put that printout away and get back to work."

We do update our example ship builds in articles periodically: usually when some new upgrade has been released that shakes things up or we play with/against some options we previously hadn't considered and they're better than expected. That said, they are starting points that are fairly agnostic towards commander choice so I don't want anyone to consider them the absolute be-all end-all: please play around with your options and find something that works for you and your specific fleet!

In terms of wave 10 and the future here at CGYSO: we don't entirely know when everything is actually going to reach us. We've been getting lots of conflicting information on release dates so it's a big question mark at this point. Once we have the plastic spaceships in our grubby mitts we'll be releasing new articles like usual. We had a big backlog ready to go for wave 9 but it meant a flurry of activity here initially followed by a slow process of updating to version 1.5 across the blog. For wave 10 I expect we'll have regular updates here and there for around a month as we get caught up and then filling in some backlog due to new upgrades changing options from earlier.

As always, thanks for reading!

Fighting Fleets: Obliterating Onagers!

I've been playing on Vassal a fair amount more than Eric, so I stepped up to write this one. The recent Italian TTS tournament had a swath of Onagers, dual and triples in fleets everywhere. Let it be known that I'm giving you a look. It is not a happy one. Let's talk about fighting wave 8's flattest boogeyman, the Onager!

There's a description for people who like running double onager fleets...

Who's the Bossk Inaugural Tournament

Admiral Ackbar's eyes awoke with a start.  He had just gone to bed and here he was, suddenly on the bridge of an unfamiliar ship. In fact, this ship was so unfamiliar it appeared to be crewed entirely by.... robots? These looked to be Clone Wars vintage droids, when did the Rebellion get a stock of these....? Where was his first officer Walex, where had he ended up, what ship was this, WHAT WAS GOING ON???

His eyes glanced up, out the front viewport, and he saw something to make his fish blood run even colder. Across the distant space, it was a Super Star Destroyer. His 4 fish hearts sank, but he was an Admiral of the Rebellion. He had his duty and would do it, well, admirably.

"Officer!" he called. "Send everything we have at that ship. We'll send it to the bottom of the deep yet."

--

Dooku was not sure what was happening. One moment he was staring down his master along with a boy who had a hatred in his eyes that gazed at Dooku like he was nothing more than a speck of sand, the next he was onboard a different ship entirely.  The walls had shifted and the Jedi had disappeared. In their place he saw hundreds of.... clones? Their helmets seemed different. And the officers on this ship were all human, including the 2 making out in the corner*.

"Sir, the enemy ships are approaching in attack formation omicron, should we engage?" The nervous looking man looked evasive and generally apologetic, but Dooku glanced out the viewport and saw what looked like 3 Munificents coming towards him. Why was he being attacked? Was this another part of Sidious's plans?

Their laser fire opening up steadied his resolve. No one destroys him or his ship, no matter WHO they thought they were. "Turn towards them and engage" he rasped. "Show them the true power of the dark side. And you two! Quit smooching!"

--

So, happy April Fool's Day, and welcome to the first (hopefully) annual CGYSO Who's The Bossk Tournament.  In the spirit of "March has been busy" and "the pandemic has made doing a lot of things I'd like to rather difficult at this moment", I'm throwing this together as an event Eric and I have often wanted to do, but haven't really had the time for.

THE RULES

You're going to make a (for almost all intents and purposes) legal 370-point list WITH NO COMMANDER from one faction. (Do not make a 400 point list with a 30 point commander and make me remove it (* I am aware that Minister Tua doesn't go on the SSD, but I needed an Imperial ship with 2 officer slots for the joke and reference, so you get this. Deal.)) Maximum 4 uniques TOTAL in your list (one per 100 points). Squads, titles, officers, time to figure out what makes the cut!

We're going to play a 3-round tournament and each round I will spin a wheel (wheel under construction/theft from Pat Sajak) that will have a commander on it. You will be randomly assigned said commander and use him/her/it to play a game against your opponent under the same restrictions. You might get Ackbar for your Munificents! You might get Sloane for your Clams and ARC-170s! End of 3 rounds, best player wins.  And what do they win? Points towards the 2022 Vassal World Cup Qualification Thing!

When you submit your list, you will also describe it as one of our three archetypes: Big Heavy, Squads, or MSU. One of the rounds I will assign you a commander from that archetype; he/she/it will NOT be from your faction. (This is to ensure that I don't end up giving out Sloane 3 times to someone running squadronless. It's for fun, I'm not trying to be mean here).

Why a 30 point bid? Rough estimate of what each commander averages to. Whoever has the cheaper commander has initiative, so feel free to build to 370, it's not affecting the end point total you have. If you end up with a more expensive commander, congrats on slightly gaming the system and getting Vader or Ackbar or the Emperor himself for "30" points.

What commanders can I get? Anything legal as of tournament start.  Which, speaking of, will be April 16th (convenient, isnt it), so you have 2 weeks to get your lists into me.  Each round will take roughly one week, with the standard caveats of "schedule your games, don't make me give someone an 8-0 for not showing up." Play on Vassal, play on TTS, play in your garage if you can get your opponent there...(default is Vassal).  There IS a special category of "The Garbage Will Do" for 5 commanders (Mothma, Cracken, Tagge, Kon, and ONE CLONE COMMANDER NOT REVEALED YET).  Not because they're garbage, but because they're so specifically related to your fleet construction that if you spin into this one you'll get your choice of options (assuming not your faction).  I'm not going to make someone running a 5 hardcell fleet play Konstantine, who does LITERALLY nothing for them. 

There may be some special bonuses showing up (Choose the commander? All Ackbar all the time?) but those will be revealed as things happen and based off your fleet submission answers. Click on the link below and let's find out together who the real Bossk is.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfpjG1xrT3hUeIU1gqtrH64RenpzVOZJhj5iMakukw-SZVL-A/viewform?usp=sf_link