Fleet building 201: Swarm/MSU

The last of the 3 archetype build articles, MSU, took a while to write initially due to turbulence from wave 7. Armada 1.5 introducing pass tokens has been a similar experience with the newest update, but MSU is alive and well. Arguably in much better shape than it once was.

As always, a quick warning that I'll be making a lot of generalizations in order to communicate points - once you've gotten a lot of experience with a particular archetype, you'll be able to identify circumstances in which some of the generalizations can be bent or broken with the right tactics or fleet-building.

This is the start of an MSU fleet leaning hard on Intensify Firepower, right here.

Fleet building 201: Heavy Squadron

Time for the second installment of the fleet archetype building series: Heavy Squadron. Just like the previous installment on Big Heavy, I feel the need to mention that for purposes of this article there will be a lot of generalizations that will not hold up in 100% of situations, especially with fleets made or used by experienced players who know when and how to bend or break some of the guidelines.

Just the first deployed ace squadron of many, courtesy of Admiral Sloane.

Fleet building 201: Big Heavy

Vader knows where it's at.

Big Heavy
As mentioned in the header article, Big Heavy is looking to stress the inherent strengths of heavier combat ships (medium and large ships focusing on direct confrontation). Heavy combat ships have high-value activations that can get a lot done. For the amount of space they take up on the table, they can throw an awful lot of dice, and for the most part they can take a lot of punishment, especially if the enemy is unable to gang up on them to overheat their defense tokens. Heavy ships that are only taking one or two attacks each round are in most cases effectively immortal, especially with the right defensive tech; conversely, light combat ships taking one or two attacks each round are going to be destroyed if they can't get out of trouble and soon. A Big Heavy fleet is looking to quickly destroy heavy-hitting opposition that threatens its heavy ships and then hopes to spend the rest of the game casually gobbling up the less-threatening survivors.

Fleet building 201: Archetype guidelines

In my earlier article on basic fleet-building, I mentioned 3 basic types of "skew" fleets: Big Heavy, Swarm/MSU, and Heavy Squadron. John and I have since written articles on dealing with those types of fleets (as well as more specific components of fleets that can be troublesome), but I've had some requests for articles in reverse: namely, some idea as to how to build and use those particular types of fleets. That seems pretty reasonable, so let's proceed with Fleet building 201, an article series where I'll cover some guidelines for building and using fleets based around those three basic archetypes.

Fleet building 101: the basics of fleet building

First and foremost, I (Eric) am going to be moving into a new house this week so my availability is sketchy at best. I'm hoping to be able to get one more article in this week when I have some downtime but I make no promises. I'll do my best, though. On to the article!

John and I have been dancing around the topic of fleet building for a little while and I figured now that I'm caught up to wave 3 of the Imperial releases it's time to at least get the basic parameters established for fleet building. I'll do my best to explore the considerations that go into it at higher levels but this is not an exhaustive guide. Everyone makes fleets differently and so if you're successful and your process doesn't follow my recommendations exactly, then good for you. Anyways, let's get to it, shall we?

Bidding for initiative/Mailbox #3

We got a question from smashthedean in the comments of the Sunday Adepticon wrapup post. He asked:
"Speaking of point bids, this might be a better question for a future mailbag post, but... how much is too much??"

That's a fine question and a subject on which even experienced players can differ. I'll do my best to give my take on bids and what I would recommend:

All in on black! I've got Ordnance Experts if it comes up blank! What do you mean "you're not making any sense"?

Fleet Building 301: Damage synergy

I've made passing reference to this idea in a few of the fleet building 201 articles when discussing hybridizing archetypes as well as a bit in the XI7 Turbolasers article, but I figure the time has come to actually give it the space it needs to really stretch out and run around a little bit: let's talk about damage synergy.

The Nautilian getting acquainted with long heavy burst damage.