Minor update to the TIE Fighter article

I told you I'd let you know when things changed! We'll see more major changes I suspect as time goes on (wave 6 woot!) but I wanted to add some Vassal examples to the TIE Fighters article to both break up the wall of text towards the bottom but also to illustrate the points being made.

That's it! Probably my shortest post so far!

Quasar preview article hot take

So FFG just released its preview article for the Quasar. If you haven't read it yet, please do!

A Quick Discussion on Worlds and the Status of John's Blogging Updates!

"Rise from your grave!"

Hey guys

First, sorry about the lack of MAJOR updates on my end since the LMC80 article.  I'm working on the Madine one soon enough, but I will fully admit that job applications (actual reasons!) and a bit of playing Fallout 4 Sunday night (John, you lazy oaf! I don't care if you're finally at the good point in the story and have stopped doing side quests, back to the Armada mines!) got in the way.  Madine is coming, I promise, but my tomorrow is a bit busy, so it'll likely be the end of the week.  Then I'll start hitting the Wave 5 squadrons soon too.  I'll be honest, in that I'm trying to put off Sato until I can find a way to get him to work for me.  I have PLANS, but they may need a Hammerhead to come to fruition....

The OTHER thing I wanted to bring up is a recent comment on the Rieekan post from Graeme.

I'm hearing that a lot of the top rebel lists for worlds this year were reeikan lists. Might be nice to update this article with some of them if you find any. I have never used him yet but for store championship coming soon might switch from Dodonna to him :)

First, Graeme, I hope you don't mind me throwing your comment out here.  I figured it might get a little more traffic than in the comments of the Rieekan article, and it lets me blather on for a bit about it all, haha.

Regarding Worlds 2017, Eric and I and a few of our friends have talked to each other about the results and everything they entail.  At the moment, Eric and I don't plan on addressing Worlds (well, beyond this post, I suppose).  We might come back to it if/when we get time later, but at the moment we don't have anything of actual note to say about the results and lists.  We see what happened, just like you all do, and we're concerned about it as well.  From what I've heard, the people who talked to Michael Gernes (the guy actually in charge of Armada, who, if he's reading our blog, welcome Mr. Gernes!) say that he's SUPER invested in the game.  So I'm sure he ALSO sees those final standings and wants to do something about it.  He doesn't want to turn Armada into the Rieekan Game, as I think we'd all get bored Going to a Dead Man's Party repeatedly.

Eric and I don't have current Buzzfeed list plans on What Needs to Change to Keep Armada from Dying (Number 3 will Electroshock You!), as that's just us talking past each other and you, not actually contributing meaningful discussion here.  So we're not going to try to Fix Armada.  I don't have a degree in Game Design, so it's not worth it.

Degrees in Game Design come from Bovine University

The best advice I can offer at the moment is twofold: first, wait for wave 6.  Sloan is going to shoot defense tokens out from under aces FAST, and we'll see what happens to that list then.  Plus with Hammerheads and the Boarding Engineers hitting carriers, let's see what goes down there?

Second, the best thing to do to deal with it is to look at what options you currently have available.  And if you want my honest opinion, Raiders with Flechette Torpedos can get a LOT done against it in your current meta.  Eric's Raiders have squished my squadrons like bugs on a windshield more often than I can count.  I can't claim they'll solve EVERY problem, but they're a good start.  Learning to fly them takes time, but I promise that if you get deadly with them, they'll become one of your favorite ships (yes, the REBEL is advocating learning IMPERIAL ships.  I'm shocked too!).  As for Rebels, massed YT-2400s is an answer, but one I can't just keep recommending that EVERY time.  Give me some time to come up with a current solution or two for Our Side.

Lastly, we are planning on going back and updating all the posts at some point.  Especially when a new wave comes out, and new upgrades, ships, and turbolasers/ordnance (see, I can spell it right when informed I was doing it wrong, haha!) appear to be fielded on ships.  I can't promise WHEN it'll all happen, but Eric and I view this as a resource for everyone, so we want to keep it updated as much as possible.  So, alterations to articles will happen eventually?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

A Quick Thanks to All our Readers

So Eric and I attended a Meet-and-Greet slash viewing party for an Internet Celebrity we like last night (Specifically, Nostalgia Critic - give him a watch, he's pretty correct in ripping apart terrible movies we watched growing up.  His review of Batman and Robin is STILL right and on task with how dumb that movie was....) and during the Q&A portion, someone asked the cast a question along the lines of "How does it feel knowing you've impacted so many people's lives?"  Their response is very similar to our feelings with your guys, so I'll post ours below.

I want to say thank you to everyone who reads this blog and finds us helpful.  Eric and I started this as we just wanted somewhere we could write down all of our thoughts about the game and have an easier place to just refer people back to when we wanted to expand on a topic.  It's really easy for me to yell "Git Gud!" with squadrons as I play a game, but that helps no one and doesn't get the community to grow.  What DOES help is giving people the ability to read some ways we've found of running things, in a format that you can both read and remember at your own pace, so it's not a datadump of information for you during the middle of a game.

When people comment on our posts or on the forums saying "Thank you!" or "Great article!" or "So helpful!" it really makes us feel great, and I'm glad to know that our advice is helpful AND that people are reading us.  Knowing that we're helping people get better at the game we both enjoy is just a great feeling for us, and I'm glad that people find us intelligible enough to read and follow our advice.  If we didn't have you guys reading us, this whole site would be just Eric and me yelling into the void.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

So I can keep saying "Thank you," repeatedly (John? Wordy? NEVER!) but I'll just close this out by saying "Thank you all, we're not going anywhere, we're glad you're all here reading us.  It's just great that people like us all.  May the Fourth be with you all."

Store championship swag!

Here's what those store championship kits look like, for those who are curious. Great work by FFG!

Dead link!

So as of 11/19, this link is dead.  I pulled all the LFC stuff together into one chapter, so let me A) refer you there and B) ask you to comment on this with what link directed you here.

The Squadrons Encyclopedia is a work in progress, but we're getting there! I promise!

Thanks for the help in cleaning this all up!

Dead article, used to be bidding example fleets.

This article became drastically out of date with previous erratas/changes and I foresee that any new fleets I put up as examples would eventually suffer the same fate, causing this article to be perpetually out of date. For that reason, it's just blank now. The original article on bidding is pretty straightforward and should hopefully answer most of your questions. If there's enough demand for this to return, I may overhaul this again but for now it feels better to devote that energy to other articles.

Adepticon Sunday!

Shorter update on this one as I'm beat:

John and I and 4 other Fair Game participants arrived this morning around 9:30 to get our Armada on at Adepticon. Of the 20 participants, we made up 30% - pretty good! I still feel a bit weird about two-round events, but we had a good time.

Here's some pictures!

Friday Adepticon

So as I mentioned yesterday, John and I participated in the two-round Adepticon tournament on Friday. We started at 3:30PM and got done at 9:15PM and back home (John's crashing at my place for the weekend as I live a 30 minute drive closer to the event than he does) by around 10 and then collapsed. So sorry for a short delay. First things first, I won the event! I talked about how two-round events are a bit weird and I still feel that way, but it always feels good to do well. Still a kind of weird format, but I get why it is that way - Armada tournaments of 3 rounds (and sometimes 4) take up a lot of time and many Adepticon attendees want to play other games too. Therefore a shorter format makes sense.

I swear these things are simultaneously the coolest and goofiest things I own. Servo skull medal the size of your fist? SURE!

To Adepticon!

Today is the first day of Armada events at Adepticon (the second day is Sunday). This year, FFG is doing two "mini-tournaments" of two rounds each. With only two rounds I'm thinking of it more as a "casual play plus" event, where FFG hands out fun prizes at the end, but it's short enough for luck to have a very big role in who wins so I'm not taking it too seriously. Sure I'm planning on doing my best, but I hope to not sweat it too much. Even in a 3-round event, good luck can help a lot, but let's not get too much into that shall we?

For example, just look at this amazing yet goofy thing the author won for taking first in the 3-round event last year. And no, I'm not wearing it to Adepticon. I'm not that guy, haha.

Adepticon is a huge (and I mean HUGE) miniature gaming convention held once a year in Chicagoland. Minis games big, small, inbetween, and not-even-actually-released-yet-but-won't-you-please-demo-our-game-and-back-it-on-Kickstarter are present. There's tons to see and do and the vendor hall is always fun just as the crystal brush entries are always extremely impressive. Highly recommended for anyone who can make it and you don't even need to buy a badge if all you want to do is wander about, buy something, and look at neat stuff.

Anyways, John and I will be heading to Adepticon in a couple of hours and I'd expect several posts about our experiences to pop up over the next few days. If you'll also be at Adepticon, maybe we'll see one another there!

DEAD LINK

This is a dead link.  At this point, "using the SFC" should be referring you to the basic SFC link, found HERE:

http://cannotgetyourshipout.blogspot.com/2017/02/squadrons-encyclopedia-2-small-fighter.html

And also linked in that word HERE in all caps above.  As of 11/13/19, I'm working on editing all of these links, but I haven't started fixing them yet as I want to finish one or two of the other articles up in order to not have to renumber the chapters for these things more than once.  Please comment on this post with a detail of what link brought you here and I'll start making changes as quickly as I can.  Thanks for your patience!

Armada wave 6 spoilers!

Hoo boy, this is exciting! Our first Armada wave spoiler as a blog! We interrupt your objective coverage and squadron articles to bring you this spoiler article!

Get hype!

dead link

THIS IS THE OLD IMPERIAL SQUADRONS ADDENDUM AND IS NO LONGER CURRENT. If you were directed here by another article, please comment on that article so I know to redirect the link. The new combined article is here. Thanks.

Armada 101: working your way up from starter box games tips and reminders

Last Thursday we had two new players in for Armada (our local community continues to grow, which is always a good thing), and being the odd man out, I assisted them with rules and fleet building and such for their first non-starter box game. They had many questions and made numerous mistakes (which is normal and nothing to be ashamed of) and it prompted me to think of many pieces of advice and clarifications for players in similar situations where they're starting to come to grips with "regular sized" games. So without any further ado, let's get to some general-purpose reminders/tips/clarifications for new players!

Run, run, run, jump! I can be a backpack while you run!

Mailbox/Q&A Post #1

I received some questions from someone going by firedogee on the Armada reddit forum that I'd be happy to answer. If anyone has any shorter questions, we'll be collecting them and responding on occasion and grouping them into a mailbox/Q&A index (off on the right, so many indices!). The question was:

any chance you can cover "worst case scenarios" that new players find themselves in such as: 1) all of my command dials are set to engineering yet all my ships are about to fly off the play area, 2) I have all bomber squadrons and they keep getting swarmed, 3) at setup my ships are setup too wide and now some of my ships don't get involved in the action, 4) My ships keep running into stuff (or each other), 5) I always seem to end up in the front arcs of ISDs (or side arcs of MC80/MC30), 6) I have no idea how to choose upgrades or objectives based on the commander I want to use, 7) Why can't I just ram my opponent into submission?

I'll do my best to answer those in order, but don't be surprised to find longer answers to these in their own articles in the future.