Fleet Support upgrades

It's time for another upgrade review post, just in time for the Gozanti review article (it's effectively a two-fer)!

Fleet support upgrades are cards released in wave 3 that are used for support and denial purposes. I figured it would be easier to keep them all in one place for easy reference.

John Updates 12/15

Ackbar - removed my writeups of the individual ships and went with a vaguer assessment of what does/doesn't work for him. I also updated my DnD character in one of the jokey jokes (as my Dragonborn Paladin has retired); this is the content you came here for right?

MC30 - title changes and viability, and I stripped down the "Scooty Puff Jr" build to its most basic elements.  Can you run them titleless? I don't hate the idea!

MC30: The Curse of the Flying Hellfish!

The Mon Calamari people brought a lot when they joined the Rebellion.  Specifically, the best ways to murder other ships.  Let's jump into today's ship review with the MC30, the angriest fish ship in the smallest package.

Artist's Representation

Eric updates 12/15/2020

 On to the objectives and one particularly big article update!

• Objectives introduction
• Minor changes
• All wave one objective articles updated.
• Mostly editing a bit of text, adding some hyperlinks, etc. Minor stuff. 
• Imperial starter fleets article given a major overhaul!
• The big issue holding us back earlier was trying to get the best combination of ships and upgrade cards to get started with on a budget, and those upgrade cards could only be found packaged with specific ships (unless you wanted to hunt them down on eBay, which most starting players don't). No longer! So long as you add the upgrade pack to your beginning purchases (you should), you get a lot more freedom with your starter fleets.
• There are now 3 different Empire starter fleet options.
  

Building an Imperial fleet on the cheap: the $250 challenge

One concern about Armada is the cost of entry. I cannot deny that miniature wargaming overall can be an expensive hobby (especially compared to more "compact" entertainment, such as video games or board games). One thing in Armada's favor is that so far as miniature wargaming is concerned, it's much cheaper than a lot of the "large scale" competition such as Warhammer 40K or Flames of War (not to say it's bad to enjoy any of those games as well).

This short article's goal is to get newer players to a reasonable 400 point Imperial fleet at a cost of $250 MSRP or less. Why Imperials? Because that's the faction I'm most familiar with. John has a companion Rebel article if you like, but otherwise you're stuck with me 😉. This can be the start of an Imperial-only fleet or it can be the first Imperial fleet you build into (maybe you are going for both factions and you'd like to start Imperial or you went Rebel already and want to bulk out your Imperials?).

Why $250? Its a fairly round number. It's less than the cost of a gaming console but is still a good-sized investment. It should be enough to get you by for some time. I will note that you can find individual components cheaper online or perhaps at your local game store, but whenever possible I encourage you to buy your gear at the store where you play - that's how they keep their lights on and their doors open so you and your buddies can play there!

One quick note: FFG can have issues keeping some items in stock. This list assumes you can grab everything. If you can't, you'll need to riff off of what's available to you.

So let's get down to it!

Definitely not this many triangles though.

Armada objectives: yellow objectives, wave one

We've arrived at the final article of the wave one objective reviews, which will focus on the yellow objectives! Yay!

Armada objectives: blue objectives, wave one

Okay, we're done with our wave six spoiler screaming and let's get back to the blue (navigation) objective cards!

Armada objectives: red objectives, wave one

Let's start our 3-part wave one objective reviews with the red (assault) objectives. These are a good starting point, as they're often more straightforward than their blue and yellow cousins.

Armada objectives introduction

For my next few updates, I'm going to be examining the objectives available in wave one and explaining why you would or wouldn't take them in a given fleet. Before I get much further into that, though, it seems proper to have a short discussion about the role of objective selection when designing your fleet.

And we're nothing if not proper!

John 12/13 and 12/14

Yesterday AND today!

Garm - addressed some round choice options, made some minor clarifications. He's still good, he's just not flashy. Think of him as dodonna with 5 points of "everyone gets tokens twice," which is a very good ability.

Assault Frigate - minor cosmetic changes, but I had updated that one recently.  Some mentions of the Evade effect, but nothing too substantial.

Mothma - some rewriting, but her ability is still evade based. Mentions of how she's very similar to Cracken and the few ways they differ.

Know Your Enemy/Commander's Corner: Mon Mothma

So I'm working on catching up with Eric and the fact that he's through wave 2 and midway through wave 3.  (This line was written in 2017 and it remains true 3 years later). I'm working on it though, doing what I can.  This week's goal is finishing the Commanders through Wave 2 (So, Mothma and Ackbar) and I'm going to try to hit another ship (the MC30 sock fulla quarters) this week too.  Next week is the HMC80, the flotillas, and hopefully Cracken.  Anyways, if we're starting out with Mothma, let's get to it.

Many Bothans died to bring us this picture with Walex Blissex in it (over Madine's shoulder)

Eric updates 12/14/2020

 Updates today for...

• Darth Vader commander
• Minimal changes.
• Raider
• Evades work at close range, fellas. Smoke 'em if you got 'em!
• Removed a whole bunch about flakking versus squadrons with Intel boosting them. It's a lot easier to force enemies to fight your squads and get your Raider flak in nowadays.
• I'm quite frankly astounded at how much Intel keeps showing up across all these different articles, even about ships.
  
• Shortened the article a bit, actually. It's still long, though.
• Fixed points costs for ordnance upgrades.
• I'm no longer as dismissive of APTs or ACMs on Raider-Is but I definitely still feel more comfortable there if Screed is involved.
•  Ozzel
• Is amazing now. JOIN ME. 
• Seriously, though, this required a pretty substantial rewrite given how much he changed.
• Now that he's simpler and better, the article is shorter as a lot of the "for real he's not bad just follow my line of thought" elements were shortened or removed as they're no longer necessary.
  

Imperial commander review: Admiral Ozzel

Admiral Ozzel? Isn't he that guy who was as clumsy as he was stupid? Didn't Vader choke him out in a Zoom call?

Pictured: Piett is tired of Admiral Ozzel's workplace yodeling.

Imperial ship review: Raider Corvette

What? Where's the star destroyer designation? Cor...vette? Is this a real Imperial ship review? It is, in fact! Not everything must destroy stars. Or... be a destroyer ship of the "star" classification, I suppose. Whatever it is exactly that "star destroyer" means in Star Wars anyways - it seems to get used on wildly different ships when you really think about it and that can't be any kind of reasonable categorization system for a military dictatorship that spans a healthy chunk of a galaxy, right?

There's no good way out of this tangent, so enjoy some sweet missiles!

Imperial Commander Review: Darth Vader

We're looping back around to commanders and taking a look at Darth Vader.

 

Counterpoint: yes?