Grand Inquisitor added to Imperial officers article

The Imperial officers article has been updated, with some cleanup involving the Quasar now officially being released and the addition of the Grand Inquisitor. The ISD article has again been updated to mention when I'd recommend Leading Shots on an ISD-I and to mention the Grand Inquisitor as an option on ships with Quad Battery Turrets due to his synergy with them on an ISD. That should, to my knowledge, completely update all of my articles to wave 6.

That Grand Inquisitor section added to the Imperial officers article is below:

Where is Spain? Why does everyone ask if I'm from there? It's so unexpected!

The Grand Inquisitor requires a little clarification before we go any further:

• The line "when an enemy ship... changes its speed" is a little more nebulous than I'd like. It can be construed to mean "its speed is changed from any effect," which would allow you to trigger the Grand Inquisitor when using a Tractor Beam or some such, but consensus seems to be that it refers to the ship itself ("changes its speed," being "the ship('s owner) choosing to change its speed") making the decision and not from effects being forced on it. I'd appreciate an FAQ on this sooner or later, though.
• That said, you can use speed-down effects to encourage the owner of the ship to speed it back up to trigger the Grand Inquisitor, though!
• Remember that you can't premeasure with the maneuver tool until your ship gets to its determine course step, so when the Grand Inquisitor triggers you don't get the benefit of seeing how you like a different speed and the options it gives you like you would with a navigate dial and/or token.

The Grand Inquisitor fills a bit of an odd niche by allowing you to quasi-navigate during an opponent's turn but only if a nearby enemy ship changes its speed as well. Because of his restrictions, if you're looking to use the Grand Inquisitor as an on-demand navigate token, I'd recommend looking to Wulff Yularen for an extra 3 points or use a Veteran Captain or Skilled First Officer if you only anticipate a one-time emergency need. You really don't want to be relying on the Grand Inquisitor only to find your opponent has denied you the triggering event you need for him to work.

Okay, so when would you want to use the Grand Inquisitor over a more reliable officer that can help you change your speed? A few situations come to mind:

• On ISDs or (to a lesser extent) VSDs using Quad Battery Turrets, the Grand Inquisitor can be quite helpful as he allows you to slow down during your opponent's turn, prior to your attack with the Quad Battery Turrets. Given that heavier enemy ships are often slowing down to avoid the extra blue die when the dice start flying and lighter enemy ships are often speeding up to get out of your front arc, the Grand Inquisitor often has ample opportunities to trigger and can assist you with getting your speed into the "just right" category where you'll be able to use your QBTs and also navigate as you prefer.
• In conjunction with a navigate token for larger speed changes. This is another feature where I feel like the Grand Inquisitor is likely best on an ISD, but any ship that enjoys going between speed 1 and 3 and back appreciates a 1-point bump from the Inquisitor followed by a navigate token spend, especially if it's generally busy performing other commands. The trick is that the ship in question needs to prompt speed changes from enemy ships to be able to quasi-reliably pull this off, and that's why the ISD is a good candidate whereas an Arquitens or Raider, for example, is not.

With that said, the Grand Inquisitor isn't bad but I overall don't recommend him much outside an ISD, and that's an officer seat with a lot of competition. I have had more success with him on a Quad Battery Turrets ISD-II than I expected, however, so I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot at some point.

Checking it Twice! Individual Activations

So we've hit the start of each turn in our last article in this series.  Now, we break this down to individual ships and how to know when to activate them.

I suggest activating the Star Destroyer first.

John Updates 9/5!

Well, Eric spurred me into it, hitting some of my own articles to update or check for updates.  I just hit:

Turbolaser article (updated for ISDs with QBTs, and potentially Quad Turbolaser Cannons on Cymoons)
Generic Officers (nothing much to update beyond adding in links)
Support Team upgrades (links)
Defensive Retrofits (links)

After I finish one of the several articles I'm writing, I'll start hitting commanders and ships and updating them more.  I have several Commanders I need to update, and I know that for SURE (with crazy plans for them all.....).  I will fully admit to having been spending the last several days playing Walking Dead Season 3 (spoiler alert: alcohol keeps the crying away!), so Eric has been outdoing me on the blogging.  Eric and I have a giant list of articles we're planning, so we'll keep those going soon!

8/30-9/5 updates

In the past few days, I've updated several articles with new hyperlinks and minor editing and such (I realize this is getting repetitive, I just like to let people know that I'm sprucing things up and that we've got a commitment to keeping the articles up to date as new waves come out so they'll be relevant in perpetuity). Those articles include:

• How to black dice!
• Interdictor Cruiser 
• Admiral Konstantine
• Ion cannon upgrades
• Arquitens Light Cruiser
• Moff Jerjerrod
• Lambda-class Shuttle
• TIE Defender
• VT-49 Decimator
• TIE Phantom
• Weapon teams 
• Red (assault) objectives, wave five
• Blue (navigation) objectives, wave five
• Yellow (defense) objectives, wave five 

No major changes were made, although the Interdictor article got a bit more work due to Disposable Capacitors improving the Interdictors' stock. As we get closer to more recent articles, the amount of cleanup/linking required diminishes greatly and so hopefully we should be 100% up to date on the older articles soonish.

Next up for me is an article on something new, as editing older articles is slowly rotting my brain.

8/29 updates

Found myself with a lot of spare time today, so I did a lot of blog-updating administrative work.

The Admiral Ozzel, Intro to objective selection, Wave one red objectives, Wave one yellow objectives, Wave one blue objectives, Gozanti Cruisers, fleet support upgrades, Bidding for initiative, Bidding for initiative 2: fleet examples, The attack sequence and you!, The basics of fleet building, and General Tagge articles have all been updated today. Nothing major - mostly hyperlinks were added to link to other articles that were produced later and were relevant, text was cleared up, some additions were made account for new meta situations (particularly regarding Sloane and the Quasar on the Imperial side) and some tweaks to Tagge's article post-TRC nerf, which has made him even worse, sadly 😞.

Slowly but surely everything is being brought up to date. It's not so much wave 6 causing major changes in the content of articles so much as the formatting of articles and the existence of lots of new reference points in the blog that were created after our earlier articles but didn't exist at the time of writing for older articles. Revisions in the future once I'm caught up should be much simpler for articles that don't need major content updates.

Update to Squadrons Encyclopedia 4 Large Fighter coverage Imperial segment

As I made my way through older articles, I found a lot of the information about Imperial squadron-building and carrier ships was outdated in our old LFC article and needed a pretty substantial overhaul due to Sloane-shaped changes in the meta and a Quasar-sized hole in the carrier ships section (what a difference one wave and a Rhymer errata makes!). With that said, the majority of the Imperial section of the article has been written anew. Here is the new section separated out:

Wave 7 announcement hot take

So FFG just out of nowhere teased wave 7, thankfully. Let's take a look at the new goodies!

8/22 updates

The YV-666, Firespray-31, Darth Vader (commander), Armada 101: Working your way up from starter box games tips and reminders, Squadrons Encyclopedia 2 Light Fighter Coverage Imperial Addendum, Imperial squadrons portion of the Squadrons Encyclopedia 3: Medium Fighter Coverage, Raider Corvette, and a small portion of the ISD article were all updated today (yes, it got updated once again). As before, it's mostly text clean up and some editing. I tried to cut down on repetition in the longer articles and mentioned a few wave 6 improvements in the Raider article (specifically Disposable Capacitors and a possible build for a Raider-II utilizing it, the wonders of External Racks were already integrated into that article earlier).

The main change in the ISD article is I changed my stance on Quad Battery Turrets and there's an argument for them on ISD-IIs (thanks to Giled Pallaeon for changing my mind on this one). Ships going faster than the ISD are the ones likely to slip past your front arc. They either get to eat extra blue dice or they are going slow enough to likely not escape your front arc. Either way, win-win.

8/21 updates

The Gladiator, ordnance upgrades, Jumpmaster, Aggressor Assault Fighter, and Imperial Star Destroyer articles were all updated today. As before, in most cases it was minor editing and adding hyperlinks.

The ISD article now includes an aside on Sloane - specifically in combination with the Avenger title. The Avenger also makes note of Boarding Troopers for the same reason, and a Boarding Troopers build is included in the ISD-I builds section.

Rebel Updates!

In the realm of updating articles just like Eric did, I hit all the Rebel fighters articles myself.  Mostly updating links (how MANY times can I reference Toryn Farr? ALL OF THEM!) and linking in upgrades (Expanded Hangar Bays or Fighter Coordination Team, usually) or Commanders (Sato and Rieekan were my 2 most referenced.  Considering I had so MANY aces, Rieekan makes sense, of course.)

Not a whole lot to say on that, but I do plan on hitting the last of the checklist articles very soon.  I'm quite close on grokking Leia, and soon after hopefully the Hammerhead (that's.... not as easy/fast, haha).  I've been having a lot of good experiences with my Leia list, and I may even develop it into a plan for Fall Regionals.  Eric and I have a store tournament the first weekend in September, so you can expect my Leia article soon after that (when I bring her to THAT, I bet).

Anyways, squadrons are updated as of now.  I read over the Nebulon article today too, and I have nothing substantial to add to that as of right now, either.  Keep on keeping on, I suppose!

More updates 8/20/2017

The TIE Interceptor, TIE Bomber, Admiral Motti, Admiral Screed, Faction breakdown, Grand Moff Tarkin, Victory-class Star Destroyer, and Offensive retrofit articles have all been updated.

For the most part, I added hyperlinks to other relevant articles and did some minor to moderate text editing to make points clearer, fixed the rare typo, and removed any ambiguity left over from anything prior to the errata we received two months ago (particularly relating to Rhymer, who keeps popping up in all kinds of places I didn't expect him to be). Nothing major.

The VSD and offensive retrofit articles had some more substantial changes:

TIE Squadrons updates

Minor update:
I've updated the TIE Fighter, TIE Fighter aces, and TIE Advanced articles. Nothing major beyond creating hyperlinks where there used to be none and minor editing to make wording clearer, but it's done and the articles now look less old and more like something we'd be creating now. This should be going on intermittently as we catch everything up to wave 6.

Planning to get the offensive retrofits article updated to include the Disposable Capacitors soon, and then hopefully a Quasar article as well.

Gencon stuff and Star Wars: Legion

Unfortunately not much information about Armada from FFG other than "something big is coming," which can mean a lot. Super Star Destroyer? Huge wave 7? Another campaign? Armada 2.0? Who knows.

However, please enjoy these sweet pics of Star Wars: Legion, the upcoming FFG ground skirmish minis wargame.

Edit: and the official article just came up!

Updates and an Update!

So quick updates for some articles and the state of the blog.

I updated the Turbolasers article to include Quad Battery Turrets (Spoiler: I like them on certain ships.  This is quite shocking, I know) and some more thoughts on Quad Turbolaser Cannons (it was a quad-tastic kinda day, and I'm still dumb enough to think they're going to be useful for me soon.  In my super small ship meta, they kinda might be?)

I also updated the Nebulon article, but I will likely go back and revisit it some this weekend to put a few finishing touches on it until I'm much more happy with it. However, I didn't want it to go unmentioned in case someone asks "Hey, when are you putting QBT in the Nebulon article?" (Today.)

As of right NOW, Eric and I have a few irons in the fire.  I've still got to finish my checklist series (I haven't forgotten, I promise!) and Eric has a few things he wants to write about as well.  I've got an idea or two to hop onto after that, as well.  We're going back and updating the old articles as they have some stuff that needs to be hit and adjusted (I still had a few things in the Neb article about using TRCs twice in one turn, comma, sigh).

But where's the new articles, you ask? I promise that it's not a matter of life getting in the way (well, mostly, I did get a new job and have been running copious amounts of mileage for the Chicago Marathon), but it's a matter of trying to figure out what to write.  I lucked out in that "all" I have to do is figure out how to use Hammerheads; Eric has to learn a Quasar, see how DCaps affect a VSD-II, if they're worth it on other things, and we both need to learn our new Commanders.  I like Leia, though i can't claim I know what I'm doing with her fully yet (I AM having fun though!).  So we're both kind of in a holding pattern of trying to figure out what to write about.  We'd both rather have GOOD information out to you guys rather than FAST information that needs to be corrected, so the "How to Hammerhead" article is not necessarily going to be tomorrow, but I'm hoping it IS soon.  I need a few more games before I'm comfortable writing about them and how to use them.  Wave 6 shook up our meta and our playstyles, and that's a good thing.  We'll get more stuff out soon, promise.

Fleet deployment

I've been putting it off for a while trying to figure out exactly how to write about this huge subject, but the time has come for the fleet deployment article!

Spoilers: it's gonna be a bad time for everything you can see in this picture.