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This article became drastically out of date with previous erratas/changes and I foresee that any new fleets I put up as examples would eventually suffer the same fate, causing this article to be perpetually out of date.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.

Armada 101: faction breakdown

This is the second post (the first being my post on what I consider to be the core features/selling points of the game) of what I hope over the long run will be a series of posts I like to think of as "the basics" or "Armada 101." Stuff that people considering Armada or very new to Armada can make use of in terms of just grokking the basic elements of the game before they dig into something even more detail-oriented, like a squadron or ship analysis.

This time around, I'd like to answer a question I get from many new players: which faction should I choose? Some players intend to use only one faction (for example, John plays only Rebels) and others would like to focus on one over the other (for example, I'd say I'm about 90% Imperials 10% Rebels). Focusing on one faction can also make Armada more affordable, especially earlier on. I do come across the occasional "splitsies" player who do manages to more-or-less evenly play both sides but in my experience such people are a rarity.

First and foremost, there is no "bad" faction. Both Imperials and Rebels can field competitive fleets and have a great variety of competitive builds. Both can be fun to play as well, so there's no "good, but boring" faction either. The two factions do have tendencies in their designs, though, that differentiate them from one another and can appeal to players of different temperaments. I'd like to discuss at least some of those features with an eye towards helping new players decide which faction seems like it would appeal to them most. I would like to note that all comparisons are made as of the writing of this article, so as of wave 5.

Why play Armada? What makes it unique?

This topic was our very first request received for an article topic and for something so elementary I hadn't even considered it. Given we're focusing on articles for newer players, this kind of article is for the newest of the new players: those who haven't even played Armada yet!

So, what would I consider the defining elements of Armada as a miniatures game?

"You are a member of the rebel alliance, and a traitor.”

Greetings from the rebellious side of things. I'm John, and I'll be your primary commentator on Rebel leanings, tactics, ship loadouts, and various other things. My little introduction of who I am and why I'm doing this. As Eric said previously, we're two old friends who play way too much Armada. Eric and I have been playing since Wave I, where WE were the entire meta at the game store. He tends towards Imperial things (order, discipline, big pointy triangles) while I lean Rebel (squadrons, side arcs, zany schemes).

As Eric said, we're going to try making this a guide for less experienced players. Eric will tend to do most of the Imperial lifting, and I'll be your Rebel guide. He has played some Rebel games, and I've.... acknowledged that he plays Imperial, haha. With a less than populous Rebel Alliance in our meta (I think we're up to 4 out of 11-12ish players now?), I stick with what I know just to provide an opposite side. Well, that, and I love the MC30/MC80 (FISH LIFE), the Rebel ships, squadron v squadron combat, Rebel hero units, Rebel cards, bombing capital ships with X-Wings, B-Wings, Y-Wings, etc, desperate attacks that may or may not work out based on 12% of a plan and some luck..... It's a good life on the Rebel side.

In the analytical articles, I'll post all the information I've found especially helpful. Game writeups I'll try to get into analysis of why I did WHAT I did (and if it worked or not, haha), and why I built a specific list to be a certain way. I'm willing to try something weird once or twice in order to see if it works out. Sometimes it does, and sometimes you get my Madine list with 2 LMC80s and 1 HMC80. Fun, but not super strong. Oh, but so much fun.

First up for us both: squadrons and squadron roles/choices

Welcome!

Welcome to Cannot Get Your Ship Out, a Star Wars Armada blog co-written by two friends (Eric and John) who play way too much Armada and want to keep telling other people about it too. At the moment, it's under heavy construction. We'd like to get some articles lined up prior to really linking to the blog, but if you stumbled across it on your own, please be assured there will be meaningful content here soon.

A quick side note: we're both new to blogging although we're old hands at minis wargaming. Expect a bit of tinkering around the edges with formatting and layouts and the like until we get a result we're happy with.

Our early focus is to provide a resource hub for newer/less experienced players. To that end, expect a lot of squadron, ship, and upgrade breakdowns as well as usage guides (squadrons, black dice ships, fleet building, deployment, etc.) and objective selection discussions. That alone should provide for massive piles of content.

We hope to see you back soon!