Star Wars: Armada What’s It All About?
Star Wars Armada is just around the corner for all of us Star Wars fans, but is it just X-Wing with Star Destroyers or is there more to it than that?
Hi all,
I wanted to take the time today to cover something a little different to my usual chat about all things X-Wing.
Star Wars: Armada is due to hit in Q1 2015, with February being the slot being spoken about and I thought now would be a good time to start talking about it as a game and what I am expecting.
The first thing to cover is my fanboy status of all things relating to Star Wars capital ships but I will do my best to keep this in check…
Anyway, FFG now have a fair amount of information available on their site on Armada and vlogs have been up on youtube for a while showing some of the play from the events earlier on this year.
I think it’s fair to say that FFG have done a lot of work to ensure that the game has a completely different feel to X-Wing and the best one line comparison between the two that I could give would be that it is Strategy Vs Tactics.
Comparisons between the maneuver dial and the command dial are expected but it does not take long to realise how much of an impact the command stack can have and how they are being used to differentiate the different ships and play styles.
The mighty Victory Star Destroyers have a lumbering feel with a command value of 3.
This forces you to commit 3 turns ahead with what you are planning to do, when you combine this with the re-jigged turn order where we now shoot first and then move makes for a completely different feel to if you were to compare, for example X-Wing to Attack WIng where the game still feels the same despite the different scale.
If you compare the command value of 1 on the CR-90 for example it has that feel of being able to react to the battle quicker even before you compare the relative maneuverability of the two ships.
So the number of ticks on the “dial” is the number of clicks you can make at each relative speed so not only is the CR-90 faster it is also considerably more slippery, now consider that in the Ship Phase each Capital Ship can fire twice as long as the shots originate from different zones of the ship, it then becomes easier for the CR-90 to get those maneuvers to allow multiple zones to cover a single target and concentrate fire, whilst even if you can get that perfect on the Victory you are still going to be up against it as the relative dice from the front arc of the Victory are sill in the Imperials favour you have to consider that the CR-90 is only 44 points compared to a Victories 85 you get a good feel for how both factions are going to play in Wave 1 of Armada.
The Fighters are a completely different animal as well, and even with the focus being on the larger ships FFG have done a masterful job of differentiating between the types of squadrons due to there interactions on the table with not only enemy fighters and capitol ships but also friendly squadrons.
The Imperial Star Destroyers would be suicidal to engage the Rebellion without their TIE Swarm cover as whilst being unable to get critical hits on a capitol ship (in most cases…) the fighters are extremely difficult for the larger ships to pin down, fortunately a fighter squadron can normally attack a capital ship through a screen of fighters as they squadrons are considered engaged and so are too busy dogfighting to bother with the Star Destroyers.
The thematic interactions don’t stop there though with the Star Wars feel going in to the type of ships in the squadrons.
The cheap TIE’s get stronger if you have multiples and the X-wings combine a solid offensive punch of the Bomber rule with the Escort ability allowing them to screen Y-Wings or B-Wings on their attack runs.
You even get to add in some old favorites like Howlrunner and Luke to have even more fighter based fun.
I really like how all of this adds up, and as a lover of Battle Fleet Gothic, Aeronautica Imperialis and Epic getting to enjoy even more of those style of games in the Star Wars setting is really exciting to me. The obvious cool factor of throwing down your Rebel Wolf Pack and Fighter swarm compared to the Imperial Sledgehammer feel is going to make for an incredibly thematic game and if the rules set and balancing that FFG have done on X-Wing are anything to go by I honestly think that Armada is going to be here to stay.
I for one am buying in early and will be going to as many event as possible as if the recent explosion in popularity of X-Wing is a guide than FFG are on to another winner here.
What are your thoughts, too much of the same, or are you going to wait until the later waves to see how the game pans out? If you want to see more of my Star Wars based ravings or even my quite sensible talk about other things why not head over to my blog?
Kris
