Star Wars: Armada Breaking – New Ship Upgrades Unveiled For The Clone Wars
Let’s take a look at the newly unveiled Star Wars Armada cards.
This week Atomic Mass Games, which has taken over the FFG Star Wars games, gave us their first peak at more upcoming Armada stuff set during the Clone Wars era. Let’s take a quick look at what was shown off.
Pelta Upgrades
Clone Captain Silver
Silver is a Republic crew upgrade that lets you sort of mimic the speed-changing effect of a navigation command. While he doesn’t let you change how much you can turn, he does let you change your speed by up to 3 instead of the normal 1, letting you make some really radical changes. You can also use this alongside other orders. Overall this seems like a pretty useful card, especially on a light fast ship.
Admiral Yularen
Wow. Yularen, a Republic Commander, has got to be one of the best commanders in the game for squadron play and seems really useful. Not only does he allow your ships to activate more squadrons, but he lets your ships heal squadrons as well (this seems really useful for the Pelta Transport, with its 4 engineering and low cost). This guy has a lot of potential, and being able to heal powerful squadrons seems really good. I’ll be looking out for fleets based on him.
Adi Gallia
Adi Gallia is a Republic crew who lets all your defense tokens act like weak redirect tokens. She’s cheap and this is a pretty useful rule if you are out of redirects or just want to save them. Getting more value out of your tokens is always good, so I can see a lot of uses for her.
Venator Upgrades
Plo Koon
Plo Koon! (Eat that Jenny Nickleson, people do know who he is). Plo Koon is another squadron-focused Republic commander. While he gives some nice benefits, it’s mainly bombers who are going to want to take advantage of them, getting those accuracy dice on attacks. However, for a lot of squadron attacks against ships, I don’t think an accuracy is all that great and he just seems like a worse choice than Yularen for a Squadron based build.
Ahsoka Tano
Good old Snips shows up as a Republic crew also, though based on her card Snips would have been a better nickname. Allowing squadrons to gain snipe is a pretty cool rule with a lot of potential. I can totally see her featuring in squadron heavy builds.
Clone Commander Wolffe
Wolffe is another crew card that buffs your squadrons, this time giving them Assault, or buffing assault if they already have it. This allows you to really mess with enemy ships, and if you combine it was a ship that already has Assault and Plo Koon you can get a nice combo that lets you get “free” assaults off. If you want to cripple your enemy’s commands, he’s a good choice.
Providence-Class Upgrades
TI-99
TI-99 isn’t just a really advanced calculator you need for space school, it’s also a CIS crew upgrade. This is a very interesting card as it really gives you a crazy strong defensive position. TI-99 gives friendly, unactivated squadrons a really powerful counterattack, or boosts counter if they already have it. However, once they’ve counter-attacked they count as being activated, losing the counter attack and you can’t activate them later. This basically trades their normal action, for a single strong counterattack. If you got a bunch of squadrons in position around a ship and they don’t need to move this could be worth it, but the cost is pretty high.
Admiral Trench
Spider-Admiral, Spider-Admiral, does whatever an Admiral can. Trench is kind of your standard boosting effects admiral. He allows you to pick a command and when a friendly ship resolves just that command they count as using a dial and token. This is a nice easy boost to your fleet, and can really help if you are using a ton of squadron or con-fire commands. It doesn’t really open up a lot of new ways to play, but it’s nice.
Tikkes
Tikkes is kind of weird. He basically lets you get free command tokens, but forces you to pick specific commands on later dials. If you’ve got a ship that’s basically going to be using the same command the whole game, this is really good, as it’s just free tokens, but otherwise could run you into trouble down the line.
Recusant-Class Upgrades
San Hill
What in the San Hill is this! Hill, lets you affect how many squadrons you can activate at a time during the squadron phase. This can be pretty powerful, letting you get the drop on enemy squadrons and overpower them. However, it’s only really useful if both players have a lot of squadrons that are activating in the squadron phase rather than by using commands. This could be good with the right build, but feels a bit corner case.
Passel Argente
At first read, Passel seems really good, as he lets you get free command dials, which is rad. However, his rule is pretty restrictive. The soonest you can get a free dial is on turn 4, and only is A. you’ve survived that long and B. you’ve used a different command every turn. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a ship use all four commands in the same game, so you’d have to really work to make this happen. I guess if you know you’ll get a big pay off it could be worth it, but I’m not sure it something that will happen enough to be worth it.
Mar Tuuk
Mar Tuuk is a pretty interesting, and I think powerful CIS commander. Getting to add free red dice to your attack pool is just always good. That’s really powerful, and lends its self well to a fleet running a lot of smaller ships. Yes, it only works if the enemy has an active shield on the defending zone, but that’s when you need it most. Combined with one of a few upgrades and confire command, this can give a cheap Hardcell a 6 red die frontal attack. Now yes, if the enemy has no shields you do have to cancel one of your attacking dice, but I don’t think it’s a huge deal. For one, it is kind of rare that an enemy has no remaining shields at all (for Mar Tuuk its no shields on the ship at all, not no shields on the zone). Most of the time you will focus on one area and wear it down, and even using redirects will normally leave one zone with shields. Even if you have to lose a die, you can probably just drop one that missed with little effect. This guy seems like a real solid option.
Let us know what you think of these new upgrades, down in the comments!
