Since nearly the beginning of the game the ion cannon slot has been the Leading shot upgrade slot and nothing else really saw much play. There have been a few new cards that have challenged that, and some old cards that are starting to see the light again. There has also been new ways to get rerolls or improve damage output. There are Three ways to help improve damage output: increase the damage ceiling, increase damage Floor and Increase average damage. We will look at how different upgrades affect all of these, put simply Damage Ceiling is maximum possible damage, the damage floor is minimum guaranteed damage, and average damage is just that the average damage. To help us we will be looking at the front dice attack of an ISD-II and showing how different upgrades impact the different aspects of damage output, we will assume medium range.
Let's start by trying to raise the ISDs ceiling so what kind of upgrades raise the damage ceiling? Well any card that adds dice, or any crit effect that adds damage a good example of a card that does this is spinal armament.
This card will add a red dice into our front arc attack boosting our damage ceiling from 12 to 14, and increasing our average damage to 6.75. Any card that adds dice to an attack will boost both the ceiling and average damage cards like Slaved Turrets, QBT, EA, etc.
In addition to cards that add dice many critical effects will add damage to an attack roll a card like Heavy Ion Emplacements.
Heavy Ion Emplacements if the crit goes off will add 3 damage to our attack boosting our damage ceiling by 3 for one attack, and on average an ISD-II will roll the blue crit to trigger this meaning our average damage is technically boosted by this as well, but please note this only works because the ISD on average would get this effect to go off, on another ship it would likely be different. So in this case if we use Heavy Ion our Ceiling goes from 12 to 15 and the average damage goes from 6 to 9. Any critical effect that adds damage like APT, ACM, Ion Cannon batteries etc. will increase a ships damage ceiling.
So what if we combined both Spinal and Heavy Ion Emplacements? Well we get a pretty scary ship our damage ceiling is 17 and our average damage is 9.75, however our floor is still zero meaning it is possible to completely wiff a die roll so for many this idea is just to risky, so lets look at adding a floor to our damage.
Okay so we looked at increasing the ceiling of our ISD but let's look at increasing the floor. For that we are going to start with what is probably the most overlooked card in all of armada, SW-7s
This card is nearly unmatched in its ability to raise a ships floor if you arc has 3 or more blue dice it is the best card for raising your floor. When this card first came out many people that were better than me at armada said it was no good, so I never really used it, but coming back to it I don't think it's dismissal was justified. With this card on our ISD our ceiling stays the same but we raise our floor to 4 and we do increase average damage from 6 to 7. So when you roll with this ISD you know you will get at least 4 damage, it's a criminally underrated card.
Probably the best bang for your buck in increasing your damage output for you whole fleet is Intinsify Firepower.
This card makes the damage floor of all your ships one so with just our ISD would have a floor of 1 and a very slight increase in average damage to 6.25. There are other cards that increase your floor like TRC, WBT, etc.
Lastly we have upgrades that Increase your average damage of witch leading shots could be said to be one of them so let's look at that.
Okay so in order to help us best understand leading shots and how it will impact our rolls with the ISD we will give it the best case average roll for it that would be two red blanks as 4 reds will produce on average 3 damage so one double one single two blanks. We reroll our 2 blanks by spending a blue die and by so doing reducing our damage ceiling for this attack pool. By doing this we actually decrease this ship's average damage from 6 to 5.7.
Now I understand that you should not use leading shots if you rolled average, but if you rolled bad, however it decreases average damage, decreases your damage ceiling, and does not increase your damage floor so even if you do use it it could still be a wiff. So in the end Leading shots does not increase your average damage, but gives you potential to save face on a bad roll, however other cards do this without the downside of leading shots LTT, OE, etc. I think Leading shots might be okay in very specific situations/builds/dice pools, but it should definitely not be the auto include it has been.
So when building a ship ask yourself what is my damage ceiling, do I have a damage Floor, what is my average damage? In armada Consistency is king, and personally I feel building ships with a damage floor is the best way to get consistency, but the choice is up to you this build or something like it is quickly becoming by default ISD build.
Imperial II (120)
• Gunnery Team (7)
• Electronic Countermeasures (7)
• SW-7 Ion Batteries (5)
• Spinal Armament (9)
• Chimaera (4)
• Intensify Firepower! (6)
= 158 Points
It has a damage floor of 5 a ceiling of 14 and an average damage of 8. Until next time be safe and have a great week!
Great article. I agree on leading shots. When I started a bit over a year ago I was told that it was amazing. The more I used it, saw it used (crabbok), and thought about it, it is almost never worth it. You sacrifice a perfectly good die to reroll, and you need to come out +1 of where you were originally. Not to mention I see people grab a 1-hit red (with other blanks) and reroll hoping for a 2-hit, when you are already down a die from leading shots.
I take SW-7s a lot. You don't always need the accuracies, especially late game, or if you burn their defense tokens with other ships/squads.