Well we got a ton of news and details from last week live stream everything about it has me pretty excited so I am going to break the information that we got from the stream into 2 categories things as they apply exclusively to the campaign, things that can be played in standard/tournament play, so let’s dive right into it.
First what did we learn about the campaign with fleet building. Well its very similar to Corellian Conflict (CC), in that you build you list and can’t have more than one upgrade per ship, but in addition to that you cannot equip any unique cards as they must be earned over the course of the campaign. It sounded like you could take 1 unique squadron in your starting list but if you wanted more again they would have to be earned. How do you earn cards? Well it seems by winning battles at different locations will let you get 1 upgrade card of a certain type. I like that it adds some more interesting choices when declaring attackers and defenders in that your list might be able to defend the system better against the attacking fleet, but the other guy on your team could really use the upgraded type rewarded to the victor just makes choices a little more interesting. You will be able to add up to 50 additional points to your list from my understanding so you will have a list around 250 points once fully upgraded. There will also be rules on scaling the campaign to higher points as well. Also your custom commander does not cost points so that is nice. Speaking of custom commanders let’s talk about what we know about them.
So we know that as mentioned before they cost no points to put into your fleet. We also know there will be Six ability trees your commander can progress down one for each of the 4 commands, and then in addition you have the Espionage tree, and the Logistics tree. We don’t know to much more than that other than your commander can have up to 4 abilities and you can get your commander these extra abilities though gaining experience and that is earned by going into battle if you lose a battle you get one experience just for playing and then an additional one because commanders learn from their mistakes. The winner gets again a point for playing, then a point for winning, and then 1 additional point for every 75 points worth of MOV. I love that last part this means if you are winning a game you really want to get an high MOV to help maximize your experienced gained and if you are losing its worth narrowing the gap of the MOV to deny the other player experience points. It’s possible if a game is close that the winner and loser walks away with the same amount of experience points if the loser can keep the game close. This addresses the issue I had with Corrlian conflict where it just really didn’t matter what the MOV was win or lose, I think this will make games a lot more interesting especially when thinking about the game in terms of the campaign, I also think this help address the snowball effect.
In regards to commanders one of the players mentioned they had Master Navigator 2 so I wonder if you can upgrade abilities your commander has without it taking up another ability slot. I am really not sure on that one its just speculation but it interesting. I don’t think they said if you could take abilities from different trees but I am guessing you can but we will have to wait and see on that one. I like what I am hearing and am excited to explore the custom commander system in more depth once we know more about it.
So what do you know about the campaign game play itself? Well the campaign map is divided into 6 different regions they did not explain to much as to why that is or how that effects the game other then certain regions can have certain effects that gives conditions to fleets so that is kinda cool. Some planets on the map confer special abilities and you are able to use them if you have a base their making bases a little more interesting than just a resource farm and campaign point piñata that they were in CC. It was also implied that most systems/planets have multiple special abilities so you will have to choose what one to use, you can also forfeit the use of this ability to help your fleet in other ways like repairing ships and the like at least that's what it sounded like.
It is also possible to have fleet wide condition cards, spoke briefly about them earlier that have a negative impact you your fleet, it was not super clear how you get these condition cards, but it seems like a really fun and cool idea. The hosts also mentioned something about blockading a system, so I am guessing conditions like diplomats from CC have been reworked and brought over into this camping as well. If done right this can be really cool. It also seems that each system as certain objectives assigned to it I am guesing you will play more obectives this way as they will be entirely based on the system you are fighting in so that helps bring much more variety to the campaign, and you have incentive to attack multiple different systems so that you can get a verity of upgrades.
We even got a peak at one campaign objective so let’s look at that:
So steal the supplies seems like a fun one, the first player will want to get in range of the station and steal at least 4 tokens off the station by slowing down around the station, seems like this might be a good pick if you have ether a lot of ships in your fleet or one big tank of a ship that can just sit near the station and continually pluck off the tokens, then jump out to get out of range of the other players ships so that they can score the tokens. This feels like they mixed salvage run and contested outpost, and I am a little surprised this is campaign only, but it definitely slants to the second player pretty heavily with the ability to put a ship close to an enemy ships that has tokens preventing them from scoring, so I can also see why it was not included in the standard play objectives, but it feels thematic and fun so I look forward to playing sometime during a campaign.
We are still not quite sure how an act is structured or stuff like that but the campaign seems to be hitting on all cylinders, fixing issues I had with CC and adding in new cool stuff as well for more flavor/narrative, it even scales to larger points if you want it to, so I am extremely excited for even just the campaign that is coming in this box.
Now that we have talked about what we know about the campaign itself well what about all the extra stuff we are getting that is both good in the campaign and outside that setting, I mean nothing is stopping you from running a custom commander in a casual game, or playing some of the campaign only objectives as long as your opponent is fine with it but for standard play let’s look at the goodies we are getting.
We were shown one new Objective card.
So they played this objective on the stream and it looked really fun and cool. It looked possible to score a decent amount of point off it as well. I think the objective is best in side arch style builds so I think Ackbar lists will like this one, MSU will probably like this one as well. You will be scoring in most cases every other round so if you have 2 ships next to a purgil you will get 60 points over the course of the game if you have 3 ships every other round you can get 90 points. It seems like a reasonable objective to take and if you fly right it can get again some decent points out of it.
A weird thing is you can keep a purgill from hyperspacing away or moving to far by blocking them with your ships. Another thing is you can change the course of a purgill with strategic by moving the objective token giving you a little more flexibility. I can definitely see this one being a good pick in some lists, and it looks fun too.
We also got some titles for ships not as many as I was hoping for but it’s still exciting none the less.
So something overlooked is that they are using a fleet support card to cover up some of the text, but that in and of itself is a bit of a tease, because well they pulled it from the pile of cards that was implied where the upgrades that will come in the box. So does this mean we are getting more fleet commands? That would be cool like a nav fleet command that will add yaw? or an engineering one that will remove a damage card at the start of the ship phase from each of your ships? Its all just speculation, but I think we might be getting more fleet commands.
Anyways back to the title cards the above spread we cant see any of the text other than a small blurb on the CR-90 title it says "you gain one additional.. Icon on your up(grade)…you cannot.. if you." All I can really say is that we get to add some sort of upgrade icon to our upgrade bar. I hope that it is ether a weapons team or an Ion cannon slot these would help out he CR-90 B quite a bit as it could ether equip another upgrade that was spoiled that we will talk about later, or take leading shots to get the blue crit off more reliably. The word additional makes me think it has to be something we already have on our CR-90, but Minister Tua uses the same wording additional, but she is not restricted to any one type of ship so, it’s still up in the air but I hope for weapons team or ion cannon upgrade slot.
As far as the other two are concerned I can make out a little bit of Harrow it looks like it will cost 3 points it has some sort of upgrade or command Icon and can can see a "!" that only appears on fleet commands, so if I had to guess it adds a fleet command upgrade to the ship and buffs one fleet command, probably the maneuver one. Aside from that I could see vanguard adding a redirect to the neb-b’s tokens, but that is just a stab in the dark. That is all we got, so now on to the only title that was fully spoiled.
Okay so this card is good it will probably become stapled to raiders unless they are geared with some interesting squadron attack shenanigans. But essentially getting to deploy last, unless you face Raddus is good even if it’s only a raider. You can use it to misdirect your opponent so maybe you have Corvus and a few rouge squadrons drop it in one corners and then switch corners. You can also use it to reposition a raider that is going for squads to intercept the squad ball a bit easier. You could even use the title to have your raider able to engage the exact ship the exact way you want it to. It’s a good title and you should expect to see more raiders when this box come out for more reasons than just this title, but also this title.
So now lets look at the standard upgrades we had spoiled.
Can you say staple this to a neb-B, I mean that is what this is going to be I had fun running neb-b as flankers with engine techs but this is just great. It will work really well with Garm as you get a token at the start of the round then redirect the two rear shields to the side that is most likely going to take a hit and your good. I think this is also okay on Arquatins as in most games you will likely not be taking shots to one of your sides just stack 4 shields on the side that will be taking shots. Also the LMC80 will like this card a lot as well so its really only a handful of ships that want it. In any cases I think it’s a solid card that is cheep that useses a slot that is ether left empty for points or you take engine techs and for only 3 points well it seams like a no brainier. I like it not great on all ships that can take it but really good on the right ones.
So this cards flexibility is what makes it so good it is best on a ship that will attack twice so otherwise your fine taking DTT or Slave Turrets at least as far as ship damage is concerned. Its ability to heavy hit one squadron is nice for finishing off that pesky squadron as well. Some clarification on this you can only use this ability once during your activation, this is because it only triggers on the first squadron you attack this activation, not this attack, so even with Gunnery Teams you cant get a double use out of it sure you can standard attack the other squadrons you have not attacked already but no double dipping this card. So its flexibility and ability to reroll dice on two attacks is what makes it stand out. It will see play for sure on the AFMKII with gunnery teams and Aakbar or without. All in all it’s a solid card that has its place you will probably see this one a lot.
Okay so I really want to be able to put this on a CR-90 B to get that blue crit off, but it’s a weapons teams so sad day. But this card is good for helping blue crits go off and maybe getting more damage out of your red dice when you roll an accuracy you don’t need. It works great on raiders and also MC-75s with H-9’s and it can be kinda cute with warlord and quad turbolaser cannons. It can also pair well with home one, and Jonus boosting your damage or giving you an accuracy whatever you need. Sure it takes up the weapons team slot, but it can really give you some good value when built around.
So this card you are going to see a lot of play, I think it might even make Sloan generics a thing. I can also see this card helping the ISD-I make a comeback. Sure this can be used for Z-95’s but lets just be honest with ourselves it’s an Empire card though and though. So most ships with swarm will on average take 2 shots to kill the jumpmaster can sometimes take 3 but with this card to permanently remove a fighter it will take generally one more attack this can help you get a little more value out of your interceptors counter, your generic jump master will probably start to see more play as you can just have one of these to make it hard to remove your intel, and remember you can still heal on the station. I have always loved my tie fighter screens, but they have struggled this gives them new life. it will be a card you will see in probably almost every Imperil list if points allow it and they have any swarm fighters.
So the last thing we got was minor, possibly unintentional spoilers in that we know a little bit about the squadrons from when they showed us this punch board:
So lets talk about what we can learn from this board about these new squadrons from this punch board. We go left to right starting with the rebels. First is our friend Lando we have already seen him and know what he does so lets move on so our first one we will talk about is our new YT-2400 pilot. Mart Mattin
Mart Mattin is the nephew of Commander Sato, and commands the ship Sato's hammer, a YT-2400. He was introduced in what was probably my least favorite rebel episode, but that is nether here or there. He as rouge and grit and that's all we really know about him. I am assuming he will have some ability that will have some sort of synergy with Sato and that will be nice as Sato could use a bit of a boost. Next up is our HWK-290
Kanan Jarrus/Caleb Dume
Again another member of Star Wars Rebles joins the fray piloting an HWK. I thought he was a fairly odd choice, but apparently he does fly one in his stand alone marvel comic series. Now he is interesting in that his HWK dose not have Intel or counter, but it gains a bunch of other abilities. First he has rouge cool, then he has Cloak the first rebel squadron to have that ability. Then he also has the Assault keyword being the first rebel squadron to have that keyword as well. So he fills a niche in the rebel squadron arsenal, but what will his pilot ability be, no idea. If I had to guess it would probably be something to do with after ending a movement he would get to trigger it twice a round with cloak or maybe friendly squadrons at distance one gain cloak I really don't know. Lastly we have our Scurrg pilot.
Saw Gerrara?
Okay so I am only about 60ish% sure on this one and I don't think anyone else has pegged him as the new pilot, but it goes with the Star Wars rebels theme, also the shoulder pauldons fit, darker complexion, and if you look closely you can see a walking stick of some kind, it just fits Saw so well. However the hair looks a little wavy and its hard to see a beard of any kind so I have my doubts, but I think it is more likely than not. I am sure people will disagree with me so here are some other options. I was thinking it was going to be Sol Sixxa at first, but it just does not look like him. Some have suggested Sana Starros, and I can kinda see it in the face but the huge pauldrons just keep me skeptical. Others have said it could be Seripas, it explains the pauldonrs, but just can't see it in the face, and the walking stick just seams to point right at Saw. So I really think it is going to be Saw Gerrara, the keywords are the same as a normal Scurrg, it will probably have a pilot ability biased around bombing ships and Saw's Ruthlessness, other than that it loses heavy and that is it. Onward to the new Imperial pilots starting with the Firespray. Hondo Ohnaka
Hondo friend to all helping the empire, would be great if he had a rebel squadron too, but just empire for now. He has all the same abilities as a normal firespray, but gains grit and that all we really know as far as his ability, well it would be kinda fun if we flopped sides in a game, but I don't think anyone would take him if he did that. So maybe something like when he attacks a ship the gain a command token of your choice I'm not really sure but whatever his ability is I'm guessing it will pretty fun. Next up will be our new pilot for the YV-666 Moralo Eval
Okay so I'm not 100% sure on this one, but I'm about 90% sure this is the new YV-666 pilot, so Ill call it, and if I'm wrong well then I'm wrong. As far as abilities go we have rouge and grit and we don't have heavy, so there you go. As far as his pilot ability not sure where to stab on this one. The next would be IG-88 B so lets skip that and go right to the jumpmaster.
Tel Trevura
Again this is not one that I am 100% sure on but it is the most logical choice. Most people want it to be Manaroo, but she is an Aruzan and they have blue skin that is diffidently not a characteristic of the individual pitcher on the dial so Tel Trevura is the most logical choice. So again interesting this guy in a jumpmaster does not have Intel, or swarm, but gains rogue and grit. As far as his pilot ability it has to be something about when attacking a ship, because that would explain the lost of Intel. So that everything that we learned from the live stream as far as the box goes but we also learned the release date of the SSD August 2, and it was confirmed that we would get an announcement of new ships pural on the in flight report that will be July 31st 7:00 pm Central time, and I believe that will be streamed live so look for that should be exciting. We also have way more content in the box that we don't even know anything about we only know about 11 of the 24 new upgrades that will come in the box not even half and for some of thoughts we don't even know the text on the cards, we got more objectives that we don't even know about we where told to be on the lookout for an article about RitR later in august, and I would not supersize me if the box dropped late august. We have so many exciting release and announcements just around the corner its a good time to be an Armada player, anyway until next time have a great Week!
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