I had mentioned the brace bracket in a few of my write ups and I had someone ask what that means. I think everyone knows what the brace bracket is, but may not know it by that name. However giving something a name and meaning, just helps us understand it a little bit better. Understanding this fairly simple though potentially overlooked concept of a brace bracket will make you a better Armada player, so let’s get to it.
So what is the brace bracket in quite simple terms the concept can be put simply like this: “When attacking a ship with a brace it is better to have an odd number of damage than an even number, unless you can prevent them from spending their brace.” Why is this the rule well its simply the mechanic of rounding up, for example 5, and 6 damage both brace to 3, so the extra damage from the 6 damage roll is more or less useless, unless we can prevent the brace from being spent. Now a ship is more likely to spend it’s brace on a 6 damage attack than a 5 damage attack, so if your goal is to put more pressure on defense tokens (and in general that is a good idea) more damage is always good, but as far as getting damage that will stick or sticky damage, odd amounts are better than even.
Your “Sticky Damage” only increase on odd numbers, however I was thinking we needed a way to value the pressure a certain amount of damage puts on defense tokens. This is fairly hard to do as different amounts of damage have different threats to different ships, but just as a general rule when do ships “have to” spend a token?
Low pressure damage amount are for most if not all ships at full health could get away without spending defense tokens, and still come out in good/okay shape this is about 1-4 damage. Medium Pressure damage means most ships in the game will have to spend at least a redirect to prevent any hull damage or just outright dyeing this is about 5 to 8 damage. High pressure damage a defense token must be spent to prevent death or large amounts of hull damage this is 9+ damage. It’s not a perfect system and only works when dealing with ships at full health, but it gives us a very general idea, however 6 damage to a raider or CR-90 means death unless a defense token is spent, so again a damage values pressure will vary from ship to ship, but I think as far as generalizations go this is an okay pressure tier breakdown.
So what are we going to do with this now and how can this make us better players? To put it simply it shows you when to push for more damage and help you understand when to spend defense tokens. I see people almost mindlessly go for more damage, or spend defense tokens Willy Nilly to reduce damage as much as possible, and in most cases this is the right thing to do, but let’s look at some examples.
Probably the most egregious offender I see is when people are running a ship with a brace and an evade, or a die canceling effect like Brunson. A player attacks your ship and hits for 6 damage no doubles rolled. The defender cancels a single die with a single hit as there were no double damage dice, then braces the damage. Even though this player canceled a die in addition to the brace the outcome was the same if they had just spent the brace 3 damage. When canceling dice or reducing damage before a brace it is so important for you to not reduce the damage unless it’s going to lower the brace bracket. So if your opponent rolled 6 damage against you and you are planning to brace you should only evade/Brunson if you can reduce the damage to 4 lowering the brace bracket/sticky damage to 2, otherwise you just used two resources to gain the same effect one could have given you.
The second most common offence, I have seen is rerolls. People get worried that if they have an okay roll than they should just keep it and not push their luck, but there are appropriate and inappropriate times to push your luck let’s look at an example.
We have a raider attacking out its front, and it rolls 4 damage each die is a single hit, some would keep this others would reroll both blacks with ordnance experts, I find both unless fishing for a critical effect unacceptable one is too risky the other to conservative Why? Well first we are at 4 damage that means a brace bracket or sticky damage is at 2, by not rerolling anything our brace bracket is fairly low, by rerolling both we could get 6 damage, but we could also whiff and only get 2 total damage lowering our brace bracket to 1. However if we reroll one we can only increases our brace bracket to 3 or it will stay the same at 2, as 3 damage braces to 2 if we get the double on our reroll 5 braces to 3. So it would be worth it to reroll a single die and increase my brace bracket and slightly increases the pressure on the tokens as well with no risk of lowering my brace bracket. This is a case by case biases, and other factors should be taken into consideration such as how likely are they to spend the brace, and will it really matter if they spend it if you don’t have a follow up attack. In most cases I find erroring on the side of increasing your brace bracket is best as I find that is better in most cases.
Really that is all there is to it, brace brackets are not that difficult concept, but understanding them can help you make better, buy understanding when to push to the next brace bracket, and how to spend your defensive abilities. It’s a little thing, but it’s the little things that add up. One last point unless you have a follow up attack later in the turn or they have already spent their brace breaking through to the next brace bracket is always better than getting more pressure on the token. Until next time have a great week!
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