Our mission was to pick up 'intelligence' tokens, with a single nominated ship on each side. We both 'cleverly' hid the tokens in the asteroid fields, and set up for a head to head pass. Garret used a fast blockade runner, while I was hoping to explode him with my Gladiator. Unfortunately I've found the gladiator is a knife fighter that is incredibly tricky to actually get into firing range. Boo. 
The rebels had admiral ackbar who adds a sick amount of firepower to all the broadsides, which ended up being pretty punishing over the game.
More after the jump....
Another event which has solidified some wisdom for me is when his big ship (?liberty) pounded the snot out of my interdictor in one round. Choosing which ship to activate when is pretty key, as if it's destroyed before it takes it turn you are SOL. No spontaneous actions here.
Our game hilariously involved LOTS of collisions. Our ships were almost destroyed by collisions, which really was what allowed the single turn of good rolling to kill my Interdictor.
After that was gone, and with the rebels holding a 2:1 advantage in intelligence it was all over. Points wise it was a pretty substantial rout. It was note worthy that I was close to killing some key ships twice, and they escaped a near death. The liberty never really faced any threat though.
Time wise this game took us about as much as the first game took 2.5 - 3 hours. I suspect this was due to some fatigue, as well as the plethora of special characters and extra card abilities on the ships. It will be interesting to see if we can bring this down.
I am not a great fan of the fighter rules in Armada and definitely not a fan of named characters at all (But that's my opinion on all mini games).
ReplyDeleteIt's a hard game to master for sure and I'm far from winning regularly. (Not that I play often.) My opponent is a Rebel player and loves his MC-80's, which with Ackbar make life really hard for my poor law-abiding/enforcing Imps.
Yah, named characters do grate on me. "Oh you have admiral ackbar too? I guess it's a battle to see who is the *real* ackbar. hur hur hur".
DeleteI can appreciate in a game some sort of mechanism for adjusting how a given army fights. I sorta like army wide changes in doctrine.....maybe something similar to ackbar: better broadsides, but works all the time, affects all ships, and is costed out as a fraction of the army value. Call it broadside tactical doctrine or something).
I think the big problem is with adding too many options is that it creates too many opportunities for strange synergies that start breaking things. Certainly a good way to prompt a new edition to fix what's broken and claw back all the power/option/rule creep.
Being only my second game too, positioning definitely seems to be key, although i think we both positioned better than our first game. You neutered my fighter screen (specifically my bwings) the first couple rounds, when i had higher expectations for them dealing with your gladiator. dice gods just prevailed a bit better for me to free them up in the alter rounds..
ReplyDeleteThe One thing that i think would have changed the outcome was i think in turn 3/4 you opted to turn your gladiator away rather than into the fray (i think to avoid a ram) this would have had (i think) a major 3 fold effect for you
1) you would have sat right with my corvette (my objective ship) who barely survived after some extremely luck maneuvering and damage mitigation. thus you probably would have actually killed it.
2) Also, after the corvette would have been dealt with, you would have been right in my mc80s rear/right side at point blank which would have either;
A) let you pound me at point blank with your black dice with both your arcs. and having your interdictor on my right side would have put me in a tough spot
B) forced me to move on (to avoid out come A) rather than taking the collision to keep your interdictor in my side arc. and then my mc80 would have been flying out to the lonely space station.
It is one of the nice things about the 6 turn limit: Decisions really do matter. You don't have a lot of time for faffing about, and powerful ships can be neutered by having them in the wrong place.
Delete