What to Buy First for Star Wars Armada – 2023

Updated Buyer’s Guide for Star Wars Armada in 2023.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a new ship or squadron for Armada. Since AMG has taken over the reigns, there hasn’t been much, if any news for the game at all. But it hasn’t been a complete void. Now in 2023 we’ve seen our second installment of Rapid Reinforcements and with that comes a host of new opportunities, strategies, challenges, and best of all – cross faction ships!

With this in mind, it was long past time to update my long-running series of “What to buy first on a budget” for Star Wars Armada! Each video is dedicated to a specific faction.

Republic Buyer’s Guide
Separatist Buyer’s Guide
Rebels Buyer’s Guide
Empire Buyer’s Guide

This also marks the first year I’ve done individual guides for each of the Clone Wars factions. Hopefully you enjoy it!

No More Armada? Or Just a Pause?

AMG Released this statement on August 20th, 2021. They’ve had Armada since November 2020. They haven’t worked on anything for Armada yet, and don’t plan to now. But maybe they will someday. I’ll admit I was hit VERY hard when I saw this – I was also already struggling with some internal issue that particular Friday, so when this showed up I almost broke. So what does this announcement mean?

First the bad. There isn’t any new product now, soon, or even next year. They don’t have any experienced Armada developers on board and just had 3 games fall into their lap. This isn’t AMG’s fault – but they do have to react to it. They chose not to prioritize making new content for Armada. It’s a tough pill for Armada fans like myself to swallow, but it’s also the facts. And even if they do get things stable enough to devote some time to Armada development by 2022 or 2023… the turnaround time between starting a wave, and it hitting store shelves is typically around 2 years. So it could be 2024 or later before we have any brand new Armada ships in our hands.

Next the mediocre. They are still supporting the game through organized play and reprints. This is significant in that it’s NOT the same treatment games like the Star Wars LCG and Destiny received. It does however resemble Imperial Assault, in some ways, however Imperial Assault has very separate challenges. The good news is that Imperial Assault is still being printed, still gets played, and is also currently expecting new product, as Steve Horvath mentioned back in 2020 – “Imperial Assault’s Story is not finished”. Armada hitting a developmental pause does not mean the end.

The GOOD part. Perspective is important right now. Armada is already used to only 1 ship a year. We’ve seen it with the SSD and similar situations. The game is VERY solid and has a dedicated playerbase. But the key here is that we JUST got so much. First, we got a 1.5 Ruleset, which made some significant changes to the rules, including points updates, and card errata. These changes were also represented in the upgrade card expansion. All the old stuff is new again! That’s years and years of content that’s ripe to go re-explore! Plus we got The Clone Wars! 2 new factions, 4 ships per faction, squadrons, and even more new upgrades, many of which can be used across all 4 factions. Seriously there are so many builds, combos, and changes – it may actually take Armada players 3-4 years to try out all the new ships, commanders, and upgrades!

Our community is strong, and I’ll keep creating content. There’s a plan already in place if the game gets cancelled or support otherwise ends. There’s also tons of homebrew to satisfy those eager for even more content as well. I would urge you to explore the game as it is however, rather than dive to deep into fan made content, as there’s probably TONS of options you hadn’t even considered yet!

This game is pure gold. And it absolutely is NOT dead.

The Future of Armada! An Interview with Michael Gernes!

I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with FFG’s Michael Gernes, Lead Developer for Star Wars Armada!

We talked about everything ranging from The Clone Wars, to Wave 2, to future support for Rebels and the Empire!

Some highlights from the interview include:

  • Pass Tokens – Pass Tokens will be assigned at the beginning of the game, are partially influenced by the composition of your fleet (Large Ships will likely give you more), and also are influenced by weather you are 1st Player or 2nd.
  • Faction Identities – We talked about the new faction, and Michael spoiled a new separatist card that upgrades a token’s effect to a full dial effect!
  • Konstantine! – Everyone’s least favorite commander, Konstantine, is getting refined to be more playable and to work with Huge Ship! Konstantine SSD here we go!
  • The Future! Armada will continue to support Empire and Rebel fleets – players just need to be patient!
  • So much more!

Here’s the full video!

Bellator and Executor Team Up!

The COVID-19 lockdown has us all going sitr crazy! To help pass the time, I’ve been playing more AI games. If you aren’t familiar, you can find my Armada AI system here.

The AI system is amazing for simply passing the time for the sake of fun! This makes it especially fun for huge crazy pitched battles! I wanted to battle two Super Star Destroyers and decided to use the second base that comes with the SSD to support my Bellator model from Mel’s Miniatures.

The results were spectacular!

This was a 400 point fleet for me, facing off against over 1,000 points of Huge Ship AI! Now granted, my AI isn’t exactly the smartest opponent, but it is unpredictable and that can be exciting!

The full video should be up soon on Patreon!

Clone Wars in Armada!

At Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, FFG announced that they are finally bringing Clone Wars to Star Wars Armada! This will complete the cycle of Clone Wars coming to all of their games that still have physical product in development.

This is extremely good news for Armada players! There has certainly been a lack of news over the past few years, but now Armada is approaching what very well may be a golden age. The Super Star Destroyer, the Rebellion in the Rim campaign, two un-announced “sizeable” ships, and the Clone Wars itself, all in development at this point means we have more product in the pipeline for Armada than we’ve ever had before.

Hopefully this means new Armada players will have a cheaper entry point. Either through a cheaper starter or an essentials pack. Armada’s principle downfall has been it’s entry cost, and with a $99 starter, many players simply skip it and jump to X-Wing instead. Although the high cost of entry hasn’t been a problem with Legion, that may likely be due to the tremendous amount of units that come in the Legion core set, compared to the Armada Core Set.

So most of the new product should be in stores before the end of 2019, while the Clone Wars should be hitting Armada in 2020! And this almost certainly doesn’t mean the end of support for the Rebels and the Empire as well! Plus we have high hopes for card packs to come as well, which will allow new players to gain all the missing upgrade cards that were exclusive to only one faction previously! Armada’s future is very bright!

Something BIG is Coming!

A few months back I was asked to take down my videos that talked about the recent flyer in the December issue of Game Trader Magazine, you know… the one that had the massive Super Star Destroyer article in it?   Well I’ve got my own physical copy of that flyer in hand now so I figure it’s time to talk about ALL of that juicy goodness now, since FFG won’t do it!

Here are all of the images, I’ve taken newer photos of them, hopefully they are legible enough!  I’ll be doing videos on them over the course of the next few months to hold us over until this gorgeous model finally comes out!

First video went up this morning!

Armada Nunchuck Expansion v1.0 Is Ready!

The Nunchuck Expansion is finally ready!

 

This expansion is a title-only expansion that has multiple new titles for every ship in Star Wars Armada!   It is NOT official and NOT tournament legal.  This was a project of mine and it’s now available! This expansion is free to everyone!  Download the FULL PDF here!

This is version 1.0.

 

More Custom Content!

If you like this expansion and want to support me on Patreon – hey that’s always an option!

Armada – Nunchuck Expansion Preview!

What is the Nunchuck Expansion?

The Nunchuck Expansion is a free expansion for Star Wars Armada.   It consists exclusively of titles for existing ships, which will showcase new strategies and new options for ships that only had limited roles.  The Nunchuck Expansion is NOT an official product and is not tournament legal.  I am designing the expansion and will be releasing them right here on crabbok.com.

Here are a few samples of just a few of the Imperial Titles that will be included.

Some of the details are still subject to change, and I’ll be letting my patrons on patreon vote on some of the names as well!   Let me know what you think!

Winners and Losers of the April Armada FAQ

With any major new FAQ and Errata there’s always bound to be a major shake up in the meta.   Today I want to discuss the winners and loser of this change, and how the meta may change moving forward.

Losers:

Some changes were good overall, like the change to Strategic Adviser and Biggs.   But ultimately, some things really got hurt.  Lets talk about the biggest losers.

Relay

Relay got hit hard, but in a way that makes perfect sense.  Now it simply extends range rather than making squadron range infinite.  Most would agree that this makes great logical sense, but this does hurt those fleets that were designed to exploit the old way of keeping ships far away from the fight, and removing all risk of their carriers taking fire.  The Lambda is probably hurt more than the VCX, considering it has twice the Relay value, but the entire strategy of using Relay now has to change to include some risk, keeping your fleet together, and keeping your carriers in the fight.

Gallant Haven

This one wasn’t as widely abused, but when it was used it had the potential to be significantly overpowered.  The power came from unique squadrons with the brace token.  Even if a friendly squadron was hit for two damage, they could just brace and reduce it to one, then having Gallant Haven reduce that one to zero.  And if you had Jan Ors nearby, you didn’t even need to have your own brace token, since you could “borrow” hers.  This title now will still help for larger attacks, such as three or more, but it will no longer stop the small damage from going through.

Yavaris

While Yavaris wasn’t changed too much, a very common crew combination certainly was.  Using Flight Commander and Fighter Coordination Team together, would allow you to delay your squadron command until after moving, and also after you gave your squadrons a free speed-one move.  It allowed you to partly ignore the restriction that came with this amazing ship.  But that isn’t the only nerf to Yavaris.  The relay nerf also hurts Yavaris more so than any other carrier, in that most Rebel Fleets that use Yavaris, often find that it’s the first target for the enemy fleet.   No more, can Yavaris dish out squadron double-taps from the rear ranks and relative safety.

Avenger

While not the worst nerf, the Avenger’s new requirement to exhaust will actually affect it in multiple new shooting scenarios.  The first case is the common use of boarding teams, where you have a double arc on the defender.  An enemy flagship, at full strength, would seldom be able to survive.  Another case is when using Gunnery Team, where you’d be shooting on multiple targets that may have spent some tokens already.   But a third scenario is when using the Advanced Gunnery objective and you were actually able to attack from your front arc even against the same ship twice.  At least in the case of this nerf you can still use it’s ability once, which still allows it to be used, and it will still probably be the most widely used Star Destroyer title.  Probably.

The Third Flotilla in Your collection

This was the one that bothered me the most.  Restricting flotillas to a hard cap of only 2 per fleet has a ton of implications.  First off, everyone who bought 3 or more are now unable to use them unless it’s a strictly casual game.  Second, those flotillas are now much less useful, in that they can no longer hang out around the edge of the board, supporting your squadrons, even while your ships are dead.  But another implication is that future flotillas are now at a disadvantage.  If FFG makes another flotilla in the future, you’ll have a hard time deciding on which 2 you want to use, considering the utility that GR-75s and Gozantis offer your fleet, it may force players into an uncomfortable decision.

Winners

When some things get worse, sometimes other things get better by proxy. Let’s take a look at the biggest winners that result from these changes.

Hera

With all of the VCXs and Lambdas getting nerfed, Hera remains the one that was untouched, keeping her original balance and power level.  Her ability still is able to ignore distance from ships, and she now has more of a unique ability when you consider that her counterparts with the nerfed relay are restricted to staying close to the fleet.   All rouges, actually, are winners here, but Hera is by far the biggest winner from the group, being able to still provide that autonomous activation to squadrons who lack rogue.

Boosted Comms

Boosted Comms started to see less and less play once relay came out.  It almost became irrelevant.  Now it is back and better than ever.  Considering it stacks, in a meaningful way, with relay now, you can layer these two extensions together and still get some distance between you and your squadrons if you really want to.   I expect to see more of this card in the future, especially on Quasars.

Centicore

Another upgrade that may see more play as a result of the relay nerf.  Centicore never saw alot of play, and one main reason for that was that relay was just so much better.  Now it can potentially help fill some gaps left by the nerf, giving squadron based fleet greater flexibility in activations.  And since fleets will likely be flying closer together now, you are more likely able to take advantage of this one.

Other Boarding Parties

Since Avenger’s slight nerf, Boarding Troopers might get taken a bit less, and therefore we stand a chance of seeing other boarding party cards showing up.  Cham Syndulla and Darth Vader might see a small rise in play in the coming months.

Ackbar

The nerf to flotillas is good new to slow-moving fleets, especially Ackbar fleets.  That classic broadside fleet that was never able to chase down distant flotillas will now have an easier time securing victory.  Additionally, Ackbar fleets have some extra flexibility in that Home One isn’t quite as crucial, in that you no longer HAVE to destroy enemy flotillas, so that one accuracy, while still great to have, isn’t quite as crucial as it once was.   Perhaps now we’ll see more Ackbar fleets with only Assault Frigates?  Same goes for any red-dice heavy list honestly.  Imperial Cymoons and Arquitens based lists will have similar flexibility, in that they won’t absolutely need that accuracy for flotillas as much.

 

Ultimately, only time will tell how these changes will fully impact the game moving forward.  All in all, I feel they are largely Quality of Life changes, meant to reduce negative play experiences and some “cheese” factor.  You can head over to the Armada Errata Page for a summary of changes, and links to all relevant documents.