Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

In my area, like most areas I read about, XWing is pretty much king-daddy of everything. Our local xwing club has like 30 active players in it, which eclipses any gaming club content that has ever existed ever in my area. (We once had 28 people in a 40k event, thats as close as we get to the xwing popularity)

Armada is almost the reverse. We have four or so interested people and no one else wants to touch it.

Both have pre painted models. I find you spend roughly the same money on either game overall.

So whats the deal xwing guys? What makes Armada so repellent?

From my perspective, X-Wing has many iconic and cool ships on both sides.

For Armada, there's the Imperial Class Star Destroyer and the Victory Class Star Destoyer and that's it for iconic AND cool. After that you have the Nebulon B Frigate, Blockade Runner, and Mon Cal pickle ships, and they're all iconic, but they're just not cool to me. And then the rest is just EU stuff which is pretty emblematic of why I don't like EU designs. To me they just look like random bits and don't come across as belonging in the Star Wars franchise at all.

Then there's expense. It seems Armada is extremely pricey. I don't know if it truly is or not. There's a good chance my already deep investment in X-Wing colors my perception and makes me not want to start at ground level in a cousin game.

Basically - the starter is expensive, but doesn't offer a great experience out of the box, so you have to make a fairly large investment beyond the already pricey starter in faith, ultimately meaning you need to spend a lot before you see returns in gameplay on money spent.

I've been told by people whose opinion I trust that it is a good game, but that isn't enough for me to spend the money after a very ordinary first play experience to get there.

I think the high price for the starter box is part of it, it's not bad for what's in it but it's not really a complete experience, you can level the same charge at the X-Wing starter, but an X-Wing starter and a handful of other ships is give or take the same as the Armada starter

Armada also came out later than X-Wing so launched into a world where X-Wing already had an established fan-base so picking up players was going to be tough as there are only so much hobby moneys to go round and whilst they are wildly different beasts they are still broadly 'spaceship games' and in my experience people tend to stick to one game of a genre, YMMV

I think it's also slower paced and a tad more fiddly than X-Wing, so for quick pick up and play X-Wing is likely to appeal more

The ships in X-Wing are generally more iconic, yes we have had some oddball EU stuff of late, but X-Wings, TIES, Firesprays all suggest Star Wars, beyond the CR90 and ISD a lot of the capital ships could be from anything

It's not that it's a bad game, it's just I feel it was always going to be more niche that X-Wing

Doesn't each match usually take a lot longer?

For almost 25 years I've wanted to play a Star Wars capital ship combat game, and peridocally worked on my own. As an existing X wing player, Armada was supposed to be 'it' for me.

And then I saw it, scale issues and all. And, after 20+ years of waiting, I said 'nope'.

*shrugs*

The game seems perfectly fun to me, and I played Battlefleet Gothic all those years back upon it's release (and loved it!). Hell, my 63 year old dad is now my regular Armada opponent, and he's not even that big of a wargamer.

I think the game has far less problems than X-Wing. Literally everything out right now can have a fun part in a fleet.

I am a total geek about x wing. I could care about winning just as ling as I can bring a Tie swarm.

Once I picked up Armada and a couple of opponents I haven't played x wing once. And I have over a hundred tie fighters now.

Well, I think that Armada had 2 big issues that limited it's initial momentum, and continue to hold it back.

Cost

A) As was mentioned, the Armada Starter sucks. In a sub-100pt game, the Victory Class is hard to kill, especially since the Rebel ships are not hard to kill, meaning the Rebel player is about to get their firepower cut in half.

B) Like X-wing, the Armada starter does not come with enough dice to actually play the game (X-wings need 4 blue dice base, and all the ships will need at least 4 dice of the same colour if they use a concentrate firepower command). This means that you will need to buy more dice if you want to actually play the game.

C) Expansions cost more. For both X-wing and Armada, you need about 4 "Units" minimum to make a list (counting Armada fighter packs as a "Unit"). However, unless you are running a corvette swarm, you are going to be paying a lot more per unit for Armada than X-wing (with a ship in armada costing 2-3x as much as an X-wing fighter). So, you are now talking a couple hundred bucks to get a usable fleet for one side. Contrast, X-wing, where that much gives you a lot of variety in lists that you can run.

Competition

A) X-wing scratches a lot of peoples "Star Wars Spaceship" itch. Six Waves of X-wing gave the game a lot more variety than armada when it first hit, and, due to the issues with the Starter set, was a massively more satisfying experience. Hobby money is limited, so a lot of people just stuck with X-wing. Which leads to...

B) Timing. Armada Wave 1 dropped at a bad time. There was a lot of hyped X-wing releases that we knew were coming soon, but didn't have an exact date (Wave VII, the TIE Advanced Patch). I know that several people who would normally have given Armada a push were saving their money for the expected drop.

C) Armada is fiddly. This ties into the whole "hard to get people started" thing. X-wing is much more straight forewards to teach someone.


There were other things. The game being very not to scale (when a ships length should double, it instead increased by 25-50%). The game feeling incomplete even after Wave 1 hit (No ISD? Seriously? And we still aren't playing at full point values?). The fact a lot of ships are not very attractive (The Gladiator looks like a half-build ISD, the MC 80 looks like poop, the Assault Frigate Mk 2 is very love-it-or-hate-it, the CR-90 and Nebulon B have terrible paint jobs, the fighters are unpainted and at a clunky scale, etc.) further hurt the games visual appeal.

For me, it's definately the cost and a lack of variety.

It's fun to play, I like the models and I can live with the scale issue. They're not as abhorrent as in Attack Wing for example and still look ok on the table.

As far as the cost is concerned: in X-Wing, 2 Starter Sets plus the Ace set for each faction will give you 2 legal 100-point lists with tons of pilots, dice, markers and ships and quite a bit of list variation at ~100€. In Armada, I've spent more than 300€ so far and can barely field 2 legal 400-point lists with almost no variation. (Core, Neb-B, CR-90, Victory, Home One, MC-30, Scum & Villains, Imperial and Rebel fighter expansions, Imperial Raider).

Also there is the competition issue. X-Wing is basically on it's own without competition (space-fighter tabletop). Armada (space-capital ship tabletop) has to compete with Firestorm Armada, Halo:FB, Attack Wing, Gothic, and more recently Dropfleet. A bunch of guys I play with have been playing FSA and Gothic, got into X-Wing, but stayed away from Armada, arguing that they'd rather just play FSA and that Armada and X-Wing are too close to each other rule-wise to offer variation.

I thought about Halo or Firestorm Armada, but Spartan games drove me to Star Wars Armada. They provide at least half the fleet-scale games out there (Halo, Firestorm Armada/Taskforce, Dystopian Wars) and still those guys can't support a game to save their lives.

I talked with them at Gencon about how it was damn near impossible to get some of the Firestorm Patrol Fleets (not Ebay, Amazon, MiniatureMarket or Warstore), and he said I should just order direct from them, and I don't want to have to ship all the way across the pond to get basic materials for a game, when I can get an Imperial Star Destroyer from Barnes and Noble, of all places (same with X-Wing being super accessible).

The biggest meme over on the FFG Armada forums is "Armada is dead!", just like the 40K rants over on these boards. The counter to the higher price of Armada is the slower release waves, and even the higher prices are easily mitigated by Amazon or sales. I bought into Armada with the MM sale in late summer, at 50% off. I also bought tons off of Amazon this Christmas for at least 60% off, including one CR90 Corvette that was $7.50, and a second Core Set for $45. A savvy buyer won't have much problem with the pricing.

I like it, and we have local players. It's no-where near as popular as X-Wing, but that's a high bar to reach.

The games are longer. But I like it, because it's not 30 minutes between rounds of doing something. It's always back and forth and very little dice to roll.

The cost of the starter is definitely something not in its favour, of course.

A pet peeve I just stumbled upon is the "2 squadrons" of each per box.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
That being said, I love the much longer scope you have to see in order to plan your moves ahead. It's more of a "come with a plan or leave in defeat" game.

But yes, I think what puts people off is longer games and more real estate needed to play. In a city, a lot of people with kids are in a crunch for both.

I don't think it takes any more time than any other fleet-style game I have played (like Battlefleet Gothic), but I agree with the packaging of some of the squadrons. The latest Rebel one is stupid- Z-95's function for the Rebs like TIEs for the Empire, but after buying the Core and the first squadron pack, you have 8 TIEs. But Z-95's only come with 2 in the latest squadron pack? Dumb as all hell.

Still can't imagine Star Wars Armada is selling less than ANY of the other games in this niche (I don't include X-Wing in this particular genre, it's essentially a really good space "skirmish-level" game), and probably sells better than all of the three Spartan games combined. Maybe it and Dropfleet are neck and neck, but that's all I'd believe.

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:

A pet peeve I just stumbled upon is the "2 squadrons" of each per box.

This. Wanna Run a bomber swarm? Z-95s? Anything other than X-wings or TIE Fighters? Make it rain, buddy.

Last Reb squadron pack should have had one less of each of the two freighter-sized ships, and instead had 4 Z-95's. Meh, I'm in it for the capitol ships, not the fighters.

While I'm in no position to comment on whether or not the game is or is not catching on, the main reason why I did NOT get into it upon release despite being an avid xwing buyer/player at the time was the cost. I could afford it but rather just didn't think it was worth the asking price. Ffg since xwing was released and the subsequent merger/buyout with Asmodee has gotten a pretty big head since and I suspect they thought folks would pay any asked price for more Star Wars minis and they priced even the starter set accordingly. In their defense, the xwing mania at the time this game was being developed was at its height with people paying MORE than msrp for used xwing ships due to the constrained supply was indeed misleading. In any case, I simply thought they were asking way too much (xwing was already criticized as too expensive per fig upon release) for what they were offering. Unfortunately, I decided to go with Spartan and Halo Fleet Battles instead which was an even worse choice overall due to Spartan' s entirely predictable and stereotypical mishandling of the game.

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:


A pet peeve I just stumbled upon is the "2 squadrons" of each per box.

Making the new squadron cards only available through the 40€ Corellian campaign set is another example of their packaging strategy. Someone who is only interested in the 8 imperial squadron cards needs to buy the whole set, similar to people having to purchase epic ships to get access to TIE-Adv. and X-Wing pilot and title cards in X-Wing.

OT:

 warboss wrote:
Unfortunately, I decided to go with Spartan and Halo Fleet Battles instead which was an even worse choice overall due to Spartan' s entirely predictable and stereotypical mishandling of the game.

I made the same mistake. The starter sets looked nice, but everything that came afterwards was horrible. Slow release schedule, horrible packaging (paying over and over and over again for overlays, dice, markers and frigates; charging ~25€ for 2 admiral cards), rules being a dumbed down version of FSA and releasing the same starter sets in different versions over and over again instead of releasing new models. Add to that a decline in quality of the models (I'm looking at you, Punic), total lack of communication with their customer base and a resale value of ZERO, it's become the biggest disappointment in my tabletop career. I really thought that with 343 keeping an eye on Spartan it wouldn't become such a disaster.

I enjoy FSA, though, and luckily they released enough ships already.

BRB wrote:
I made the same mistake. The starter sets looked nice, but everything that came afterwards was horrible. Slow release schedule, horrible packaging (paying over and over and over again for overlays, dice, markers and frigates; charging ~25€ for 2 admiral cards), rules being a dumbed down version of FSA and releasing the same starter sets in different versions over and over again instead of releasing new models. Add to that a decline in quality of the models (I'm looking at you, Punic), total lack of communication with their customer base and a resale value of ZERO, it's become the biggest disappointment in my tabletop career. I really thought that with 343 keeping an eye on Spartan it wouldn't become such a disaster.

You pretty much read my mind with the above except for the resale value as I haven't attempted to sell mine but was just this week planning on doing so. :( I won't elaborate further though as this is an Armada gripe thread and not a HFB one.

What made me give up on Armada before even trying it was the game components minus the ships by themselves. For prepaints, I really cannot complain about them. And I can forgive the lack of paint on fighter squadrons. My X-Wing group talked about getting into Armada, and all but one of us shared very similar feelings on the game. If it wasn't for one of us already having a sizable Armada collection than we probably wouldn't have even tried it.

With X-Wing, when your ships are on the table, they look good. Besides the tokens next to your ship the gaming area looks fairly clean since everything is printed on the base, the base isnt huge and distracting, and the only dials are the movement dials. I just don't like the way the Armada bases look, I felt like I was playing a Star Wars Heroclix expansion when I played my demo game about a month ago. I also don't like the weird corner base stands that they went with. Made me feel like my ships were attached to small clear plastic furniture stands with dials. I was also put off by the movement toy that looks like it came off a public television kids race track commercial. I get that X-Wing components are card board, but that doesn't really bother me since they are nice and simple. And if it really starts bugging me in the future or as they wear out, that is easily fixed.

When I actually tried Armada, it didn't inspire me with it's game play when compared to X-Wing. Battlefleet Gothic is still one of my favorite games of all time, and I enjoy fleet scale games. I just found the combat in Armada to be a bit on the boring side. I absolutely loved the different attack dice idea though, and would love to see something similar to that in X-Wing. And I did like the resource management and allocation element to the game with having to really plan your commands well and adapt on the fly. I could have forgiven what I didn't like about game play, if the bases and movement thing weren't so clunky and cheap looking.

For me, the game just doesn't do what I want it to do. The name's misleading; call it "Armada", and I expect to field several Star Destroyers and dozens of frigates and smaller vessels. This is more "Star Wars Squadron".

It's a decent enough game, as an abstract exercise in spatial awareness and probability, but it's no good, IMO at getting me into the Star War feeling. Even X-Wing is better at doing that.

More widely, I suspect that it's because X-Wing has already cornered that space for a no-setup, "collectible" game with toy spaceships in the box, and Armada simply couldn't make any headway there. The glacial release schedule probably didn't help.

One of the things I learned with Armada's small amount of ships on each side versus other fleet games (I thought the number of ships in an Armada fleet seemed small at first), is that most of the squadrons are functionally at least a pair of other games' "escort" class ships, especially in the case of damage they can put out and take. For example, in BFG, escorts usually only had 1HP, where even TIE fighter stands in Armada have 3HP each so would be like a squadron of 3 escorts.

So last game, I had 5 small-sized Rebel capitol ships and 6 squadrons, which in BFG terms pretty much equalled out to 1 cruiser, 4 light cruisers, and 6-10 escort models on my side.

I like but the problem is game mechanics really slow down the action if you try to play large scale fleet battles like we always see in Star Wars. And the limit on types of ships also really brings what you can do down.

Personally my indifference is simply that Star Wars has never really been about capital ships at any point as far as I'm concerned. Those battles happen, but its really the fighters that determine the outcome and Armada's fighters just aren't that interesting. Overall, I'd rather just play Epic X-Wing, which is the closest to what I feel Star Wars space combat should be about.

Fighters, when used properly, can totally change the outcome of a game, especially on the rebel side.

In all honesty, I also thought the ship bases would bug me to no end, but after a few games, they're really just elegant play aids, in a game that needs them. I prefer to keep dials and tokens on the ship cards, which we have on a separate table next to the dice pit. It feels much more like those old WW2 movies when they'd slide unit i to position.

I like the speed component being locked but having the possibility to adapt your manoeuvre's course in function of the conditions at that particular moment. Although having a second manoeuvre tool only half assembled.is ace in cramped.quarters.

I'll admit, I love X-Wing... but Armada might be more my cup of tea.

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:
Fighters, when used properly, can totally change the outcome of a game, especially on the rebel side.

In all honesty, I also thought the ship bases would bug me to no end, but after a few games, they're really just elegant play aids, in a game that needs them. I prefer to keep dials and tokens on the ship cards, which we have on a separate table next to the dice pit. It feels much more like those old WW2 movies when they'd slide unit i to position.

I like the speed component being locked but having the possibility to adapt your manoeuvre's course in function of the conditions at that particular moment. Although having a second manoeuvre tool only half assembled.is ace in cramped.quarters.

I'll admit, I love X-Wing... but Armada might be more my cup of tea.

But hey, that's the great thing about having multiple options of games. Your bound to find something you like, and things you don't like.

It's a great moment in history to be both a gamer and a Star Wars fan.

I had a lot of enthusiasm for Armada, but the local players don't.

Biggest turn off seems to be cost, but the game is not as much "by the seat of your pants" as X-wing is, they've done a good job of making it seem like a sea battle to X-wings dogfight (which is great!), but it doesn't have the energy. Unfortunately, when I do play Armada, I often can only handle one game - it's too taxing mentally for more than that in a go. I can, conversely, easily sit through three x-wing games in a row.

Finally, I also thing the sliding ship scale has turned several folks off, mainly because X-wing stressed everything was in the proper scale. Armada's scale works excellently for the game it is, but it just tends to throw people that the ships aren't properly in scale to each other.

For me, about the only thing that bugs me is that the squadrons aren't painted, it kinda makes the game feel "cheap" in that way. Other than that, I eagerly await every release of this game and hope one day I'll get to play it with my friends.

It's also a much, much heavier game in terms of mechanics than X-Wing.

The whole command dial thing may also be too restrictive against big ships, which is why the current meta is heavy on smaller ships. But at the same time, players will have to buy into packs they don't need for the cards to correct that mistake, and also use up valuable upgrade slots.

It may feel restrictive, but it's just because the concept of the game is to come to it with a plan. It all hints towards being a vastly different game where you need to plan ahead, like Chess (at which I've never been particularly good, I'm afraid). It also curbs their efficacy while you're on the learning curve.

As for the fighters not being painted... there's a solution to that, you know...

I have come to question that X-Wing scale as of late. I think it worked relatively well until Wave 8 hit, but then the ShadowCaster felt off, to me. It's a beautiful ship, but it feels too big, especially compared to a YT-1300. And I don't know much about the SotE computer game, but the YT-2400 looks like it is quite a different scale than the other ships. Or was the YT-1300 too small all along?