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The wife and I played our first game of Armada a couple of nights ago and whilst we enjoyed it, there were a couple of questions/observations. We were playing the beginner tutorial so not playing with the full gamut of rules. I can't help thinking I was misreading or misinterpreting some things. For example, shooting at Squadrons with a ship; am I right in thinking that you can attack each Squadron that is within the same hull zone? So if you opponent, for example, decided to park all of his x-wings in your front arc you can attack all of them as one of your two attacks?

Also, why is the anti-squadron defence of the VSD so poor? It only gets to roll one blue dice when attacking Squadrons right? I thought these things were supposed to be bristling with lasers that meant flying close to them was a death-warrant (it certainly is in the video game anyway!) but if I am reading the rules right, the VSD can only hope to take a max 2 damage points off a Squadron per turn? Am I missing something here?

 filbert wrote:
The wife and I played our first game of Armada a couple of nights ago and whilst we enjoyed it, there were a couple of questions/observations. We were playing the beginner tutorial so not playing with the full gamut of rules. I can't help thinking I was misreading or misinterpreting some things. For example, shooting at Squadrons with a ship; am I right in thinking that you can attack each Squadron that is within the same hull zone? So if you opponent, for example, decided to park all of his x-wings in your front arc you can attack all of them as one of your two attacks?

Also, why is the anti-squadron defence of the VSD so poor? It only gets to roll one blue dice when attacking Squadrons right? I thought these things were supposed to be bristling with lasers that meant flying close to them was a death-warrant (it certainly is in the video game anyway!) but if I am reading the rules right, the VSD can only hope to take a max 2 damage points off a Squadron per turn? Am I missing something here?

On the first part you are correct. You can roll the anti-squadron dice against all valid squadrons in a given hull zone as one of your attacks. This is covered in the Rules Reference on page 2 where step 6 of attack is "Declare Additional Squadron Target" wherein you repeat steps 2-6 meaning you can declare a third, fourth, fifth, etc. target so long as you do not attack the same squadron twice.

In the fluff, the Star Destroyers were designed to take out capital ships and anti-starfighter was something of an afterthought for them; that was a role to be handled by escorting cruisers or its own fighter screen. While it has some ability to engage starfighters, it struggles greatly in this role due to the size of the ship and number of blind spots between the anti-starfighter guns that result at close range. In the game, it's a designed weakness that the ship cannot engage fighters on its own very well. You'll notice that capital ships that wander into its frontal arc tend to disappear shortly thereafter so that's part of the trade-off for game balance.

Also in the X-Wing series of video games it was great fun to hang out around the ISD hangar bay picking off TIEs. If you kept your speed and jinked around you could rack up pretty easy kills.

 filbert wrote:
For example, shooting at Squadrons with a ship; am I right in thinking that you can attack each Squadron that is within the same hull zone? So if you opponent, for example, decided to park all of his x-wings in your front arc you can attack all of them as one of your two attacks?

Yes, you can target all enemy squadrons in your firing arc as one attack.

Also, why is the anti-squadron defence of the VSD so poor? It only gets to roll one blue dice when attacking Squadrons right? I thought these things were supposed to be bristling with lasers that meant flying close to them was a death-warrant (it certainly is in the video game anyway!) but if I am reading the rules right, the VSD can only hope to take a max 2 damage points off a Squadron per turn? Am I missing something here?

Balance and theme.

Thematically, this is a game of fleet warfare so your big guns should be used for destroying enemy ships, not their pesky squadrons. Game play-wise, it's better overall to have the capital ships fairly week against fighter squadrons; if they were too powerful, there would be no point in have fighters because they wouldn't be able to get near the capital ships. The trade-off was being able to attack multiple squadrons as one "attack" instead of using full power weapons and only attacking one group.

Also when you think about, a fighter squadron is pretty large. At the Battle of Yavin, there were twelve X-wings in Red Squadron. In the game, an X-wing squadron has a "hull value" of five representing the squadron at full strength. Assuming there are at least twelve fighters in the group, after one round of shooting and scoring a hit with one die, you've killed 20% of the squadron (2.4 ships).

Interesting stuff, thanks for the replies. I understand the logic; it was just one of those situations where you scratch your head and think 'am I reading that right?'

Of course with your destroyer picking off a point or 2 from a squadron, it makes it a bit easier for your TIEs to finish off the X-Wing squadron.