u/Ixalite1

Good afternoon everyone!
Today I would like to discuss the Swarm mechanic.
This beloved synergy mechanic is central to many fighter strategies, but in my opinion fails to reflect either the function of fighters operating in numerically superior "swarms" or the feel of outnumbering an enemy squadron.
To resolve this, I suggest the following change:

Old: " Swarm. (While attacking a squadron engaged with another squadron, you may reroll 1 die.)"

New: " Swarm. (While defending against a squadron, you gain counter 1 or increase your counter value by 1 if the attacker is engaged with another squadron with swarm.)"

This shows the difficulties of close offensive action against numerically superior forces and favors the "correct" strategy of attacking large fighter formations from the edges as the safe play. For every tie-fighter an x-wing ace targets, he must play around others trying to get on his tail.

What do you think?

Hello everyone!
I think we can all agree that mines do not work very well. There may be little desire on behalf of the community to change this, as being beaten by the setup phase has little appeal to anyone.

To that end, what if the entire mines concept were re-worked to be something that ships did actively; potentially giving a ship a way to leverage the engineering value into niche damage.

Proposed Upgrade:

Proximity Mines
Offensive Retrofit
10 pts.
Starts with (Engineer token) equal to your engineering value
(Engineering activation), you may exhaust this card and remove one (engineer token) from it to deploy one proximity mine token at range 1 of you.

Hello Everyone.
Moving in a subtler direction from previous rules tweaks / changes ideas for discussion, here is a simple upgrade card concept to talk about:

MISSILE TARGETING RELAY
(Ordinance Upgrade Slot)
(10 Pts.)
"After you execute a maneuver, you may select a friendly squadron with Strategic at distance 1-3. Toggle its activation slider to the activated side. If you do, place a targeting token within range 1 of that squadron.
Each of your firing arcs is also a special firing arc, with a special battery equal to the black dice within that arc. You may only conduct an ignition attack using targeting tokens deployed with this card."

Hello everyone!
I have another potentially game-breaking idea for discussion; an aspect of the rules that may confuse new players and negatively impact the flavor of ships in certain cases: the 1 of each type of defense token per attack rule.

I propose that ships which have or gain multiple instances of a defense token be able to use all available tokens against individual attacks. There are three potential implementation levels to this:

1: Most minor change: effects which replace the function of a token still permit the use of the original token. Most notably, Expert Shield Tech should still let the ship use redirect with the other token.

2: Meat of the issue: All redundant tokens usable. Ability to redirect damage to multiple (adjacent) sides with redirect. Ability to reduce damage by half, then half again with double brace. Ability to apply the various evasion effects to twice as many dice.
I suggest that salvo be excepted as the potential of a 9 die salvo attack set is problematic, even to me.

3: Full Insanity: Tokens able to be used and discarded against the same attack. This is already implemented with evade tokens. Likely unwise for other options.

I recognize that any of these changes will lead to a shift in game balance toward defense and away from big dice pools. They may not be wise, but they may be worth discussing.

Hello Everyone!
From when I was a new player, I felt that there were certain aspects to the rules of Armada which felt unintuitively restrictive. Everyone knows you can't have two Darth Vaders (Darths Vader?) in a fleet, that's just common sense, but why can a ship with two offensive retrofit slots not use 2x expanded hangar bays?

Here is my proposal for brainstorming a rules change:
-Permit ships which have multiple redundant upgrade slots to include multiple non-unique non-modification upgrades on the ship.
-If the upgrade requires an activation condition: e.g. taking a maneuver action (looking at you, engine techs) then you may only use one of the upgrades per action that you take. (token + dial lets you use both at once?)

Points for consideration:

Offensive retrofit (most common to have doubles)

• Disposable capacitors: gives two different rounds of longer blue dice range in corner cases.
• Expanded Hangar Bay: Unlocks 6 squadron quasar fire 1 (!)
• proximity mines: can lead to 4x mines from one ship
• quad laser turrets: counter 2 on a ship?
• rapid launch bays: store a bunch of fighters, bigger clown car?
• reserve hangar bays: more difficult to kill swarms
• tractor beams: 2x the slowdown

Gunnery team:

• fire control team: potential of 3x critical effects?
• flight controllers: 2x extra blue dice (!)
• local fire control: how many salvo tokens do you really want?
• ruthless strategists: No one likes automatic damage(!)
• veteran gunners: lots of re-rolling
• weapons battery techs: become poor man's SW7

Officers:

• Intel officer: doubles could be powerful

Defensive retrofit

• ECM: not too much of a problem since they cost resources to reset?
• reactive gunnery: people like salvo tokens?
• Early warning systems: extra "safe" hull zones?
• blast doors: Did you really not have anything better to do with your points?

Turbolaser

(I see no problems here?)

Interdictor:

• gx-7 : could make the board difficult to deploy into(!)
• Targeting scrambler: I like it!

Ion Cannon

• SW7: may need to prevent adding 2x damage per accuracy(!)
• Point Defense Ion Cannons: very strong(!)

Ordinance upgrades

• External Racks: is this upgrade itself a problem?(!)
• Ordinance Pods: powerful!(!)

Support Team:

• ENGINE TECHS!!!!: Biggest problem.(!)