Special Modifications, Part 1: Tokens of Our Discontent

Han Solo once said he’d made a few “special modifications” to the Falcon. Some good, some bad, all of them interesting. That’s the spirit behind this new series: exploring nonstandard Armada. Not just fleet lists or tournament meta, but the underlying strings that hold the game together. What if the designers had pulled them differently? What might have worked better? What happens when you tinker with the system in ways it was never quite built for?

And where better to start than with the most important mechanic in the whole game: defense tokens.

---

Defense Tokens Under Siege from Day One

Defense tokens are one of THE defining characteristics of Armada. They’re what let a Star Destroyer soak up punishment, and what give a CR90 at least a chance of dodging a heavy broadside. And it accomplishes this WITHOUT making the CR90 infinitely evasive or the ISD oppressively tanky.

In Armada, defense tokens are a finite resource. You only get so many braces, so many redirects, so many evades. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. If you don't overspend, they can last the entire game, but if they get pressured, you'll be forced to discard and will eventually be out of tokens. And as well all know, a ship with no defense tokens is in big trouble.

Because of this defense mechanic, part of Armada’s combat isn’t about damage output. It’s about denying your opponent the ability to spend defense tokens or mitigate their effects.

This sounds great on paper: Limited defense that can be overstrained by concentrated attacks. A damage mechanic that doesn't revolve purely around damage, but also around stopping your opponent from stopping part (or all) of that damage.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in actual play, problems show up immediately, including but not limited to:

• A single accuracy locks your brace.

• XI7 Turbolasers make your redirects half-useless.

• Intel Officer forces you to discard rather than just exhaust a token.

So already in Wave 1, we had fleets firing IO + XI7 at ships with ECM, or a Demolisher triple-tap with IO, skipping accuracies altogether and relying on raw damage. Defense tokens, already a limited resource, were in deep trouble because they either could not be spent at all, had minimal effect, or had to be discarded immediately.

So, something DID go wrong. Unless you think that this was part of the design plan all along. I'm pretty sure the concept of defense token mitigation was discussed, and some cards created to address (and counter) this, but I don't think the SCOPE of anti-token tech was fully realized until it was a bit late to change the fundamentals.

---

Exhibit A: Electronic Countermeasures

Enter Electronic Countermeasures (ECM).

This is the defining defensive card of Star Wars: Armada. Why? Because it restores the ability to use a limited resource.

For years, every ship that could take ECM — especially if it had a brace — did. Period. The card was so central that it basically erased the rest of the defensive retrofit slot from consideration. Yes, I'm exaggerating for effect, but not by much.

• ECM had a soft-counter in Intel Officer since wave 1.

• The Empire got Minister Tua specifically to give their vulnerable ships ECM access.

• In Armada 1.5, it finally got nerfed with a refresh cost.

• Don't forget how insanely popular Agate was (and still is) when she was released. An extra Brace on any ship, AND a built-in ECM-ish effect? Yes, please!

Exhibit B: Denial is the Name of the Game

The theme — you don't get to use your tokens — only grew as the game expanded:

• Sloane could strip tokens directly.

• Avenger punished exhausted tokens.

• Overload Pulse lured new players before they realized the timing killed it.

• Thermal Shields arrived later as a cheap alternative to ECM, IO-proof but problematic in other ways.

• Boarding Troopers are everywhere today for the same reason: because denying tokens wins games.

To me, the implications of ECM are clear: denying the defender the ability to use a limited resource (defense tokens) was too strong right out of the gate, and has continued to be so until this very day. Which is a shame, since the idea of defense token mitigation being a viable strategy is a good one. 

And this skew has knock-on effects:

• Ships that don't have a defensive slot are disproportionately punished, as they don't even have to means to try and avoid token mitigation.

• Small ships are disproportionately punished, since they rely heavily on their few tokens to survive. They also frequently don't have defensive slots, and even if they do, they either don't have the tokens to justify ECM or ECM is too expensive for the chassis.

• Squadrons chipping at ships, which SHOULD be a key way of getting around defense tokens, become less desirable when there is so much tech to get around defense tokens. And 1.5 squadrons (bc of the intel nerf + PDIC) are much less able to get through to ships anyway, so this threat is much reduced.

---

Our Fantasy League Fix

Back in the VASSAL Fantasy League of 2022, we tried an experiment:

Step 4 of the attack sequence:
The defender may spend 1 readied defense token that has been targeted by an [ACC] icon. If it does, discard that token instead of exhausting it.

Basically, we gave every ship a mini-Agate effect.

I can already hear the protests: “Do you want to make ships even more tanky??”

Well, yes — but only to a point.

• This does make ships tankier, but only once per attack and once per defense token.

• It doesn’t make ECM/Thermals ships dramatically stronger; they’d still want those upgrades, as the benefit is still stronger.

• The real winners are small ships and anything without defensive retrofit slots. Your Raider gets to brace once against a big hit. It still might explode, but at least it gets a fighting chance.

The limits kept it reasonable:

• Only once per attack.

• Only green tokens.

• Tokens are discarded after use.

• Accuracy is still powerful; tokens are still finite.

So no, it didn't break the game. But it shifts the emphasis — away from “sorry, your tokens don’t matter” toward “you’ll get one shot at survival.”

Such a change would, of course, require a thorough rebalancing and possible redesign of any card or effect that spends or exhausts a defense token. Sloane could not exist in her current form. Boarding Troopers are definitely not a 3-point card. Maybe Overload Pulse finally IS the GOAT?

---

Why Bother?

Because this is what Special Modifications is all about: looking at what might have been, pulling and prodding the rules, exploring alternate concepts.

Would I expect ARC to implement something like this? 

No — it’s far too drastic a change, with too many knock-on effects, for a living game!

But it is, I think, a superior design in that:

• It makes defense tokens feel relevant for all ships, not just the ECM-capable.

• It opens up new design space for upgrades and objectives.

• And most importantly, it improves the experience of playing Armada.

We’re all grognards now, used to token denial. But imagine being a new player, constantly told that your defenses are irrelevant. That’s true NPE right out of the box.

Could something like this ever come back? Not officially, but perhaps in the future, another Fantasy League might dust off this idea and see what happens. After all, the whole point of “special modifications” is to test the system and learn from it.

---

Up Next

Defense tokens aren’t the only shaky pillar holding Armada together. In the next installment, we'll continue discussing defense tokens, and the relative weakness of some of them, and the rather OP nature of others. If we have time, we can have a look at defense-adjacent stuff like stacked rerolls. Stay tuned.