Defensive Retrofits are — alongside Weapons Teams and Officers — among the top three upgrade slots. Whether it’s keeping your brace alive, stopping a crucial die from rolling, or shaving damage off the top, the upgrades here often decide whether a ship survives and gets to take one more turn.
Because of that, competition is fierce. Almost every ship with access to this slot is married to one of a handful of powerful cards, leaving the rest in relative obscurity. Let’s start with some of the more overlooked options.
Advanced Projectors
You don’t see these often, but not because they’re bad. Quite the opposite: they’re excellent if you’re running a double-redirect ship without a brace. In practice, that basically means the MC30 and the Imperial Arquitens. On the MC30 they can be brilliant; on the Arq, at 6 points, harder to justify.
You can also throw them on the MC80 Assault as a second Defensive Retro, but post–1.5 that’s mostly redundant. Without the looming threat of a triple-tap Demolisher with ACMs, most players will just take Early Warning Systems instead.
And ships with braces? Forget it — they’ll 100% choose ECM or Thermal Shields every time, because getting to use that brace at the right moment is one of the biggest pivot points in Armada. That’s not a flaw of the card, but of the underlying rules design.
Verdict: A good upgrade limited by its available platforms and outshone by ECM/Thermals. Could probably drop to 5 points — it doesn’t actually stop damage, and it blocks Expert Shield Techs from being useful anyway.
Cluster Bombs
I’ve used these to decent effect on occasion. They’re a strong deterrent against squadrons — cluster bombs plus flak plus your own squadrons can tip the math against enemy squadrons. At 5 points, though, they feel slightly overpriced compared to other defensive retros.
The bigger issue: this is a Defensive Retrofit that only protects one ship. To get real coverage, you’d want it on multiple hulls, and suddenly it becomes very pricey. And 99% of the time you want your Defensive slot for something else. That means Cluster Bombs almost always end up on small ships, sometimes MC30s, but rarely anywhere else.
In many ways, it suffers the same fate as Advanced Projectors: the design of the slot forces medium and large ships into other upgrades.
Verdict: I’d suggest a redesign or moving it to another slot (Offensive Retrofit is the only one that comes to mind). If redesigned, make it able to trigger off squadron attacks against friendly ships at distance 1–2. That would let you throw it on a few small ships to give fleetwide anti-squad protection, instead of just one-off deterrence.
Early Warning System
A solid upgrade on the right hull. Most often seen as the second Defensive Retrofit, but occasionally taken alone. Not because the card is flawed, but because of the ECM/Thermals stranglehold on the slot.
Verdict: Leave as is. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and it does it well.
Electronic Countermeasures (ECM)
The gold standard. For every ship that can’t take Thermal Shields, ECM is stapled on almost by default. The bigger and more important the ship, the more likely you’ll see it. Even the nerfed “pay-to-refresh” version is still that good.
Why? Because nothing matters more than getting that brace to work at a key moment. Sure, there are counters — Intel Officer, Overload Pulse (cheaper now but still not great), Sloane, Boarding Troopers — but those just flip tokens. ECM still lets you get that one critical use. And in many games, it’s even more useful than that, allowing you to squeeze value from secondary tokens or just make your opponent's accuracy icons matter a whole lot less.
Unless you rewrite Armada’s core defense-token system, you can’t really “fix” ECM — because in a way, it fixes the system. You could limit it to a few charges per game, but it would still get stapled.
Verdict: The only practical adjustment is cost. At 7 points, it’s already an auto-take; bump it to 8 and it’d still be stapled, but at least you pay a bit more for it.
Reactive Gunnery
Perfectly fine. Extra salvo is always welcome, but it costs a Defensive slot and exhausts. That keeps it balanced, and unsurprisingly it only finds homes on ships that really lean into salvo builds.
Verdict: Leave as is.
Redundant Shields
Potentially useful, but 8 points plus modification makes it a tough sell. The effect isn’t bad, but the tax is.
Verdict: Keep the modification tag but cut the cost significantly. At 4–5 points, suddenly it’s attractive on small or medium ships that don’t already need their mod slot. At 8, it’s binder fodder.
Reinforced Blast Doors
A perfectly solid card — timing is good, effect is clean, price is reasonable. But it almost never shows up, because the ships that benefit the most (big tanks) are the ones locked into ECM/Thermals.
Verdict: Leave as is. Its problem isn’t power level, it’s slot competition.
Thermal Shields (GAR/CIS only)
A well-designed card, created to give Clone Wars factions a much-needed defensive edge while also offering counterplay to Intel Officer — which remains a popular tool, so Thermal didn’t invalidate it completely.
The issue? It’s underpriced for what it does. In practice, it’s worth more or less the same as ECM. If ECM is 7, Thermals should be 6; if ECM is 8, Thermals should be 7. The current gap makes it feel like a bargain.
Category Verdict:
Defensive Retrofits are one of Armada’s most important upgrade categories — arguably the most important. And the problem is clear: everything revolves around being able to leverage a brace at the key moment. That creates an overreliance on ECM or Thermal Shields, and while both cards are excellent, their dominance squeezes out nearly every other option.
The catch is you can’t really nerf ECM or Thermals without destabilising the whole game, because they patch a weakness in the core rules. That means other defensive upgrades will always be fighting uphill for relevance.
Still, there’s space for small fixes — trimming costs on underplayed cards, nudging overpriced deterrents like Cluster Bombs, and considering redesigns for upgrades locked into the wrong slot (Cluster Bombs and PD Reroute come to mind). But fundamentally, this slot is shaped by ECM and Thermals, and unless the defense token system itself changes, that won’t shift.
Next Up:
Support Teams — the slot of nav tricks, engine techs, and a few oddballs. Some are staples, some are long-forgotten, and one or two could probably have been designed as ship titles instead.
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