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| Your Pass Tokens are weak, old man |
WARNING!!!
Early Warning Alert: Rant incoming!
WARNING!!!
Back to the Bad Old Days: Before 1.5
To understand why pass tokens exist — and why they’re a problem — we have to rewind to the dark age of pre-1.5 Armada.
This was the era when the infamous last-first was king. And if last-first was king, Demolisher was its crowned prince, warlord, and executioner all rolled into one. A well-flown Demo could scoot forward at the end of a round, erase a ship with a close-range shot, then — thanks to first activation next round — double-arc something else into oblivion before it could react. Or just do the triple tap and delete that undamaged MC80 from the map, maybe using 2-3 bumps to seal the deal, depending on the dice.
With Engine Techs, Demo could pull this trick from beyond even red-dice range. With Intel Officers, it could neuter ECM braces. And with ACM or APT plus Ordnance Experts (or, before those existed, Screed), it could delete anything in the game — even the big boys — with essentially no counterplay.
Even for a game where things are supposed to go BOOM, this was… not ideal.
Demolisher wasn’t alone. MC30s — especially in the hands of Rieekan (though for Rebels, abusing Rieekan with squads was often even filthier) — could pull the same stunt. Boarding Trooper Avenger was another variation on the “you don’t get to play” theme.
Now, this is a gross oversimplification for the sake of brevity. Armada in wave 1–2 was not the same beast as Armada in wave 7. Ships, upgrades, and counters evolved — but the general principles of activation control and initiative abuse stayed the same.
I personally ran a nasty version with Demolisher and a Vader Devastator Cymoon — a combo where the Cymoon softened up or erased problem smalls, ensuring Demo could last-first without interruption later in the game. In either case, the formula was the same:
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Control initiative (by bidding high for first player).
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Control activations (outactivate the opponent to guarantee last-first).
And what was the easiest way to get activation superiority? Flotilla spam. Demo + Cymoon + four Gozantis hanging way in the back worked just fine.
The same flotilla wall worked beautifully for squadron-centric builds, too — not just for stalling, but because it was the only realistic way to get a high ship count in a squad-heavy fleet.
It was a nasty, stagnant meta — and it set the stage for the “solution.” Unfortunately, that solution had all the subtlety of orbital bombardment…
Wave 7: The Domino That Fell
Wave 7 hit on February 1, 2018 — well before Armada 1.5 dropped on December 11, 2020. In fact, some of the cards from Wave 7 are key to understanding why 1.5 — and with it, pass tokens — ever came to be.
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Sloane
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Raddus (pre-nerf, i.e., pure nightmare fuel)
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Strategic Adviser
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Governor Pryce (the old one)
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Bail Organa (Rebel officer version)
Sloane took Imperial squads — previously great at anti-squad duty but underwhelming vs ships — and turned them into defense-token-stripping monsters that shredded both.
Raddus, in his original incarnation, made a complete mockery of enemy deployment and maneuvering, with essentially zero counterplay.
The other three upgrades? They’ve all been banned and replaced by… you guessed it… pass tokens.
Of these five, only Sloane survives in her original state — and even she’s been indirectly nerfed by a laundry list of changes: flotilla spam ban, Relay nerfs, the ace cap, and (I’d argue) the rise of Lumina and high-hull GAR generic squad spam in general.
Breaking the Activation Race — and Everything Else
Let’s circle back to those three banned upgrades: Strategic Adviser, Governor Pryce, and Bail Organa.
The idea behind them was to give players a way to break the activation race.
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SAd: Essentially stapled to any large ship, giving it a “free pass token” every round.
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Pryce and Bail: Fundamentally twisted the last-first dynamic by letting you choose who went last or first in a specific round.
In theory, these were meant to break flotilla spam.
In practice… they opened up another, arguably bigger, can of worms.
Case in point: the Thrawn 2-ship with Pryce. All your points concentrated into just two heavy hitters plus squadrons, using Pryce to delay a critical turn, then — BAM — you’re dead, no realistic counterplay.
Some claim that by the time 1.5 arrived, the community was already figuring Bail and Pryce out — that with sharp deployment and careful tempo control, you could neuter both. I don’t disagree; their impact had been blunted. But for anyone short of expert-level play, Bail or Pryce was still death incarnate — mechanics that magnified a skill gap into a 100× consequence gap. One mistake, one misjudged turn, and you weren’t just behind… you were gone.
So yes, Wave 7 made large ships more viable — and that had been a major complaint for years — but it also created its own problems.
Problems that 1.5 then tried to solve in a more generic, “future-proof” way… and failed spectacularly.
1.5: Change Without Vision
FFG took a pile of concerns and feedback, threw together a list of potential fixes, and then hurled them at the playtest wall to see what stuck — with, in my opinion, near-zero vision for the overall impact those changes would have on the game. I’m exaggerating for effect here… but not by much. Playtesters have even commented that the process leading to 1.5 felt haphazard and opaque.
Some of these changes were spot-on:
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Evade token buff – Absolutely the right move.
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Ordnance Experts limited to 2 rerolls – Fine, not a huge deal on its own.
Some were fine in isolation, but started to get dicey in combination:
3. Key black crit effects now exhaust – On its own? Sure. But alongside the two changes above… we’re edging toward problematic. And they went down in cost at the same time, so… okay, I guess?
And then…
4. Pass tokens – The moment the wheels came off. Suddenly, those tiny ships that live or die by positioning and activation order? They no longer matter as much. Second player can just delay at the key turns. The value of your smalls effectively fell off a cliff — but their points cost stayed exactly the same.
Taken together, these changes broke the back of black-dice MSU fleets. Gone overnight.
Step 3 (exhausting black crits) was already maybe a step too far — that’s debatable — but all four changes combined, with zero adjustments to small-ship pricing?
Get. The. F. Out. Of. Here.
Come to think of it... most of the changes 1.5 added are pretty good, great even, or at the very least well-intended. But the overall effect, I think, was rather poorly understood by the designers. I suspect they really wanted and needed to get this out pre-CW and were short on both playtesting and especially project management.
Anyway. Onward.
When Knife-Fighting Dies, Red Dice Rule
When knife-fighting with smalls isn’t viable anymore, the meta shifts. Red dice become more prevalent. Blues are fine, but blue range isn’t much further than black, and their damage is only moderate. So red it became — plus the dice mods needed to tame those swingy bastards.
The ships with the most reds are usually medium-to-large hulls. They’re a big investment, so you want to keep them alive. And with no fear of black-dice MSU deleting them, you can keep them alive. For the first time, tanking became a genuinely viable strategy — and players ran with it.
Pass tokens had removed a baked-in core tactic from the very start of Armada, and in doing so, they boosted large ships far beyond the modest leg-up FFG should have given them.
Enter the Tanks (and the Salvo Era)
Then came the SSD — which is… fine, I guess. Not useless, not auto-win, so credit where it’s due.
More interesting was the Starhawk — pure tank jank — and the Onager, designed as a counter to tank jank of all sorts… and later nerfed nearly to extinction.
Wave 8 also introduced Salvo defense tokens — although they would only fully come into their own with the subsequent two waves — another mechanic that heavily favored medium and large ships, and hurt smalls even more. On its own, Salvo is a fine addition to the game. Combined with pass tokens? Yet another nail in the coffin for the poor little Raiders.
Then Wave 9 brought the Clone Wars. Finally, something cool, and definitely designed with 1.5 in mind. Wave 10’s extra CW ships came after 1.5, but you can tell they were designed alongside it.
The Intel Aside
I’ll save the details for another post, but the Intel change is worth flagging here. It was good in isolation, but it reduced the ability of ships to use squads to kill other ships, which made tanking even more viable, and rogues even more desirable.
My Point After All This
Get rid of the f’ing pass tokens.
Let Armada be Armada. Let smalls at least be an option again. I honestly don’t think we’d see anything truly problematic re-emerge if pass tokens went away. Black-dice MSU is still weakened by other changes: Evade is still better, ACM/APT still nerfed, OE capped.
Removing pass tokens won’t invalidate tanking. It won’t erase Salvo. It won’t delete Luminara or cancel Projection Experts. But it will make the game more dynamic again.
Let things go boom.
