The age of Armada 1.5 is upon us and it's a bright and glorious time indeed!
If you have followed my "Armada 1.5" article series I've looked at every card in the game and made a running commentary of what I think of that card in the new meta - and what I would like for FFG/AMG to take a look at going forward.
Here I've taken these scattered thoughts and structured them somewhat.
The basic idea comes from X-wing 2.0's system for updating points and upgrade slots every six months or so. FFG recognized that a game as complex as X-wing (or Armada for that matter) could never be perfectly balanced across years of releases. What's fine in wave 1 can be underpowered or overcosted (or vice versa) a few waves later, for example. They knew from experience that fixing imbalances purely through new releases both took too long and didn't always work (5 years and 8 waves and Demo is still being tweaked, for example).
If you're familiar with X-wing 2.0 you know what I'm talking about. If not I can explain it very quickly:
- Ships that are too popular might go up in price.
- More commonly ships that are underused go down in price.
- Which upgrade slots ships have can also be tweaked (this happens more rarely).
- Upgrade cards receive the same treatment and in some cases have variable costing implemented, are made unique, or subjected to other restrictions.
- As a last resort, FFG will turn to rules changes and/or errata. That's nothing special, I hear you say. True, but this happens quickly, sometimes before a particular archetype becomes problematic (Tripsilos - Tripple Upsilon shuttles is one archetype that died that way).
