I've been playing most of my games with Rebels against my friend Mario who has been playing with Imperials, and so far it has been a blast! I'll write here about our last game, only because it's the one I took most picture of!
Mat and 3D Rocks
For this game we used the Space Rocks (from www.space-rocks.net) and a new 3x6' mat.. The miniatures look even better than normal with this material!
Fleets
Mario played a VSD II and two Gladiators with Admiral Screed. I don't remember his upgrades, but one of the Gladiators had the Demolisher title, and both had Engine Techs.
I played with 3 Assault Frigates with Bel Iblis. All my ships had Advanced Projectors and Gunnery Teams, two of them had Enhanced Armaments and the third one had Bel Iblis. I heard of this list in the IFF podcast and decided to use it, as I had not played before without squadrons.
Mario won the initiative bid and decided to be first player. He then chose my "Intel Sweep" objective.
Setup
Mario chose his VSD as his objective ship and placed his Gladiators so as to threaten my objective ship (Bel Iblis). This was one of the reasons that cost him the game, as I was able to focus first in his Gladiators and then in his VSD, and he was unable to use his VSD to finish the Gladiators work.
This was my third game against Gladiators, so I decided to give them as little maneuver possibilities to flank me as possible and packed my ships in a tight formation.
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| The Rebels set up close to three of the objective tokens in a tight formation... the idea was to make it difficult for the Gladiators to flank them |
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| The VSD starts far from the main action... it would need 3 turns (a battle takes 6) to get close to the Rebel ships |
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| The Gladiators had a lot of trouble maneuvering in the close quarters with the 3 Assault Frigates, two asteroids and being in the corner of the map; here, the Demolisher Gladiator is in the sights of all 3 Assault Frigates in turn 3 |
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| The Demolisher Gladiator falls under the concentrated fire of the three Assault Frigates |
After the encounter with the Gladiators, Demolisher was destroyed and the second Gladiator had taken two Hull damage (and it had not been able to shoot a single time at close range).
The VSD then got at firing range of the Assault Frigates and shot at the one that had been damaged a bit by the Demolisher. I positioned my second Frigate (which had not suffered damage) between the VSD and the damaged Frigate and risked a double arc attack from the VSD... the Assault Frigate took a hard beating but survived relatively well (Advanced Projectors in an Assault Frigate works wonderfully well).
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| The VSD is surrounded by the Assault Frigates |
Summary
The Gladiators are very scary ships, but positioning them is not so easy, especially if they have to attack a close formation. The VSD would have helped breaking that tight formation, but Mario had deployed it too far away, and this gave me a big advantage in the game, as I could always focus on half of his fleet at the time.
That decision and two badly timed criticals on the VSD gave me a big advantage and final score. I also won the "Intel Sweep" objective 3 to 2, adding 75 extra points to my tally.
Armada vs. X-Wing
If you are considering which game to play (if you don't want to play both as I do) then ask yourself:
- Do you like to plan ahead your strategy, or do you like simulations of ship of the line battles? Then Armada is your game.
- Do you prefer a more reactive game, in which the first plan is not so decisive (although it will always be important, of course) and that simulates an airplane dogfight? Then you cannot miss with X-Wing!
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