Talk:Armada

I really enjoyed this game. I made it 3 players and put buoys out as another way to score points. Much was the same. Awarded 2 points for sinking someones ship and minus the type you lost if you did. (I may change that the next time I play it cause I think it made the game go for a while) Having the buoys gave ppl reason to attack another player. (temporal alliance were fun 2) Me and person A battled while B was scoring points and positioning (had a bunch of bigger pieces so was slow getting to the buoys) Then me and A decided we had better go after B so we did.

Imbalance between ship sizes, or "the fuzzy wuzzy fallacy"

The game seems to have balance problems between the ship types to me and the person I played a couple times with. In case it helps, here are notes I wrote afterward (but we've never made the time to try out these rule changes):

Logged plays comment:

2 games (our first). First I have the 4 bigs vs MisterC's 4 medium and 4 small. It soon becomes clear this has the same problem as Anteel; swarm of small ships beats a few big slow ships. He kills my fleet with 3 of his mediums surviving. We switch sides, and I kill his fleet with 2 of my mediums and 2 of my smalls surviving... so I guess a more or less even result for the match. We think it may be fixable by making smalls move only 3 steps (as you'd expect) instead of 4 and making the firing range equal to the firer's size instead of all ships firing as far as a big ship. Amusingly strong sense of Anteel deja vu... but this may be more easily fixed.

Game comment:

As written, it seems to have the all-too-common "fuzzy wuzzy fallacy" of lots of small fast ships being able to destroy a few big slow ships.

We want to try again with a couple rule tweaks to try to tone down the small/medium power vs larges:
1. Small ships move 3 steps (as you'd expect, instead of 4).
2. Range for ships is their ship size, instead of all ships firing long like big ships do.

Or play with equal forces on both sides. (But that's obviously an unsatisfying blunt solution... :)

Goulo 09:53, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

I just noticed an, apparently, less known sequel to Armada called Ice Pirates, which seems to expand the original and allow for more players. It might be worth comparing the rules to see if it deals with any of these issues.--nihilvor 02:39, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Looking to update & balance these rules

OK. After some prompting about Armada a month or so ago, I am finally getting around to working on balancing the game a bit more. Any suggestions and/or playtesting help would definitely be appreciated.

I don't want to drastically change the game from it's present form since it has been out there for quite some time. I just want to attempt to tweak it to balance the single-stash variant. Hopefully, this can be done in a simplified way that will also work well for the multi-stash game.

Currently, after a dozen or so playtests, I am thinking of the following changes for the single-stash game:

1) Smalls move 3-spaces (this is mostly just to make the design a bit more elegant) 2) Fleets are based on a points system of Pips+Ships. - So a Large ship counts as 4 points (3pips + 1ship) - Four Larges would therefore be 16 a point fleet - Two Smalls plus Four Mediums would be 2pips + 8pips + 6ships = 16 points. - Basically Smalls=2, Mediums=3, & Larges=4

In my limited testing, this still seems like the SM fleet has an advantage, but I need to get in more playtesting to verify. Especially with experienced players.

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By the way... the short story on Ice Pirates is as follows: It is an unfinished game, and I had even forgotten that I posted the rules that I had so far for it. It was actually the precursor of Armada. I had streamlined the game down to a single stash game for the IGDC and thus came up with Armada. This is part of the reason that I wanted Larges to be slower than Smalls, and thus had Smalls able to move 4-steps. The Larges were intended to be important as the transport vehicles, and the smalls would be the defenders and attackers.