Thursday, December 24, 2015

Ordinance - Wave 2

Onward with Wave 2 upgrades, and it's time to talk about ordinance.  We have two new ships that can take ordinance and they are both small base ships.  The MC30c and the Raider1 also give us two new ordinance upgrade cards to go along with them.  They join the VSD1 and GSD as the ordinance platforms in the game.

Let's take a look at the upgrades in question, and see how they can fit onto our lists going forward.





Assault Proton Torpedoes - 5 points - Black Crit Effect:  Deal one face-up damage card to the defender.  The new APT is the big winner of ordinance for this expansion.  Directly competing for space in lists with the Assault Concussion Missiles, APT is a face up damage card, that goes into effect before any other damage is dealt.  Remember how much fun ACM was, with damage being dealt to adjacent shield zones before anything could be redirected?  Well, APT gives you the chance to get a particularly nasty crit, such as shields being dropped or structural damage even before the rest of your hits slam home.

This is an obvious inclusion for a fleet lead by Gen. Dodonna - your choice of the nastiest crit effect before anything else is included.  Screed, much like with ACM, can guarantee the crit effect, and the new Ordinance Experts can almost make it automatic as well.  For ships, the MC30c is the only option for Rebels, and it finds a good home there - possibly backed up with XI7 Turbolasers, to really pour damage onto the opponent's hull.  Ordinance Experts are a good addition here, to try and fish for the critical effect.

For Imperials, the VSD1 can take it as a cheap upgrade to improve the damage potential for the black dice, and can also be used with XI7 shenanigans.  It is also an option on the GSD1.  But the upgrade really shines as a non-Screed cheaper alternative to ACM on GSDs, coupled with Ordinance Experts or Vader.


Rapid Reload - 8 points - Modification - The battery armament of your left and right hull zones are increased by 1 Black die.  A variant of Enhanced Armaments, the extra dice from Rapid Reload is most useful for ships that do not want to be dependent on critical effects, but also don't want to pay a premium for Expanded Launchers.  The Raider1 gets perhaps the most mileage out of this, as it doesn't have the best odds of rolling a hit/crit on its dice in the first place, and improves their damage potential if they can double arc a target.

I'll admit that I don't really like this card on other ships besides the Raider1 - the VSD1 just isn't likely enough to be using its side arc at close range to spend 8 points improving it, and if they are going to take a modification, they'd be better spend on tractor beams.  As for the GSD and MC30c, they are better served with an Assault ordinance, or with Expanded Launchers if it is going to take a modification.


That's it for ordinance.  We've only got Ion Cannons and Turbolasers left to discuss for Wave 2 Upgrades.  Happy Holidays everyone!

5 comments:

  1. On an unrelated note, I'm getting a lot of traffic suddenly from the UK. Where are you folks coming from?

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  2. I've been reading for a while now from the UK mate. I'm sure people are reading your posts on FFG website. And following your link to your blog....seems to be working

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    1. Well that's good. I was figuring it got linked somewhere else.

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    2. Have found you through Google looking for decent blogs to read :)

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  3. I'm probably one of them also great blog + You link to others.

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