Armada and Legion Notes from GenCon

GenCon Notes

Another GenCon has come and past.  While I had planned to do daily updates while there, I was just having too much fun for that.  So, here's a rundown of what I learned about Armada and Legion while there.

Armada Tournament

I ended up finishing 9th with my Sato fleet, which is not too bad.  There were some excellent players at the event.  I lost horribly to my first opponent and spent the rest of the day crawling back up.  I will be putting Sato to rest for awhile after this and finding something else to play for the upcoming regionals season.

My 1st game.  I was about to lose 3 ships in short order.

The game of Armada is in its most balanced state.  The Devs are super pleased with the current balance in the game.  The tournament bore this out.  There were 9 different admirals in the Top 10 finishers.  There was a mix of heavy ships and MSU, a mix of no, mid, and high squad counts, and a mix of Imperials and Rebels.  I saw ships from early waves and ships from late waves all doing well.  In fact the only ship not represented was the Assault Frigate which the FFG guys felt was due to the MC-75 stealing some of its role in the game.

There was a great variety in the Top 4 and a solid variety of other fleets in striking distance of the cut. 

The Devs were super pleased with the results of the last errata and felt that the diversity of the field at this event showed that i had the desired effect.  Don't expect any of those changes to get walked back anytime soon.

SSD 

Look at the size of that thing!

While the size is the first thing you notice, the pictures really don’t do justice for how pretty it is.  From what I could gather , it was originally intended to be released with the Corellian Conflict campaign.  It wasn’t released for manufacturing reasons, but they ran with the campaign anyways.  They always wanted to get it out and decided that now was the right time.  As a fan of Epic X-Wing I am excited about playing with the SSD.

Community

The developers do really care about Armada and its success.  They love how easy the Armada tournaments are to Judge/Marshall as the players are so easy to get along with.  No comments on the future, but I didn’t sense they were trying to hide the impending doom of the game.  In fact, it was stated that they had to put significant resources into designing the production of the SSD.  I don't think they do that for a dying game.

Legion Tournaments

Due to some timing conflicts I was only able to participate in 2 rounds of the Lgion event I played in.  I did try to stop by and watch portions of the other events though.  From what I saw the meta is pretty limited, but most saw huge potential.  DLT/Bike spam was very common, but the mix of Rebels and Imperials was still pretty good.  It was really reminiscent of the early Armada meta.  No T47s were brought to any of the Maximum Firepower events, but I saw one at the team event.  The devs felt that it was a strong model though and I don't anticipate any change to it in the short term. 

My 1st match

The Devs were pleased with what they saw for the first tournaments.  There were some issues with terrain delivery, but the terrain that they had was at least nice.

Han and Commandos

I picked these up as an early release.   Played a game and they are soooo good.  Battle report coming soon.  In the short term I can't see myself playing without 3x Commando units.

Upcoming Releases

The Specialist look really great!

Models are very high quality.  They just keep improving.  Special forces and speicalist packs are really going to add diversity to the game.  All we need is additional vehicle choice.

For a game that is less than a year old, I think Legion is in great shape.  The community is growing and the game has a nice buzz to it.  The new units coming down the pipe all look solid and seem like they will add diversity to the ga,e.