ARC01 Design Journals
Introduction
Hello Armada players! ARC01’s been live for just over a week now, and hopefully that’s given you some time to form some first impressions based on the content of the release. We’d like to now share some of the design work that has happened in the course of developing ARC01, and give you a sense of the process and intentions behind some of the changes we’ve made.
First of all, let’s tackle the scope and focus of the release. With 8 adjusted commanders, 4 new ships, and 5 adjustments to older cards, it may seem like a daunting package of changes. But with 4 revised commanders each for the Rebels and the Empire, and 2 new ships for the Republic and Separatists, the ARC01 content you’ll be facing in any one game is limited to either a reworked, previously seldom-seen commander, or a couple of new ships, depending on the faction you’re using and facing. (And the 5 adjustments to some of the lesser seen ships and squadrons in the game). There have been no changes to any upgrade cards, which would have had much greater potential implications on fleet and faction balance.
Second, we’ve tried to keep in mind the principle that a game of Armada needs to be fun for both players at the table. Facing an overpowered fleet that leaves you with little agency in determining the game outcome is a situation that should be avoided, as it leaves players frustrated and potentially turns them away from the game. The previous AMG version of Anakin Skywalker illustrated this principle and was rightfully clubbed with the nerf bat. Keeping our changes modest enough to ensure counterplay is possible, while making them significant enough to matter, was often challenging.
Yet we hope the changes ARC01 has introduced are enough to inject excitement and hope into the Armada playerbase, whether you play at home or at tournaments or both. Tournament results worldwide and online showed that in the Galactic Civil War factions, certain commanders were being used much more frequently. Community opinion (in the form of tier lists and discussion) has consistently ranked some commanders as much stronger than others. Now, ARC does not subscribe to the philosophy that every card needs to be usable or equally powered. However, having the same cards repeatedly being assessed as “C” or “D” tier cards for years does tend to mean that you saw them much less commonly in games. And part of the fun of playing Armada is seeing a variety of fleets and new ideas that your opponent has come up with. Ensuring that players have solid options to build interesting and fun fleets (without handicapping themselves too badly) and encouraging creativity is one of ARC’s key goals - so with that in mind we set about looking at the lesser used commanders.
Design Space
For the Clone Wars factions, the fleet building context was quite different. These factions received many fewer releases before AMG walked away from the game, leaving them with a reduced roster of ships and commanders to work with. We felt that the disparity in commander effectiveness was smaller in these factions, and that creativity in fleetbuilding would be best encouraged with additional ships to flesh out fleetbuilding options and fill in some gaps in capabilities for the Republic and Separatists. We did not take this step lightly; but with the Armada community shrinking rapidly, we felt some degree of urgency in getting players excited to get plastic spaceships on the table again. We chose to limit ourselves to using existing ship cardboard as a starting point, in order to maximize accessibility to these new ships. Players could use (or borrow) existing ships in their collection without having to source or print new tokens. 3D printing is definitely the future of Armada and options to source new cardboard are growing, but until that market is readily available to all communities we felt old cardboard was best as an initial release. It’s not a perfect solution. Players without access to these ships will still struggle, but as a stopgap measure it was the best compromise we could achieve. Without existing designs in the community that matched these goals, we chose to proceed with designing new ships ourselves.
That decision did limit our design space for the new ships. We chose not to change dice colors or quantity in firing arcs (though it was discussed, but clarity on the table was decided as the priority), leaving the options as changes to the points, faction, upgrade bar, and potentially nav chart. Bringing a ship in from a Galactic Civil War faction opened up the possibilities, but we didn’t want to dilute faction identity too much. We are all huge Star Wars fans, and keeping that feeling of immersion as we play with our plastic spaceships was an important consideration throughout the development of ARC01. So we limited the faction crossover to one ship each, while creating a new version of an existing Clone Wars chassis as the other ship. More specifics about those below.
With that introduction, let’s turn the discussion over to our Design Lead and Assistant Design Lead. They’ve shared their recollections about each card below. A brief caveat however - while they are the design leads and made the ultimate decisions about the final form of each card, the input and suggestions of our playtesters from around the world were taken seriously and in many cases radically adjusted the form of the update. We drew from various Armada communities including Poland, Germany, France, the UK, Canada, and the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast of America, to ensure that we had a wide variety of eyes on the concepts. We also want to thank Doty and Forest from Legacy, who assisted us by keeping an eye on our development to help ensure it did not conflict with upcoming Legacy releases. Which is all to say that ARC01 was a group effort, and we hope you enjoy getting spaceships on the table (virtual or real) in the near future.
If you're not entirely sure the entire set of changes made with ARC01, make sure to take a look at the ARC01 Changelog on our resources page.
Designer Journals
Designer Journals: Rebels/GAR
Join Chris Fritz (Truthiness) and James Chen (Maturin) on this deep dive into ARC01's additions to the Republic and changes to the Rebels!
Designer Journals: Empire/CIS
Nick Larson, ARC's design lead on the thoughts and processes behind ARC01's Empire changes and CIS additions.