Creating the Grand Army of the Republic

 So you want to play in a Vassal Tourney

Recently, Green Knight decided to put on a Clone Wars vassal tournament. Which meant it was time to create a new Clone Wars fleet instead of continuing to try to find a way to make a rebel raiding fleet work. I’ll come back Kanan and Rex, just you wait. 

There were also some small changes to the game. Armada 1.5...you may have heard about it releasing with the Clone Wars factions and their starters. So now we’ll be figuring out new factions and new rules without a lot of practice. 

Only Prequel Gifs allowed, that's the law

The Journey

It began on a rainy German day, so any day after October 1st, with the most basic decision.  First off: which faction?  I chose the Grand Army of the Republic for the best reason to pick any faction in Armada.  I like the way they look! I'll figure out a fun way to play them for me eventually. I'll also figure out a Separatist fleet eventually too, but I’m starting with the Clones.

With the changes in 1.5 it doesn't look like you can't really skimp on fighters.  At a minimum you should at least have a small screen.  This being Clone Wars only means there's a real chance of a big Hyena Bomber ball on the other side of the board.  But you gotta be able to kill ships too! So I came up with a couple priorities.

1. Be able to Kill Ships

2. Be able to kill fighters

3. Be able to deal with Raid

4. Have a fun fleet! actually rule #1

These priorities being what they are there wildly different means for which effective fleets are built.  My usual playstyle is to lean slightly less on upgrades and more on a variety of ships all contributing in their niche roles.  Think the 'Dumpster Fire'.  I do like an occasional Christmas Tree ISD or Liberty that just paves a swath of destruction and ship parts though.  So I'm going into this build gunning towards the distributed lethality approach but I end up doing more Christmas Tree-ing than I usually do.  So enjoy the journey.

Building the GAR

I started off wanting at least a single Acclamator since I really like their look. I figured I would start with an Acclamator 1 because I knew I wanted to have a decent fighter ball too. And speaking of fighter balls, I went with probably the first one everyone thought of after the Jedi Aces were spoiled, or at least the first one I thought of.

Nothing will die

So I started with 3 V-19's because they're tanky escorts and will keep my expensive Jedi alive for a while.  Especially, since I can pair them with some Reserve Hanger Decks to stay alive a silly amount of time.  Even with only 2 hull, that's a minimum of an extra shot that's not going into a ship or a Jedi.

Next up was to buff the survivability of said V-19 screen.  Axe, Luminara, & Plo mean that the 3 V-19's will counter back with Swarm, be obstructed and have the ability to negate a couple points of damage before they get reborn as Hull 2 escorts to do it all over again.  

That should be able to slow down any major fighter/bomber ball or for 100 points grind out an equal amount of points and stop any bombing of my fleet. If it met a smaller ball, it should be able to eat it quickly enough and then get to bombing, or at least contributing something with Adept blue dice and non-bomber black dice.

Now I needed a way to push 6 fighters a turn so that made the choice of another Acclamator easy enough.  Perhaps an Acc I carrier and an Acc II gunboat?  Supported by 2 C70s.  Seems like those points should add up.  What I came up with is something like the below list.  Two fighter pushing Acclamators, though one one is THE carrier, a support C70 and what I think will always be my go to Charger. 398 points that can be polished up a little bit.  

The Polishing

Being a Clone Wars only tournament meant I would be facing Obi-Wan, Bail, Kraken, or Dooku as enemy admirals.  And after a bit of playing a couple matchups out, I realized that Dooku, the man who has easily a 25% chance of being in any fleet would cripple this fleet with Raid, especially in the squadron front. As at best I'd get a single token to clean up Raid for a single round of squad pushing.  That might work, or I could be left in abject horror as waves of Hyena bombers mulched my ships all because I couldn't command a V-19 to get in the way. I had to have a solution for that.

Thinking of how easy it would be to crush fleet 1

So that began the train of what ways can the GAR, who only has access to a single Comms Net/Fleet Support via Radiant VII, ensure I could push my squadrons and not succumb to Raid. The Armed Cruiser looks decent and can provide a nice scary flak bubble for cheap, but it'd only be helping 1 ship clear raid tokens.  Over multiple turns it can get everything rescued but...

And that is when I stumbled upon this charming clone of Jango Fett. Clone Navigation Officer.  He's essentially a Comms Net from any ship to any ship as long as you didn't want an Engineering token. And you still get to use the Dial of that same ship.  So you can get a squad token to clear your Raid token OR use it a turn ahead to give a squad token to a friend and so they can clear their Raid next turn to push squadrons. Or use it to toss a Con Fire token to a friend to use Clone Gunners.  

I'm just a simple man...

So now I had access to a token generation scheme that should work pretty well, but I needed the points, so I hacked out the Acc II and the C70s and thought about how best to capitalize on this unique officer the GAR has access to.  Especially a way to use tokens in case I didn't face off with Yoda's old Padawan.  

I can use tokens! 

Boarding Party Away!

I stumbled upon Boarding Troopers and realized that they fit perfectly on an Acc 1, assuming it didn't want to augment it's Carrier role more.  Double Offensive Retrofit meant there would be room for Reserve Hanger Deck and BT and I hadn't fallen in love with any of the other weapons teams for Acclamators.  Not saying those other weapons teams aren't  not good, but I hadn't seen any I desperately wanted to try.  CNO could enable a token for Nevoota Bee at practically any time (since she'll be spamming Sq Cmds) or one Acclamator could setup the other at the beginning to ensure everyone had a Sq token to discard when they got close.

This could help the Clams hurt ships (you can only brace once or just take this close range External Rack shot), prevents Dooku from completely crippling me, and keeps a mean fighter ball capability.  Not I just had to squeeze all this goodness into ~272 points.

a BTACC, 87 points of meanness

My initial goal was to put 3 of these BTACCs into a fleet and back them up with a a Parts Resupply Radiant and keep my squad ball.  I like 4 ships for activations (though I have no idea how effective that'll be with the pass tokens) and that would present a mean wall of red dice and pair well with Obi-Wan.  Every GAR ship so far only has a single redirect, so 4 ships feels pretty good for Obi-Wan to get value.  However, I couldn't fit everything I wanted in.

394 points and no admiral.  that doesn't work.

So I had some adjustments to make.  I could drop all the Racks and Axe to get points for an Admiral? But that is losing some punch for ships and I figure each ship is only going to get a single good shot (with that nav chart) to hit the enemy. So I needed External racks to pile in the damage.  So instead I saved 41 points and removed the Armed Cruiser.  Losing Axe also reduced some Squadron survivability and another deployment (5 squads down from 6) that I'd rather not lose.

Now that did cost me an activation but maybe I would get to play with pass tokens and see how they work in this new wild world.  And with only 3 redirects available and no guaranteed way of using them I switched my Admiral to Bail, though I still plan on trying Obi-Wan in the near future.  Bail's supply of Nav and Eng tokens should help keep my Clams pointed where they need go and fixing themselves as they push my squads along.  The Eng Commands almost exclusively going to keep whatever Clam is diving into the middle of the fleet.

It also freed up some more points to play with so I chose to pick some more cards to try out rather than have a large bid.  I tossed Bail on ship, Implacable on another, and since I have fighters Nevoota on the last one.  I kept my points spread equally so no one cog completely costs me the game as these ships have no guarantee of using defense tokens.  And only 2 of those defense are even concerned with keeping said ship alive, the other just makes it hurt more to shoot it.  With my last couple points I decided I would upgrade Axe to Anakin because his bombing boost for 2 points seemed way to helpful to pass up.  Especially if he needed to go hunt down ships with his 'ignore engagement' opportunity.  Plus why not give him a try! He looks like a good investment for his points.

Final Decision

Clam BAM! because I plan on just smashing the Acclamators into you

With my final fleet built I had to again check it across my goals and make sure it met all the requirements.  

1. Be able to Kill Ships

With 3 Clams flying in close formation, red range shots should be able to start contributing a small amount of damage to soften the enemies shields.  Though they must close to black range to get their damage spikes in.  This would mean flying them in such a way that they need to 'trap' their primary target in place with one Clam while the others pound it to oblivion.  Probably not going to work well against C70s but every other ship should be able to be pinned and boarded if flown well enough.

Finally, with 1 BT use per Clam the target can still use their tokens (it's not old BT Avenger OP) but once those tokens are gone the other Clams (or fighters) should be able to slice into it to finish it off.  Also, if it does escape Anakin or red dice side shots should be able to finish it off since they'd have no means to prevent damage. Or at least that's my fervent hope.

2. Be able to kill fighters

The squadron ball was my one stable element, minus swapping in Anakin, 5 hull escorts back up with Swarm, Luminara obstruction and Plo Counter should decimate any squad ball who engages them.  If there's a minimum screen or no enemy fighters they should be good for ~5 damage a round against an enemy ship. And that can pile in some hurt.

3. Be able to deal with Raid

Clone Navigation Officers should be able to clear two squad rounds of Raid and Bail should be able to token-ize his dials if I really need an important engineering or Nav token.  If no Raid then my Boarding Troopers are super easy to setup, or Nevoota can go all in on a slightly larger alpha/retaliatory strike.  

4. Have a fun fleet! actually rule #1

This'll be fun! Just taking angry Clone triangles that want to get close and pointing them in the right direction.  What could go wrong!? We have new factions, new ships & upgrades, new rules, a bunch of new things to figure out in Armada 1.5.  

Again, I'd like to thank Green Knight for setting the whole tournament up and letting us play with all the new digital toys, until we can push our real plastic space ships around.