Star Wars Armada First Impressions / Review

I purchased FFG :s Star Wars Armada few weeks back. I have played it with the starter set contents couple of times with my son, but now with wave 1 arriving (at least part of it), it was time to amass a larger fleet and take the war to our club´s galaxy.
So, on stardate 230515 Mon Anwil and his rebel scum clashed with Darth Gutrot´s glorious fleet.

 The starter set is good for learning the game, but definately too small to actually get enjoyable games. With 2 rebel and 1 empire ships + regular fighters for both sides, the options are limited, and not very inspiring.
Wave 1 will remediate the situation somewhat, and allows you to field a larger fleet, get more upgrade options and develop a fleet strategy.
I bought rebel assault frigate + rebel fighter squadrons and one more empire star destroyer, all other wave 1 products were sold out for now.

The game has some resemblance to X-Wing, as it has hidden orders you can issue to your ships. These orders enhance shooting, changing speed, allow you to repair your ship or activate fighter/bomber squadrons. Larger, less agile ships have to decide orders 3 turns beforehand, where smaller corvettes can issue their order at the start of the turn. To balance, larger ships have larger pools to "save" unused orders for later use.
Movement uses a special movement tool to decide how to turn and move, and things like agility and inertia are calculated in, larger ships are more clumsy and slow.

There are three different types of shooting die, short, medium and long, each die type has also different possible outcome combinations. There are hits, crits, active defence negators and misses.
Each ship also has different types of combinations of shooting based on facing, all clearly marked in each base.
Each ship can handle x hull points of damage. Critical hits deal the damage, and impose a random penalty to the ship. The penalties are pretty cool and enhance the "feel" as well as make interesting situations.

Larger vessels are nearly defenceless against small bombers, so fighter screen is pretty much mandatory. Fighter movement is free in sense that you can place them anywhere within their range. 

Wave 1 fighter packs introduce bombers and specialised small craft. In our game, they really showed their claws, when Y-Wings and B-Wings slowly wore down a star destroyer after X-Wings had destroyed its Tie Fighter screen.

The game has lot of tokens and cards to represent different mechanics and situational data, but they all speed up the play and keep all necessary information at hand. The production value of all ships, bases and tokens are superb, FFG has really done more than great job in that front. Except the movement tool. The movement tool is clunky and feels just inaccurate. I really hope some third party will create a enhanced version of it.

All ships and fighters come with upgrade cards, they allow you to customise your fleet to your liking and develop different strategies.

The game itself costs 110€, so pretty ok. Addon ships are 44€ a piece (for larger ones). That is a tad on the expensive side, but hey, they allow you to fire even more concussion missiles and turbolasers at a fleeing rebel corvette on a "diplomatic mission", so who´s counting.

All larger ships are pre painted in good tabletop quality, fighters are unpainted. I´m actually looking forward to painting them, I have never done so small scale yet.

So in conclusion, the game is like SAGA, easy to learn rules and nice mechanics. The complexity comes from addon rules you can use to bolster your fleet. the game has managed to capture the feel of large ship fleet combat, and with Star Wars universe you really can´t go wrong.

Go buy it.