Post by Fadril Adren on Dec 9, 2016 15:45:46 GMT -5
"Move Phoenix Squadron to intercept."
–Commander Jun Sato
The Rebel Alliance has never commanded a fleet that could match the Imperial Navy ship-for-ship. Instead, the Rebels have always chosen their engagements carefully, using guerrilla tactics, launching surgical strikes, and making certain to fly their ships clear of the battlefield before Imperial reinforcements could arrive and choke off their escape.
As you might expect, these Rebel tactics required careful planning and precise execution. And as the Rebel fleet was growing in strength, it owed much of its success to the efforts of Commander Jun Sato and his modified Pelta-class ship, Phoenix Home, both of which arrive to Star Wars™: Armada in the Phoenix Home Expansion Pack.
The Heart of the Fleet
Commander Sato and the Phoenix Home led the struggle against the evil Empire from the heart of the Rebel fleet, helping the Rebellion's ships and fighter squadrons punch above their weight by supplementing their firepower with pinpoint coordination.
In Armada, the Phoenix Home is represented by a unique Title upgrade that you can apply to either the Modified Pelta-class Assault Ship or the Modified Pelta-class Command Ship. For three fleet points, it allows the Phoenix Home to carry one more officer than your standard Pelta-class ship and grants it the ability to store up to four command tokens, rather than a number equal to the ship's command value.
While there's always an inherent risk to loading up a ship with upgrades, rather than spending those points on more ships or squadrons, the Phoenix Home Title plays nicely toward the ship's origins in Star Wars Rebels, as well as its primary role in your fleet.
In Rebels, Hera Syndulla, the crew of the Ghost, and the pilots of Phoenix Squadron report to the Phoenix Home when they meet to discuss their next strikes against the Empire. As the head of the Phoenix cell, Commander Jun Sato gets the final call on each mission, but as he demonstrates in Star Wars Rebels, he is willing to support whichever plan appears most likely to succeed, and his faith in others has been frequently rewarded.
What the Phoenix Home Title grants you, accordingly, is an extra voice and extra flexibility. Officers like Adar Tallon, Toryn Farr, and Raymus Antilles can make a significant impact in any well-coordinated Rebel fleet, but they also require a significant portion of your fleet points. Staffing your Phoenix Home with a second of these officers—or another officer of comparable cost—can easily require a greater fleet-point investment than an entire B-wing Squadron. And you're tying up all those fleet points in a ship with just five hull.
The benefit is that adding a second officer to the Phoenix Home allows you to add that officer's voice to your fleet without requiring an investment in another ship. If your plan is to use your Modified Pelta-class Command Cruiser to send your bombers at the Empire, it's easy to imagine that you might want to staff Adar Tallon and Toryn Farr aboard the same ship. Alternatively, the Title could allow you to call upon the talents of Ahsoka Tano to ensure you always have access to the right command token, or you can reinforce your ship's defenses with Major Derlin.
Major Derlin's inclusion could prove particularly valuable if you were to follow theme and place Commander Sato aboard the Phoenix Home, as well. You always want to protect your flagship, and this is especially important when you have a commander as valuable to your fleet as Commander Sato. As your commander, Sato allows your ships to replace up to two of the dice in their attack pools whenever they're attacking a ship at Distance "1" of a friendly squadron.
Sato doesn't allow you to fire at a ship that you can't already attack. You still need to be able to form an attack pool, which means you need dice of an appropriate range. What Sato does is allow you to replace your long-range red dice with more accurate blue dice or with more potent black dice.
Alternatively, you might trigger Sato's ability to replace the red dice on a ship like the MC30c Scout Frigate with some blue dice, in the hopes of rolling accuracy to negate your opponent's best defense tokens.
A New Class of Upgrade
The Phoenix Home Title grants you the ability to outfit your modified Pelta-class ship with an additional officer—and additional command tokens—but it's ultimately what you do with the extra upgrade and tokens that really counts.
More than the ship's firepower, it was Commander Sato's leadership that made the Phoenix Home an integral part of the Rebellion's early efforts. Likewise, although the ship boasts a thoroughly respectable battery armament of four dice from its forward hull zone, it is the ship's new Fleet Command upgrade type that truly allows it to assume its intended role at the nerve center of your Rebel fleet.
There are three different Fleet Command upgrades in the Phoenix Home Expansion Pack, and each provides a unique, fleet-wide benefit. In turn, each of these benefits costs you the expenditure of a command token or of the upgrade itself.
All Fighters, Follow Me! allows you to increase, by one, the speed of each squadron activated by a friendly ship. This might make it easier for you to race Hera Syndulla and the Ghost into position to trigger Commander Sato's ability and adjust your ship's attack pool. Or if you run Garm Bel Iblis as your commander, your Phoenix Home can start with a squadron token and seize immediate control of the game's fighter engagements by using the extra speed from All Fighters, Follow Me! to position your bombers and Moldy Crow.
When you spend a navigate token for Entrapment Formation!, you can adjust the speed of each friendly ship by one until the end of the round. In this way, your entire fleet can rebound quickly from the effects of a G7-X Grav Well Projector, or you can offset the debilitating effects that the enemy's G-8 Experimental Projectors may have upon your ships. More than that, however, you can make your entire fleet far more maneuverable than it would be otherwise, even without forcing your larger gunships to plan a series of navigate commands.
In this diagram, Home One takes advantage of the maneuverability it gained from Entrapment Formation!, increasing its speed from "1" to '2" in order to slip out of the Star Destroyer's menacing forward firing arc.
Finally, when you use Shields to Maximum!, you can convert each engineering token assigned to Phoenix Home into a point of shields for every ship in your fleet.When you consider the far-ranging impact of each of these Fleet Command upgrades, it becomes easy to understand why you might want to add a second officer to your Phoenix Home. With both Raymus Antilles and Ahsoka Tano aboard your Phoenix Home, you gain the flexibility you need in your command stack and ensure you'll have the type of command token you need round after round after round. Or you can double down on the ship's defense with officers Major Derlin and Lando Calrissian. In fact, the better question might not be if you would like to use the Phoenix Home Title to add a second officer, but how you will make use of that officer's services.
Precise Coordination
Ensure that your strikes are executed with exacting precision. With its new officers and Fleet Command upgrades, the modified Pelta-class ship from the Phoenix Home Expansion Pack is bound to become an integral part of your Rebel fleet.