The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is: (Re)Building the Emperor

“The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is.”

Part One

This piece is an experiment. There are some good resources out there (check out the resources section of our blog!) all about where to start when you build a fleet. Each player has our own process through which we go. There’s a ton of advice out there, both from friends and folks we don’t know. There is conventional wisdom (“if you’re going to use this, then you have to use that,” “there’s never a good reason to field this card,” etc.). Then, of course, there is our own personal experience with different ships, upgrades, and combos. All of this is extremely useful! But it’s also not gospel. I know not everybody has this particular problem, but I do: when I get locked into ways of playing a game, it can be hard for me to break those patterns. Even if I try to, my subconscious might fight back and cause me to lean one way or another without my realizing I’m overlooking an obvious possibility. That goes for fleet building as well as actual Armada play. Sometimes, those details are interesting trivia, but not necessarily relevant. Other times, they can be devastating oversights. Also, all of these various bits of information sometimes stop us from building what we want to build just because we *know* it doesn’t work. And that’s no fun. Even well-intentioned advice can sometimes stop us from making choices that are more fun or are actually more competitive than what we *should* be building. The only way to find out is to experiment, right? Anyone who doesn’t know shmitty was stunned by the effectiveness with which he wielded Garm and his Dumpster Fire fleet at GenCon this past year. But there are a couple of people who know shmitty, and they talked or posted about how they knew there was more to that fleet than meets the eye, and that shmitty had figured out something that no one else had about Garm. Anyway, to make a long story short…





...what the heck is this piece/experiment/diatribe about? Welp, it’s about my experimentation with a Palpatine fleet in the standard format. I’m going to present a starting point list that I put together after much consideration (I had 7 *serious* thoughts in the running, while many others never really got through the pipeline for any real sort of consideration). This is also after several iterations of a Palpatine Command SSD fleet that ultimately became a Piett fleet. I’m going to take the list I’ve chosen, and run it against each of my esteemed colleagues here at It’s A Trap. After each match, we’ll sort of take notes on our thoughts as to what worked and what didn’t, I will choose what feedback to implement, change the fleet (or not!), and then play the next opponent. As failure is, indeed, the best teacher, I plan to fail, fail, fail again until I either admit defeat or find a fleet I like flying.


TL;DR I’ve got a fleet I want to try and this piece is a long experiment about trial and error. Admittedly, this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it’ll give you some insight as to what choices I make and why while building a fleet, and maybe you’ll find some useful thoughts along the way that you can incorporate into your own fleet building exercises. This will likely be more useful to newer players, but you never know!


Before I give you the list I’ve decided to use as a starting place, let me say that there were some obvious choices that I intentionally omitted from my attempts.


None of my lists were 3 Arqs/Rogues. Why? Because duckbird from the FFG forums already flew this, and as per Snipafist over at CGYSO, she did decently with it at Worlds. I love the concept, but here’s the thing: I watched duckbird fly at NOVA a couple of years ago, and she flies WAY above my level. It’s...yeah, it’s not even close. So if she only had decent success with it, I’m not going to see more success than she did. I can assure you of this. So while it was difficult to avoid any builds resembling this one (and trust me, it really was, as I love Arqs), I did just that.


I avoided LMSU without squadron support. Why? Because this is the final fleet that Snipafist landed on during his month of flying Palpatine, as per CGYSO, and according to him, “overall, this build did fine. Not great, but fine.” Snipa knows what he’s talking about, so I just don’t think I’m going to stumble upon a version of the same archetype that works better than anything Snipa found.


I didn’t go with an SSD, despite Palpatine being packaged with it. Why? Because I’ve tried this already. I had a Command SSD, and dropped something like 6 TIE Bombers and 5 TIE Fighters. It was fun. But Palpatine was not the right guy for this fleet, so it became a Piett fleet. It works well from the one or two times I flew it, and I look forward to getting back to it. But I just never came up with a Palpatine SSD build that wouldn’t have been better with some other commander.


The first iteration of my Palpatine experiment:


Master and Apprentice (90/400/400)

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Cymoon 1 Refit (112 + 57: 169)

· Emperor Palpatine (35)

· Director Krennic (8)

· Gunnery Team (7)

· Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)


Quasar Fire II-class Cruiser-Carrier (61 + 19: 80)

· Agent Kallus (3)

· Flight Controllers (6)

· Gunnery Chief Varnillian (6)

· Boosted Comms (4)


Arquitens-class Light Cruiser (54 + 7: 61)

· Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)


Darth Vader (21)

4 x TIE Phantom Squadron (4 x 14)

Tempest Squadron (13)


Rift Assault

Contested Outpost

Volatile Deposits


Oofta. What is this hot garbage? I’ve got a plan. Not necessarily a good or complete one, but enough of one to be getting along with. And to my credit, I anticipate that this is, in fact, hot garbage that will not do anything I theorize it could do.


Successful use of Palpatine depends on leverage of enough damage (consistent damage, ideally, but questionable damage for your opponent can also help a little bit) to force tough choices between only one use of a defense token, or letting the damage get through in order to save Palpatine’s chosen token.


I am counting on the Cymoon throwing 5 red dice at long range at two different targets with dice control provided by LTT and Krennic (I’ve been burned by Krennic before, but I’m messing with red dice - I’m already lining myself up for another burn, if we’re being honest). I wanted to include Intensify Firepower! on the Cymoon, but couldn’t free up the points. Additionally, since I’m throwing dice from downtown, I really need Gunnery Team. I adore Gunnery Chief Varnillian. I want to use her in this Weapons Team slot. But my Cymoon is more likely to have multiple targets in their front arc, so I shouldn’t poke the bear. Especially because I’m already messing with something...questionable, at best.


Arq use is obvious if you’ve done any reading about using Palpatine. But for those of you who haven’t, basically, Palpatine requires constant pressure on defense tokens to be successful, and red dice have the longest range (outside of an Onager), so a lot of Palpatine builds are centered on Arquitens (which I avoided for the reason listed earlier in this article). LTT is for some dice control. Easily the most questionable bits of this concoction are the Quasar and my squadron selection.


I’ll start by saying, again, that I’ve been warned off of this. In a different draft of this fleet that didn’t make the cut, I had a Quasar I and a bunch of TIE Defenders. Gold Leader said, “If you’re gonna go squadrons with Palp, they have to be threatening squadrons that are gonna force token spending. I would also never use a Quasar with him because it’s not a threat to anything.” Another friend said, “Your Quasar is incredibly vulnerable, especially without Boosted Comms...If your TIE Defenders have pulled back to defend it, then you aren’t going to be leveraging enough damage to make Palpatine make sense. I’m not sure, but I don’t think this fleet hits sufficiently hard.”


A quick detour about advice from colleagues and friends: if you’re just gonna ignore everyone, then don’t ask for advice. It’s crappy. So many of us do it all the time. We’re not actually looking for advice; we’re seeking validation or praise. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless we frame it as seeking advice. Then, when we get it, we explain why the offered advice is wrong, and just do what we were gonna do anyway. Again, that’s a crappy thing to do. If you believe what you’re doing will work, then just try it and don’t ask around. Feel free to disagree with it, of course. You don’t have to take advice. But maybe don’t be the kind of person who asks for advice, doesn’t take it, then asks the same person for advice regarding the same, unchanged situation? Maybe? For the record, I definitely don’t know people who do this, nor have I ever resembled a person who does this. Ever. For sure.





Anyway, to that end, the advice I received made a lot of sense to me. I dropped the Defenders (who are Bombers, but only throw 1 die, and don’t have any dice-fixing in my proposed fleet). I replaced them with Phantoms, because even though Phantoms are really swingy, that might work in my favor with this fleet. Do you burn your Scatter or Redirect when the first of 4 Phantoms rolls into 2 damage? I mean, the remaining Phantoms might each roll into 4 damage against either your ships or your squadrons, but you just don’t know. It might be zero. But it MIGHT be 4. EACH. And Vader is still out there, waiting to unload on you, whether it’s a ship or a squadron that’ll be defending. Tempest can force a token use regardless of target, owing to its Bomber ability. So those were my squadron choices.


Why Vader? He’s in there because I wanted him in there. Is he the best choice? I honestly don’t know. I doubt it. And my best guess is that my squadron choices will end up reverting to something a little more...expected? Something like Bossk and Zertik will probably be an anchor for my MFC rather than Vader. But this takes me back to something I mentioned earlier: if you want to play something, then play it! Try to make it work! If it doesn’t, then that’s fine. No big deal. But just because advice or conventional wisdom indicates that there’s a better option doesn’t necessarily mean that’s true. Top players prove this ALL THE TIME. There are a lot of examples, but again, I reference you to shmitty’s experience with building and wielding his Dumpster Fire fleet over at Steel Command. It’s not a fleet I would have ever come up with, and even if it was handed to me, I could never fly it nearly as well as he does. Because he knows exactly why he built it the way he did, every piece is designed to accomplish a specific task the way he wants it accomplished, and so it’s his sword to wield. So if you want to mess with a ship or an upgrade that *shouldn’t* work, then do it. Again, the worst thing that happens is you fail. And failure truly is the best teacher, so long as we can take a step back, take a breath, and learn why we failed. I’m definitely guilty of learning the right lesson for the wrong reasons, which can cause a cascade of further failures. So the other element of this on-going piece will be what I learn, how I learn it, and how I implement what I’ve learned.


This takes us to what is, in my mind, undeniably the biggest question mark of the entire premise: the Quasar II. Gold Leader said the Quasar I in the origina list isn’t a threat to anything and so doesn’t really fit with Palpatine. My other friend said that same Quasar was a liability. So why did I invest an additional 7 points in the Quasar II chassis, which is not any more survivable than the Quasar I? Welp, I tried to balance my experiment with the advice I received. The Quasar I was vulnerable in the previous build because it didn’t have Boosted Comms, so it had to be at medium range both to push the squadrons and/or shoot anything (barring a single turn during which it could burn Disposable Capacitors for blue dice at long range). So, not a threat until medium range. Huh. And obviously not much in the way of defense against squadrons, which means I might need to pull back my MFC (Medium Fighter Coverage, generally not a popular choice in the meta for a little while now) to protect it, which means the fighters aren’t doing damage, which is a problem. But I still want to push squadrons while posing a threat to enemies. I looked at a Glad, but the timing and balance required to coordinate my fighter attacks alongside the red dice from the Cymoon and Arq with the black dice from my Glad just looked...well, daunting. Plus, unless my enemy is very obliging, it will be tougher to spread the damage love around between multiple targets wielding black dice. The same was true of the Raider. I didn’t have the points for a second ISD without a major overhaul, and my VSD would be pretty bare bones, which wouldn’t work well for me. The Interdictor is more expensive than the VSD, and still throws blue dice. Unless I pick the Combat Interdictor, which...yeah, no. Not feeling it. So, I thought: What the hell?

My Quasar II only boasts a couple of red dice, but I’m thinking that might be enough with Gunnery Chief Varnillian on-board. It’s not a lot of damage coming your way if you’re a ship, so do you really want to blow your defense token on the attack, knowing two other combat ships are hovering? I’m not sure you do. But if you don’t, that’s some damage I’m landing because you chose to accept it. Plus, the Quasar II can be a little tougher on enemy squadrons with that red flak. If it’s a target rich environment for squadrons, it’s likely there are some enemy aces in the mix. Agent Kallus means I’m throwing a red and a blue or a red and a black at each ace. They going to burn their scatter to avoid it, or risk simply taking the damage? Plus, that ensures some really excellent opportunities to swap Varnillian’s dice more often than I might normally enjoy. I can remain at long range, given Boosted Comms, and my squadrons all become a little more dangerous against other squadrons with Flight Controllers. 5 anti-squadron dice from all except Tempest, who would throw 4 blue.


If you’re asking whether or not I think this will work, the answer is no. I do not think this will work. I think there are too many janky elements that *could* work, which means that it’s unlikely they all will. But there are a couple of reasons Imma start with this anyway. The first is that I think it *could* work. Conventional wisdom, insight from blogs, and my own experiences tell me that this won’t work. But in my head, I can see the interactions and how such a hodgepodge could possibly and very unexpectedly sing together. I won’t know if it does or doesn’t until I try it. Secondly, it looks like fun to me. I like Palpatine’s ability, even if I’ve not seen it work particularly effectively just yet. I really like squadron Vader, despite his shortcoming of sporting the Escort ability, which is just one of the reasons we rarely see him out in the wild. I’ve enjoyed the notion of TIE Phantoms forever, but have just never built a fleet with them that has ever seen actual play. It’s only ever been theory. So yeah, all of this sounds like fun to me. Plus, there are a bunch of things in here I’ve never played with, so, why not? For new players, this is really the crux of the game, right? All of the vets will tell you to fly what you think will be fun, but we also all have our own opinions of “what works and what doesn’t,” as well as why. That can be kind of intimidating, in my opinion. There have been times when I’ve backed off of ideas simply because I read an article that made it clear the writer thought a card or tactic or combination was not worth trying. It can be easy for me to read that insight from a more experienced and better player than myself, feel stupid for having the notion at all, and then not attempt to field it. Honestly, the vast majority of Armada folks I know do not at all intend to come off that way. The main reason I’ve stuck with this game is because the people I’ve met while playing have been genuinely kind and thoughtful people. But we are also an opinionated lot, and it can be easy to get caught up in the group think. So, new players, I mean this when I say it: play what you want to play. Play with the ships and upgrades you know will bring you joy. I think that’s important, even at competitive levels. But the other important thing at competitive levels is to acknowledge that you might be playing with something that doesn’t work particularly well in the current meta, or with something that has a direct counter, and so you might not do well. Acknowledgement of that possibility can help you avoid tilting or otherwise having a negative experience. And while I’m very supportive of players fielding any fleet at all that your heart desires, I am not at all supportive of players who get upset because “my fleet was supposed to do this, but your dice were hot...Demo is OP...Squadrons are stupid...etc etc.” Not at all supportive of that nonsense. It’s a game, fly what you want. Just know there are consequences. There are a lot of ways that my little Palpatine fleet could go wrong. And I’m sure I’ll get stomped. As long as I know that going in, I won’t be heartbroken and dysfunctional when it happens.


Objectives-wise? Well, objectives are nearly always the things that shift regularly in my fleets, as I figure out ups and downs, specific interactions, etc. I’m starting with Rift Assault. I’m not necessarily sold on it, given that it could easily backfire on me. But this objective offers me some dangerous and unprecedented dice control, and for this fleet, the notion of any additional dice control alongside objective scoring opportunities is most welcome. Plus, my placement of the Gravity Rift means I have increased ability to dictate my opponent's deployment. Contested Outpost means I know where the action is going to be, so I can farm points until my opponent comes to me. Not true if I’ve got to deal with an Onager, but I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. My final chosen objective is Volatile Deposits. Another objective that can very easily backfire. But if they’re in blue dice range of my guns in order to utilize this critical effect, that means they’re in range of my red dice (which also means they’re in range of my ability to use this objective’s crit effect, as well). So it’s risky, but also, the objective just seems like fun and I never see it used.


That’s it. That’s the start of my little Palpatine Quest. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes! The next time I write an installment of “The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is,” I will be joined by each of the other folks here at It’s A Trap. Each of my esteemed opponents will endeavor to beat my Palpatine fleet, and after each battle, we’ll share some thoughts and notes, I may or may not make some changes based on my experience, and then I’ll delve into another match. Hope you’ll follow along!