Star Wars Armada - The Corellian Conflict News

The Corellian Conflict

The Corellian Conflict
An Epic Campaign Expansion for Star Wars™: Armada




"Fear will keep the local systems in line."
     –Grand Moff Tarkin
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the upcoming release of The Corellian Conflict, an epic Star Wars™: Armada campaign expansion for two to six players!
The Galactic Civil War was not won in a single battle. The epic conflict at the heart of Star Wars saw countless skirmishes, waged in hundreds of systems and over thousands of planets. Even the ancient Core Worlds were touched by the spark of rebellion.
Soon, with The Corellian Conflict, you and your friends will be able to wage strategic battles for key hyperlane routes, seize vital shipyards, establish new bases, and decide the fate of the Corellian Sector. Working as teams, you will take sides with the Galactic Empire or Rebel Alliance, then meet your foes in battle for control of vital worlds. New campaign rules guarantee that your battles have long-term consequences, and the experience you gain from your victories may prove invaluable toward the success of your overall campaign.
Finally, The Corellian Conflict introduces new objectives and squadron cards for use both in your campaign and in standard play. The expansion's twelve objectives introduce new challenges and paths to victory. And its sixteen new squadron cards add greater variety to the squadrons from your Core Set, Rebel Fighter Squadrons Expansion Pack, and Imperial Fighter Squadrons Pack, allowing you to field them as some of the most legendary pilots and squadrons from the Galactic Civil War!

Your Path to Victory

The dramatic events of The Corellian Conflict and your struggles for the Corellian Sector play out over multiple campaign turns during which you and your teammates meet your foes in games of Armada, or battles. These are fought at any of the twenty-five different strategic locations depicted on the expansion's map, and the results of these battles carry forward, reshaping the sector and your position within the campaign.
You may suffer damage to your ships, leaving them weaker for ensuing battles. You may gain resources with which you can repair your ships or add to their upgrades. You may even be able to add new ships to your fleet. At the same time, your unique squadrons and the crews of well-captained ships may gain veteran status, making them more effective in future combats. Or the damage they suffer may leave them scarred. It is even possible for them to meet their demise, and all those unique ships, squadrons, or crew who do fall in battle are removed from the remainder of the campaign.
Of course, you need to pay attention to the impact your battle will have on your fleet, but it is the success or failure of your bid for the Corellian Sector, itself, that will ultimately matter most. To this end, no matter whether you play as Rebel or Imperial, you need to mind the strategic importance of all the sector's twenty-five battlegrounds, and you need to determine the best time to make your play for any of them. These different planets, stations, and asteroid belts are worth varying numbers of campaign points when you assault one and destroy your opponent's base or outpost. Moreover, many of these locations offer advantages in the terms of strategic effects that you gain while you control them.


For example, the Repair Yards at Nubia allow you to more swiftly and effectively repair your damaged ships, and the Spynet at Raider's Point provides you a token that you can spend to redeploy one of your ships or two of your squadrons after your opponent has finished deploying his fleet.
In the end, a team wins control of the Corellian Sector when it scores a set number of campaign points based on the number of players, and because each team can only score a couple of campaign points each round, The Corellian Conflict guarantees you a thrilling series of battles that mount in tension as they build toward the final campaign points… or as your opponents risk everything in a desperate gamble, throwing the remainder of their fleets at you in a one, climactic All-Out Offensive.

New Squadrons and Objectives

Even as The Corellian Conflict introduces a dynamic new campaign option to your games of Star Wars: Armada, it adds greater variety and tactical depth to your standard games with twelve new objectives and sixteen new squadron cards.
The objectives in Armada lend shape to each of your battles, ensuring that each is layered with strategy. While you can win games by destroying your opponent's entire fleet, it is often difficult to do so. Star Destroyers and Mon Calamari cruisers often prove too resilient to fall. This means that victory often goes to the player who did the best job of pursuing the strategic goals set forth by the game's objective card, and it becomes vital to balance your attention between the game's ship-to-ship combats and your pursuit of valuable objective points.
And with The Corellian Conflict, balancing these matters becomes even more vital, more dynamic, and more challenging. Not only do you double your possible options, allowing you to tailor your fleet-building more closely to your objectives, but you find a greater variety between the different challenges these objectives create—not just in how you can pursue them, but also in how much each one might be worth.
You can strip the Station advantages for your opponent and double them for yourself with Station Assault,  you can protect your fleet of small-base ships with a Jamming Barrier,  or you can race through the game's obstacles—including the new dust field obstacles—in order to get to the middle of the table and complete your Salvage Runahead of your opponent. Whichever set of objectives you choose, they do more than simply force you to adopt new tactics; they permit you to pursue new strategies with your fleet, and they create whole new narratives over the course of your games.
Meanwhile, the sixteen unique squadron cards in The Corellian Conflict add greater utility to the squadrons from your Core Set, Rebel Fighter Squadrons Expansion Pack, and Imperial Fighter Squadrons Pack.
These include some of the most storied pilots and legendary squadrons in the Star Wars universe, meaning that for the first time, The Corellian Conflict allows you to fly Biggs Darklighter alongside Luke Skywalker in Armada. You will also find Rogue Squadron,   Black Squadron,  and the new Imperial interceptor ace, Ciena Ree,  who hails from Claudia Gray's recent Star Wars novel, Lost Stars.


Best yet, because all these squadrons and objectives are all fully tournament-legal, they are destined to impact all your games, not just those in The Corellian Conflict!

The Corellian Sector Awaits You

Explore a new sector and whole new dimensions in your games of Armada. Work with your teammates. Aim for new objectives. Command some of the most storied and talented squadrons in the Star Wars galaxy. And coordinate the strategy of your battles to win the larger war. 
The Corellian Conflict is scheduled to arrive to retailers in the fourth quarter of 2016!

"Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design. Your friends up there on the Sanctuary Moon are walking into a trap. As is your Rebel fleet! It was I who allowed the Alliance to know the location of the shield generator."
    –Emperor Palpatine

In less than two years, Star Wars™: Armada has already established itself as a heavyweight in the miniatures genre. Its massive capital ships batter each other with powerful lasers, missiles, and torpedoes. They deploy squadrons of starfighters to launch bombing runs or intercept enemy fighters. They lumber across the battlefield with tremendous momentum, forcing you to account for your movement and your strategy multiple turns in advance with the game's custom maneuver tool and command dials.

The game of large, tactical fleet battles in the Star Wars universe, Armada assigns you the role of fleet admiral and demands that you consider the shape of your engagement long before the first shots are fired.

Soon, the game's rich strategic and tactical options are going to explode further outward with the campaign rules from The Corellian Conflict. Announced in July, just prior to Gen Con, The Corellian Conflict features a map of the Corellian sector, new squadron cards for your existing squadrons, and all the rules and resources that you need to win the Corellian sector for either the Empire or the Rebel Alliance.

If Armada was already the game for clever admirals (and fans of huge ships blasting each other square in the hull), then The Corellian Conflict magnifies much of what is best about the game, largely transforming it from a game of tactical fleet battles to a game of strategic space warfare.


Plan Your Conquest

To the standard rounds and shape of your Armada games, The Corellian Conflict adds structures for campaign turns that add new layers of strategic decisions to each of your battles. Teams plan their assaults in the Strategy Phase, engage the enemy in the Battle Phase, and reap their rewards (or suffer their losses) in the Management Phase.

Strategy Phase

In the Strategy Phase, you and your teammates review the map of the Corellian sector and plan your next move. Starting with the Rebel team, or the team with the fewest campaign points, each team can declare one assault, designating a player to lead the strike force and targeting a specific location on the map. Then, the other team must choose a player to defend against the assault before they can declare their own assault and force you to assign a defender.

Normally, winning one of these assaults as the attacker means that during the Management Phase you'll be able to eliminate any base or outpost your opponents may have had at the location. You'll also gain campaign points equal to the location's Victory Bonus Value.


Since you need to amass campaign points in order to win The Corellian Conflict, those locations with higher Victory Bonus Values will always be tempting, but there's far more to consider than just the immediate reward.

For starters, if your opponents successfully defend against an assault where they have a base or outpost, they gain a campaign point. This means you cannot afford to launch assaults against your opponents' bases that you don't think you can win.

Additionally, especially in the early turns, you might want to focus on building toward the later stages of your campaign. Whenever you win an assault, you can choose to spend resources to construct a new base or outpost at the location. Then, in subsequent turns, that location will generate resources for you and may even generate other strategic effects. Amassing these resources over the course of several turns may eventually put you in a better position to win the campaign points you need than vying for them on less favorable terms.


Another way during the Strategy Phase that you might set yourself up for later success is to launch a "Special Assault." Once per campaign turn, your team may declare that one of your assaults is a Special Assault, and it's then fought according to one of the campaign's two faction-specific objectives:

   The Rebel Alliance may launch a Hyperlane Raid .
   The Imperial Navy may proceed with a Show of Force.


These Special Assaults can only be declared in certain locations, and both change the stakes of your battle. Instead of vying for campaign points, you're battling for a quick boost of resources. Even if you lose a Special Assault, you're guaranteed to gain resources whenever you declare one, and these resources have serious repercussions in the Management Phase.

So you might want to declare a Special Assault to gain quick resources. Maybe the better long-term plan is to establish a base. Maybe you would rather keep your main fleet focused on assaulting the locations with the highest Victory Bonus Values. Either way, you'll need to keep an eye to the long-term throughout the Strategy Phase, because The Corellian Conflict aligns perfectly with your standard Armada battles by making you plan your conquest of the Corellia system multiple turns in advance.


Battle Phase

After the teams have declared their assaults and assigned their fleets, they resolve the engagements in the Battle Phase. These play out like your standard Armada battles except that the player who declared the assault always has the initiative, and many of your battles will use the new campaign-specific objectives.

   

• If your assault is a Special Assault, it will use the corresponding objective, either Hyperlane Raid or Show of Force.
     
  
• If you declare an assault against a Rebel or Imperial base, you'll play according the defender's selection from three new base defense objectives— Ion Cannon,   Fighter Wing,  or Armed Station.
     
  
• Finally, if you declare an assault that is not a Special Assault and is not directed against your opponents' base, the defender may still have the option of using a campaign-specific objective, provided it is listed by the contested location.
  

Management Phase

It is in the Management Phase that you reap the rewards of your efforts in the Strategy and Battle Phases—or suffer the consequences.

In addition to tracking the results of your battles and accruing campaign points, you can also spend any of the resources you have gained over the campaign. You might use these resources to establish a base or an outpost in the location where you just won a battle. You might use them to refit the ships and squadrons in your fleet. Or you might use them to expand your fleet.

After winning a battle at Truuzdann, the Imperial team spends fifteen resources to construct a base and secure the planet's eight resources, aiming to build for the future.

Establishing a base or outpost at a location secures its resources, giving you access to them on each subsequent turn that you hold the base. Additionally, many locations come with strategic effects like Repair Yards, Diplomats, or Skilled Spacers.

• Repair Yards improve your ability to refit your fleet.
  
  
• Diplomats allow you to mark certain unoccupied regions as "off-limits" for a campaign turn.
  
  
• And if you're the second player, Skilled Spacers allow you to temporarily swap one of your objectives for another objective of the same category before your opponent chooses from the options.
  

Naturally, the longer you hold a base or outpost, the more valuable it is to your effort, but the question is always whether or not the resources you devote early in the campaign toward establishing that settlement would have carried you further toward victory if you spent them on expanding or refitting your fleet.

It's hard to say that there's any better way to spend your resources than to refit your fleet. After all, your fleet is the currency by which you play the game. You can't win battles or take control of locations within the sector if you don't have ships to fly. Throughout your battles in The Corellian Conflict, your ships and squadrons may become "scarred," and refitting them is the only way to remove those scars.


Ships and squadrons become scarred if they're destroyed in battle. A scarred ship is then marked by a scar token and must discard one of its defense tokens before the start of a battle. Likewise, a scarred squadron must suffer one damage before the battle begins. If a scarred ship or squadron is destroyed in battle, it is then eliminated from its controller's fleet, along with any upgrades that were on it, and those cards may not be purchased again.

This is particularly notable given the fact that all the game's unique cards are unique to an entire team, not just within a single fleet. This means, if one of your teammates is running Darth Vader as her commander, you cannot run Darth Vader at the head of his elite TIE Advanced Squadron. And just as unique cards are unique to the team, they are unique in time; if Darth Vader's squadron shoots down a scarred  Jan Ors,  Jan Ors is removed from the campaign entirely, never to return.

For this reason, you may even consider targeting powerful ships like the Demolisher just to remove them, prioritizing them even higher than the battle itself. Boba Fett,   Major Rhymer,  the Mon Karren,  the Interdictor,   Han Solo,  and Grand Moff Tarkin's flagship—they may all find hefty prices on their heads. And if they're removed, you'll need to adapt your fleet and your strategy to accommodate for their absence.


Before such ships are removed, however, you have the opportunity to repair them by spending refit points and resources equal to half its fleet point cost, rounded up. Refitting your fleet is so important that you gain thirty refit points each campaign turn that you can spend before you need to dip into your resources. And each of your Repair Yards adds an additional five refit points to your total.

Of course, if you don't need to spend your resources just to maintain your fleet, you may be able to spend those resources to expand it by adding new ships or squadrons—to a maximum of 500 total fleet points.

Whether you're refitting your fleet, expanding it, or tracking permanent damage, you track all your changes on your fleet roster at the end of the Management Phase. Then you're ready to begin the next campaign turn.


Who Will Claim the Corellian Sector?

For all its massive starships and sleek starfighter squadrons, Star Wars: Armada is primarily a game of tactics and stratagems. To win, you must factor in both your ability to survive your battles and to complete your battle objectives. You try to outmaneuver your foe not within a single move, but many moves in advance. And soon, with The Corellian Conflict, you'll be able to plot moves within moves, aiming them all toward something greater than you've yet experienced in Armada.

This isn't just a game of tactical space battles, anymore. This is a full-scale war for the Corellian sector!

Make sure you get your copy of The Corellian Conflict as soon as it's released. Head to your local retailer to pre-order it today!

"Accelerate to attack speed! Draw their fire away from the cruisers."
    –Lando Calrissian

With The Corellian Conflict, your campaign for the Corellian sector will span numerous planets, and it will lead you into numerous pitched battles. To emerge victorious, you will need to devise a cunning and adaptable strategy. You will establish and secure bases, use the resources you gain to maintain and improve your fleet, and strike at your opponents' supply lines and bases.

Star Wars™: Armada has long been the cunning admiral's game, full of strategic, objective-based confrontations between massive Star Wars fleets. These epic, strategic elements are magnified even further with the campaign play permitted by The Corellian Conflict.



Throughout the course of your campaign, you'll need to think not only of the battles you're fighting, but also of how much you stand to gain if you win them—and of how much you can afford to risk in order to do so. Your unique ships and upgrades can be damaged and even destroyed. Lose a ship, and it's gone for good. Lose the Demolisher?  No more Demolisher. This is even true for different iterations of the same unique character; if you lose Darth Vader's TIE Advanced squadron,  you lose the opportunity to play Darth Vader as your commander.

It's true that you can remove damage from your ships and squadrons, and we saw how in our last preview you can do so by spending your refit points or resources. However, there are ways for you to adjust your fleet beyond repairing or removing ships and squadrons. You can use your resources to expand your fleet, buying new squadrons, upgrades, or even ships. While you cannot expand your fleet beyond 500 points, there are still other ways you can improve upon it. One of these is by ensuring your ships and unique squadrons become veterans.



Veterans of the War

Whenever your ships and unique squadrons prove their worth in battle, they can earn veteran status. Ships do this by surviving a battle and destroying at least one enemy ship in that battle. Unique squadrons gain veteran status by surviving a battle and destroying at least one enemy ship or squadron. In either case, the ship or squadron is said to have "destroyed" the enemy ship or squadron if it performs an attack and the defender is destroyed after resolving the damage.

At the end of the battle, any ship or squadron that earns veteran status is awarded a veteran token, and its veteran status is recorded on your fleet roster.

In subsequent battles, you can spend your veteran tokens for beneficial effects:

   

• Ships: When a ship reveals a command, it may spend its veteran token to gain one command token of its choice.
     
  
• Squadrons: When it attacks, a squadron can spend its veteran token to reroll any number of dice in its attack pool.
  

Like defense tokens, a veteran token is placed on the associated ship or squadron card and starts the battle with its readied side up. When you use it, it is flipped to its exhausted side. When an exhausted veteran token is spent, it is discarded for the rest of that game, but still remains associated with your ship or squadron for the duration of the campaign.

A veteran token cannot be spent more than once during a ship or squadron’s activation, and these tokens do not ready during the Status Phase.

Stay on the Leader

Because only your unique squadrons can receive veteran status, The Corellian Conflict and its campaign place a slightly higher emphasis on your unique squadrons. It then goes on to reward your decision to run unique squadrons in your fleet by presenting you with sixteen new squadron cards from which you can choose.

Designed for use with the plastic miniatures from your Core Set, Rebel Fighter Squadrons Expansion Pack, and Imperial Fighter Squadrons Expansion Pack, these squadron cards offer you potential replacements for any of your unique squadrons that fall in battle. They allow you to explore new tactics and tinker with your fleet. And they include the first unique squadrons that are priced only a hair above the equivalent non-unique squadrons.

Like Rogue Squadron and Black Squadron,  these unique squadrons that are not named after the aces who lead them are priced just a point or two above the base squadron. They come without defense tokens but add variety to your fleet by featuring different abilities than the base squadrons. For example, at just fourteen fleet points, Rogue Squadron is the cheapest Rebel squadron with the versatile Rogue keyword.


Additionally, some of these non-ace unique squadrons, such as Saber Squadron,  play completely unlike anything else in the game. With its Snipe 4 and Swarm abilities, Saber Squadron is just as good outside of an engagement as it is inside of one. This means you can fly an ace like Ciena Ree into the fray, using her ability and defense tokens to shrug off most of the damage she would absorb, and you can have Saber Squadron launch its own attacks with impunity from Distance "2."


Finally, some of the new squadrons from The Corellian Conflict simply offer new ways for you to further refine a specialized fleet's use of its squadrons. For example, we have seen plenty of "Rhymer ball" fleets that relied upon the use of Major Rhymer and a full complement of TIE bombers or Firespray-31 squadrons to swarm ships and explode them with a massive barrage of bomber fire. These now gain new tools in the form of Captain Jonus and Gamma Squadron,  both of which come with Grit, forcing your opponent to bring an actual fighter screen, rather than just a couple of squadrons, or risk letting you launch a good measure of bomber shots, even if he or she tries to engage your bombers.


Likewise, Biggs Darklighter's unique squadron ability may change the way you view all your X-wing Squadrons,  even if his Bomber and Escort abilities are standard X-wing fare. In just one example of how Biggs Darklighter can lend tremendous resilience to your fighter wing, you can imagine him in flying alongside Wedge Antilles and Luke Skywalker.  When any of these X-wing aces are targeted, they can brace against the damage, reducing it by half, before Biggs allows them to pass off potentially lethal damage to one of their Escort wingmates.


In this way, including Biggs in your fleet might help Luke survive a series of assaults from the likes of "Howlrunner," Black Squadron, and Valen Rudor.  Instead of taking four damage, then two damage, and then another three, Luke can brace against the first hit, shifting one of the points of damage to Biggs, then take the second straight on, and then survive the last volley by bracing again and shifting a point of damage to either Biggs or Wedge.




All Wings Report In

With the new emphasis that the campaign from The Corellian Conflict places upon unique squadrons, you will find plenty of reason to hunt for veterans among the sixteen unique squadrons included in the box. For many, though, the best thing about these squadrons may be that they are fully compatible with your standard games of Star Wars: Armada and completely legal for tournament play.

How will you make use of these new squadrons? Which ability excites you the most? Would you rather anchor your fighter wing with Shara Bey or Ten Numb?  Share your thoughts with the other members of our community forums. Then be sure to head to your favorite local retailer today to pre-order your copy!