So, having recently gotten Star Wars: Armada, my son got hooked on it about as much as me, so we've been playing a few games over the past two weeks.
Today, we played our first 400 points game. I played Rebels: an mc75 ordnance cruiser, an mc30 scout frigate, a cr90a, a CR90 and the four x wings from the base game. He played Imperials with an ISD1 and carrier upgrades, an Interdictor with the two upgrades that could slow down nearby vessels and that created that speed-zero-zone when placing ships and lots of squadrons.
This was our initial setup. I navigated the cr90s quickly over to the the two mcs, the isd got stuck in the asteroids and the two mcs destroyed the Interdictor in turns three and four.
Here's the deal though... After that happened, I quickly glanced at his cards, figured I had a comfortable lead over him and simply left. Turns four and five were essentially just me stepping on the gas and getting away from his isd.
The whole game felt just so... I dunno, boring? Anticlimatic? It was one turn ramp up, one and a half turns of space battle and finally three and a half turns escaping and no fighting.
Is that really how the game turns out? Are we missing something? Forgetting something?
I'll admit I've only played x-wing, but this was a problem in that system as well. Once you were ahead on kill points, and you could outrun your opponent, it made sense to just fly away as fast as possible until the game ended. This was fixed with objectives in x-wing 2.5. Does armada have objectives? This might be a symptom of playing without the full objective rules.
Armada does have objectives... They are worth quite a few points, but vessel point values are still translated to victory points, so objectives can only even out so much.