Mike and I played a game of Armada on the weekend. He had just painted up his dwarf fleet and I had wanted to try the Dictator which is the extra-large Basilean ship -- I turns out that his whole fleet is 25 points less than the Dictator so I added in a Tier 3 Wizard and our points were equal but it is illegal under the rules to just take one big ship. (Which it turns out does make some sense.)
Mike has a post on his blog here
Based on the fleets we felt the "Get the Flagship" scenario made sense. In this there is one ship that has to sail the length of the table and victory is based on whether or not it gets to the end. The flagship is restricted to battle sails only but is given a few advantages the main one being that it can make repairs and fire in the same turn 5
Mike split his fleet in 2 and the wings closed into me from either side. We exchanged a few shots at range and then when we got close there was one turn where he did about 30 points of damage in one turn (I think this was the only turn all his ships got a broadside from every ship). The downside of attacking me from 2 sides was that I was getting to fire both broadsides and my stern chasers each turn and was sinking his small ships quite quickly
I managed to force one of his ships to sail straight for a turn with a spell which put that ship effectively out of the battle (it ended up being the sole survivor of the dwarf fleet) and then ended up being chased by the surviving dwarfs. By this point my firepower totally outclassed the dwarfs and it was pretty obvious how things would turn out.
I think if I had taken a balanced fleet it would have been a much more even fight. Despite that it was a fun game. This was the first time that we have used the magic rules and they seem reasonably balanced if a bit bland. I do feel that the dwarfs should be a bit more different (and should be more like mid 1800s ironclads rather than having such high hulls) the engine rules make them a bit more flexible than sails but they still feel similar.
I have some of Basilean small ships to paint up as well as the flyers but I think I will channel any desire to paint ships into getting some more of my US ships for Black Seas
