4. Electronic Countermeasures
This is probably the one that is most dependent on your local meta. If your meta is rife with large bases or SSDs, you should probably be taking this on every ship with a defensive retrofit, especially larges with a single brace. What I like about this card is the certainty it grants you, virtually guaranteed access to your brace when you need it. The issue is that many lists will just forego fishing for a accuracy altogether and try to produce raw damage. When was the last time you saw someone running H9's? When an opponent can just forego an accuracy and optimizes their build for raw damage, you end up mitigating even less that you would ordinarily, limiting the utility of ECM even further . My preference against this card also is tied to my preference for rebel double brace ships, which almost never find themselves completely locked down, and indeed, my downgrading of this card is tied to the fact I main rebels and rebels got an admiral (best combined with an officer) with a similar effect to ECM in wave 8.
Imperials will still want to lean towards always taking ECM on ISDs. But the Kyrsta + Walex Combo cheaply gets out a commander for your fleet who turns one ship into a mega tank. Moreover, with the insurance available for the worst case scenario of a 9+ damage roll, you can turn a ship like the MC80 nearly unkillable by now using its upgrade slots for EWS and RBD.
So yeah, still a great upgrade, but with the introduction of Kyrsta Agate, there are a lot more options for Rebels that now that allow you to potentially forego it even if you are in a large ship meta.
3. Gunnery Team
This has been the default card for this slot on any non-black dice ship for a long time and I think that needs to change. Number one, it's expensive for what it does, and is 2-3 points pricier than its primary competition: Weapons Battery Techs and Local Fire Control. Two, MSU has been out of vogue for a long time in Armada, meaning its best use (alpha-striking multiple small bases), often gets left on the cutting room floor. In a standard game of Armada in 2020 where the opponent has 3-4 ships, you get to use the GT effect once or maybe twice, and often the other attack is putting damage on a ship that you will be unable to kill before the game ends.
Now all that being said, if you have a front arc of 7+ dice, you should still strongly consider this, especially combined with spinal armament. However, in most games this card is going to work out to be 3-6 extra damage over the course of a game, and encourage a pattern of play where you are single arcing multiple enemy ships rather than going for double arcs and focus-firing things down. The damage number is notable because its competition offers potential similar damage boosts.
Local Fire Control allows you to swap out your boring everyday contain for a sparkly new salvo, which on a large base 3 dice rear arc ship will not only very dependably produce damage over the course of a game (what are they going to do, not target your flagship?), but potentially dissuade attacks altogether. On the other end of things, WBT makes blue crits basically a sure thing, including the almighty HIE critical effect. In sum, GT is still a solid upgrade and on a ship like a Cymoon might as well be stapled to the ship card. However, in wave 8 it has real competition in the form of LFT and WBT, all of which promise potentially more damage on your primary target for less points.
2. XI7 Turbolasers
XI7 often ends up being a default passive turbolaser upgrade because HTT is weak by comparison and there are a lot of ships in Armada dependent on their redirects. In particular, ships like MC30s and MC80s, are completely dependent and get screwed by this card. This card got weaker in Wave 8 with the introduction of Expert Shield Tech, but that's not the primary reason I consider it iffy. If you want to equip XI7, you need to essentially ONLY have large dice pool ships. When they will just get to use those redirects and shields anyway on subsequent attacks from an ubiquitous TRCR90, what's the point of XI7? Moreover, you should have a reason that you're drilling; aiming to critically hit your opponent. However, people equipping XI7's rarely build with this in mind, so the much of the benefit of the XI7 effect is lost due to the randomness of the damage deckdeck. Combined with Dodonna or XX-9s, I'm a fan, but how many ships have double turbolaser upgrades or lists use Dodonna at this point?
Armada really needs more red critical effects, and until we have some options like that, or other reasons to incentivize drilling, I would downgrade these to B tier with the exception of double ISD lists and the like.
1. Leading Shots
This is going to be my hottest take. For years LS was a slot defining upgrade. A must-take on any ship with a dice pool larger than 5 in an arc. Then two upgrades happened, in Wave 7 and Wave 8.
HIE, the queen of all crit effects, now easier than ever to trigger with WBTs. But, giving up dice control in your ion cannon upgrade slot was still a big ask. Then LTTs came along, giving you two red dice free rerolls per turn.
The problem with LS is that it consumes a blue die, a blue die that always shows something. You will generally spend this die to reroll a couple red dice. and not infrequently find yourself in the awkward situation where you have a single blank die and removing the blue die for LS is a net neutral move. Simply put, between LTT and the increasing prevalence of IF, players now have lots of options for dice control that don't give up a valuable blue die or the ion cannon slot, as LS now has competition for the ion cannon slot that it didn't have in wave 6. Beyond HIE, an increasing number of ships want to use high capacity ion turbines, and SW-7s have a similar effect as far as allowing you to smooth out your damage numbers and only utilize as many accuracies as you want for only 1 point more. This is the other reason I argue that XI7's are overrated - the introduction of LTT means for many ships dice control is moving from the ion slot to the turbolaser slot, and there is now real competition for the ion slot depending on how you want to build your fleet.
Still an S tier upgrade - especially on ships that have blue and black dice in the same arc and don't want to or can't take ordnance experts. It's also very good combined with quad battery turrets. But with 3-4 red dice pools you can often strongly consider taking LTT instead of LS. Put another way, LTT allows you a measure of dice control at long range, where LS only can at medium. Even if it's slightly less precise dice control, you get to use it all the time. Moreover, how often do you need to reroll an entire dice pool to begin with? With LTT instead of LS, you will need to trust and accept your dice more, but in exchange you can replace it with HIE which creates the potential for far more damage.
