I realy hope what this joke of customization system with 2 skills for flagship and 2 upgrades for WHOLE fleet is just part of the beta and in actual release we will have full upgrade,skill,crew and services list for each ship in fleet just like in Armada 1.

If yes , please ignore this post and everything below this point.

Cz if not game is already worse than Armada 1 and by much. I mean nearly whole point of nearly all W40 games and universe is high customization of your army and your strats. You not only can choose your race, your faction but also give them YOUR personal touch and usually this include customization of each squad or in our cause ship, which we dont have for some reason at the moment. You could made empirial ramming fleet with troop upgrades and additional armor, or orcish control fleet with gravity rays, or eldar carrier spam, you know, your personal little cheese. You could enter fleet customization menu and go like "All right our flagship not gona engage in close battle so il give him range upgrades and teleport so he could escape if enemies will come close and personal, for this ship il raise troop value and give him more armor and upgrade his strike so he could block ramming enemies or ram himself, and for last one il give stasis,radar and engines upgrade and he will be support".

I realy prefer situation when i have only 1 ship in each category but customizable then this system with 3 "different ships" one with torpedoes,one with hangars and one with bigger guns but identical in every other thing. I want for each ship be my creation i will use for my strat, not to painfully squeze existing and unchangeble ship hulls with strat i gona use.

I want to be in control of my ship design, not being controled by my ship design.

You could say what i can, for example, change race if i want to change playstile but in this casing the whole point. I dont want to go in battle and just from loading screen and race info already get nealy all possible info about what my opponent capable and uncapable of. I realy want to see something original and expect something different. In Armada 1 you could expect something different from same race, in Armada 2 you cant.

And for the cherry on the top,since flagships are only ships with skills now their value in battle raise from high to "flagship kill=autowin". This is just stupid.

Dear developers, i realy like you previous Armada and i can see many things i like in new one but customization system was one of the best things in first game and thus what makes first game right now better than the second one. I realy hope you will bring this system back. If not i would possibly asked for refund but i already have much more than 2 hours in Armada 2.

while im not sure either it looks like they got rid of it and to be honest the customization in the first game really wasn't over the top or complicated like at all so i don't know why they would and yes I agree with you about dumping most of the skills onto the flagship (as in i'm against that).

The customization in the first game was mostly fake, at least for multiplayer. In reality there were only 1-2 viable builds for each faction, sometimes not even that. In singleplayer everything was viable so i can undertand your annoyance there but this will work better for multiplayer.

@solaire 1-2 viable builds in Armada 1? What. No. I play chaos like brawler with nyrgle mark, also i have slanesh helbringers as anti-eldar. And officially chaos fleet was lance & carrier fleet. And many people in multiplayer played in this style. This is 4-5 different builds. Different viable builds. My brawler builds eat almost all in multiplayerl (except ork nova spam) until space marins no release and barges started tore my cruisers to pieces. But CSM lance fleet was good vs SM. And i play Imperim and i know that there were others builds then nova spam.

@solaire said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

The customization in the first game was mostly fake, at least for multiplayer. In reality there were only 1-2 viable builds for each faction, sometimes not even that. In singleplayer everything was viable so i can undertand your annoyance there but this will work better for multiplayer.

Well if you put it that way in ARmada 1 was ONLY ONE VIABLE BUILD and it was called if my memory serves me corectly GO TAU OR BUST. Like lets be serious and ignore full tryhard mode ,im talking about having fun both in multiplayer and singleplayer, good balance will work better for mulitplyer, reason why it was bad in ARmada 1 was not due to upgrade system but to braindead fire barage from Tau wich was never actualy nerfed ,and even if it was connected to upgrade system IT STILL NOT GOOD to remove all upgrades,all skills,all crews and all favours just in order to make ship customization so simple what even 8-year-old could balance it perfectly.

@lenin Tau are only the 3rd strongest faction. It's not my fault you can't deny bombers. Regarding tau railguns, HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF BRACE FOR IMPACT?

@takt Either you were against bad players or got lucky with RNG. Also nova spam isn't viable. It's pretty shit. It's moderately useful against eldar, that's it.

@solaire said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

@lenin Tau are only the 3rd strongest faction. It's not my fault you can't deny bombers. Regarding tau railguns, HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF BRACE FOR IMPACT?

https://steamcommunity.com/games/363680/announcements/detail/1425804364199305132
I just leave it here.

***spoiler to link***

PS
Is that you on second place?If so ,explains many things.

@lenin The reason i went tau is because they're fun. They can't beat orks or chaos in 1v1 engagements. We just lucked out that not many were playing them, and most were imperials. Warboss was full meta orks, and i guarantee you if he played more he'd be up on that leaderboard.

@solaire said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

The customization in the first game was mostly fake, at least for multiplayer. In reality there were only 1-2 viable builds for each faction, sometimes not even that. In singleplayer everything was viable so i can undertand your annoyance there but this will work better for multiplayer.

So then take it out for the multiplayer guys. I don't understand why singleplayer is getting half a game so that the multiplayer game can be balanced so that the community can focus their anger on the races instead. Also you've got to be kidding me if you're honestly saying that the Tau were third best in the first game. Seriously, get real. There's a reason they swept the entire tournement (Including them Imperial and Ork players), and the community called for their nerf immediately after release.

@Lenin Unfortunately buddy, I don't think we're getting customization back. The game isn't even designed around it any more. I'm in the same boat as you, I feel like I'm playing half the game that I was before. I'll just refund my purchase at launch at this rate.

@romeo said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

I'd hold off until you see campaign.

@solaire said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

@romeo said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

I'd hold off until you see campaign.

They said we're not getting campaigns until after the Beta though. At which point, I no longer have the option to refund. If they want to throw it prior to that, then hey, maybe it'll sway me. But I'm not gambling on them with the way things look so far.

@romeo We get campaign in the second beta, starting early january.

@solaire said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

@romeo We get campaign in the second beta, starting early january.

Well, hopefully that goes well then, because I think it's about the only chance that I don't walk away. I cannot believe how disappointed I am so far with the game.

skill spam was cancerous and a admiral ship should be valuable
its not an autolose except usually for nids
there was nothing good about covering half the map in stasis fields like in BFG1 and with more ships it would end in even more stasis spam
and why care about maneuvering and positioning when you have MWJ on every ship, its not like those are relevant things in this kind of game
skills are something special you carry on your flagship and that is as it should be

the upgrades, i dont care, in the end there where very few choices unless you deliberately built your ships badly
couldnt even get extra hp for more ramming damage on orks
like you said, its just for "your personnel (but also used by everyone else)" cheese

campaign will give more freedom for customization and upgrades you can earn or go after
even in pve it would be just a lot of wasted time as you have to apply all those pointless same upgrades every time you build a new fleet
its why i only have a few ranked fleets in BFG1
its fun to play the game
its a boring hassle to add one of the 3 configurations of upgrades to a fleet over and over again

With all that customization it caused for a terrible experience in multiplayer in armada 1. so bad that with in a months time the amount of players in multiplayer dropped to dismal levels. this customization is to not overpower 1 persons fleet at being a level 10. This is way better than the first game.

@neighbor-kid said in Where the hell is ship customization?:

With all that customization it caused for a terrible experience in multiplayer in armada 1. so bad that with in a months time the amount of players in multiplayer dropped to dismal levels. this customization is to not overpower 1 persons fleet at being a level 10. This is way better than the first game.

So, again, if it's a problem with multiplayer, remove it only for multiplayer. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the desire for one group automatically has to gimp the game for another group.

The campaign does have a bunch of upgrades you can unlock for your whole fleet (or "escorts only" etc.), if I remember correctly. Although I don't think you can mix and match upgrades for individual ships.

12 factions means balance is a pipe dream anyways, i agree it will be better that 1 in terms of MP balance but your never gonna get that balance your looking for. I mean you already have posts claiming Necrons are under powered while other are complaining about the aoe. Balance is subjective.

Balance isn't subjective. Compare faction winrates (factoring in use rate) among top players, especially in a tournament setting, and you'll have a good sense of whether a game is balanced or not.

BFGA is never going to have perfect balance, but I think that if all factions have at least a 30% winrate against every other faction in level 10+ admiral vs level 10+ admiral matches, we can say it's in a good place. That seems achievable, ESPECIALLY if the devs do implement the "pick skills and upgrades on deploy screen after seeing map and enemy fleet" they mentioned early. That would allow them to add very niche skills that would help in particularly unbalanced matchups.