Firestorm: Armada

""There's nothing quite like the look on your opponents face when you steal a battleship out from under his admiral.""

- Unknown

Firestorm: Armada is a science fiction wargame setting produced by the UK based Spartan Games. It has undergone only slight rule revisions since its initial release in 2010, and maintains a small but loyal fanbase in most areas. It is played as a tabletop wargame where two or more players use a variety of ships to attempt to destroy the enemy fleet, capture enemy ships, or achieve certain objectives.


 * Arbitrary Maximum Range: Enforced. No ship is able to fire further than 32". Handwaved as being the maximum effective sensor range—which runs into Space Does Not Work That Way.
 * The Asteroid Thicket: Played straight. Every asteroid field is dense enough to have a fair chance of doing significant damage to anything passing through.
 * The Battlestar: The Aquan Manta class battlecarrier. Carries an enormous number of Wings, and has absolutely massive guns to mix it up with other ships.
 * Beam Spam: The Aquans and Sorylians preferred method of attack.
 * Boarding Party: Ships can send over assault teams to try and overpower the crew of another ship. If that ship still has assault points on board they get to fight too. Before any of that happens, the boarders have to get past point defense. So, if you manage to actually win, you take your opponent's ship, and the assault team runs off with it, earning you double the normal number of victory points.
 * Cool Starship: A matter of opinion, but everything is cool to someone.
 * Critical Hit: Built into the game. Hit a ship hard enough, and you'll inflict lasting damage. Get Boxcars or Snake eyes on the critical table, and the ship undergoes Critical Existence Failure.
 * Desperation Attack: Ramming; it can only be done when a ship is on 1 HP, and will only work 1/6 of the time. The other ship can also try to evade it. If it works, however, both ships take a critical hit, and bad things will happen.
 * Fanon: Pretty much any piece of background material not from the rulebook proper.
 * Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: The Dindrenzi's Hat. Given that these tend to be BFGs, it's just as well their arc of fire is limited.
 * Flying Saucer: The Directorate. All their ships are reminiscent of old 60's and 70's sci fi, complete with Zeerust.
 * Gradual Grinder: Both the Aquans and the Directorate count. Weaker than average weapons in most arcs, but generally tougher or harder to hit.
 * Grey Goo: The Relthoza. Their primary weapons fire self-replicating nanites that like eating metal and ceramics. Guess what your hull is made of...
 * House Rules: All over the place, most commonly with custom designed ships.
 * Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Terrans and Dindrenzi. Both go about it in different ways, the former with large bore coilguns, the latter with high powered railguns.
 * Loads and Loads of Rules: Averted for the most part. Approximately 80 pages of actual rules (including ship statistics, race backgrounds, and a build-your-own-spaceship section), filled with helpful diagrams. Inverted with Wings; Seven full pages of rules dealing with the smallest possible craft in the game that turn half the stuff you've already learned on its head.
 * Lightning Bruiser: The Sorylians. They have the fastest small and medium ships, and the strongest broadsides available.
 * Luck Manipulation Mechanic: STAR Cards. Each player has a hand of cards that can improve weapons, reduce incoming fire, increase speed, change obstacle locations or even modify dice rolls.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: Any torpedo heavy fleet can do this, but the Terrans and Aquans are especially good at it.
 * Magnetic Weapons: Terrans and Dindrenzi are specifically stated to use Mass Drivers (Coilguns) and Railguns, respectively.
 * The Mario: Terrans. Relatively good at everything, and very good at absorbing enemy fire with shields
 * Miniatures Conversions: Less common than with other games, but they do exist. Invoked for anyone wanting a space station or military installation.
 * Mighty Glacier: The Dindrenzi. Not so much for lack of speed as for having the strongest and toughest ships in the game.
 * Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: 3, Physics Plus. Aside from the whole Space Is an Ocean deal, most of the technology is reasonably well explained. Some things like shields, Foldspace Drives, and so on, really aren't explained.
 * More Dakka: Evoked by the Sorylian dreadnaught's special rule: Lots of Guns. Essentially, the rule states that the ship has so many guns and fire control systems it's impossible to stop it from shooting. (The weapons are energy based, so this is technically Beam Spam, but the ideal of the trope is there.)
 * Negative Space Wedgie: Distortion Fields. Overlaps with Swirly Energy Thingy. Good luck trying to move across one.
 * No Saving Throw: Unless you have shields, nothing is going to stop that attack punching clean through the hull.
 * One-Hit Kill: Roll a 2 or 12 on the critical table and that annoying enemy ship either blows up in spectacular fashion, or disappears.
 * Plasma Weapons: The Directorate. Combining good old beam spam with Kill It with Fire since before the war began.
 * Point Defenseless: Averted. It's not always 100% reliable, but point defense guns have the ability to decimate entire wings of attack craft or reduce massive torpedo salvos to nothingness.
 * Ramming Always Works: Played reasonably straight for balance reasons. Both ships suffer a critical, which will kill the ramming ship every time, and also has 1/18 chance of completely destroying the target as well. Otherwise it just knocks off 2 HP, and does damage to the weapons, engines or crew.
 * Random Number God: Don't ever say you only need X hits. You will always get X-1 hits. Also, never, ever, ever make fun of a weapon that only rolls 1 die. Any roll of 6 generates 2 hits and a re-roll. Guess what these single dice normally roll when ridiculed…
 * Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: There isn't really enough background material to tell if this is actually in force.
 * Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Round by Round. Each player activates a squadron of ships, moving, firing (boarding as well, if they're crazy enough), and then play passes to the next player.
 * Splash Damage Abuse: Stealth Bypass. Mines are are effect munitions, and ignore the effects of cloaking devices, making them an ideal weapon against the Relthoza.
 * Squishy Wizard: The Relthoza, with an emphasis on the wizard. About as tough as any other fleet, but they come with cloaking devices as standard.
 * Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Each of the core races currently has access to Frigates, Cruisers, Heavy Cruisers, Destroyers, Carriers, Battleships, and Dreadnaughts. Several also have access to R&D Cruisers, Gunships, or Battlecarriers.
 * ISO Standard Human Spaceship: The Terrans. Boxy and wedged shaped to a tee, with some trilateral symmetry thrown in for flavour.
 * Standard Starship Scuffle: The game is built around this ideal. That said, the ranges are reasonable if one extrapolates the scale.
 * Stealth in Space: Deconstructed/Reconstructed in Fanon. Played straight otherwise.
 * Subspace or Hyperspace: Foldspace. Stated to work by folding distant points of space together. Range is rather limited however.
 * Subsystem Damage: The previously mentioned critical table. Ranges from taking weapons offline, to setting the ship on fire, to simply making the ship Go Away
 * That One Rule: Wings; as mentioned above. Borders on being a Scrappy Mechanic for some players.
 * Units Not to Scale: The largest ships are as much as 8" long. The flight stand (the area of space they actually occupy in the game) is ~1/8".
 * Universal System: If you don't mind ships (of any kind) blasting the snot out of each other. Invoked, as Spartan themselves have used the same core mechanic for all three of their games.