Siege was my first fully designed Armada campaign that went from concept to completion. I worked on it between 2017 and 2018, and playtested it with a group based in Burbank, CA in the fall of 2018. In the process of working on SotAS, I had a number of design goals:
Anti-Snowball: SotAS bears a clear resemblance to the Corellian Conflict, which provided the foundation for its structure. The CC gets criticized often for its snowball effect, where players and teams are rewarded for winning, which gives them an advantage that they use to win more. In that campaign, forcing an enemy out of a location denies them the resources that they would need in order to mount a comeback. A team on a winning streak can more easily repair and expand their fleets, allowing them to grind down the opposition. It seems that the design intent was that teams would look for favorable matchups and try to shield their fleets that are the most damaged by matching them against similarly weaker enemies.
My main tool for curbing the snowball effect was to reduce player control over fleet advancement. Instead of handing out universal points that can be used to purchase anything according to the player's strategic needs, I randomized the rewards into rollable tables. After winning a battle, a fleet picks up bonus forces according to the category of reward indicated for that map location.
The rewards are not actually 100% random. They are in some way thematic to the locations of the campaign map, so that the "Mining Colony," "Spaceport," and "Advanced Designs" tables are assigned to locations where they make sense according to setting lore. Players can attempt to improve their chances of getting the most helpful rewards by choosing to wage battles at locations that have rewards tables that complement their strengths.
One other, lesser method I included for balancing winning vs losing was to soften the mechanic for retiring a fleet. This can be an important comeback mechanic in a campaign. A winning fleet may have an effective strategy, but an enemy who scraps their current fleet and builds a fleet specifically tuned against that strategy can hope to turn the tables. In the CC, retiring a fleet is almost never a good idea, because of the vast points discrepancy between your newly built fleet and the established fleets who did not retire. But in SotAS, a newly built fleet would have the same fleet points as the rest, but simply without victory rewards added on top of it.
In fact, a miniature form of fleet retirement occurs throughout the campaign. Because fleets grow primarily through victory rewards, and because fleets gain plenty of points each round that can only be spent on new ships and squadrons (not repairing the old), fleets who suffer losses can more efficiently spend these points. Fleets that win consistently may not need the help, preferring to retain what has been successful in battle, but fleets that lose can replace their lost forces with new ones. This hopefully leads to a back-and-forth effect rather than snowballing: Fleet A wallops Fleet B with bombers, so Fleet B replaces its losses with interceptors and in the next battle inflicts severe damage to Fleet A's squadrons.
Attrition-Based Fleet Growth: Similar to the Anti-Snowball goal, I wanted SotAS to encourage fleets that evolve naturally, as a result of the ebb and flow of war. This instead of the typical approach, which is for players to dream up an "end build" and work their way toward it, with the events of each battle simply obstacles to overcome along that path. My ideal scenario would be for fleets to begin with a solid concept, and to emerge in their final form through unplanned gains and losses. The random rewards tables obviously encourage unplanned gains, but I also tried to enhance unplanned losses through extra-lethal scarring rules.
SotAS makes it much less easy for players to un-scar their ships and squadrons. A few rare rewards exist, but it lethal by design to fleets. The system incentivizes players to identify and target down their enemies' most important ships and eliminate them. This was both strategically interesting as well as thematically appropriate, since the concept of destroying a superweapon is sort of the foundational narrative of Star Wars. The theme of fleets straining their supply lines, in the far galactic reaches where reinforcements aren't available, also fit the Outer Rim setting of the campaign.
During playtesting, players reacted with some shock to just how lethal this was. A destroyed ship becomes scarred, is nearly impossible to un-scar, and if destroyed again is gone for good with no recovery. We experimented with easier repairs, but I found that it caused access to repairing effects to become too valuable. After seeing battle after battle over the sector's Shipyards, I reverted the design back to its extra-lethal scarring rules.
Glory to Jank: I have a soft spot for neglected cards in this game. Many of the game's early upgrade content started showing its age as players figured out which stuff was competitive, situational, or just not playable. (I could be more charitable and call this stuff "off-meta.") Some of those misfit cards got edged out in points efficiency, but I enjoy trying to salvage the jank so that nothing is fully obsolete. Yes, you may have some ugly ducklings in your fleet who don't serve an obvious purpose. But they don't count toward your fleet's points limit so any value you can eke out of them is all bonus.
My affinity for jank cards isn't entirely sentimental. I think that part of the point of playing a scenario-based format to a game like Armada is to get a different experience than in competitive formats like at Organized Play tournaments. When players have perfect control over which ships, squadrons, and upgrades to buy in their fleets, then the game rewards the same compositions and strategies as a tournament. I've been a part of campaigns that recreate the experience of tournament play, with the same combos and archetypes present because they remain the most efficient paths to victory. In my view, a campaign is pointless if it is just a tournament format with extra window dressing in between each battle. So, for SotAS I made it a core goal to "gently" force players to make do with cards that they might not otherwise consider. Most players would rarely put E-Wings, Cluster Bombs, or Redundant Shields into a list. But, if the campaign gave them for free, then a successful admiral would be one who makes the most of the fleet they are given.
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