“The support characters in Heroes have some insanely powerful healing and shielding abilities. If you want your attacks to mean anything during a team battle, you should aim for these characters before anyone else. If you don’t, an experienced Rhegar or LiLi player can easily keep all four of their teammates alive no…

Okay, look. I have reservations, you don’t. Obviously you don’t want to discuss it because you’re coming off as hostile to me, so I’m bowing out. I hope it’s as good as you think.

“while now they have enough firepower to invade a small country.”

Yeah, can we talk about how a wild animal park has access to Miniguns and Rocket Launchers? No, don’t give me that ‘Well but most animal parks don’t have Dinosaurs!’ They have pretty large mammals, they don’t spring for anti-tank rifles to bring them…

First of all, the subtle ‘Are you even a REAL fan?’ is irritating. Knock it off. I’ve read the books and seen the films, thanks. The first one was fantastic, the other two were just attempts to recapture the magic that didn’t go well at all.

Second, a large amount of the promotional material is literally “Remember how…

That’s actually something that concerns me: The film is very much ‘Hey remember this?’ and very thin on the actual plot.

So let’s talk about Mercs. Specifically, their purpose and when to take them.

Mercs give a team two advantages. They put additional pressure on a lane and, far more importantly, they force a response from the enemy team, allowing you to exert a soft form of control over how they respond. The best timing for a merc camp…

In my opinion Armada is the more complex of the two games (it adds a layer of of complexity via the order system, tracking the various arcs and learning to react).

I would encourage you to demo X-Wing though. It’s less intimidating than it looks.

Star Wars Miniatures are currently booming in popularity, and your FLGS might have an active group. Armada seems to be picking up steam and may end up pretty popular when the next few waves come out.

I played a lot of BFG and it feels in some ways like BFG light, with more emphasis on manuevers and better tools for keeping track of everything. Hard to replace the hole in my heart left for BFG though. (I just loved how each fleet in BFG played so very differently from one another).

One thing to try is to keep your Star Destroyer at a slower speed at first and only ‘throttle up’ when you engage (especially since if you keep either the Corvette or Frigate in the front arc there’s a decent chance you’ll inflict heavy damage. Lucky roll on a single volley can near destroy the Corvette outright) and…

In the case of scorpions it’s ‘bigger the claw, the weaker the sting’ in general. It’s the scorpions with the little dainty baby claws you generally have to watch out for.

DEFINITELY don’t apply that to all insects though. Oh god no. Totttaaaaally big spiders that will ruin your day.

That is an Emperor Scorpion though. They’re practically harmless! They’re super mellow and their sting is, at worst, a bee sting (which, I mean if you’re allergic is actually really deadly, but you get my point).

And he’s cute! He wants to cuddle! Well he sort of wants to cuddle. He... doesn’t want to cuddle, but still!

The name realllllly strong reinforces the tie to Revan between that and the very strong resemblance in Kylo Ren's mask, it's looking more and more like something involving the name is involved, if nothing less.

The general audience enjoyed the films but they're not exactly desperately in need to see the next film, nor does it really stand out in that many people's memory. Seriously, most people I know who 'liked it' just sort of enjoyed their time, and have no desire to rewatch or continue it, and would be just as fine if it…

I’ve been reading Erik Larsen’s Dead Wake. Everything about being in a WW1 era Submarine sucked. The pressure (not to mention all the bodies in a cramped space) raised the ambient temperature and humidity inside to something between sauna and swamp. Between that, the air scrubbers, and diesel fumes/’sweat’ that has…

I will point out that if Hardline is any indication EA is trying to ape COD style games a bit more, which suggests a slightly deeper single-player experience. Whether or not that's better is up to interpretation.

While that's basically true (you flew, you shot lasers, other ships shot back) they were completely different animals. To start, playing a Tie Fighter changed your perspective tremendously as you were fragile as all hell, you just tended to be more agile than what you were fighting, so it was far more up to you to…

If we're talking about anti-social personality disorder/Sociopathy/Pscyhopathy in the old days, I kind of recall a book on the subject (The Sociopath Next Door, I think?) suggesting that it's more common than people thought and a lot of them tended to do pretty well on the battlefield (largely because being fairly…

Oh it's cool, you can store MP3s on it. So you know, some dick hacker can play "Don't go breaking my heart" while actually stopping your heart.

Regarding the complexity of the rules: I played with like 6 or 7 groups over the years and every one had house ruled decking/hacking to simplify it or, more commonly banned it entirely. 2nd ed./3rd ed. In particular had a notorious reputation for Deckers slowing games to a crawl while excluding the rest of the party.