I started off small with a medium ship for my first Armada custom, so naturally, I’m going to jump straight to a huge ship. That’s sensible, isn’t it?
Hello! Today’s article is on the Separatist's version of a superweapon, and one that I think is actually a good idea!
So before we all get ionized, let’s get stuck in!
The Overall Design:
The Subjugator-class heavy cruiser was a massive Separatist ship, four times the length of a Venator. It was bristling with turbolasers, proton torpedo launchers and could carry hundreds of starfighters. Its best-known feature was the two massive Ion-Pulse Cannons on either side of the dreadnought that could be used to disable entire fleets in one massive shot.
So obviously this massive vessel needs to be a huge sized ship, however, even though this ship is huge, it’s not as big as a Super Star Destroyer. Because of this, I’ve kept its stats at similar levels to the weaker prototype SSDs.
The Armaments, Shields And Hull:
As this ship’s main weapons are on its side, it naturally moves towards more of a broadside based layout.
As I said before, its hull and shields are of similar strength to the prototype SSDs with it having four shields across most of its hull zones and a tough hull.
For the armaments, the two ship cards take the ship in two directions with the more standardised Subjugator-class heavy cruiser getting a better set of side batteries, with good amounts of red, blue and black dice. The experimental Subjugator-class heavy cruiser removes all of the blue dice from the attack pools and places them in two massive ion cannon ignition pools.
This is to show the Subjugator-class heavy cruiser’s experimental Ion-Pulse weapon more effectively, I was tempted to put it on both ship cards. In legends five of these ships were made, and not all of them made use of the Ion-Pulse Cannons due to their experimental nature.
The Defence Tokens And Manoeuvres:
Like with the Super Star Destroyer, the Subjugator has access to six defence tokens making it much tougher than most standard ships. The only difference between them is that I decided to drop one of the Redirect tokens for a Salvo token. I did improve its manoeuvrability compared to the SSD’s, but only for the standardised Subjugator as its power is not being drawn away to the superweapon.
The Command, Squadron And Engineering Values:
Like with the SSD these values are much higher than most. I did drop its engineering down to three and its squadron down to four for the experimental variant.
The Upgrade Slots:
The main difference between the two variants for upgrade slots is the number of ion cannon upgrade slots, with the experimental variant getting three to show the strength of the Ion Pulse Cannon, as well as the superweapon slot.
The standardized variant can act as a fleet command ship with a pair of fleet command stots and an additional crew to aid it.
The Upgrades:
Ion-Pulse Cannon:
This is the upgrade that makes this ship an absolute powerhouse! As we see during the Clone Wars, the Ion-Pulse’s shots are massive discs that can hit multiple ships at once. Because of this, this shot puts a large amount of 'ion' dice into a single ship, then the rest of the disc puts three 'ion' dice into surrounding ships and squadrons, with this in mind, you need to be careful of hitting friendly ships and squadrons.
The only issue with this superweapon is that, like the SPHA-T, it needs concentrate fire tokens to charge up its shots, although this shouldn’t be too much of an issue for the huge size Subjugator.
Malevolence:
The most famous of all the Subjugators, the Malevolence was able to cause devastation to the Republic, taking out entire fleets without leaving any survivors to warn the Republic of the threat.
This title lets you more effectively ionise enemy ships by applying additional blue critical conditions to your attacks. This combined with Fire-Control Team will let you apply three critical effects to an attack, allowing you to effectively paralyze an enemy ship using the Ion-Pulse Cannon.
Devastation:
The only other named ship of the Subjugator class in canon or legends, the Devastation was a very different version of this ship, using a massive front cannon instead of the two ion cannons.
I didn’t really want to give this ship a “super laser” in its front arc, so as this is a legends ship, it “changed” its lore a little. It still has the Ion-Pulse Cannons, but its power outputs could be changed so the ion cannon did more instead of ionising the defenders.
Because of this, you can change out any of your blue dice for red ones to maximise the amount of damage you can do.
Vultures Nest:
This is a custom named ship that I came up with for an X-Wing mission I made a year ago. It involved flying into the remains of a Subjugator named the Vultures Nest and getting attacked by wave after wave of Vulture Droids.
I’ve brought this ship into this pack, letting the Subjugator become a massive carrier that can lead a massive number of droid squadrons into battle and make them much more effective.
If combined with Expanded Hanger Bay, you can get up to a squadron command value of eight or nine if you use a command token as well.
Shutdown Shots:
Although being able to combine multiple blue critical effects can make it feel like you are shutting down enemy ships, this upgrade takes it to the next level.
You can use this card to exhaust multiple defence tokens and assign a new token, paralyzed tokens.
Paralyzed Tokens:
A ship is paralyzed while it has a number of paralyzed tokens relative to its size:
Small: 1
Medium: 2
Large:3
Huge: 4
A paralyzed ship cannot ready tokens or cards and cannot recover shields.
When a paralyzed ship spends an engineering dial, it may remove paralyzed tokens for 1 engineering point each.
This lets you easily cripple your opponents, but you need multiple blue critical results to activate it. Although smaller ships are easier to shut down, they normally have fewer
command dials so they can get round to an engineering dial faster. Whereas, larger ships may take more to shut down but it could be a few rounds before they get to their engineering dial.
Overloaded Capacitors:
This is similar to Disposable Capacitors, but for larger ships. I was inspired by the sideways discharge the Ion-Pulse puts out, I imagine it damages the shields and ionises that part of the ship. Even though you can get off ion shots at a longer distance, you are depending on those shots to either take out an opponent or cripple them as they’ll be able to damage you more effectively when they shoot back.
Rail Jets:
I was a little stumped for a while when trying to make the officer upgrades for this pack, then I thought of this. I know these aren’t officers, but it’s more to show how the massive ships have systems of trains to get their personnel to different parts of the ship as quickly as possible.
It’s restricted to large and huge ships as the idea of the relatively tiny Hardcells getting the most useless train to fill them, is both funny and stupid.
Asajj Ventress:
As a Grievous admiral is already done, I decided to give Ventress her spot as an admiral. Her ability works well with raid tokens, letting you either push more raid tokens onto an opponents ship as she aids your boarding parties or helps you repel enemy ships boarding attempts.
I went with this as she’s less of a commander and more of an assassin who’s an expert at infiltrating enemy ships and taking out key targets. This also works well for protecting her allies too.
This works well with the next two cards especially.
Droch-Class Boarding Ship:
As its first big appearance is during the Malevolence arc of the Clone Wars, I felt it would be fitting for it to make an appearance in this ship pack as well.
My design for this ship is a light and cheap border/objective token mover that’s a poor anti-squadron squadron.
The assault combined with a black die means you have a decent chance of boarding your opponent, especially if your AI battery is active as well!
I also went with strategic as its ability to grip escape pods as it could be put to use to move objects around. I really like the idea of these ships gingerly grabbing the mines from the Minefields objective cards and moving them around.
B1-JT-628
This B1 jet trooper is skilled at getting its complement of troops onto its opponent’s ship and disabling the ship’s systems.
I really like the way this and Ventress can completely cripple an enemy ship if you get a raid token onto your opponent.
This is even easier with its additional black die, I was tempted to give it bomber as well, but I felt that would have been too good...
The Example Build:
Experimental Subjugator Heavy Cruiser: 234
Ion-Pulse Cannon: 10
Kraken: 30
Vultures Nest: 10
Shutdown Shots: 10
Comms Net: 2
Comms Net: 2
Comms Net: 2
7 x Droch-Class Boarding Ship Squadron: 91
Total: 599
This build uses Kraken and Weapon Battery techs to consistently paralyze enemy ships at long range.
The four Hardcell ships keep the Vultures Nest flush with Concentrate Fire command tokens and help to activate Kraken.
The Vultures Nest can then concentrate on commanding the Droch squadrons to raid your
opponent and shut down the ships further.
The Conclusion:
The Subjugator-class is one of the most interesting huge ships for the game. Its massive ion cannons add in a cool feature that makes this ship deadly and terrifying.
I was quite interested I think the ability for this ship to take on entire fleets makes it rather interesting as it forces your opponent to split up more than normal, which would hopefully make it harder for them to push damage on a single hull zone.
I wish I could afford to get a model for this ship to be able to fly it, however, unless someone is willing to give me far too much money for free, it’s nothing but a fever dream. For anyone in a stable financial situation without a kid on the way, here’s a link to a really cool 3D model from Mel Miniatures!
As normal, feel free to use my cards to crush the Republic and free the Separatists from their tyranny!
Thank you all for reading,
Watcher Leader out.
Where you aiming for a Large or Giant (like the SSD) base?
Hey i made a base Card for your idea, if your interested i can send it over :D its also on the armada discord