Buy and Install Table Top Simulator from Steam.
Go to the Community Hub, then Workshops on the TTS site on Steam.

Search for 'Armada' and click on the one by Valadian called 'Star Wars Armada, complete with scripting'; click the 'Subscribe' button.

Read the Tutorial he linked to in the description. Get confused, even though it will make sense later (once you no longer need it!).

Keep the Tutorial open in a window, and run TTS. You will need to create a game (do single-player to create your fleet and save it) in the first screen.


Step through everything from the tutorial and realise nothing works quite how it seems like it should...

So, to make a fleet, you need the ship cards and upgrade cards. You find these in small blue bags on the left side of the mat. Find the one labelled 'All Cards' and drag it somewhere convenient. A brown bag will appear where you drop it.

If you right-click the brown bag, and choose 'search' you find some categories of cards. Drag one category, such as 'Rebel Ships' out of the search window and onto the mat.

This makes a stack of Rebel Ship cards. Again, right click and select search. Drag out the card you want to use to the table/mat area. Don't click the buttons on the card itself yet, but if you do you get the ship model and the defense tokens appearing.

Go back to the brown bag and drag each category of cards out of it. Right click and search them for the cards you want to use for your fleet.

Once you have the cards, select all of them, then right click them and choose 'Save object'. This will save them so you can reload them later.

To load saved objects, go to the top menu buttons across the top of the screen and click 'Objects'. There you find the 'Load Saved Objects' button!

Your saved fleet cards have a drop-down button near the top right corner, where you can pick 'spawn'. Do so.
Spawned ship cards lack their 'spawn ship' button on them, but you can still spawn their ship by right-clicking each one and writing the word 'spawn' in the very bottom box, where it says 'description', beneath the name of the card.

If you save a fleet with the ship and its defense tokens already spawned, the ships don't reappear when loaded. But the tokens do. Respawning the ship also respawns the tokens, so you might end up with 2 sets of them. Just press delete whilst hovering over each one you want to get rid of.

You can also spawn all the ships in one: select all the cards, right click and write "spawn" in the description space. All your fleet will spawn together.

Be careful to not save the list with the ships already spawned, or they will not be associated to your color when you spawn the saved object. This will prevent the command dials working as intended, although you can still use them as loose objects on your ship card.

Making a fleet has been updated. It is now much easier - there is a menu on the right hand side of your screen, where the topmost icon is the fleet spawner. You can click on the various upgrade types, to get each card to appear on the mat, but by far the easiest method is to build your fleet in any fleet-builder, and copy it into the 'spawn' box. Then click 'parse' for the module to identify the typed words, and finally press 'spawn fleet'.

A spawned ship has a button on to spawn its shield dials. Only do this after you deploy the ship - once you do this, the ship 'locks' itself in place and can only be moved using the manoeuvre tool. If you 'unlock' it (right click menu) to move it manually, it leaves the shields behind!

To play an actual game, you need to create a multiplayer game at the TTS loading screen - and have an opponent. Use the Discord server to find one and chat with them during the game - this is pretty essential.

Then open TTS and Create a multi-player game. You will need a name for it and a password (definitely set a password, there are some idiots around who enjoy barging into a game and knocking the table over).

Then the second player can join it. When you join an existing game, you get a big, unstable list of all the games around the world appearing which keep refreshing. Type in the name of the game you want to join in the top search box.

An alternative method of getting your opponent to join your game is to press the '+' button underneath your name at the top right hand corner of the screen. This allows you to 'invite' any friend you have on Steam if they are already online. They will still need to know the password, but this bypasses the unstable listing of every game being played anywhere in the world on TTS.

Once the 2nd player joins, click their name in the top right corner of the screen and 'promote' them. This allows them to use the top menu and load their own saved fleet from 'Objects'. Also lets them delete items and interact fully with the game board. You can also make them become the Host (with a small gold crown symbol near the names). There is a number in that top corner too - this is the ping time. Green is good, Red is bad and can cause the game to hang whilst it catches up. Also set Colours before spawning fleets.

If you zoom in on the mat, you can see faint lines at distance 5 from the sides and 3 from the player edges, and a few others.

Obstacles need to be dragged out of the blue bag of obstacles to make a brown bag, then searched for the ones you need for your game. Once they're placed, right-click each one and 'lock' it to the mat.

Spawn your fleets and play the game!

Remember that ships can't be picked up once they spawn their shields; nor can squadrons once they first 'move' using their movement buttons. The 'magic ruler' movement tool is amazingly good, but locks into place as soon as it appears, so you get to 'cheat' a bit - which helps since judging distances is harder than in real life. If the ruler is obscured, you can set its shape on one side of your ship, then press 'M' on the other side and it reappears that side whilst keeping its shape.

To remove destroyed ships or squadrons, right-click them and unlock them, then delete them. You'll need to do shield dials individually. press the red 'explosion' symbol found on the right hand menu. This brings up a red 'destroy' button on *every* ship and squadron! Be careful to only press the button on the object you wish to destroy! The red buttons automatically go away after about 5 seconds, so you may have to press the menu icon again.

To set command dials, you have a square cube of your colour by your left corner with 4 versions of the dials inside; drag each dial from there and drop it onto the rear hull zone of each ship turn over the dials that spawned by each ship, change them by pressing number keys 1, 2, 3, or 4 and then place them on the round 'command dial stack' object that also spawned by your ship.
Each one you add should change colour and put itself to the bottom of the stack. You can view the set commands by pressing the 'C' button on the rear starboard corner of the ship.

To change speed dials and shield dials, hover over them and press the number needed using your number keys; to get zero shields, press any number over 6, and to set a speed dial to speed zero press any number over 4. You can do this with dice results too.

When rolling dice, hovering over a single die and pressing 'r' will roll it; for multiple dice it's easier to select all the dice, then place them on the mat, then press 'r'. IMPORTANT: de-select them before pressing anything else or your results will change!
There is also now a dice-rolling tray which can spawn dice into itself and keep them in the tray as they roll - either by selecting them as described or by pressing the 'roll' button on the tray edge.