My first BFG Game
I had the opportunity to be a dork on Sunday and made a pilgramage to Danger Planet. I was invited to try a game of Battle Fleet Gothic and so I did.
What a fun game! The mechanics are slick. The game play is a blast. It’s really easy to get into the spirit of the game while manuevering little warships around the table.
A couple of things jump out at me as far as tactics.
1. Escorts are considerably cooler than I thought. I shot the hell out of my opponent’s escorts but he left mine alone and so one of ‘em was able to sit and fire torpedoes into the engine tubes of the Imperial scum each turn. Tons of fun.
2. Launching fighters is only really useful when the enemy is at a reasonable range. I was using them as a screen to protect my ships from ordinance and to wipe out his fighters so that my torpedoes and bombers could make attack runs unimpeded. Once distance between fleets shrinks, fighters aren’t much use, unless you completely surround a vessel.
3. It’s odd, but I found that ships took a few turns of fire without too much damage and then all of a sudden they just collapse. Part of that was probably due to the fact that our ships closed the distance quickly and issued some serious broadsiding (well, I did at any rate. For some reason my opponent didn’t capitalize on the proximity of the bulk of my fleet).
4. I had ZERO luck with bombers. I think they’re slick, but I just couldn’t do ANY damage.
5. Do not let yourself be rammed. I had a completely unharmed ship become crippled by a last ditch ramming attempt by one of my opponent’s crippled cruisers. He scored four hits against me and I didn’t do anything to him. It was ugly. He then put two lance hits into my aft and that pretty much put the nails in the coffin for that ship. He didn’t destroy it, but it was badly mauled.
6. Arcs of fire determine your success! Now I hadn’t ever played before and so I was kind of unfamiliar with the ships I was using so at times I’d maneuver in ways that didn’t allow me to bring some of my weapons to bear. That was ugly. However, it did teach me a valuable lesson that I capitalized on for my escorts. Drop behind an enemy capital ship and just start pounding ‘em. Not a single cruiser I was up against had aft firing weapons so as long as I hung out behind ‘em I was able to fire with impunity. I imagine a Dark Eldar fleet would be pretty good at this since there’s not a lot of ships that can out manuever a Dark Eldar ship.
The end result of the battle was I had destroyed his carrier early. His four escorts were destroyed. He disengaged one of his cruisers and his last cruiser was chased into an asteroid field and the damage from that caused a plasma drive overload.
I had lost two of my Infidel escorts. All three of my cruisers were crippled - but still combat worthy. My last Infidel probably would have been destroyed, but the Imperials were routed and couldn’t hurt me at all.
Oh, the short version: I was victorious.
6 Comments so far
Escorts can be positively evil if used correctly. They can’t stand up to a capship, of course, but they can can support one easily. Once a friendly cruiser downs an enemy cruiser’s shields, the escorts can start laying down some damage.
One of the update rules is that fighters touching the base of a friendly ship will automatically intercept any ordnance that attacks that ship. Fighters can also help bombers by suppressing turrets. If there are fighters stacked with bombers, turrets on the defending ship automatically hit the fighters first. Bombers normally roll 1d6-(defending turrets) to see how many attacks they make, but any fighters still in the stack negate turrets; hence, if the defender has 3 turrets and you still have 3 fighters in your fighter/bomber stack, each bomber makes 1d6 attacks.
That’s typical. You have to concentrate your fire to have much effect through shields.
You have to use bombers in big stacks to be effective.
Sounds like you had a pretty good first game. BFG is definitely a game of maneuver; if you just try to move in an slug it out, someone will cross the T on you and smash you. You have to think not about where you are and where you’ll be this turn but where you’ll be two or three turns ahead.
That I didn’t know. I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future. I don’t think it would have changed very much though. I was able to keep out of the path of most of his torpedoes and his carrier was taken out of the game early (after rolling boxcars when trying to reload ordinance! heh!).
I had a fantastic game. It’s a good game. You were right. Tell your sister that you were right.
A canny opponent (like me) will launch torpedoes from within 30 cm so they hit in the same turn as they’re launched, giving you no time to evade. I’d only launch from a greater distance if I wanted to try to force you to change course.
Then I must be a canny opponent because that’s exactly what I was doing. Now, based upon what I read in the BFG Annual 2002, I’d be able to put fighters in base contact with my ships and then I’d be able to intercept torpedoes as they make contact with my ships? Wouldn’t that negate that tactic to some extent?
Yes, stacking fighters on your ship’s base will negate one torpedo counter per fighter counter.
Note, however, that under the same rule revision, a given carrier can’t have more fighter/bomber ordnance tokens in play than it has launch bays. This means that if you’ve got a Devastation-class cruiser with four launch bays, you can’t have more than four fighter counters in play from it at one time. Basically, they removed a carrier’s ability to sit back and build up squadrons as long as it can keep making Reload rolls.
Carriers got some extra benefits, but they also got nerfed.
Ah. Is that where that rule was clarified? After reading the main rule book I wasn’t sure whether or not carriers could launch multiple waves of fighters and bombers over and above the number of launch bays they had.
To be honest, it makes a certain amount of sense to limit the number of fighter/bomber markers in play to the number of bays. I kind of thought that was what the rules implied anyway.