BFG escort debate.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

before port maw went down, i noticed many people there as well as here, seem to hate (or at least very much dislike using escorts).

 

i want to know why.

 

here's my view on it. (i play IN and i think that their ship classifications are the easiest for all to understand and translate to roughly translate to their own fleet, so i'll primarily use IN classes for examples)

 

1. the 40k-verse and all it's surrounding games are fluff based. you don't play 40k and completely disregard fluff, so why do so here?

1a. battleships and other large ships (heavy cruisers, grand cruisers, battlebarges, strike cruisers, etc.) take a lot of time, and resources to create, and most are extremely old and rare, so it doesn't make much sense for your fleet to have a battleship, and a handful of heavy/grand cruisers.

 

2. no one likes a power gamer. just like in CoD no one likes a corner camping noob-tuber. ya the goal is to win, but if that's all you're thinking about then your opponents aren't going to be having any fun, and the point of a game is to be fun.

the only reason i can see for choosing only large cruisers or BBs is for power gaming.

 

now, those reasons aside i personally prefer larger groups of smaller ships. (WWI-WWII DDs are amazing imo, and i think that's transferred over to BFG) some of the classifications and their jobs differ from historical classifications, but relative size helps to translate job-class.

 

personally 2 heavy/grand cruisers 2-3 cruisers, and 2-3 escort squadrons would make a good even balanced fleet, that would be fluffy as well.

expand the fleet size slightly add in a BB and you still get even balanced fleet.

 

here's how it seems thing go to me

BFG classification-Real world/historic classification

BB-heavy cruiser/battle cruiser, fleet carrier

heavy/grand cruiser-cruiser, escort carrier

cruisers-light cruiser

light cruiser-destoyer

escorts- P.T. boats

 

any way, that's just my two cents, now lets hear your opinions.

[Octavulg]

...Escorts are perfectly capable, or at least they were last time I checked.

 

Personally, I'm not a big fan of them because I find painting them interestingly to be more difficult than with a cruiser and naming them all to be a hassle. Oh, and they're finickier to move as a group.

[mughi3]

I am one of the escort haters. in game terms it is quite simple.

 

While they may be a bit harder to hit than a cruiser they are a 1 wound model you have to pay points for. when i can do the same job they do with assault craft. which i get with the carrier ship. also assault craft unlike escorts are not lost when they are "destroyed" i just re-load them and send them out again.

 

The other issue with BFG is that some fleets need escorts to truely function(Imperial navy and space marines) while others can do just fine with cruisers alone.

 

From a fluff perspective The modern equivalent of escorts for a wet navy would corallate to a dauntless light cruiser or regular cruiser. the escorts that are in BFG would be small partrol craft who usually act independantly from the larger ships.

[Gillyfish]

This is an interesting debate. Recently, some of the rules committee have been debating changing escort rules to make them more resilient to attack craft. Currently they are seen as underpowered and ineffective.

 

Brother Argos and I have an occasional BFG campaign going in which we are trying this out. In addition, we've set ourselves a list building rule that a certain percentage of our fleet roster must be made up of escorts.

 

This is because, from a background perspective, we think our fleets should have escorts (and because there is something undeniably cool about the image of capital ships surrounded by a protective swarm of smaller ships).

 

It'll be interesting to see if the proposed rule changes (which we are using) help make them more effective.

[Demoulius]

personally love escorts, but then again i play space marines ;)

 

i agree though, fluffwise they would be the majority of a fleet... since theyre dead cheap as well i see no reeason why people dont take a few at least <_< theyre ideal to protect your bigger ships with in regards of target priority/torpedo catching :lol:

[Vaaish]

Escorts are a rather polarized subject. Some races like marines and eldar need them to function at all while other races like Chaos or IN can do just fine without them. In the past, assault boats dropped an escort on a 2+. This took a ship which was ostensibly more difficult to hit and by extension destroy and instead forced them to brace for survival against an effectively renewable threat that lost little for failing. For example, I can just relaunch ordnance if it fails but once an escort dies it won't come back. Since ordnance was more than capable of performing most of the roles assigned to escorts and because it kept coming as long as your carriers were alive, the game was about how much ordnance you could spew and escorts weren't as useful. Ordnance limits have helped on this front and now reducing assault boats to killing escorts on a 4+ has given escorts another boost.

 

So where does that leave things? Personally I find escorts to be a bit fiddly and not overly effective as an IN player. A full squadron of Swords will give you what I call silly dice (22 dice within 15cm closing capital ship locked on... you get the idea), but it also means you will attract the attention of every enemy in range. Another option is to just stick them at the back and use escorts as a cleanup force or to protect your rear from enemies attempting to get behind you. Either works but as IN, you have access to a couple of varieties of light cruisers which give you the maneuverability and, in the case of the dauntless, the speed to function in a similar role to escorts without the vulnerabilities inherent to escorts. That's not to say that escorts can't be used or shouldn't be used. Certain escorts are very effective. The sword packs serious firepower and has decent defenses which makes them excellent in hunting or cleanup roles. Cobras are dead cheap and can get +1 to RO checks to give you a very fast torpedo platform to snipe enemy ordnance or annoy capital ships. The falchion is a mix of the two and gives you a very effective torpedo sniper or fighter interceptor with enough firepower to still do alright in a fight. Marines just have better and faster versions of cobra, sword, and firestorm with their hunters, gladius, and nova. Eldar, well lets not get started on their escorts!

 

In the end, escorts will give you a hard hitting, maneuverable, and direct fire resistant platform with a high weakness to attack craft and rapid degradation of capabilities with the loss of ships or bracing. As Marines, your escorts are essential despite the drawbacks. As IN, you have other options with light cruisers, and as Chaos you can ignore escorts entirely for increased AC capabilities.

 

(as a side note, I'm one of those players who like grand cruisers and battleships. My normal 1500 point fleet is a emperor+ab, 2x vengeance, 2x lunar+nova cannon, and 2x torpedo dauntless.)

[Grey Mage]

Escorts have a large firepower to size ratio in most cases. This is useful in many cases- swords, galdius, any eldar escort- because a full unit of escorts has more firepower than a battleships broadsides in many cases.

 

They are correspondingly fragile. If you can deploy enough fighter cover to keep assault boats away from them though they tend to be resilient enough in my experiance. The main problem is 'bleedover wounds' I find. IE when a cruiser with a good amount of firepower pops up and unloads a broadside on them... it doesnt stop with one ship, because of the squadron rules it just keeps going.

 

I find them useful. Particularly for IN fleets and Nid fleets... who otherwise may find themselves outmaneuvered by faster enemies or outgunned by orks....

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

grey mage that's how i see it, maneuverable firepower. i mean if you have nothing but cruisers (hvy, or grand) and battleships, kind of seems like all your eggs are in only one or two baskets for the most part.

 

escorts are pickets/screening ships. they're meant to protect the bigger ships.

 

not to mention you can get 12 cobras for 1 apocalypse class BB. thats a lot of torpedoes and weapons batteries, as well as it forces your opponent to split his fire among 3 targets. i'm not saying that 12 cobras is the way to go, but say 8 cobras and a dauntless or two, plus your big bad hvy/grand cruiser.

[Demoulius]

has anyone ever tried mixing space marine escorts up? i could easily see group of 2-3 gladius frigates with a nova thrown in beeing effective. that way it will be harder to snipe your lance :) (and th, you want to fire batteries to strip shields first anyway, this way you can do it all with same unit, first batteries then lance :geek: )

 

or is that just wishful thinking?

[Vaaish]

Mixed squadrons don't typically pay off because a single lance doesn't really perform all that well and if you take two you need a squadron of five ships to keep up your battery strength. You also deal with things like mixed armor values, turrets, speed or weapons arcs. Speed differences can make it harder to keep the squadron together which hampers SO use. Armor differences let shots that didn't roll high enough to damage some of your ships hit lower armored ships in the squadron causing more damage. Weapons arcs can be even more critical since some ships may be unable to bring their weapons to bear or force the squadron into a disadvantaged facing if you do. In the end, if you are already firing batteries first what are you gaining tossing in a lance that costs you 5 extra points?

[Demoulius]

Mixed squadrons don't typically pay off because a single lance doesn't really perform all that well and if you take two you need a squadron of five ships to keep up your battery strength. You also deal with things like mixed armor values, turrets, speed or weapons arcs. Speed differences can make it harder to keep the squadron together which hampers SO use. Armor differences let shots that didn't roll high enough to damage some of your ships hit lower armored ships in the squadron causing more damage. Weapons arcs can be even more critical since some ships may be unable to bring their weapons to bear or force the squadron into a disadvantaged facing if you do. In the end, if you are already firing batteries first what are you gaining tossing in a lance that costs you 5 extra points?

weapon arcs are all the same IIRC all front/left/right. speed im not sure about, IIRC the nova is 5 cm's faster but tbh that would only be an issue if youd want to move as fast as possible (where the other escorts wouldnt be able to catch up) with minimal distance you can just move the nova its required distance and let the rest follow at the same pace (as they CAN do that)

 

armour is IIRC also the same (5+ all round) the reason i mentioned the placing in a squadron is so your opponent cant pick off your lance bearing frigates as easily, as he will ahve to wade through the rest of the ships first (if you place it well enough)

[Vaaish]

You may get the squadron to work alright as marines, but typically they don't combine so well. IN cobras have 4+ armor to the 5+ of the others; the firestorm has its lance forward arc only. Escorts with ordnance conflict Lock on and Reload Ordnance.

 

To be perfectly honest, I'd find less threat in your one nova than in the gladius supporting it. One lance doesn't typically do much and 2 batteries does less. Now lets say I want to get rid of the nova. All I need to do is maneuver my AB or bombers around and contact the nova's base and all the attacks go there or hit the squadron with a torpedo salvo. Nova goes poof, and I didn't even need to shoot through the other escorts to hit it. It is possible you could surround the nova if you have a full squadron, but most of the time you end up with squadrons of 3 or 5 which means there will be an opening and even if I can't hit that the nova I'd still take dropping one of the others or forcing the squadron to brace since going from s10 batteries and a lance to s6 batteries and a lance is pretty good. Even better if it means your braced and can't only use s3 batteries and a lance.

 

The point being that ordnance, whether AB, bombers, or torpedoes, can all "pick out" a target regardless of position in the squadron and even positioning can be overcome with maneuvering to bring the target as the closest ship though that's a bit more challenging. Second closest is easier if you have the firepower to kill two escorts at a go.

[Grey Mage]

That makes the assumption your bombers get through durable fighters.

 

Seriously, I think people who have alot of problems with attack craft ripping apart their escorts may not be bringing enough defense against them, or using the turret support rules.

[Vaaish]

Durable fighters are only available to eldar and there are far more issues with taking down their escorts than avoiding fighters. In that situation I'd be chucking as much battery fire at the squadron foolish enough to end the turn that close.

 

against other races, 30cm is basically shotgun range for AC and if you don't have fighters on cap you most likely won't be getting them to the escorts in time. Alternatively send the entire 4-8 bomber/AB wave at it. Again, it'll be difficult to intercept all of them because with unlimited turning, it is surprisingly simple to end run a group of fighters and still hit your target. Sure there will be times I don't get through, but just reload ordnance and try again. Massing turrets is great, but if you are in base contact when the shooting starts, I can drop the shields on a good chunk of the squadron with a single hit.

 

The only time fighters are powerful enough to negate a good sized wave on their own is if all you do is launch fighters or if you are playing the rules incorrectly and letting a single fighter take out all markers in the wave rather than just a single marker.

[Drahazar]

Making people take escorts is kind of silly. If you read the fluff for the Necrons they don't take escorts all the time mostly its a scythe or two that come in attack and leave or a Group of shrouds that attacked mars no escorts there. Another time it was just a tomb ship that showed up blew up a IG fleet and left no escorts. Just saying.

[Demoulius]

ive played a total of 5 games now at a maximum of 750 points costs and there they completly shine. i outnumber my opponents (necrons and IN) nearly 2/3 to 1) and the ability to manouver and outplay my opponent is golden!

 

that said, i can totally see them as becoming useless in bigger sized games -_- a single cruiser (or a pair) can dish out alot more hurt (and incidentily) take alot more hurt as well. ive found the mose usefull ones to be nova frigates and gladius frigates (for space marines obviously) since for a cheap amount of points you get plenty of shots and the nova is the only lance available to marines <_<

 

for other fleets liek IN however....they got light cruisers that fill that role alot better :devil:

[Captain Juan Juarez]

Could it not be a case of people not treating Escorts as Escorts?

[Firenze]

I have 8 ships in my 1000pt marine fleet. 5 are Gladius class escorts. They are a great meatshield and linebreaker.

[Demoulius]

Could it not be a case of people not treating Escorts as Escorts?

what do you mean with that exactly? :P as far as i see it escorts are meant to...well escort the bigger ships.

 

seeing though that SC's are utter **** on their own in regards of firepower the escorts are basicly all we got, unless you play big games where you can take a few squadrons of them (or failling that a BB)

[Captain Juan Juarez]

Could it not be a case of people not treating Escorts as Escorts?

what do you mean with that exactly? :P as far as i see it escorts are meant to...well escort the bigger ships.

 

I have seen - I forget where - footage of a demo game of "what not to do" with regards to BFG and one of facets was the use of the Escort - one fairly common problem being people believing that Escorts can drive on into the face of the foe without regard for thow they should operate.

 

This is a thing from about four years ago though, so maybe people have evolved since then.

 

 

Also, we all know what Escorts are for.. But in the heat of the moment.. *shrug*

[Demoulius]

ah i see :P i like to fly them alongside my SC and/or a big group of other escorts to give my opponents plenty of targets to shoot at. and er...mainly hunt other escorts as it turns out *shrugs*

[Vaaish]

Marines tend to fall into the category of must take escorts to survive since they have rather limited options in their ship choices and their special rules make it harder to knock out the escorts. Other races like IN have light cruisers which can also fill the role of escorts while others like Chaos really have no need to take them at all. Eldar on the other hand are the polar opposite in that they tend to ONLY take escorts due to their movement rules and holofield save.

[koran]

When I played BFG my group played around with a number of house rules to sort out escorts. The one we liked the best was that any escorts actually escorting a cruiser or larger ship by being within a certain distance of it (we varied this and found 5cm a quite good distance but others also liked 10cm) it got to add the cruisers turrets to its own. This doesnt totally solve the assault craft problem but it made them a little more hardy and encouraged them to act as we thought they should have been in the fluff.

 

Other things we tried was having a rule that if an escort squadron was within Xcm (again we varied this) of an enemy cruiser it could choose one cruiser (or cruiser squadron) which gets a positive column shift due to the escort passing back targeting information. We also played around with it giving a bonus to nova cannon fire but it either did very little or was far too good so we ended up saying that they wouldnt risk using such a hazardous weapon with escorts so near.

 

This gave escorts a really good feel to us as they could either act as an escort for cruisers or as a scouting squadron to allow more accurate long range fire, which fitted our image of how they should be.

[mughi3]

Marines tend to fall into the category of must take escorts to survive since they have rather limited options in their ship choices and their special rules make it harder to knock out the escorts. Other races like IN have light cruisers which can also fill the role of escorts while others like Chaos really have no need to take them at all. Eldar on the other hand are the polar opposite in that they tend to ONLY take escorts due to their movement rules and holofield save.

That really depends on play style.

 

I have the old gothic official magazine and i favor running black ships in my grey knight fleet, however thats house rules. otherwise escorts are a marine fleet backbone, when it comes to eldar however they work fine cruiser heavy or excort heavy, a friend of mine runs nothing but cruisers, light cruisers and a void stalker in his eldar fleet and he does quite well with it, unless i break out my necrons. ;)