Warband size and ship transportation options

[Lay]

The second is related to the first, how are these warbands traveling around? Do they each have their own fleet of ships or maybe just a single ship. Do they "own" the ships or are they paying another faction to taxi them around. How many Marines can you fit on a ship, again we have rough numbers for loyalist but do those hold true for Chaos?

Page 26 of the 3.5 Codex deals with Legion fleets. Or look up "BFG Trator Fleets" for Battlefleet Gothic.

The huge Space Marine Legions were broken down into Chapters of a thousand warriors and equipped with specialist barges and strike cruisers. [...] The defeated Traitor Marines were never a part of these reforms however. [...] To them any capital ship with the capacity to launch Dreadclaws or hoarding torpedoes is potentially a battle barge and any fast cruiser might be used to move small forces around

Their ships are often captained by non-Space Marines, many of them former privateers or rogue traders such as Abraham Thurst and Maleficia Arkham. The services of such men are so valuable to the Traitor Legions that they are assigned Chaos Marines as ship's troops and act as Fleetmasters for the greatest of the Warmasters. Such service is not without risk, as failure is not readily tolerated by the Lords of Chaos

 

Codex: Eye of Terror lists three notable Chaos Fleets during the 13th Black Crusade:

 

- The Grand Fleet of the Despoiler: 7 Battleships, 13 heavy cruisers, est. 23 cruiser squadrons, est. 30 escort squadrons

- The fleet of Kossolax the Foresworn: 1 Battleship, 3 cruiser squadrons, 8 escort squadrons

- The plague fleet of Typhus: Terminus Est: 2 Battleships, 3 heavy cruisers, 5 cruiser squadrons, est. 12 escort squadrons

 

However, few Chaos Lords can compare to Abaddon or Typhus. One ship per warband seems pretty common.

For example, even the largest warbands featured in the Siege of Vraks books are based on single ships:

 

- Anarchy's Heart: Despoiler class battleship of a large Alpha Legion warband.

- Blood Dawn: Styx class heavy cruiser. Transported two World Eaters warbands (Skulltakers and Berserkers of Skallanthrax) to Vraks.

- Ferrum Invictus: Devastation class cruiser of a large Iron Warriors warband.

[A D-B]

One of the annoying (and often overlooked) limits of BFG is that a lot of the Chaos fleets - as in, their classes of ships - aren't Heresy-era ships at all. While it makes sense that not all Chaos vessels are Heresy-era, it completely misses out the fact that a lot of Chaos Marine vessels will be Heresy-era vessels, and many more will be daemon-engines or previously unseen classes of warships made in the Eye of Terror.

 

So as a reference, BFG can fall a little flat: it shows the classes of Chaos vessels in one subsector, over the course of a few thousand year period. A lot of us can mistake that (for want of any other information) as "These are the ships Chaos Marines use". The Imperium is vast. Those ship designs are a fraction of the whole, over the course of 10,000 years.

 

A lot of the discrepancy is because of game balance. The Chaos fleets had to be different to the Imperial ones, so they ended up frequently being M32-M36-era vessels that Chaos stole, etc.

 

Still bugs me, though.

[minigun762]

I am loving the personal responses detailing how and why you came up with the size of your own warband and its ability to get from point A to B. They all come across as likely methods and no two are the same, which is very telling when it comes to the nature of Chaos forces.

 

It looks like I'm not alone in wanting to find that balance between a reasonable number of ships, marines and support staff and where it crosses the line into absurdity. I tend to rely on defining "what is normal" and then making sure that I don't drift too far from that standard, but here we see that "normal" can be a great many things and they all work.

 

I do find it funny that the Styx class heavy cruiser is a common choice. It is almost always the first warship that I consider for my fleets because its somewhere between a battle barge and a strike cruiser and it has enough speed, firepower and most importantly attack craft to be a real threat to anything.

[Ah-a-nothepsis]

Styx class heavy cruiser is a common choice

 

More importantly, it looks super cool ^.~

[Trevak Dal]

My Tzeentch Warband has no ships (It uses the webway!) and if we don't count rubrics then it has 18 marines ;)

 

That sounds pretty cool, they just Slide right into battle.

[Kraull the Rampager]

Actually, mind if I hijack the thread for a little bit...

 

What are some people's idea's for types of warships? I've never really played BFG, or even looked into it. So the kinds of ships I see and read about are just cool descriptions with no real "Sounds cool, but in reality, it's terrible." kind of experience...

 

I just kinda keep with the general "Cruiser" description...Though I would like to see what kinds of Warships are available.

 

Also. My idea of a Space Hulk is essentially a dug out asteroid fitted with engines and weapons....Much like Ork Roks. Sound about right?

[totgeboren]

Well BFG is avalible for free from the GW website, and all the ships that have been added by fans and such are also avalible for free.

 

A nice thing about the ships in BFG is that none is really "terrible". Ok, some ship types are configured to only work in large fleet engagements, like being equipped excursively with long range lances. This sort of ship will struggle in one on ones with just about anyone, and if you base your warband on just one of these ships, it will be kinda odd how they could survive.

 

But generally the ships in BFG all have their worth, and fluff-wise fit in any setting.

 

One can say there are Battleships, Grand Cruisers, (heavy cruisers, which are really just cruisers with some extra gear), cruisers, light cruisers and escorts, going from biggest to smallest.

 

And regarding space hulks, they can be many things. Many are described as a conglomeration of old ships and debris, some are more or less asteroids reworked for war, and some might be the combined work of thousands of years of expansion, addition and reworking of a massive ship. And others are all of the above, so you can make it as you wish.

[Lord_Caerolion]

This is why I prefer the Rogue Trader ship-creation method a little more, although it obviously only really works on a smaller scale, rather than with fleet creation. Basically, you choose a hull, which has a certain amount of space within it, and then you've got a load of different engines, gellar fields, weapons and other components to choose from. The only stuff you must include is the engine, warp drive, gellar field, shields, bridge and auspex. After that, everything is optional, whether you want to load up on guns, cargo bays, launch bays, teleportariums, or anything else. The only thing you're limited by is the amount of stuff your hull can fit, and the amount of power your engine can generate to power everything. Of course, it only really presents Imperial stuff, although it does list some cool archaeotech, and the occasional bit of xeno-tech. Sadly, no player-usable Chaos stuff (as of yet).

So far, the hull classes include transports, raiders, frigates, light cruisers, cruisers and grand cruisers (although I'm not entirely sure about that last one, it was in the Battlefleet expansion). So far they haven't included battleships, because they're pretty much beyond capacity to get one, although they might add them later. Some day, I'll create a ship from that for my own warband.

[TheDarkApostle]

One of the annoying (and often overlooked) limits of BFG is that a lot of the Chaos fleets - as in, their classes of ships - aren't Heresy-era ships at all. While it makes sense that not all Chaos vessels are Heresy-era, it completely misses out the fact that a lot of Chaos Marine vessels will be Heresy-era vessels, and many more will be daemon-engines or previously unseen classes of warships made in the Eye of Terror.

 

So as a reference, BFG can fall a little flat: it shows the classes of Chaos vessels in one subsector, over the course of a few thousand year period. A lot of us can mistake that (for want of any other information) as "These are the ships Chaos Marines use". The Imperium is vast. Those ship designs are a fraction of the whole, over the course of 10,000 years.

 

A lot of the discrepancy is because of game balance. The Chaos fleets had to be different to the Imperial ones, so they ended up frequently being M32-M36-era vessels that Chaos stole, etc.

 

Still bugs me, though.

The good thing with them however is as a reference sample of various cruiser designs who can rather be invoked as "catch-all" phrases to describe a ship of similar configuration.

 

Like how Space Marine Battle barges are always Battle barges even though they can look like pretty much anything and with pretty much any configuration.

 

So then you can gave a Heresy-era ship which you call a Styx since that's the configuration it has, and you won't have to go though coming up with a bazillion new names for vessels whose only real difference is the millennium they were created in. :)

 

TDA