Battlefleet Insurrection

[simison]

When I'm doing particularly well on my posts, I figure I can drop a post here and there to create our own version of the infamous BFG. This thread will serve that purpose. I have found a PDF of the original game and will use that as my guide. The only caveat being is that I will probably be next to useless as far as rules are concerned. 

 

That all said, first question: what should the name be? Should it be named after a particular Battlefleet? Should it have more of a generic name? 

[ShadowSwordmaster]

Name it after a famous naval battle durning the Insurrection or a Battlefleet.

[TheBlindPrimarch]

BATTLEFLEET BLIND TALON!

In recognition :)

[Grifftofer]

Just checking sim. Did you get one of the versions that has the Armada and 2010 FAQ amendments? Or grab those separately?

[simison]

Grifft, this is the page and PDFs I found: http://www.forum.specialist-arms.com/index.php?topic=5203.0

[Grifftofer]

Yep. That's fine :) Just wanted to check. *Begins pondering spaceships*

[Doctor Perils]

Hum, I'm not sure about this, but one campaign in which massive fleets from both sides would do battle is the Blood Crusade - I know the participating Legions aren't the best known for Void Warfare, but that's possibly for the best, to represent "normal" factions. It's also got the potential for adding variety with Daemon Ships under the Eagle Warriors and Berserkers of Uran, and it would be fairly easy to then expand geographically into the Suzerainty faction.

So my proposition is this

 

Battlefleet: Dominion

[bluntblade]

Be a bit early to have actual daemon ships.

[simison]

I echo Blunt. Even the Eagle Warriors don't have daemon ships yet. 

 

Though Thorn does have a point. Do we need to set the game post-Suzerainty so that they're properly represented?

[Grifftofer]

Well unless we intend to change the base rules in some way then all we're really looking to do is create fleet lists (or maybe even just one fleet list) to represent the ships of the Insurrection. In which case why change the name at all?

 

If we go with multiple lists then I'd suggest naming them after the main 'bases' of the various groups: "Battlefleet Solar", "Battlefleet Akira" and "Battlefleet Strela". (Not sure about the last one, but maybe someone else has a better idea)

[simison]

Well, I know I was planning on different Legions giving different benefits to their ships, but I guess that has no impact on a faction basis. 

[Beren]

Given that the Void Eagles are the void warfare legion that should probably be represented in some way . Also the Harbingers and Iron Bears seem to have above norm quality ships, with the Berserkers and Drowned being more acquisitive, so things like that could be represented if anyone thinks it is worth it

[Kelborn]

Well, I know I was planning on different Legions giving different benefits to their ships, but I guess that has no impact on a faction basis. 

 

I concur.

The canon Legions did some modifikations on their ships. I'm curious of what our guys would do.

 

For the Preds, I'm a bit torn on either focusing on speed (like the Scars) or shadow capabilities (like the Raven Guard) in order to fit their theme the most. I'm tending to speed as this would allow them to outmaneuver their enemies and overwhelm them afterwards.

[Doctor Perils]

I'd say make a Base legion list (a difficult enough task on its own I imagine), plus probably a Mechanicum list. Once that's ready and playable, have optional modifications open to certain legions, but not necessarily have it done for every legion - canon scars, raven and death guards have unique modifications, and the Word Bearers and Imperial Fists have unique ships (or ship classes), but there isn't all that much said about specific differences for other Legions.

 

Edit : the Suzerainty wouldn't be far off the Maelstrom (relatively to the size of segmentum solar) so something between Madrigal, Delos, Fenris and some of the southern parts of the Suzerainty could be possible for the "published setting" (in the same way the gothic sector was the setting for the original game)

[simison]

[Per Grifft's request. Let me know if its too long.]

 

The Dominion of Reason had been the personal flagship of Lord Protector Pyrrhicles for near a century before its eventual capture by the newly-named Harbingers at Madrigal. Granted the warship upon being promoted to Alexandros' Equerry, it was originally a Goliath-class battleship. A hard brawler, Pyrrhicles often wielded its armour as a potent offensive weapon as it allowed the warship to close the distance with its foes before pummeling at close range. 

 

In 002.M31, the Dominion underwent a refit as Pyrrhicles sought to make the venerable ship a better reflection upon Pyrrhicles' status as Equerry to the Warmaster. With the increasing necessity of diplomacy over combat, a portion of the Dominion's armour would be stripped to allow for increased travel speeds. At the same, a more advanced communication array was installed, along side several ambassadorial suites. Finally, the Dominion received a series of upgrades to change it to a battle barge. Although not as capable of planetary assaults as the dedicated classes of battle barge, the Dominion was more than capable of unleashing its complement of Legionaries to devastating impact. 

 

For three decades, the Dominion of Reason served its master exceptionally, whether on the fields of war or of peace. The Battle of Madrigal would interrupt this faithful service and see its master slain at the hands of traitorous cousins. Yet, its fate would carry onto the future...

[bluntblade]

I really don't think weight of armour has much bearing on speed in the void, let alone the Warp.

[Talonair]

Acceleration would be a factor to consider, as well as deceleration

[Chief Captain Redd]

Overall speed wouldn't be an issue; but leaving planetary orbits and gravity wells in general would be an issue with increased mass. Not that time would be different necessarily, but fuel expenditure would be greater to achieve escape velocity.

[Grifftofer]

Okay, so, I've been running through the Battlefleet Gothic Rules, with an attempt to understand it and how ships are built, with an attempt to create a Gloriana Class.

 

The Gloriana Class ships are seemingly much more than simply 1-off vessels that were gifted to the legion; the Alpha Legion had 2 vessels, the Word Bearers had a Gloriana Class called the Chronicle of Ashes, Abaddon had a ship called the Harbinger of Doom which was a Gloriana (going by the 40k Wikia article), and Battlefleet Solar's Amphion was also a Gloriana. However, these aren't sourced materials, so it's really hard to justify which are pointless bloat added by later 40K Writers adding worfism into their works.

 

That said, I think the Legion Ships could do with being modified, but my hope was to create a Generic "Gloriana" Class vessel, above that of the Battleship class.

 

Going by sizing (which is apparently to scale) the Cobra Destroyer (Escort Class) in Book III; Extermination was around 812px, for a 1.5km sized vessel; the Tribune (Victory Class Battleship) in comparison was around 4841px; give or take the spare change, 6 times its length; 9km in length in total; this puts the Contrador (A Legatus Class Battlebarge) differentiation from the BFG Battlebarge Model in that it has a 7 Port/Starboard oriented guns at around 8.3km, and the much larger Iron Blood Gloriana at around 18.3km in total length.

 

So these Gloriana are huge.

 

However, we have slight discrepancy with some of the other Battleship sizes. The Battlebarge is a Battleship/12, which is the same as an Apocalypse Class Battleship, at 4km in size, which is also a Battleship/12. However, that I feel is nonsense, as another article (again, unsourced, god damn that wikia), lists Light Cruisers as 4km, and Heavy Cruisers at 6km, with nothing with respect to Grand Cruisers, so I'm comfortable enough to ignore that Apocalypse Class is sized too small. By comparison, the Grand Cruisers, Cruisers, and Light Cruisers are Cruiser/10, Cruiser/8 and Cruiser/6 Respectively. I do get that size isn't everything when it comes to hull density, but when a "Light Cruiser" is apparently the same size as a Battleship, skipping two size categories feels a bit off.

 

I think that gives us a rough indication of the size of hull to expect from a ship.

 

8km+= Battleship/12 (Perhaps Battlebarge Sized are slightly smaller in order to give them greater speed/maneuverability, which the Iron Warriors then mitigated by throwing four heavier guns and up armouring her).

8km = Cruiser/10

6km = Cruiser/8

4km = Cruiser/6

1.5km = Escort/1

 

In reference to this, the Planet Killer is a Battleship/14, while Eldar Light Cruisers are Cruiser 4. An Ork Hulk is "Defense/40", while a Rok is Defense/8; their Battleships however are more conventional in that they are Battleship/8. A Dormant Blackstone Fortress by Comparison has Defense/16.

 

My Suggestion would be to make all Gloriana "Battleship/18" vessels. This means that they're a lot more resilient than the typical Battleship (although it's not as though they especially need it), rather than simply being a scalar uptick. This gives them 1.5* the amount of hits that they can take. The rest of the defenses of a Battleship is it's Speed, it's Maximum Turn, any Shields it may have, Armour, and the amount of turrets. This Battleship/18 can allow factions like the Steel Legion, Iron Bears to increase the amount of Hits the ship can take, without that benefit being made less useful by simply doubling it (+1 Hit at 18 is a larger percentage increase than +1 Hit at 24), but is also not unmanageable in a game.

 

Most Imperial Battleships have a speed of 15cm; however, the Retribution Class has 20cm, as does the Space Marine Battle Barge, and the 40k-ified Plagued Terminus Est, being the typical for a Space Marine vessel. The Desolator Class Chaos Ship in BFG 40k has a 25cm speed, however, and is noted to be Pre-Heresy, but whether it was intentionally designed to have a 25cm Speed, or if that's as a result of the Chaosification, or design changes wrought post Heresy, I'm unsure; given that most Imperial Cruisers (excluding the Dauntless Class, and Space Marine Strike Cruiser, which are 25cm) are limited to 20cm Speed, I think that 15cm should be a given for the standard Dauntless, while specifically faster Gloriana (such as the Void Eagles, or the Drowned, may have their specific Gloriana increased to 20cm. (Apologies, not au fait yet with everyone's vessel designations to pass a further judgement).

 

Turn Speed; 45 degrees without a doubt should be the limit. It's not until you get to Light Cruisers that you can do 90 degree turns. I'm not even sure that a Legion might have any ability to turn quicker than this.

 

Shields; with the exception of the Space Marine Battlebarge, 4 is the expected value of the amount of Shields a Battleship has. Thus, the suggestion is that the Gloriana takes 5 Shields. This gives those Legions who can are more tanky to take an additional Shield (Iron Bears, Steel Legion, perhaps Void Eagles again).

 

Armour; Most Battleships have an Armour Value of 5, but some have Armoured Prows giving an Armour Value of 6+; I don't think that there would be any problem with granting a Gloriana Class, of all the ships in the game, an Armour of 6+.

 

Turrets; It seems that the average is 4, but the Emperor Class and Oberon Class pack 5, while the Battlebarge packs only 3, which is the same as Grand Cruisers; Cruisers have 2, Light Cruisers usually have 2, while Escorts have 1 or 2 themselves. Given the size of the Gloriana; I think that 6 would be a fine amount of turrets to have.

 

The other universal trait that Battleships have is that they cannot use the Come to New Heading Order. Given that it's a larger ship, I think the Gloriana should match that. However, I think that given we have a Legion who has Yucahu as their Primarch, having the Primarch as the Admiral, in their Gloriana, should give them an additional benefit past just Ld10 and rerolls, and I think that the Void Eagles Gloriana should be able to make use of the "Come To New Heading" as a result of his skills.

 

Anyway, before we get into that, here is what the proposition is for the hull (still working on the weapons) of the Gloriana Class.

 

Edit; Uploaded the file, and realised I've just placed it as Battleship/12, rather than Battleship/18, my bad. Will update when I get a chance.

Ok. Here we go.

 

I've actually started to do a reasonable amount of the background work with regards to stat-ing up the new classes of ships, including the Glorianas.

 

I agree that the Gloriana should be something of a cut above the regular battleships, but I don't believe that it should be to the extent that you suggest. My experience of playing the game and browsing various forums where the game is discussed has led me to believe that there comes a point at which you cannot simply scale up all of the stats and have the game remain balanced.

 

For example the shields of a ship are supposed to be roughly capable of deflecting the firepower of a single ship of the same class each turn. This was part of the design philosophy of the game and forces you to position your ships to take advantage of their various weapons so that you can bring multiple ships to target a single enemy. A ship with 4 shields requires a pretty hefty amount of firepower to be directed at it to bring those down and by increasing that by 25% you increase the toughness of the ship overall by nearly that amount because the shields regenerate each turn.

 

Another is Turrets. The turrets value isn't simply a reflection of the number that a ship has, but rather of the density of said turrets. The other thing is that turrets interact with bombers in such a way that having a ship with 6 turrets makes it almost completely immune to attack craft. (I know turret suppression is a thing, but at that point the attack waves would need to be so big as to be insane. Or the waves themselves would do little to no damage due to lack of bombers in them at all.)

 

Anyway moving away from my critique of your suggestions I do agree on the point of certain Legions having access to certain ship upgrades that fit with their methods of war as well as the fact that the Gloriana's should be unique and customisable in some way so I think it's best if I share what I've thought of so far and then we can discuss how we can improve on it

 

Unfortunately my time for being available to write this post and assemble the associated resources has run out so it may have to wait until tomorrow (Sorry!)

[Grifftofer]

Ok. I scrounged some time from my significant other to finish this off

 

So this is my proposed base profile for the Gloriana. It's overall probably a little weaker than needed, but I'd rather build it up than try and cut it apart later. However in addition I've written a small number of modifications that can be taken by various Imperial forces as well as a couple that are specific to the Gloriana itself. The whole of my proposed Crusade Era Fleet List is in the following two images:

As can, hopefully, be seen the Gloriana has three unique upgrades:

1. It can upgrade it's prow armour to 6+ and reduce its speed to 15cm. This means that if you would rather play a more traditionally 'Imperial' fleet you can do so. [it should be noted that there rather than use the Imperial or Chaos designation we named the two major hull types Invictus (Imperial) and Profundis (Chaos). A third hull design as seen on the Space Marine style ships has been tentatively called Zalmoxite]
2. The Gloriana can be turned into a hybrid or full carrier by swapping its lances for launch bays meaning that a fully converted carrier Gloriana can put out the same amount of attack craft as an Emperor, which is a fairly major thing.
3. The Gloriana can swap one or both of it's Torpedoes for Nova Cannons to represent the fearsome and unique prow weapons that have been seen on Heresy era ships.

Now I'd like to think that by combining the Gloriana with the array of Upgrades that I've written means that we can use the base above to represent the flagships of the Primarchs or the Arc Mechanicus ships or any other huge unique vessel we might wish to. Of course I'm more than willing to discuss any/all of the above in order to try and balance the ship both in terms of fluff and crunch (I'm sure there is a right balance to be struck even if our approaches have fallen either side of it).

 

EDIT: I should mention that I really liked your idea of having Yucahu letting his capital ship use Come to New Heading. If we can come up with alternatives for other Primarchs I am more than willing to include them. It's just when I was trying to I struggled to come up with suitable rules for more than a few Primarchs and so went with a more generic version for ease (as well as the reasons stated in the red box).

[bluntblade]

Goodness, Grifft

[Grifftofer]

Goodness, Grifft

I'm going to assume that is an exclamation of how impressed you are, rather than shocked at how I use of my free-time ;)

 

And trust me this is nothing. As Talon and I were working through the various ship classes I figured out how I thought they would look in terms of the Gothic rules and wrote a spreadsheet of notes on them. I'm slowly working my way through them to transfer them into profiles like above, but its low priority stuff so I've been coasting on it in the last few weeks.

[bluntblade]

But of course

[Grifftofer]

Ok. So I need to get some feedback in relation to implementation of the Glorianas (or other massive ships) in BFG. This issue is that I feel both of the systems I'm about to suggest have merits and my mind has been chasing both around in circles going from one to the other and back again for most of the weekend. Maybe you guys will be able to push me one way or another.

 

So the TLDR version of what I'm about to break down is that we could either go with what I'm terming the "Space Hulk" approach where we give each ship a potentially large number of hull points (health) and it works much like a normal ship, save certain exceptions for being massive and unwieldy. Then there is the "Ramilies" approach where we can break down the ship into various components (Probably Prow, Starboard, Aft and Port) and each is almost treated as a separate entity save they move together on the one base. Both of these approaches have been used before in BFG by their namesakes and thus are both viable as options.

 

Space Hulk Approach

So the foundation of this approach is to try and keep things relatively simple in terms of using the same style of profile as other ships. In fact a small Gloriana would be functionally identical to a Battleship in terms of it's capabilities. However as Hull Points rise the ship would be subject to more restrictions to it's maneuverability due purely to inertia and at the highest levels suffer a Leadership penalty (to represent the delay in sending orders across a ship so big).

 

The advantage of this approach is that the rules are relatively straight forwards and familiar. Ships above a certain size suffer decreasing options for maneuvering, but become implacable beasts that must be whittled away at because they cannot be slowed or crippled, merely constantly bombarded until they're destroyed. Another positive in my mind is that we can use a nice neat parallel of a Gloriana having Hull Points equal to its length in kilometers (I've been coming round to Hesh's viewpoint with regards to Gloriana strength), which is an abstraction I quite like.

 

The disadvantage is that A ship of this kind has to be the centre of any battle, because it can't be ignored. You have to keep constant pressure on it in order to minimise its return fire and that means you can't focus on other aspects of an opponent's fleet. The other thing is that balancing something like this is quite hard. A ship with three times the health and double the firepower of a battleship should be worth a hell of a lot. But is it really worth three times the cost? Or is it worth more because it takes such a long time and effort to deal with? The other thing is that a ship like this has to observe certain limitations with regards to its profile. For example because shields regenerate giving a ship an extra shield can amount to 1HP per turn of the game. Likewise Turrets if taken up to 6 make the ship immune to bombers unless there is some method of countering that. What this means is that in spite of its huge health pool a Gloriana of this style might very relatively impotent defensively.

 

Ramilies Approach

The focus of this approach is that by breaking the larger ship down into smaller parts you make a ship that is more manageable overall and allows more options in the way of counter-play from your opponent. The individual components would be of similar Hull values to other ships, but with shielding equal to a battleship which would let opponents concentrate firepower on certain sections to try and create 'safe zones' where they are under less intense fire because they have disabled that section of the ship.

 

Now the advantages of this are that you can create a more interesting and dynamic game because this ship isn't a huge monolith that has to be destroyed, but rather a number of sections that can be dealt with individually as needed. This also helps with points cost because a ship that is divided in this way, even if it has as much health as a ship using the above method, will cost less because it is more a number of individual components that happen to be grouped together. Another benefit is that each section can have it's own value for shields so overall the ship will feel more potent defensively.

 

The disadvantages are that because of the way the ship is composed the profile looks somewhat different to the normal one. Also the additional rules that are needed to cover such a construction are more long-winded and complex than the above approach. Finally, because the sections are relatively weaker and each is focused on dealing with a specific direction it means that if a section is crippled/destroyed the amount that the controlling player can do about that is minimal due to the relatively limited maneuvering of a ship the size of a Gloriana.

 

 

So that's all I have to say on the matter for now. Its just been something that has plagued my thoughts so I hope some of you have a preference for one of the above so I can settle the issue. If you've got any questions feel free to ask

[simison]

Which approach works better for ramming? (Asking for Mikhal)