how do the french play?

[aktr]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to DW (kind of, see my roll call post)

Anyway I'm half way through painting my FSA which of course means my thoughts are turning to my next fleet

I'm contemplating the French (mostly because the get floaty boats) but I'm not sure how they will play

so what is there play style like?

Cheers

Andy

[Quickdraw]

The French have a really nice “customization is key” fleet. They have a lot of ship options with a lot of possible fleet compositions to do different things. For instance, I used to often build a slow, defensive fleet that was able to get decent AD numbers from heat lance attacks and stay at arms length. More recently I’ve been building a very fast and aggressive fleet that is great at decimating squadrons with close range gunnery and then boarding.
I’ll list out some fun tricks and features that the French have.

• Heat lance weapons, only fleet to have them, tons of bonuses when attacking
• Almost all secondary weapons, most squadrons can link all of their weapons in one attack
• Cloud generators, the large ships are hit on a 5, this gives your opponent a real headache
• High AA values and redoubtable AA, you almost don’t have to worry about rockets or SAS...almost

I think the French are a really fun fleet to play. I always feel like I’m able to try new stuff instead of getting locked into the “only one good strategy” mindset.

[Amiral X]

As a RoF player I would add to the above comments (that are perfectly exact !) a few thing :

- RoF most of the time run "heavy" fleet as their large/massive are ones of the toughtest in the game, while their medium are papier-made...
- Skimmer models offer very interresting manovering options !
- The orbat is not completly balanced as RoF have 2 dread, 5-6 differents battleships but no large airship for exemple... and the smallest carrier is the 180pts couronne...

Neverthless, RoF is my prefered faction just on top of FSA; and the 2 gameplay are really different !

[aktr]

Cheers chaps
the hard part at the moment will probably getting hold of the models

my other interest for a new faction are the Russians and the PLC

[aktr]

• Almost all secondary weapons, most squadrons can link all of their weapons in one attack

hang on have I been doing something wrong, I thought to link fire weapons needed to be called the same thing so you can link broadside (s) with broadside (s) but you cant link fore turret (s) with broadside (s)

have I bee doing this wrong?

[Amiral X]

You can link weapons of the same class (P, S or T) as long as they are not specialized weapons, in which case you can link only with same type of specialized weapons. For example :
- you can link broadside (s) with turret (s)
- you can link Leat lance (s) with heat lancette (s) and Heat flash broadside (s) as they are all heat type specialized weapons
- but you cannont link broadside (s) with heatlance (s) as the heat lance is a specialized "heat" type weapon
- you can also link tesla turret with spearschleuder even if they are not the same name as speerschleuder is among the Tesla type specialized weapons...

Same for torpedoes with torpedoes, bombs with bombs, and rocket with rocket, regardless the rockets are rocket battery, rocket broadside or rocket turret for example !

[Landlubber]

Plus they're a cool looking fleet!

I have to second what QuickDraw said about the heat lance weapons. Some good bonuses for that weapon system.