Battlefleet Borealis Fleet Action

[Tves]

Disclaimer *Does contain homebrew hybrid rules of Dystopian Wars Fleet Action and Battlfleet Gothic. Read at your own peril*

Background.
There is a rather decent group of us Battlefleet Gothic gamer's here in Iceland, we have in the last year or three run a few campaigns and had all sorts of fun along the way, but the dated BFG rules and mostly the chaotic list creation rules and loopholes always had us trying to find a fix for it. (putting band-aids on a mummy like someone said). But then few months ago we had our first Dystopian Wars game, using the fleet action booklet included in the Battle for Iceland box, which we purchased as a lark for the name alone. I think it was about 5 minutes into round 2 that we realized this system could very well work for BFG.
And thus Battlefleet Borealis Fleet Action was born.

The Rules
Now obviously this is no small task, translating all of BFG over to DWFA rules and then adjusting it all to fit the flavor and feel of gothic. But we went ahead with the fleets we planned on playing in the next campaign (based from the Flashpoint rules from DW 2.5 rulebook). Sadly the campaign crumbled in around itself due to time constraints and perhaps overly ambitious roster to begin with. But that is another tale.
So back on point, I started working on converting the Imperial, Chaos, Tau and Dark Eldar over to the new rules. Along with writing up the ammended fleet action rules, since there were a few things we liked to add.
The Current end result is the 1.2 version of the BB:FA ruleset, which is pretty much the base Fleet Action rules, with the carrier and commodore rules from 2.5 added into the mix. You can find a link to the bland PDF for the basic rules in the spoiler tag here below.
[spoiler]https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3PR13mHjHIxVUZtaGE1cGhUTVE[/spoiler]
We've done a couple of things differently from fleet action due to model constraints and play styles. That is mixed SAW wings are allowed, and the same goes for squadrons of ships. We found that very few players have the multiple copies of a single cruiser type that are nearly required to be fielded for things to work in BB:FA.

The Fleets
The main problem of course has been translating the fleets over to the new rules sets. I've so far based this heavily on the original BFG stats to keep things familiar and maintain expectations of abilities for the players. But more than that, we needed to attempt to maintain the fleet and flavor of each fleet across the changeover. But with the larger scale fights changes needed to be made. The multitudes of ships that have the exact same model (Murder/Carnage, Tyrant/Dominator etc) were simply consolidated into one of the two. And usually the one more commonly used in our group or the one that is more tactically interesting in the case of a little known types. You can find copies of all the current fleet documents here below. Work has started on the Ork fleet, with Tyranids, Necrons and Eldar coming next.

Imperial Navy
[spoiler]https://drive.google.com/open?id=11F6_J9KdHiiEj0x75eR_zQB01DZnmlwS5grEU3ctOnc[/spoiler]
Imperial Allies
[spoiler]https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hnZyCVa2WB-BEMusBHEs7Qvt3KmXik9nNv_PhrElKHc[/spoiler]
Tau Empire
[spoiler]https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VEfCwROT38ghACmdt1eAxaza9pxxawhmQ7V1YgP1O1Q
[/spoiler]
Chaos
[spoiler]https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HI02hSdKtrvb3XtoUag05ZINOuh2XfyoCETxVYSnHd4[/spoiler]
Dark Eldar
[spoiler]https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PpQ6bb9a25szxiImCabkSqicg7LggkvMQLU2nr3uQ5c[/spoiler]


All these documents are from my own Google Drive. And I sincerely hope you can find the time and motivation to read these and give some feedback, or better yet take these and play a game or three with them reporting back what you think. We've done some limited play testing already but there is no such thing as too much play testing is there?

Anyway, thank you for reading if you made it this far. And as always play more games!

-Tves

[Victor]

One of the armament we are still testing for theme is torpedoes.

Current setup is just direct strike with active defence for counter but the following ideas have been thrown around:

• Torps get 100% damage/shots/dice increase but fire using fixed arc rules (meens implementing those to FA)
• Torps get 50% damage/shots/dice increase but line of fire can not be drawn through ship bases
• Torps count as boarding dice, you get to shoot them down before the roll is made

Comments and ideas welcome.

[Fracas]

Very interesting

Have you played it out?

[Tves]

Yes so far all the fleets have been played at least once. Although not every ship has been used yet. We are planning a large 4 player battle tonight. Imperial vs Tau. Aiming for a 1000 points per player. So it will be a crazy slugfest.

We had to do a few changes to the system for it to maintain the old Gothic feel, for example collisions and LOS blocking is out since well space is big as they say. Then we ran into a minor problem with model availability, that is due to the singular nature of BFG not many people have multiple copies of the same cruiser. So we are experimenting with mixed squadrons, something made possible due to the much simpler weapon selection in BFG.

The game works, (obviously) and so far I think we've managed to keep the essence of Battlefleet Gothic in a rule set that is a lot faster in resolution. The Naval rules of DW:FA are a good fit since Gothic is based on Dreadnaught - early WW2 era naval action. Its pretty much Dystopian Wars in space if we are honest.

I'll do my best to give a proper recounting of the game tonight, both here and on facebook

[Fracas]

Looking forward to your report

[Tves]

So we had our battle, and it was huge. 1000 points a player under the BBFA rules, is far more than we had really realised. Especially since there were 4 of us, so 2000 points of imperials vs 2000 points of Tau. On a standard 6x4 table loaded with asteroid fields. Things were going to get bloody fast.

I'm not entirely certain on what exactly made it to the table. But here is a short list from the top of my head.
Tau force
2x Custodians
3x Protectors
1 Explorer
2 Heroes
1 Demiurg Stronghold
2 Demiurg Bastions

And a smattering of lesser vessels to fill up the points.

Imperials had
An Emperor class Fleet Carrier
A Mars Battlecruiser
A Dominion Battlecruiser
A Mercury Battlecruiser
Some 3-4 Gothic class
A pair of Lunars
A tyrant
5 Dauntless light cruisers
and a smattering of lesser vessels.

I'm not going to write a play by play battle report, but the system works well enough, a few kinks (mostly carrier action oriented) that need to be looked at. But boy how things get deadly in the Fleet Action rules. We had entire cruiser squadrons torn apart with Tau shooting, a battleship rendered nearly to slag in a single bombing run, we saw the insane firepower of a Stronghold utterly fail to do a dammed thing, we saw 2 Sword Escorts manage a damage roll on a battleship only to roll snake eyes and cause minor disruption. All in all quite a hectic five hour fight (yes it was long).

But since then there has been some work. I've made a rudimentary method of determining point values on ships based on the actual stats (MAR's and their effects are still judgement based since it would require far to many variables to do properly in a math format). This saw some changes in the point values of the ships. High jumpers were the hideously under priced Explorer Class and the Despoiler class battleship in the Chaos fleet.

Also victory points were normalised to account for the fact that this setting is not 1870 earth, and battleships are simply just larger vessels, as the DWFA has Large Models at nearly triple the VP of a medium ship. at perhaps only double the cost. Making the Tau fleet severely disadvantaged when it came to VP on the table. We did take some photos and I've added them here at the bottom. Perhaps next time we'll do a proper battle report and playtest rather than just a game.

[Fracas]

Looks like an awesome game