If Dominators are so vitally important to your fleet that you absolutely MUST have more than two of these per 750 points, you need to develop better tactics, not to mention you have some very forgiving (or naive) opponents.
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I don't care how much you play BFG; if your strategy as an IN player is to field as many NC's as you can cram into a fleet, you need to develop better tactics.
If you cannot run up against an all NC fleet with a reasonable battle plan then you need to develop better tactics. If you cannot run up against an all NC fleet with equanimity and poise then you need to develop better sportsmanship. It's just as munchkinish to whine about NC spam to the point that we impose a limit on them as it is to take them beyond the proposed limit.
Hi Sigoroth! When introducing a new player to the game, they shouldn’t have to resort to reasonable battle plans and well-practiced tactics in order to avoid getting wiped off the table in four turns before their own fleet even gets more than a few shots off. I know how to handle myself against an all-NC fleet, as do you, Horizon and a host of other players here. However, BFG was never intended to be a game for purists- it’s supposed to be a game I can grab some nine-year-old (my son was 7 when he first played back in 2001), teach him the basics, give him some ships and have a good time. Having a good time is the key here, as it is for any game.
Smearing some noob just because I can hide behind rules to do so means the rules are broken. That means either there are too many of a particular weapon system allowed, or the weapon itself needs to be toned down. Because we are not revisiting Nova Cannon at this time, the alternative is to restrict the number of this weapon allowed.
Letting an Imperial fleet have all the NC’s it wants is like saying Chaos can treat Planet Killers like any other battleship and have one for every three cruisers, and we aren’t doing that either.
As for the notion that they're rare, well there are 2 points that specifically address this. Firstly ships are in the process of being refitted to NC, so they're becoming more and more common as time goes on. Since they were described as rare in the BBB which was back in the 12th crusade there has been a fair amount of time elapsed since then. There's been another black crusade and then the Tau expansion since.
Secondly, while NC might indeed be rare throughout the IN as a hole, there's no reason to suppose an even distribution. There might be entire battlefleets armed with pure NC fitted ships and many more battlefleets with not a single one. It actually makes sense to form a NC battlegroup, so this isn't terribly implausible.
Here Sigoroth you are dead-on accurate. A Kar Durniash fleet list would likely be particularly NC-heavy were we to rely entirely on fluff. Just because it is fluff-true doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in game terms. Three Blackstone Fortresses killed an entire star! Do you propose we allow someone to field three Blackstone Fortresses, let them draw a straight line all the way across the table and auto-kill anything the template touches? Rules dictate fluff, not vice versa. Regardless of how much sense fluff makes, we can’t use fluff to create inherently broken rules.
Sometime in the future we can re-visit NC’s to create a toned-down weapon that can be taken without restriction. However, since that is NOT something we are visiting right now, the quick and dirty solution is to restrict how many of these can be in a fleet, keeping in mind that 2 per 750 is not too terrible a restriction.
My own personal love of the Dominator stems from a number of factors. First it has complimentary weaponry. That is to say that while closing the Dom can shoot away at long range with its NC and by the time it gets to the minimum range cut-off its broadside weaponry will be able to take over. Secondly, being a "pure" ship its easier to manoeuvre to best effect. Thirdly, WBs can end up doing significantly more damage than their equivalent weight of lances when positioned well.
While the NC does factor into these preferences, it's not because it's an overpowered weapon, or because of its psychological effect or because of how it performs in numbers. It's really just the complimentary nature of the weapons, the ranges and the approach utility, that lends itself to the Doms selection.
So, I want to have the option of taking as many Doms as I like, simply because I like Doms, rather than because I like the NC so much. In fact, I never take the NC option of the Lunar or Tyrant (well, I never take the Tyrant anyway).
You have already told me how much you dislike Tyrants!
Personally I like Dominators myself, enough so that I modeled them distinctly from my Tyrants, which I happen to like a bit more than you do. From a tactics perspective, I think the biggest reason you dislike Tyrants so much is precisely because of how they compare to Dominators when used as a prow-on fleet. I find however that when used tactically (meaning NOT when equipped with NC’s), they are a fine ship that pairs quite nicely with Gothics, especially if you spend the points for all-45cm batteries and maneuvering a Gothic between them and the knife fight. That’s just me however.
- Nate
