Orks... Flawed Ships

[trynerror]

Do you know the Light Gaugha Kroozer from the (no longer available) Armageddon3 campain page ?

This is the text of the page:

The Gouga is a relatively rare Ork vessel, but a single ship can cause immense damage against any opposing fleet. Though it is very weakly armed when compared to other Ork ships, its main armament comprises of two huge klaws and a boarding drill mounted in the prow. The klaws are used to snare an enemy ship as the boarding drill extends and bores deep into the target. The drill then splits open and hundreds of prepared Orks rush out into the heart of the enemy vessel to create immense devastation. This operation enables the Gouga to destroy ships much larger than itself and an Admiral is wise to target Gougas early in the battle, before it gets a chance to line up on a target and perform a ram.

ORK GOUGA LITE KROOZER    . . . . . . . . . . . . .    95 pts

TYPE/HITS    SPEED    TURNS    SHIELDS    ARMOR    TURRETS
Cruiser/6    20cm    45 degrees    1    6+ front/5+ sides/4+ rear    1

ARMAMENT    RANGE/SPEED    FIREPOWER/STR    FIRE ARC
Port Gunz    30cm    D6    Left
Starboard Gunz    30cm    D6    Right
Prow Heavy Gunz    15cm    4    Front

Notes: The Gouga has powerful gripping klaws mounted in its prow. These are used to grab an enemy ship before the boarding drill drives forward into the captured vessel, disgorging hundreds of Orks into the heart of the ship. When declaring a ram, the Gouga, if it successfully hits its target, may choose to grab the enemy ship and perform a devastating boarding action.

The Klaws will automatically cause one point of damage on the target ship, ignoring shields, as soon as the Gouga moves into contact. No weapons may be fired in the shooting phase as the Gouga performs this special attack.

In the end phase, the Gouga performs a boarding action with an additional +1 modifier as the attacking Orks will be in the most sensitive parts of the enemy ship. Note that during this manoeuvre, the Gouga does not cause normal ram damage.

The klaws count as prow armament for the purposes of critical hits.

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One thing they forgot about the boarding is, that the +1 only negates the "attacker on SO", so to really have a bonus the modifier should be +2

Forgot: the Ship never made it into any book for light kroozers were considered "unfluffy" for Orks. IIRC this design was one of Andy Chambers.

[Plaxor]

Yeah, I kinda incorporated that into my light kroozer design. The klaws/drills need reworking, so I thought that them causing an automatic critical to any ship that touches is a better mechanic. As well the plus one to boarding mod/the fact that it need to AAF is weird. Changed it to just normal boarding, but that the owning player just gets a +1 to boarding modifiers.

I might make two classes, one as a revised gouga, and then another shooty one. Limiting the vessels by points values accordingly, as it is written into the fluff. (i.e. 1 per 500 points)

Thanks!

[trynerror]

I used this ship some times in a campaign some five years ago. Only one timeit made any difference in the game and all the other games it did not get a chance to AAF towards anything. The one time it was ignored until it grabed a Scythe and crippled it ...

Thats my ships:

http://www.tacticalwargames.net/archive/lib/comp/gothicomp09/gothicomp54.html

[Plaxor]

Nice, but it does deserve revision, here is my take:


ORK GOUGA LITE KROOZER    . . . . . . . . . . . . .    95 pts

TYPE/HITS    SPEED    TURNS    SHIELDS          ARMOR                  TURRETS
Cruiser/6         20cm      45'         1         6+ front/5+ sides/4+ rear      1

ARMAMENT    RANGE/SPEED    FIREPOWER/STR    FIRE ARC
Port Gunz    30cm    D6    Left
Starboard Gunz    30cm    D6    Right
Prow Heavy Gunz    15cm    4    Front

Notes: After declaring a ram, if the gouga makes it to its target it can choose to stop and perform a boarding action as well as the effect of ramming.

If the ship comes into contact with a ship (friend or foe!) it will automatically do a single point of damage ignoring shields

The ship gets an additional +1 boarding modifier due to its drills and saws allowing orks easier access to vulnerable parts of the ship.

The klaws count as prow armament for the purposes of critical hits, and as such all the abilities of the klaws/drills will be lost if a prow damaged critical hit is suffered.


There, got rid of the needless wording, and simplified it (when doing a boarding action you can't shoot anyways). Made the ram work as well as boarding action, as you can do this anyways and there is no need for the complication.

[Plaxor]

This is an ork fleet I ran at our last monthly gothic meetup, note the Hammer conversion with BB bits. The jaw was extended with an additional KK jaw, then the engines were turned upside down and placed under/as a part of the tail fin. Nothing too epic, but it was made to be wysiwyg. Although depending on how this document turns out, I may convert my entire lot to have options.

[Plaxor]

Here's the ship that I put into the orks gib us a brick page.

Basha Class Light Krooza: 90 pts
Cruiser/6 Turns:45 Shields:1 Turrets:1 SPD 25   armor 6/4
Prow Heavy Gunz: 6 front
Port/Starboard Heavy Gunz: 4L/R
Prow Gunz str: D6 30cm range
Soopa Engines

Its decent, and as much as I would like to wrap all light cruisers into one profile, I think people would try to shoot me for not having a seperate Gouga class. As well the name Gouga doesn't warrant itself well to a multitude of ship types. So in the end we will have two. The Basha (probably marauder class) as well as the gouga.

Consideration; after looking over KROOZA's conversions I may include the grabbers as an upgrade for the Kill-Kroozer. It would work exactly the same as for the Gouga, but instead replacing the prow guns and p/s heavy guns with the Klaws. However this would reduce the differences between the two ships.

There are several variants possible, even barring the fluff reasoning that all ork ships are of a small number of basic designs. As well as the lack of plausible variations amongst what we can reasonably ascertain with weapon loadouts and without doing anything strange or radical.

Basically in the case of light cruisers, this would mean an oversized savage, like the ship above,, an oversized ravager, and possibly a large onslaught. Of course there is the case for a smaller carrier as well.

As far as the cruisers/bcs go, well I've covered most possibilities with my upgrade system. Although a variant hammer with lances is justifiable. As well as a larger gouga type vessel.

These of course are just from harvesting examples already mentioned. There could be more interesting upgrades, such as a big mek instead of a warlord, who makes the ship have D3 shields instead of doubling the boarding value.(the shield value would be rolled at the beginning of every turn)

Hmm... maybe that's a good way to make the pirate fleet different, turning their warlords into freeboota kaptains, who give the ships +1 ld instead of doubling boarding value. Or give them both but limit warlords to 0-1. They'll be the most kunning orks alive! As well the warlord of course would be the fleet commander still, just because you are the smartest ork doesn't mean you're in charge!


The unfortunate thing is that currently Orks in BFG are very underrepresented. This is due a lot to the 40k players thinking that the list doesn't feel orky enough. (the HA will argue about how every ork aspect is represented in different ways). That the list itself is grossly underpowered (and most people want to feel like they have a solid chance of winning), and that they don't like the models (which I do, but this is the least of the three worries). These things have made the ork players in BFG come from a different background than those in 40k, like myself, who has never owned an ork 40k army (I actually only owned chaos, imperial guard, and a daemonhunters/witchunters army) to enjoy playing the list more.

Hopefully in this document I will be able to alleviate some of these concerns. The list will at least cover two.

I'm trying to add in some variability to the ships (of course was already represented by random firepower) to cover something that Ork players in general want. Nearly all ork sample lists have tons of options, and looking at The-Waagh's forums they had a rather complicated listing and got some ideas.

[RCgothic]

This is looking a lot less like a fix of the Ork's Flawed ships and more like a complete re-write, which I think is outside the bounds of a Warp-Rift Article.

Since Orks need so much love, would it be too much to ask to wait until the HAs have finished their Ork project before we make any decisions on this?

[Plaxor]

Well, technically it is all covered  in flawed ships. As I wanted to fix everything in every list. From the fleet lists to the upgrades available on the ships.

Yes... the characters and maybe the CLs are going too far. However everything else was for a rebalance of all the ork ships against each other and mathematically. The soopa engines I added in for themeatics, and for the fact that it's represented elsewhere in the fleet.

Ugh, but yes it does feel like a complete rework. Technically I only changed the stats on 6/11 ships. The others just received upgrades. Considering that we changed 17/24 imperial ships, this doesn't seem so bad.

This thread has kind of become my own 'ork creativity/invention' thread. I'm trying my best to work in what people want, and keep things balanced. People I hope come by and comment at some point, but I doubt this section will come to a vote, and will be more loosely malleable.

The article wasn't my original goal for this. I actually was just curious what everyone thought, and was then going to type up a list so I could make changes for my local game group. I will type up the stats/converted listings into a nice pdf, editing it well and mimicing the BBB as much as possible. This will of course include all ships that we didn't change for convenience. I figure this will be an attached document to the article, which will not give numerical values, instead it will be a commentary/review and reasoning from us.

That will be the actual article, a few page discussion on how the changes worked, and our reasoning behind them, much like how I wrote here for each ork ship.

[RCgothic]

As in the message I sent you, I'm more than happy to help out with the article. I'm only suggesting a hold on the ork side of things because it doesn't seem like the community is engaging with this, and the HAs have a rework in progress.

It may be that 17/24 Imperial ships have changed, but the core hasn't - Emperor, Lunar, Gothic, Dominator, Sword and Cobra. In addition, a lot of the changes are minor - Firestorm -5pts, Falchion +1 Turret, Dictator -10pts, Tyrant -5pts, Mars -10pts.

With Orks, the entire core of the fleet needs to change. It seems the only ones you haven't touched are the Character BBs. The more revolutionary the change, the less likely the article us to be accepted, and even the Imperial/Chaos changes will stand or fall depending on whether the Ork section isn't accepted.

I would suggest keeping things extremely simple - add no new ships, use point adjustments where possible, and make a minimum of profile changes.

So what are the Orks main issues? This is what I think:

Hideous vulnerability to bombers.
Underpowered side guns makes it very tricky to line up shots beyond round 1.
Undergunned cruisers, particularly KK.
Moderate Overcosting all round.
Not enough distinction between BBs and Cruisers.
Lack of Variety in cruiser range.

I would suggest limiting the changes to these:

D3 turrets.

Flat gunnery FP buff to those that need it. (increasing the Port/SB heavy guns of the KK would help rebalance it vs the TS)

Price adjustment.

Then if the HAs do anything crazy it won't invalidate too much of what we've done.

[Plaxor]

Hopefully we'll see their work done before we submit the article. Although a lot of their ideas seem weird and ridiculous. Putting lances on ork kroozers would change the fleet more than upping the firepower by a portion, and adding the option to move 4d6 on AAF And of course it would get aproved for warp rift, Horizon is the editor. That's all that is really asked.

Orks were determined as severely underpowered, and the basic solution here was to incorporate more firepower (as determined by the killkroozer vote thread), and then the +2 turret upgrade idea was changed into d3. Then torps were added as a side option, to give some new option, and points were played with to make the prow torps an upgrade, so that it is viable to not take heavy guns.

Otherwise everything else was mainly balanced to points, rather than revising completely. This was a change list not a complete rework.

Also the core of the ork fleet hasn't changed; Brutes, Ravagers, Terror ships (other than a minor adjustment), Hammers, and the Deathdeala. The idea I think in most fleets is to bring everything in line with the core. Naw, all this section really does is give orks a bit more firepower, and gives them the option to deal with thier speed problem, without changing the core feel of the fleet.

The article getting approved by the HA or GW, you might as well ask me to spit rainbows.

However it is plausible to have it be as approved by the BFG community somewhere around MMS (which just keeps getting weirder every time)

And other than some minor editing and tweaks, this selection is done and packaged for approval by others (if they actually want to read over it, no one seems particularly interested so far).

You're also right, I should stop with the new stuff, as this wasn't the original intended goal of 'Flawed ships', it was to fix what is all-ready out there, and that's it.

[Plaxor]

New 'creative' thoughts;

Freeboota Kapitans and Big Meks are warlords just with the different abilities:

Something like:

An Ork fleet may take 1 character for every 500 points or part of each warlord, freeboota kapitans, and Big meks. they of course would have access to the upgrades. The way that powerfields would work with the Big Meks would make the ships shields D3+1. On ships with two shields the shields would go to D3+2. So basically the wording would say; the big mek's ship exchanges one of it's shields for d3 shields.

How I feel about random shields:
So the warlord is costed at 20 points for a re-roll, and the other 20 is for a mark of khorne equivalent. As a powerfield costs 25 points currently and D3 shields is almost as good as increasing the shields to two (whenever you roll a 1, people will start a shootin!), there is the possibility of course that it would go to three, however in this scenario other targets would be likely chosen instead.

Thoughts on Freeboota kaptains:
Orks have notoriously low leadership, and their fleet commanders do nothing to alleviate this, unlike other fleets. A chaos lord (ld+1), with a re-roll is 50 points, however ork re-rolls are cheaper and cost 20, so the value is at 45, but a five point discrepancy isn't a big deal. Although it could be argued that giving an ork vessel better leadership is a very vaunted idea, and that it could be more expensive as thus. This would improve the Orks ld to basic Imperial standards on one vessel, and that vessel could still roll a 1 and get 6, so I don't think it's an issue. Likely it would only get used on Gorbs revenge and TS squadrons anyway. The loss here is the typical way that orks deal with heavy armor, by boarding, making this less effective.

[commander]

Well, we no longer have an Ork-player; sold his fleet because too weak, not competitive enough.
So, no real knowledge about them. Will take a look at them within a couple of days.

[lastspartacus]

Can't wait to show you guys my WIP RS Ork fleet.  
Its closer to what I imagine Ork ships to look like.

[Plaxor]

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1Nr32u9sF3EYWQxMjcxMmItMGU1MS00NzdlLTk1YTktZWQ2MmIwYjU2ZGUz&hl=en

I've been working on a write-up for the evidence for changes in the ork fleet, as well as the mathmatical reasons why choices were made and analysis behind them. It basically looks like a research paper, but it's a lot cleaner than things on this forum.

[lastspartacus]

I'm thinking...could we have an ork lite kroozer with 8 hits?