Note the term 'to a degree'. You're calling for radical changes to how a list is played that's been in use for the better part of a decade and calling it 'conservative'
What radical change? Because you're losing the FDT? Did you also note that in exchange, I wanted the IN ships in Bakka to have better direct fire weapons vs ordnance as well as other things to help balance it out? Also note, Sig and RCGothic were the ones who really wanted it out. I am mostly silent on the issue even though I agree it's out of place and would probably be better replaced with better turrets or direct fire weapons which is simpler mechanics wise.
From the perspective of a player of this list: that would be like replacing the vanilla Gothic IN list's shields with holofields and calling it 'conservative'. I was not really thrilled with the changes the HA made to the list in ver 1.0 and I'm steadily growing less happy with it as this has gone along.
Bakka has *never* played like a generic IN list and frankly the efforts to make it 'fit in' have destroyed more of the 'feel' then they have preserved. I find it bizarre that a group of people that have never played the list are complaining about 'feel' when not one of them has a damn clue what Bakka's fleetlist 'feels' LIKE because they've never played it.
That's why what you and a LOT of these other nice people are doing is hypocrisy D'Art. If what *I* had to say about SM and lances has 'no merit' because 'go play space marines yourself and then you can tell us about it' (your own words, IIRC) then then what possible merit does the view of ANY OF YOU who have never played the Bakka fleetlist have?
Really? Losing the FDT would be like giving IN holofields? You, sir, exagerrate.
Bakka still plays for the most part the same against other fleets. Bakka is not losing ships over it yet, even if I don't like the Jovian. Bakka is even gaining new ships vis a vis the other IN lists, most of which are part of the original Bakka. If you're losing those ships, you might have a point. Bakka plays differently against ordnance but it will play similarly for ship to ship combat, even with access to slightly faster ships because the stats for the main ships are not different with the existing ones nor that different with the new ones.
The difference bet the SM thread and this Bakka one is that in the former, lances are being introduced into SM capital ships which is more a threat to ships than any FDT will ever be. If you can't see that difference, then there's no point continuing this debate.
Eh... it's something of a stretch, but the in the sense that they're both primary defenses, he has a point, sort of, I suppose.
And Bakka has already lost of a lot of ships. Dauntless, Enforcer, Cardinal, Dictator, Avenger, Vengeance, Overlord, Firestorm, and Defender have all been pulled. Long Serpent is actually added, mostly because people seemed to assume it was in there anyway, since both were in the same issue of BFGm.
The only ships the new list has in common with either old Bakka list other then escorts are Victory, Dominator, Lunar, Tyrant and Gothic. Endurance has been significantly changed and is not counted.
To make a comparison: It's like saying that the feel of an Armageddon list wouldn't be changed if you removed the Armageddon, Apocalypse, Lunar, Gothic, Falchion, Endurance, Defiant, and Endeavour and swapped them with something from Blue Book that worked 'sort of like them'.
This is the issue. Fast IN ships. It's not about FDTs. Those are secondary. Who wouldn't want a fleet full of fast IN ships and still shooty? From your comment alone it's obvious that the mainline cruisers were not the cruisers you were using.
Among other things yes. Bakka has never been a 'line astern' IN fleet. I suspect from his comments that the Baron and I used similar fleets for Bakka, which more or less fits with my own experiences that most people build this fleet using it's light cruisers backed up by a handful of line cruisers and battleships.
I will say, however, that FDT is key to this fleet, as it lets you shift a large number of turrets around where needed. I know it saved my ass against a Tau fleet last time I played one, by moving a lot of turrets off of frigates and onto the light cruisers that engaged their Explorers. The current design those light cruisers would have been swarmed under, even with their increased turrets. 2k points of Tau can produce a lot of AC. Better direct fire weapons wouldn't have worked, since there would have been no time to use it at 15cm.
got a chance to glace at the 2002 bfb.
with the exception of the dauntless not being in the new bfb, I think the list looks fine.
Stop and read the ships that are in it and think about how they're used. Just because an IN list has Lunar, Tyrant, and Gothic in it doesn't men that these ships are the one's you should be using.