@Mogwai:
I realize I was wrong about the number of escorts for a battleship, that said, 13 torpedoes and the durability of a battleship is still reasonably threatening to me!
@Everyone:
(essay on BFG incoming, skip to the "- - -" if you want the quick & dirty)
I want to explain my reasoning in a clear and concise manner, but I realize it's going to require a little bit of background first. So, the background: My experience with escorts in BFG in my gaming group was that they were taken in minimal quantities to fill out a fleet list to a set points total by the fleets that had lots of capital ship options (Imperials, Chaos), and taken in greater quantities by the players forced to rely on them (Eldar, Orks). Everyone generally acknowledged their fragility, and felt that their firepower and points cost didn't offset inevitable in-game attrition rates. In the case of the Eldar player, he never even bothered to field one escort type because he felt it was much too expensive and obvious of a target (and was he ever right, my Carnage-class cruisers LOVED his escorts). Escorts were used by the Imperials and Chaos fleets when they provided options difficult to obtain by other means. For example, I used a lot of Infidels to generate torpedoes and bog down fighter screens, and one of my Imperial friends used a lot of firestorms because he wanted to load up on lances to supplement his cruisers. Generally though, our experience was the same as most people on here seem to have had: we barely used them mostly because when anyone took large number of escorts, it already was a "world of massacres."
I do want to see more escorts in games, and I've made a point to try to field more myself. I just see some escorts as having rather limited uses. Iconoclasts and Falchions come to mind, for example. My Iconoclasts have spent more games proxying transports than they have actually engaging targets since the few times I used them as a screen for anything big, my opponents just fired past them.
My thinking is that it's too easy to select your targets in BFG. Average ship leadership ranges 6-9, mostly 7-8. So trying to roll less than or equal to a 7 or an 8 on 2 D6 generally isn't too bad; you'll manage it around 1/2 to 2/3 of the time (disclaimer: I was an English & Government major in college. I realize the more math-minded people in the room are wincing right now). For highly trained crews (Space Marines, CSM, Eldar), leadership ranges 7-10. Furthermore, my experience has demonstrated that players tend to put Leadership boosting characters (Admirals, Chaos Lords) on Battleships, Grand Cruisers, and Heavy/Battlecruisers, pairing high leadership scores with long-range weaponry. The practical result is that target priority and rolling a leadership check to ignore a nearer target in favor of a more distant target has generally been pretty easy to accomplish regularly.
So, what does this have to do with escorts? Well, the obvious answer is that I can't use my Iconoclasts to screen my Desolator when Mars-class Battlecruiser with the Nova Cannon can lob shells right past them. Furthermore, I never had much trouble picking off my Eldar friend's Hemlocks early-game with my Carnages, even when he had his Aconites in the way. I've never had much trouble picking off a flanking squadron of Cobras before they've made it into position for an attack run either. My experience has been that even with average leadership scores, it is not difficult at all for a player to override the "shoot the nearest target" rule and apply his firepower to the most tactically beneficial target.
This thread started discussing fleet lists and evolved quickly into "ok, nobody takes Escorts."
Part of the problem IMO is that escorts don't actually escort with the current squadron rules which is really their purpose in the WW1/2 Naval analog. The other, as is pointed out, is that gunships are actually a separate beast that should work in hunter packs, especially vessels like Firestorms, and should be priced as such to encourage larger packs in fleet list construction. But I'm with Horizon, they can pack a huge punch and are always present when I game. 
Jimmy's point is that nobody's actually using escorts to escort capital ships in the manner that they were used in the rough historical analogue for Battlefleet Gothic.
@AndrewChristlieb:
Upon thinking about it a bit more, maybe we need to invent a kind of 'super-grouping' for capital ships with escorts.... Since, as always, we have problems like, "Why can't my carrier reload ordnance while the other ships lock on?" or, "Bobby the Mauler braced for impact, it's lamer than a starving duck that I can't lock on with my other ships! If only they could use orders separately for some situations...." (No ducks were hurt in the making of this post)
I think that the BFG squadron rules (and their freedom) actually really suit combined squadrons because one has the freedom of protecting the capital's rear and being able to re-manoeuvre as needed with the escort's mobility. Also, changing the way capital squadrons work could make it easier to modify the Special Orders rules (if we so desired), e.g. to make add more fleet-like ones (rather than the very 'personal' ones we currently have).
Thinking Stone brought the suggestion that we combine capital ships and escorts in a squadron as a way of getting escorts more play, and this morphed into discussions about using escorts to soak hits for the capital ship(s) or using the capital ship(s) to soak hits for the escorts. I personally don't like the idea of combined squadrons (Cruisers and Escorts) mostly because it pretty much moves immediately into the wound allocation shenanigans of WH40K 5th Edition (and by the False Emperor, I really started to wonder why I was even reading BOLS for a while there, but that's another story...), and I honestly feel like we can get the same effect without altering the game rules in that manner.
This is where my idea of reducing ships' leadership when attempting Target Priority rolls came into play. My thinking is the average ship has a leadership value of 7-8, and the average ship with a commander onboard has a leadership of at least 8, often higher. A 2D6 roll means that ship is successfully firing at whatever target it feels like close to 2/3 of the time, but if that leadership suffered a -2 modifier... things would get interesting. At that point, most ships without commanders have a pretty good chance of failing 50% of the time to have the initiative to shoot at a more distant target. This in turn will force those ships to focus on nearer threats. The fleet's "Heroes" will still have at least a 50% chance of using their initiative and acting heroically, hitting the more tactically vital target over the obvious threat.
So how would this impact escorts? Well, in a couple of ways:
1) A player could choose to use some squadrons of escorts as living shields for strategically vital capital ships. A good example would be a Chaos player using Iconoclasts as a living shield for a battleship, or an Armageddon fleet's Falchions serving double duty as ablative shields and attack craft removal.
2) If juicy point-sink escorts with a lot of combat potential now have a decent chance of being protected by a moving screen of other escorts or cruisers, those one-hit glass cannons might actually be tempting to their owner to use. For example, a squadron of Eldar Nightshade torpedo destroyers could actually run interference for a squadron of Eldar Hellebores, allowing those 75pt escorts to get in closer before they start taking concentrated fire.
3) My real hope is that forcing people to shoot more frequently at the nearest target will actually generate more tactical play. If the manner in which you deploy your order of battle actually matters (read: I don't just chuckle at the line cruisers in front of your Emperor and immediately point every 60cm lance and battery in my fleet at it), then we as admirals actually have to put some thought into who's going to be taking damage first, when to overlap positions in the gun line, and flanking forces finally start to matter! I've used slaughters and small idolator squadrons for years in a wide sprint & arc maneuver to get serious firepower into people's backfield, and it works! There just isn't really a major tactical incentive to keep ships screened or out of the game for a turn or two currently.
- - -
So, for everyone I lost way back in that massive essay, here's the executive summary. My hope is that by making Target Priority rolls difficult to pass consistently, players will have the room needed to actually make ship deployment a meaningful choice. This ideally would mean that a player could use a cheap squadron of escorts as a screen for a capital ship, or that a player could hide a big threat (6 cobras in massed torpedo salvo position?) behind a line cruiser, or even that cruisers could actually provide cover for other cruisers. I feel like it's too easy to pick the most threatening target and wallop it with crushing amounts of fire, and simply single-target focus-fire your way through an enemy's fleet. Heck, I'm guilty of it myself.
Edit: I do realize that this might not necessarily increase the frequency with which people use escorts. After all, old habits do die hard, and many of us BFG admirals are pretty seasoned and might be set in our ways. That said, my theory is that forcing shooting at the nearest target most of the time would make positioning actually matter for more than just which guns you use to hit the other ship with, and that that in turn would render more strategies viable. Kinda hoping that a simpler fix would get the same, or better results than a more complex and difficult to balance fix.
