First Fleets!

[Bessemer]

Given the lamentable decision to can the SG line, and that BFGR is entering it's final stages, I find myself getting all nostalgic about how I got started with BFG...

ahh...1999. That half-remembered time! AC had no limits! A battleship cost £12! The Phantom Menace was coming out and would be the best film EVER! _{Why George, WHY?!}

My friends and I were already well into Necromunda and Gorkamorka and Mordheim, so when my local GW (Sheffield Meadowhall, which closed it's doors in Jan) were giving test games for their new game, Battlefleet Gothic I was , well...meh.
Got enough stuff on the go, what's the point. Never-the-less, I had a couple of goes. Once imperial, once Chaos (2 lunar, 2 Murder)

My warbands have never seen the light of day since.

As I was in college in those days, by the time I was earning most of the Chaos and Imperial fleets were released, enabling me to build my forces thus.

Imperial
Retribution
Mars
2 Lunar
Gothic
2 Dauntless (torps)
6 Swords
4 Cobras

Chaos
Despoiler
Repulsive
Styx
2 Carnage
Slaughter
6 Infidel
3 Idolator

Maybe not the best selections, but they provided us with some of the best games we ever played!

What were your memories of starting? You an old crusty like me? Or a recent convert? I'd love to know how you all got into Gothic, and how you intend to carry on into the future which now, more than ever Is down to the fans!

Good Hunting!

[PST]

New convert

Despite having it since release, I got round to running a game of Rogue Trader this year and wanted some ships to use with the game. Being a completionist my initial plan was to pick up a few imperial, eldar, ork etc. from ebay on the cheap, a few for assorted races.

That led to looking at more and more painted ships and fleets, reading afterimagedan's blogs, coming here etc. Before I knew it I had a couple of handfuls of Imperials, a few chaos and was planning out eldar, more imperials and more chaos.

Stupidly I put off ordering for several weeks and then went into a mad panic as stuff began disappearing (damn you GK strike cruisers, auroras, Ramilles, etc. etc.).

I'm still waiting for that overlarge order from GW but it'll take us to 14 imp cruisers, 10 chaos, 2 eldar, with BBs for each (can't get a desolator for anything but silly money though), and escorts.

Planning to kitbash dark eldar using the standard reavers/hellions. Do an ork fleet out of bits and gubbins, a necron fleet from Firestorm Armada and then Nids from, well, nids. The first three will probably stay the biggest (I've no-idea-what-i'm-doing estimated it at 4500 of imperials, 2k of eldar and 2500 of chaos).

So I'm decidedly a newbie, not played a game yet, at the worst possible time to be trying to get a fleet but going to stick with it. At some point I'll kick off a BFG campaign with my gaming group, using the same sort of handouts, maps, planetary images etc. I use for my tabletop games.

[afterimagedan]

Heck yes PST. Could I recommend something to you? Sign up for a blogger account and post about it to help build the community when you get that campaign going. I know I would love to see it happen.

[PST]

I might do though I barely post on facebook as it is so i'd have to get into the habit of updating. That and get something better than a camera phone to take pictures. Plus of course being new to the game and worried I'd describe rolling 4d6 when I should have rolled 3d6 etc.

I do tend to go all out with handouts/images etc. for my tabletop games though, so it'd be fun to vary that for a BFG campaign. Probably do starmaps, campaign images, objectives fleet backgrounds etc. Will ponder it and see what learning the game throws up. It'll be a pale comparison to yours though. Not least for my out of practise painting.

[afterimagedan]

See that's what I'm saying! Post that stuff!! And honestly, if you write up battle reports, you don't have to list out every roll. And who cares if you mess up. I thought the same stuff when I started mine but it's been a lot of fun.

[Bessemer]

@PST- This is what's it's all about! One of the reasons I threw up this thread is remembering the fun we had on starting fresh! While it's good to have a base of knowledge and experience, it's what you do to get it that makes it worthwhile

You do kind of get jaded when you've cut your teeth.

[AndrewChristlieb]

The first time I touched a miniature was BFG. My friends and I were pretty heavy into roleplaying and we went to the local comic and games quite a bit to browse. Anyway there was a decent crowd of 40kers most of the time but we never paid them much attention so it must have been a slow day or something because I ended up hanging out in the back watching one of GW's traveling whatever they were called running a demo. I loved the ships right off and probably set there over an hour or so before I got a chance to play. There were so many people trying it out that by the time I got up (people were just switching off every couple turns) all that was left on the tale was a squadron of 3 cobras and a badly damaged Lunar against an also badly damaged Desolator. Of course I didn't know that then I just knew the little ships looked cool! So I grabbed the three Cobras and my buddy took the Lunar and we proceeded to finish getting them killed . I played two turns the first turn I reloaded the Cobras but rolled doubles so that was (back then) the last turn for torps. I don't even remember if I did any damage with the Torps but I clearly remember at the start of the next turn knowing they couldn't come back and the demo guy said that it was pointless trying to do anything with them because their weapons couldn't do any damage to the battleship. I was pretty bummed out until he said but you know, you can ram it! Oh I was sold so I slammed all three right into the rear of the thing! And they all died the end . My friend and I split the cost of the box set that day and Ive been hooked since.

[FistusMaximus]

well, my BFG history is probably one of the dumbest...  sadly, i've came from 40k here to BFG.

before you now go off at me, i have to let you know a few things:
first: i'm 19, so when BFG came out (1999 was it?) i was 6 years old. unnecessary to say i didn't know anything about gaming by then. 
second: i missed the whole "golden age" of all the awesome games now no longer available. 
third: when i came into a GW store for the first time, it was already the time when no SG stuff was sold in store and all the mags were dead. 


so, the actual story:
as a little kid, my parents got me a model train for my birthday. i played with that for years. good times. until the prices for the things increased by obnoxious levels, a little locomotive cost 40 euros when i got my train, a few years later it was 500 (and that was the cheapest you could get).
yeah, i quickly decided: i'm out.
so i switched to the much cheaper revell model building, small tanks, ships, airplanes and such. that was where i actually had to build and paint the stuff by myself for the first time, and i kinda liked that.
i was only sad that after i finished a model, it just stood there somewhere on a shelf or desk and thats it.

thats when a friend of mine came in and showed me warhammer 40k. i was amazed, it was the same model building i've done before, and on similar scale, but i can actually use the models for a game!

that lasted for a while, about the last three years. reading in the fluff, i always liked the space battle stuff, and researching the ships on the internet lead me to stumbling over the BFG models.
i read that there was a game for it! saw the models on the GW website...  instant love. 

that was a  bit more than a year ago, and in my WIP thread ("the survivors") you can see a list of the things i already own....  yeah, i'm pretty madly in love

and with my fanatic motivation, i created a gaming community for BFG in my area, before i did that nobody played it. now we have four very active players, and another four already owning fleets. 

and just before starting our own campaign, one of my friends and me decided to take part in afterimagedan's draco sector campaign 

[horizon]

Back in '99 when BFG came out friend and me, already having small 40k armies, saw the release and thought: "BUY" (Being big Star Wars space battles and Star Trek space battles fans a miniature game with spaceships was amazing!)
We bought each one box and swapped ships (he Imperial, me Chaos). A good cruiser core. Quickly adding battleships and escorts on both sides.

Good times. Fun of first battles (ow, we played that rule wrong...) and a big sigh on my part when the FAQ eliminated the guess range Nova Cannon...

At first I painted all Chaos in a dark red scheme. But at one point I decided to paint half of the fleet in a blue scheme. That was my first fleet with a decent background story.

[Nicoli612]

Well I guess my first BFG fleet wasn't really a BFG fleet.

My best mate at the time and fellow 40k player had the starter box along with several other imperial bits and bobs, and we spoke about starting BFG.

I was a Tau player for 40k and they hadn't had a fleet released at the time. I used my bits box to scratch build several ship types for my own fictional race called the Ae'nari. Shame I didn't keep them when I went on a wargaming hiatus as I was pretty proud of them (even though using tau gun drones flipped upside down with other bits and bobs attached did give them a very Star Trek Saucer look)


Then about a month ago me and my housemate were lamenting all the starship video games we have, and how each of them excel in one area but fall down in another. 4 hours later and we had planned a BFG campaign with house rules to mix it up and had planned out own fledgling fleets.

And VOILA I am back into the world of wargaming after.....8 years of thinking I was a grown up :p haha

[Armiger84]

My first BFG fleet...

Well, when BFG came out, our gaming group had, in 40k, 3 space marine players, a tyranid player, an eldar player, and I'd begun building a dark eldar army out of what was kicking around from everyone's WH40K3rd boxes...  So a bunch of us were really interested in BFG, the White Dwarf teaser ruleset had us hooked, for starters, and the models looked great.  The only problem?  Everyone wanted to play Imperial... so I decided I'd play Chaos to get some variety on the table.  Three-four boxed game sets later among us, with people buying my imperial cruisers in my set and me buying the chaos off of my friends... I became THE Chaos player.  Add in two dozen escorts, a grand cruiser, and a battleship, and I spent the better part of a year painting up my fleet, mostly in time for a big campaign we ended up playing.  I really miss those days, and taking on the entire gaming group!

[timdp]

Building my first fleets now... A bit of bad timing to say the least, although I did pick up some stuff about 6 months ago.

Was looking for painting ideas so pulled out the first few BFG White Dwarfs and noticed the prices. All of the ships except the battleships have doubled in price since then. The battleships have only gone from $33 up to $35. Pretty amazing for something made by GW to only go up by $2 in 15 years....

[Bessemer]

That all! Over here they slowly went fro
m £12 to £20.50!

[timdp]

That all! Over here they slowly went fro
m £12 to £20.50!

I guess it was all about screwing the colonists. Even now 20.50 pounds is only $31, so they are still less in the UK...

[Zhukov]

Played my first BFG game at a convention in Florida circa 2001 at the age of 11 (my dad has been gaming since the 1960's, so I figured things out quick). I fell in love with the game right away. The first models I had came as a Christmas present that year. 4 wonderfully painted Chaos cruisers off ebay. Turns out, these were the first wargaming models I ever owned (you should see the breadth of the collection I have now). We bought nearly everything off eBay before it went PayPal only. I accrued Chaos and Orks, while my brother went Eldar, and a friend went Imperial.

Now? I own ships from every race. I've scratch built a contingent of Dark Eldar. And I've hijacked several models to make custom made fleets.

I love this game. It will always have a special place in my heart.

-Zhukov