anyone have any luck using daemon ships?

[unseelied]

I recently tried out a proxied Slaaneshi fleet using the 2010 compedium rules and was fairly underwhelmed.  I want to make a new chaos fleet that plays differently than my normal chaos fleet so I thought the slaaneshi one would be both different and a good excuse to build something.  The idea was to take advantage of the upgrade that allows no special orders for the enemy within 15cm.  The plan was to dump the daemon ships with that upgrade into his fleet and then smash it with the rest of the fleet, causing swift damage due to his being unable to BFI.  Does work to some degree but the daemon ships are a big points sink that isn't really on the board for a lot of the game so I am basicly playing down in points the whole time.  Anyone have any good sneaky ways to use the daemonships? Does anyone use them? What ship classes would you use as daemonships? 

[horizon]

Daemonships in the official rules are what they are... crappy.
Really, I can't say anything useful for them.

[afterimagedan]

The general consensus is that they needed some help so BFG:R worked on the daemonship upgrade.

[AndrewChristlieb]

They do a really good job of holding papers down on your desk.

[unseelied]

Yeah, they seemed a little lacking.  I was hoping someone had some way of using them that I hadn't thought of.  In the game I used them in they were interesting at least.  I just kept dropping them into the midst of the enemy formation, giving him a -3 leadership mod, while the rest of my fleet shot from afar. It did hamper his plans but I think not enough.  I am going to take fewer daemonships, give them the special slaaneshy upgrade and see how that goes.  I think that if it is correctly timed, not being able to go on BFI or disengage could be an enormous problem for the other fleet.  I will have to play around with it some more.  I think its destined to be a "fun" fleet like the orks not a powerful fleet.

No one around here uses BFG-R so those rules aren't really going to help me.  I do agree that daemonships seem to be something that could use an extreme overhaul but I can't really see BFG-R being accepted in my area even if the rules are better.(with out even looking it up I am sure that the daemonship rules are better) Without the official sanction of GW, any other rules set is just house rules and that just leads to disagreement and discord. 

[horizon]

With the demise of GW (BFG no longer produced) the question remains on how long they will have the rules available.

You could talk to your group and take daemonship rules from BFG:R and nothing else.

[unseelied]

As tempting as that is, it would only open the doors to nonsense.  If we allow BFG-R rules we'd have to allow other online rules or even rules someone in the group just made up himself as there really isn't any real difference.  I'd rather not use daemonships at all than have to face some idiot's 800pt preheresy superbattlefortressofdoom constantly.  Its all subjective to some extent.  Superbattlefortress Man thinks his ship is great and very much correctly pointed.  Now for fun, shits and giggles and all that, I'd play someone if they wanted to try some special ships or rules. However, I'd never let it be "official" in event I'd run and I'd strongly bitch about it if someone else wanted to run something and include it. BFG isn't perfect certainly but it is still a great game just how it is.  Sometimes change is bad.  Without any real way of limiting the bad changes people want to make its hard to make the good changes.  Long story short, I am stuck with the daemonships how they are.

[Duke]

Unseelied's concerns are why I sometimes wish the HA took part in our conversations from time to time. BFG:R could do with a bit more rogue official elements. I recall reading the long threads on FAQ2010 back in 2010/2011 when the three were around, and yeah... not everybody agreed with them, but they had their experience.

Along with having a few inaugural ships sold as dedicated vessel types for BFG:R ship additions, a qualifying statement that the HA has reviewed and approved the community effort would go a long way towards general acceptance of what has been a long-time-in-the-making "game patch" by BFG veterans. The quality is there in the new edition, it just needs a more official creditability than just 'from the spiritual successors of the High Admirality.'

Unseelied- does your group freely accept the HA's FAQ2010?

-Duke

[unseelied]

Yes, the 2010 FAQ is accepted but surprisingly not used by a lot of people.  Most of the players around here are "Old School" so they are pretty much happy with bluebook and armada and the fleets they used when the game first came out.
   
The 2010 update was accepted because it was written by the HA, the last official keepers of the rules.  They may not now be the keepers of the rules or even active at all in the community but they wore the offical hat last and since no one else got the hat they are the next best thing to official we have at present.
 
The second reason it was accepted was that the only two regular BFG tournaments I know about both use it.  Adepticon and Mechanicon.  Adepticon because it is a really big name deal and Mechanicon because its close enough that we locals could actually participate in it.  Once again it gives the ruleset an officiality if that is a real word. 

Third reason was that I liked it and I am the local organizer of BFG so I pushed for it.  I couldn't have convinced my fairly old guard crowd to go for it without the other two reasons but since it really didn't change much for a lot of them it was fairly easy for them to just go along with it. 

I think that is what BFG-R most difficult problem will be.  The 2010 FAQ didn't really change a lot.  It added some stuff but everything that was already around was left fairly untouched. I honestly am not following the BFG-R very closely but from the little bit I've picked up it seems( correct me if I am wrong) that a lot is changing.  Too much for the average player who busts out his ships three times a year.  They might be good changes, they might be bad ones but nobody wants to learn the game all over again and change the fleet they've been playing with for the past 10 years.  If in some alternate universe GW released BFG2 or something we'd all lump it just like we did when 6th ed 40k came out but baring that its going to be a tough sell to get these old dogs to learn new tricks without GW's offical seal of approval. 

Maybe if you guys released something smaller, like an Ork fleet list/revision that didn't suck and that worked with the present ruleset people could slowly get to know what BFG-R is about.  Thats just the first idea that came to me.  I could maybe sell a new ork fleet list( as the present ones suck)  but I just don't think that the average BFG player is ready for, or desires all the change that BFG-R represents all at once. 

[Gothmog Lord of Balrogs]

The thing is BFG:R isn't changing the core mechanics of the game, it is just trying to rebalance everything against each other and expand the game selection, especially for those fleets that had 3-4 ships in the entire list. So you wouldn't have to learn a new game, just your fleet has some different stats.

[unseelied]

I think that you may be too close to the project to actually see it from the perspective of someone who has never really looked at it before.  i just checked in the experimental rules section there is a post by plaxor that says BFG-R erratta or somesuch.  I just wanted something quick to look at.  Just in the first quarter page part of it it talks about 'Qualities", changes the rules for escorts moving through asteriods and adds several escort ship classes.  Thats the first quarter page. These are all additions to BFG and I doubt they are the only ones.

I also quickly skimmed the IN list.  At least half of the ships are changed in some way, either points or stats.  Its a lot of change for a fleet that worked very well to start with.  What did you have to do the the crappy fleets?  Maybe if I read it all and digested it it would all become so easy to use and understand but right now it just seems like a lot of needless changes.  For me BFG just could use a patch and this just seems like you are rebuilding the entire wall.  I just think that with all of this repointing it will just end up like 40k.  Fifth ed had problems and now sixth has its own different set of problems.  Some units that used to be good in fifth now suck and some bad units are now must takes.  The emperor class was the best battleship in IN BFG will the Ret now become the go to unit in BFG-R?  Something will as no system is perfect. 

I've been playing the same game since it came out.  I am pretty happy with it.  Most people are I think.  It could use some tweaks here and there but I think that BFG-R, the small part I've seen of it, doesn't strike me as just a tweak.  It seems like a different game.

[Khar]

As far as I'm aware, no actual core rule changes have been made [ok, nova cannon range got modified a bit]. Plaxor's rule modifications are from his own, earlier, version of revision, which did try to change the game.

We're not doing it now. Only ship stats are changing. So there are, in fact, two different projects called BFG:R...

(Seeing how often I stumble upon 'but in plaxor's version there are changes to core rules' I'm starting to think that maybe project should've been renamed to avoid confusion )

[Armiger84]

To echo Khar, as far as I know, the plans are to maintain the 2010 FAQ, and tweak ship costs/stats where it has been deemed necessary or beneficial by the community across about a decade's (or more) worth of playing to better balance some things.  In some cases (Retribution's range being shortened, firepower increased), this has been done to better balance a ship relative to others in its class (like you said, given the option of an Emperor, which was until the FAQs massively undercosted AND nearly matched a Retribution in weight of fire before you even factored in attack craft, or a Retribution, which one ever got fielded?), in other cases, entire fleet lists are getting restructured to make them more playable (Orks), or a major alteration has been made in terms of how the fleet plays in order to make them more balanced/enjoyable to play with (Eldar "move-shoot-move" in the rulebook going to "move-move-shoot").

If you're looking for what's been changed, I'd point you to AfterImageDan's blog, specifically, his BFG:R section:

http://afterimagedan.blogspot.nl/p/as-any-of-you-know-i-am-supporter-and.html

Things that have survived rounds of debate and voting have made it to the "Finished" list, and things in progress are being discussed on the forums here.

[afterimagedan]

Yeah, our attempt to display the distinction between plaxor's BFGR and ours isn't the best unfortunately. There are basically two BFGRs. The current version does not have a rules document because it works off of 2010.

Unfortunately Armiger, I just deleted the piece about the changes. Im hoping to remake that part to be more simple than it was.

[horizon]

Quick note: the BFG:R rules errata was from the previous BFG:R run. This has been dropped.
So all rules from Corebook-Armada-FAQ2010 stay in place.
BFG:R is now about ships and fleet lists.

The most mayor change is perhaps the Eldar MMS (rules which are used by the HA as well )