Thinking Stone's Ideas for an Imperial Navy Grand Cruiser Fleet

[Thinking Stone]

Although I generally have BFG thoughts bubbling around every so often, the recent COVID19 pandemic has stimulated a bit of a flood of BFG activity for most people and I've seized this opportunity to talk more about BFG! I also figured that I might as well put some of these ideas somewhere?I had suspected that the SpecArms forums were entering a fatal nadir before CyberShadow's Discord revival, but this is the easiest place to lay out such things as fleet lists or substantial ideas.

Onto the topic itself: Grand Cruiser fleets. I know that this idea has been floating around for a while; the High Admiralty made reference to Cypra Mundi building grand cruisers, and there have been several ideas put forward for fleets of grand cruiser + light cruiser sans regular cruiser. I pondered some of these independently, and I worried that light cruisers would give too much flexibility to a grand cruiser list. I also thought it'd be interesting and fun to play a fleet where everything but escorts is a grand cruiser, essentially replacing cruisers with an archaic version of a cruiser.

There is also the question of whether Chaos ought to have a Grand Cruiser Fleet or if it should just be an Imperial thing, since Chaos gets the short stick of list diversity. In this case, I think it's appropriate to conceive of this list as an Imperial Navy fleet because of the centrality of the Imperial Navy to the setting and because of the background of the Imperial Navy as being a hard-pressed organisation that is widely diverse but often forced to work with limited local diversity. I'm still pondering what a Chaos version would look like; I would probably keep the ship list the same but exchange the Escorts and command structure for the Chaos structure, adding in Marks (a fairly simple change considering the list will be half Chaos vessels anyway). As a final note on Chaos grand cruisers, I've always found it strange that so many Vengeance-pattern grand cruiser variants exist (due to the model flexibility, of course) but so few Repulsive-pattern grand cruisers are out there.

I have based my conception on the costs and options available in the BFG:XR Imperial and Chaos fleet lists, which I consider to be based on quite solid reasoning from discussions on these SpecArms forums over the years. But it's also pretty easy to just exchange the XR/R profiles and costs for those in Armada.

The List:
Fleet Commander.
0-1 Fleet Commander, as per BFG:XR's Imperial Navy Segmentum Obscurus, Bastion Fleets list.
Secondary Commanders.
0-3 Strategic Commanders, as per BFG:XR's Bastion Fleet list.

Capital Ships.
0-12 Grand Cruisers chosen from the following list:
* Exorcist: 260 pts
* Vengeance: 230 pts
* Avenger: 200 pts
* Retaliator: 275 pts
* Executor: 210 pts
* Nephilim: 250 pts
* Repulsive: 230 pts

All Grand Cruisers besides the Repulsive may choose one of the following upgrades, if desired:
* Prow torpedoes (S6 salvo, front): 25 pts
* Communications uplink (+1 Ld): 20 pts
* Improved thrusters (+1D6 cm to All Ahead Full moves): 5 pts

The Repulsive may instead choose from the following upgrades:
* Increase the range of dorsal lances to 45 cm: 10 pts
* Purchase a third shield: 15 pts

Note all grand cruisers with 3 shields should be mounted on the large (60 mm) base.

Escorts.
* Sword: 35 pts
* Firestorm: 35 pts
* Cobra: 30 pts

Discussion points:
* Should Chaos grand cruisers be a 1:1 option, representing their rarity? (I also suspect the IN trio are better balanced as workhorse grand cruisers).
* The Avenger is obviously much more freely available here. Is the XR version's 200 pts too cheap for FP20 broadsides in this list? This probably also applies to the Executor
* Is the XR Exorcist too strong to have as a 'workhorse' grand cruiser?
* Should the Nephilim be included? It wasn't in Armada, but I think it doesn't fit poorly.
* Additional upgrades. Since this is a purely Grand Cruiser list, I see some scope for allowing different upgrades to the usual 3. Ideas for these might be dorsal lance/weapons/bombardment cannon batteries, armoured prows, or nova cannon.

If anyone's out there, it'd be interesting to hear thoughts! If your thoughts are 'there shouldn't be a grand cruiser list' you can certainly say that, but it's probably going to be a short discussion since that kind of misses the point of the exercise!

[horizon]

No. No Grand Cruiser fleets.

/end thread

 

Haven't read XR since a long time so don't know about those specifics. But to the concept of a grand cruiser fleet: just go for it. Just form that old skool battleline with big broadsides. And keep the prow intact when closing in....

[connahr]

an interesting idea, i think you could easily make a quite powerful fleet, but you'd always be outnumbered.

fluff wise i don't think it could be a thing. Grand cruiseres are supposed to be dying out within the Imperium, hence the creation of battlecruisers. And they're not exactly common in Chaos fleets becuase 10,000 years of war results in a bit of atttrition.

If it were in a Horus Heresy time frame then thats a different story, if the novels are anything to go by grandcruisers were pretty common. It's be kind of fun to have two grand cruiser fleets face off against each other.

[Thinking Stone]

No. No Grand Cruiser fleets.

/end thread

 

Haven't read XR since a long time so don't know about those specifics. But to the concept of a grand cruiser fleet: just go for it. Just form that old skool battleline with big broadsides. And keep the prow intact when closing in....

the forum is alive after all! Thanks for stopping by, horizon!

Alas, I don't have people to test it with nearby, but maybe what I need is a fancy PDF version to hook people in.... But the idea is out there now! I think it'd be fun to play around with.

an interesting idea, i think you could easily make a quite powerful fleet, but you'd always be outnumbered.

fluff wise i don't think it could be a thing. Grand cruiseres are supposed to be dying out within the Imperium, hence the creation of battlecruisers. And they're not exactly common in Chaos fleets becuase 10,000 years of war results in a bit of atttrition.

If it were in a Horus Heresy time frame then thats a different story, if the novels are anything to go by grandcruisers were pretty common. It's be kind of fun to have two grand cruiser fleets face off against each other.

The general idea is to make for an interesting fleet playstyle and background is more of an inspiration for that (as you appreciate!).

For Imperial grand cruisers, background-wise there was this idea the High Admiralty had when FAQ2010 was being discussed that Cypra Mundi builds/built Grand Cruisers, and it could represent fleets made from old reserve vessels, distant expeditions that are poorly resupplied, or fleets from earlier than M40/M41 when the Gothic War is set. The Repulsive's entry in the BBB suggests that Repulsives were only created around M34, interestingly.

You could make a Traitor fleet with the list just as easily too, it just seems that the Imperial GCs are better-suited to being the main ships.

Battlecruisers are an interesting point: the rulebook suggests that they replaced GCs (and that looks obvious based on the Repulsive, maybe less so on the Vengeance-pattern ones), but I always thought there's also the implication that though the IN would like every cruiser to be a battlecruiser, it's just way too expensive. BCs also replace heavy cruisers. Overall though, the idea is definitely that they'd be more of a mothball/old warhorse fleet than a common modern sector fleet.


But I do see your point. I suspect the sculpting of the Vengeance-pattern GCs kind of changed the BFG background so that GCs became a bit like WW1/early inter-war ships in WW2, or like battleships in modern navies (or even like carraks in galleon times, galleons in later times, and so on), especially since Vengeance-pattern GCs are supposed to be robust and make versatile transports; while mabye the Repulsive-style GC represents the more advanced GCs that the Imperial forgot how to regularly build. The Vengeance-pattern ones always seemed a lot less flashy to me than the nicely-statted Repulsive.

Part of the trouble is that each new wave of background is prone to change the peripheral details of the setting a lot, and BFG is a game based on the periphery BFG is already a fair jump from 2E 40K as it is.


Based on all that interesting background thought, it seems like the Chaos GCs should be limited on a 1:1 basis with the Imperial ones.


Gameplay-wise, I think the restriction to just GCs could make it work alright: they're expensive, and they're only as well-gunned point for point as Chaos cruisers in may respects. Tough and fairly good, but most of all distinctive