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the basic BFG rulebook is downloadable, but i prefer to have the book in hand.

another important thing to get is the official BFG FAQ released a few years ago, its pretty beefy and covers alot of questions.

armada is a second book, that is NOT essential, but has additional ships for imperial/chaos/ork as well as fleets for necrons, dark eldar and special torpedo rules as well as special fleets like abbadon's fleet and stuff like that.

here is a sample 1500 point imperial BFG fleet:

Retribution Class Battleship w/ admiral 2 x rerolls

Gothic Cruiser
Gothic Cruiser
Dictator Cruiser
Lunar Cruiser w/ Nova Cannon

Dauntless Light Cruiser

3 Cobra escorts
3 Cobra escorts

this gives you a bit of everything, some torpedo support, some fighter bommer support and lance support from the gothics.

this etire fleet would run you 115.50 if bought from GW. if you have a good local store that can nab ya a discount on direct order stuff you could get a small disc im sure, but basiclly your looking at a fully functional fleet for a lil more then 100 dollars.

I Just picked up 4 strike cruisers a battle barge and nearly 30 marine escorts and a space station from ebay for less than £50 as part of my project to construct a chapter fleet for my crusading marines, forgeworld also do gothic stuff and its not cripplingly expensive (the grey knight strike cruiser new is £4 cheaper than the GW one) In general a 1500pt game of gothic will take a while, especially at first until you have the rules really down, until you do don't bother with more than 1500pts without a day to play it. Its a truly great game overall despite this (or because of it, the rules are very nice).


Edit: teres a few bits for sale here http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/239291.page

studderingdave wrote:the basic BFG rulebook is downloadable, but i prefer to have the book in hand.

another important thing to get is the official BFG FAQ released a few years ago, its pretty beefy and covers alot of questions.

armada is a second book, that is NOT essential, but has additional ships for imperial/chaos/ork as well as fleets for necrons, dark eldar and special torpedo rules as well as special fleets like abbadon's fleet and stuff like that.

here is a sample 1500 point imperial BFG fleet:

Retribution Class Battleship w/ admiral 2 x rerolls

Gothic Cruiser
Gothic Cruiser
Dictator Cruiser
Lunar Cruiser w/ Nova Cannon

Dauntless Light Cruiser

3 Cobra escorts
3 Cobra escorts

this gives you a bit of everything, some torpedo support, some fighter bommer support and lance support from the gothics.

this etire fleet would run you 115.50 if bought from GW. if you have a good local store that can nab ya a discount on direct order stuff you could get a small disc im sure, but basiclly your looking at a fully functional fleet for a lil more then 100 dollars.

115.00 USD

=

70.6191 GBP
United States Dollars United Kingdom Pounds
1 USD = 0.614079 GBP 1 GBP = 1.62846 USD


Wow my rough working out was near enough right, damn i'm impressed.

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Orlanth wrote:Third the fleets look great

... aside from Dark Eldar, of course...

they are just redesigned Reaver jetbikes, and are not to be counted.
A cheapass fleet selection made of just two real models, no thankyou. Personally I dont even include them, or for that matter Craftworld Eldar fleets.

BFG expensive?

NEVER heard it described like that before.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/243977.page

....for an effective fleet for not so much money.

studderingdave wrote:

Retribution Class Battleship w/ admiral 2 x rerolls

Gothic Cruiser
Gothic Cruiser
Dictator Cruiser
Lunar Cruiser w/ Nova Cannon

Dauntless Light Cruiser

3 Cobra escorts
3 Cobra escorts

Dont even think it.

Retribution, thats a good ship but requires aid. Imperials have 30cm gun range, just accept it, youi pay a lot to extend that. so the Retribution paints over a flaw, now in the alrger fleet a Retibution plus an Overlord combine together to provide long range battery cover against Eldar, but this is support in a larger fleet, in a small fleet you have too many blind spots and will be picked apart.

Gothic and Gothic. The reason to take Gothics is because you have taken Tyrants, Dominators and Overlords and have runnout of weapons battery pallets. You have gone far the other way and suggested Gothics and a lunar, this oddly enough means you run out of lance pallets, though you can get extra lance pallets from the Retribution it means you have to purchase all the capital ships at once.
Gothics are also inferior to lunars as you need the mixture of lances and batteries. To put all one and all another looks the same but specialisation is not necessarily a good thing in BFg as your enemy will target the ships that are the greater threat. for example, if Eldar attack they will pick on the Retibution right away and leave the Gothics alone. As soon as the Retribution blows they are way ahead of the curve and the ships left intact are little threat to them. Necrons and Space Marines work in the opposite direction.

Use Lunars whenever possible, and only take a gothic if you need to for lack of weapons battery pallets. Those pallets are what you will be short of.

Dictator Cruiser
No problems, good choice but in this sized fleet four launch bays is pushing it.

Lunar Cruiser w/ Nova Cannon, another good vessel.

Dauntless Light Cruiser Lances or torpedoes, you have to specifiy. The Dauntless class is designed to operate seperately from the ships of the line. If you want a ship in line you dont want Dauntlesses cheap though they are. Now single Dauntlesses need torpedoes as three lances are better but on their own will not clear shields, torps can do some damage. When you squadron Dauntlesses then you need lances as six or nine is then enough to punch through and do the job.

2x3 Cobras. Cobras are sold in packs of four, so this is wasteful. Also Cobras die easy and six torpedos is nothing much, you can get that as a side efect of having a cruiser. If you advocated a squadron is six it would be something as that yields a salvo of 12 torps, which is something woth having as it is firepower you cannot replicate elsewhere without squadroning close formation capital ships, which is not recommended.

If you want a Retribution based fleet:

Retribution
Overlord
Dictator
Dictator
Gothic
plus escorts

For an Emperor based fleet

Emperor
Overlord or Mars
Lunar
Lunar
Dictator (or Dominator with Mars)
plus escorts

My brother and I both bought the starter boxes a couple of years ago, and that was quite a bargain. Not sure if they still carry them.

ZF-

Unfortunately they do not (just checked)

As stated, both BFG and Epic are actually relatively cheap games to get into.

BFG has been covered, but a decent fleet is around £60-£80. One thing that hasnt been covered though is that there is a lot of replayability in a fleet, and you dont need to continually add vessels to keep it fresh (although new stuff is always nice)!

Epic is also not expensive. There is a viable army list for the Marines floating around somewhere costed out at £42. For example, the Marine Epic Battle company has 24 stands of Tactical Marines and 8 Assault stands. Even if you built them as Tactical and Assault stands, and included no upgrades, that makes two Assault detachments and four Tactical detachments. That is over 1500 points for £12, where a standard game is 2700 or 3000 points. Sure, you can add Rhinos to this and it gets more expensive, but you dont have to, and you could use Drop Pods (which dont even NEED a mini).

Add to this the fact that all the material for both games is available for free download (yeah, from GW!) and the material produced by fans for the games - for example Epic Raiders for Epic ( http://www.epic40k.co.uk/rules/epic/raiders.html ) and Warp Rift for BFG ( http://www.epic40k.co.uk/bfgmag/index.html ) and you have some fantastic games which represent a real bargain.

As you can probably tell... I am a bit of a fan of both of these!

FWIW, my Imperials look like this:

3 Mars heavy carrier
1 Dictator carrier
2 Lunar w/ Nova Cannon
2 Dominator
2 Gothic
4 Cobra

This is an Ordnance-heavy fleet, and uses massed Nova Cannon for full-range combat (I was very good at "guessing"). The Mars carriers are good generalists, as are the Nova Lunars. The Dominators have a ton of batteries, which is awesome when you broadside. The Dictator and Gothic are not optimal, simply using up bitz. The Cobras are just to make up odd points during list-building.

As it is nearly all plastic, it is very cost-effective. Metals cost considerably more per point to field.

HI all.
If you want some cheaper alternatives to GWs space ships to convert etc.EM4 minatures sell 12 space ships for £2.50!

TTFN
Lanrak.

Fairly sure I flogged off all my ships earlier this year, but part of my seems to think I still have some knocking about.

Sure I have a Space MArine Battlebarge at least.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Found them~!

I have one Battle barge, 1 Imperial Retribution Class, and one each of the original Chaos Battleships (the really big ones!)

Oh, and a single Cobra Class Destroyer.

And randomly, in the same box, 90% of a Skaven Vermin Lord (missing his hand and Glaive) Oh. And his tail

Hmm,
I have a massive SM all Metal Fleet in Dustdock that hasnt been touched in about 5 years. Might be worth digging it out and seeing what I can get for it.

If you like BFG, then there are resources that will help here-

http://www.sg.tacticalwargames.net/forum/index.php
http://www.tacticalwargames.net/forums/index.cgi

There are some dedicated BFG forums, but I only have one link handy.
http://www.portmaw.com/news.php

Hope these help