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So after about 10 years (give or take) I decided to dust off my BFG and play some. Trying a couple games with different fleets I've come to a couple conclusions (note: I have an actual eldar fleet, but using proxies you can have any fleet)

1. Eldar are still glass cannons. Their lances are BRUTAL, especially on 'locked on' special orders, but they can't take a hit for anything.
2. With eldar hemlocks (lance platform escorts) I'm not convinced that there is any reason you would not go under 'brace for impact' special orders if anything is shooting at you unless you were setting up for 'lock on' in the next turn
3. Chaos has a lot of long ranged guns


So I guess I do have a couple questions. Is there any advantage to having your escorts in formations? it seems to me that everything in the game favors individuals with the single exception of special orders leadership tests. Also, with fleets like chaos and imperial navy, is it better to cluster your ships or keep them separated some? eldar have such movement that you can have them somewhat separate, but with the inertia of the other fleets it seems that if you cluster the ships you can get a better value even if you run the risk of enormus explosions wiping out a large chunk of your fleet.

Escorts should be squadroned. Cruisers and Battleships can be run singly, although some cruisers benifit from being squadroned.

It does depend on the fleet of course. Plus its easier to remember one Ld value for a squadron then 10 Ld values for 10 seperate ships.

Adding gunnery firepower together before going to the chart an be very useful, depending on circumstance.

As mentioned, escorts need to be squadrened by the rules.

funny thing about the squad rules is that you need to place them in a squad at the start of the game... but if they happen to move apart, they are no longer considered a squad

Use nothing but Ork ramming ships! Kill all the things!

Any ship that falls out of formation must attempt to move bak into formation, they also may not take any special orders until they return to formation.

I'm betting that's in the 2010 faq somewhere... gotta read that thing eventually. It hasn't come up in a game due to the non-comp nature of the group (noone is being 'gamey'... we still all like to win)

Heres another one for you:

Imperial ships have heinious front armour

Imperial torpedo lines/squadrons are NOT fun

A good guess with a nova cannon can determin the entire game.

Squadron rules are in the BBB, may have changed from v1.0 to v1.5 tho.

Yup Imp turtle and AAF torp shotgun are both pretty good.

Scatter die replaced guess range back around 02?? iirc. This is in the v1.5 book for sure and the online pdfs.

I'll have to try the imperial turtle with torp shotgun system sometime. Sounds like a sound strategy

Here's my recommendation for the "shotgun" IN method if you are interested:

Tactica: Imperial Navy

I am sold on the idea. In my mind, it plays the the greatest strengths of the Imperial fleet. Nova Cannons are for AdMech.