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All BFG needs is a general cleanup of wording and such as it's from the era where GW wrote rules like they were prose.

AI is really the only specialist game that GW dumbed down to worthlessness and I bet sales numbers made it clear that's not the right approach, so I wouldn't worry too much.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
All BFG needs is a general cleanup of wording and such as it's from the era where GW wrote rules like they were prose.

AI is really the only specialist game that GW dumbed down to worthlessness and I bet sales numbers made it clear that's not the right approach, so I wouldn't worry too much.

Yeah, the rules for BFG are mostly on a rock-solid foundation that works and only need a touch-up on wording and some rebalancing for the Xenos races at most, other than that it's mostly 'want' and not 'need' - you can always add more ship classes, expand on additional fleets or give us spiffy new models, but none of that is a necessity.

habedekrai37 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
Terminals? Ugh fun with big battles with big pile of terminals...

Okay here's 12 escorts. How do I fit all those terminals?

or smaller battles with only a few ships...

@Escorts: maybe 1 Terminal / squadron?

Thing is BFG worked just fine in bigger fleets and indeed was more of problem in smaller games...

The rules weren't issue. Availability of them and models is.

Why break what works? Being forced to play smaller games is hardly improvement.

tneva82 wrote:
Terminals? Ugh fun with big battles with big pile of terminals...

Okay here's 12 escorts. How do I fit all those terminals?

Probably in the same way they lumped 2-6 Knights together in a single terminal, and such smaller ships turn out to be a last minute thought because "its supposed to be about the larger starships! Why would you play with anything less than a fleet of Blackstone Fortresses?".

I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that we should have saved ourselves the hassle, and bought a copy of A Billion Suns instead...

A Billion Suns isn't a naval game tho. If you're happy using any mechanic to push ships around a table, you're better off with One Page Rules FTL instead.

They would have the design requirement of more ships faster game. You actually didn't use much and the game lasted quite a while.

I would hope the ships get smaller to make them easier to use on the table top, but what will happen is they get bigger, probably to firestorm size.

Hmm, or maybe bigger cruisers / battleships and smaller escorts? Think Battlefleet Galaxy here.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
A Billion Suns isn't a naval game tho. If you're happy using any mechanic to push ships around a table, you're better off with One Page Rules FTL instead.

Even better, although the point is that I've learned to stand on the side of caution when it comes to anticipating a new edition or game from GW...

Don't really need alternating activation if they just make the damage applied at the end of each phase or turn like in Battletech or even the last version of Apocalypse.

 NH Gunsmith wrote:
Don't really need alternating activation if they just make the damage applied at the end of each phase or turn like in Battletech or even the last version of Apocalypse.

Oooh that's a nice idea. It would even be super easy to implement, blast markers are already a game mechanic, jkust pile them on for each "penetrating" hit and resolve them all at the end.

BFG was a great game, but (much like WH40k at the time) was too easily broken by fielding loads of cheap units. The focus should always be on the capital ships duking it out, not trying to avoid being overwhelmed by loads of little support ships.

I'm kind-of excited to see the return of BFG. In the pre-pandemic era a friend of mine and I were trying to home-brew our own game borrowing heavily from the BFG rules.

Basically it involved a generic ship creator so you could make anything (and use any miniature) from Star Trek to Star Wars, to Battlestar Galactica, to a generic sci-fi. Smaller scale encounters with 1 large ship or a handful of smaller ones.

A reboot of BFG might inspire me to get back to this.

 Snord wrote:
BFG was a great game, but (much like WH40k at the time) was too easily broken by fielding loads of cheap units. The focus should always be on the capital ships duking it out, not trying to avoid being overwhelmed by loads of little support ships.

Trick to that might be introducing an FOC-alike, where you build by Squadron?

 Snord wrote:
BFG was a great game, but (much like WH40k at the time) was too easily broken by fielding loads of cheap units. The focus should always be on the capital ships duking it out, not trying to avoid being overwhelmed by loads of little support ships.

Well that's your opinion. For others deathstars isn't appeal in any game

I'd love a new BFG, but controversially, I'd like to see it in a much bigger scale - I would like the ships to be bigger, and plastic....

Imagine each ship costing as much as a tank.

Snord wrote:BFG was a great game, but (much like WH40k at the time) was too easily broken by fielding loads of cheap units. The focus should always be on the capital ships duking it out, not trying to avoid being overwhelmed by loads of little support ships.

This is odd to me because it was a long-recognized issue that escorts were too vulnerable, particularly to strike craft. The massed turret rule was introduced specifically to stop assault boats from making escorts an endangered species.

Even in the most recent version of the rules, a fleet that spams escorts either goes hard into MSU and suffers for lack of special orders, or gets penalized by the unwieldiness of large formations, and won't have any strike craft of its own. I don't think I've ever seen an escort fleet dominate the table.

StraightSilver wrote:I'd love a new BFG, but controversially, I'd like to see it in a much bigger scale - I would like the ships to be bigger, and plastic....

I've heard a lot of people say the same, but I dunno how you're supposed to make that work on the table in a game where facing is important but ships physically colliding with another is a problem as it stands. Much larger bases, I guess? But then you start approaching parking lot battlefields, which is really no good for the sort of game BFG is.

StraightSilver wrote:
I'd love a new BFG, but controversially, I'd like to see it in a much bigger scale - I would like the ships to be bigger, and plastic....

BFG is one of the few GW games where the tables are not overladen with units and things and actual, meaningful manoeuvering and positioning can take place, if you'd enlarged the ships much that would probably suffer. Also, changing scales always has the potential to anger owners of existing collections. A version where you control maybe one capital ship, a couple of escorts and more defined and diversified ordnance could be cool as well, but that would be a new game, a bit like Titanicus in space, and not reall BFG redux.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Snord wrote:
BFG was a great game, but (much like WH40k at the time) was too easily broken by fielding loads of cheap units. The focus should always be on the capital ships duking it out, not trying to avoid being overwhelmed by loads of little support ships.

Trick to that might be introducing an FOC-alike, where you build by Squadron?

Dystopian Wars solves it by battleships unlocking cruisers, rather than BFG's cruisers unlocking battleships. In any case it doesn't matter as long as units are balanced.

The issue of models bumping into each other was already solved neatly bySpartan Games by making the second range band, rather than the first, the optimal shooting distance.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
A Billion Suns isn't a naval game tho. If you're happy using any mechanic to push ships around a table, you're better off with One Page Rules FTL instead.

If you want a game for this sort of thing, a space based Castles in the Sky seems like a better option to me than A Billion Suns.

Also solves some of the "escort" issues folks are talking about above.

 Dysartes wrote:

habedekrai37 wrote:
In my opinion, the rules are now outdated and need a general overhaul.

What would you like them to overhaul, while keeping the feel of a naval game in spaaaace?

Dropfleet Commander, also written by Andy Chambers, feels more modern and streamlined to me. Well, the space battle rules do. The “drop” part of the game just gets in the way, but that was the brand.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

The issue of models bumping into each other was already solved neatly bySpartan Games by making the second range band, rather than the first, the optimal shooting distance.

That would be interesting.

Tsagualsa wrote:

StraightSilver wrote:
I'd love a new BFG, but controversially, I'd like to see it in a much bigger scale - I would like the ships to be bigger, and plastic....

. A version where you control maybe one capital ship, a couple of escorts and more defined and diversified ordnance could be cool as well, but that would be a new game, a bit like Titanicus in space, and not reall BFG redux.

That does sound pretty cool - a much larger scale version of the Expanse battles in some ways

If this is a) true and b) not intended to be a one box only splash release, then please not the Aeronautica release model. Everything about the way they "supported" AI, killed that game.

Otherwise, bring it on. I doubt they can do multiple races, so guessing Heresy style Imperial vs Chaos. I'd be fine with that if there was a steady release of ships (Necromunda pace is about right).

interesting how the wishes and hopes diverge, hopefully we will soon know in which direction BFG will go

I just think bigger models are more realistic:

- more details
- old ships not usable
- harder to print yourself

something else:

There is always talk that the remake could be Horus Heresy only. Will we then change style? The iconic imperial ships from the old BFG are more from the post-HH era?

I'm not sure why people think they can't do a full range. Certainly they have recently often chosen to be stingy with sprue allocation, but it's defnitely not a matter of ability when they can casually tool half a dozen or more new sprues of Warcry whenever they feel like, multiple times per year.

"Can" and "will" are definitely very different things, in relation with GW.

How much shelf space and SKUs they want to dedicate to it is probably more relevant then production/design capacity. It was a game sold in the days of blister packs. Which was great, as one blister was a flotilla of escorts. The primary way GW displayed products matched the way the game was sold/marketed/structured. These days GW is mostly boxes, with only a small section for clampacks

They could easily put 4 destroyers on a character sized sprue. But do they want to dedicate the shelf space to have every unit broken down like that? Would they rather have a normal units sized box with a “fleet support section” with 4 destroyers, 3 frigates and a light cruiser. All sharing a medium sized sprue. If they make them multi-build, you could have one box cover a lot of ground for a faction. I know the imperial and chaos cruisers did an excellent job of this in the prior edition, where one set of hulls made a LOT of options. Not sure how well this would scale down to smaller ships, or other factions.

Or they could hand out destroyers like tyranids get ripper swarms. Just toss an escort onto every ship of the line sprue, so you get the little guys hand in hand with the big ones! (this is a horrible idea)

habedekrai37 wrote:
interesting how the wishes and hopes diverge, hopefully we will soon know in which direction BFG will go

I just think bigger models are more realistic:

- more details
- old ships not usable
- harder to print yourself

something else:

There is always talk that the remake could be Horus Heresy only. Will we then change style? The iconic imperial ships from the old BFG are more from the post-HH era?

Bigger models are also terrible game pieces. Arguably the current models are too large to the extent we have to keep a supply of empty stands on hand to replace the ships with when they get too close. My 3D printer dream is printing my own fleets where the cruisers are the length of the base diameter so I don't get that problem...

 Nevelon wrote:
How much shelf space and SKUs they want to dedicate to it is probably more relevant then production/design capacity. It was a game sold in the days of blister packs. Which was great, as one blister was a flotilla of escorts. The primary way GW displayed products matched the way the game was sold/marketed/structured. These days GW is mostly boxes, with only a small section for clampacks

They could easily put 4 destroyers on a character sized sprue. But do they want to dedicate the shelf space to have every unit broken down like that? Would they rather have a normal units sized box with a “fleet support section” with 4 destroyers, 3 frigates and a light cruiser. All sharing a medium sized sprue. If they make them multi-build, you could have one box cover a lot of ground for a faction. I know the imperial and chaos cruisers did an excellent job of this in the prior edition, where one set of hulls made a LOT of options. Not sure how well this would scale down to smaller ships, or other factions.

Or they could hand out destroyers like tyranids get ripper swarms. Just toss an escort onto every ship of the line sprue, so you get the little guys hand in hand with the big ones! (this is a horrible idea)

Again the Dystopian Wars reboot is a good guide here. The typical box is a resin battleship and 2-6 sprues. There are currently about 3-4 sprues per faction. The most common sprue builds a cruiser (in any of 4-8 different classes and that's only counting hull stats and weapon layouts, not weapon choices of which each hardpoint has 2-4 , or can be replaced with a module that buffs something else) and about 2 smaller, usually monobuild support models (either a pair of frigates, destroyers, submarines...). The ratio of SKUs to different game elements is incredible. And these are sprues the size of a regular Specialist Games sprue with a 4x8" footprint, like Necromunda gangs.