![]() ![]() Orks are the polar opposite of Chaos their ships have tons of HP (although not much armour), huge gun batteries that are ineffectual beyond point-blank range but deadly within it, and a high troop value that makes them resistant to boarding actions they also get a whole bunch of special weapons like boarding torpedoes and tractor cannons that are designed to cripple or immobilise opponents so that they’ll stay still long enough to be rammed. Chaos ships have a lot of long-range weapons, and while their boarding capability is okay thanks to their access to daemons their ships aren’t all that robust, so they love to stand off beyond macrocannon range and plink away at your ships – and the chaos AI is pretty good at kiting you indefinitely unless you get creative. The campaign has you playing exclusively as the Imperials, but aside from renegade Imperial ships your opposition is composed of three enemy factions who each have ships that play in distinctly different ships. Sometimes this is precisely the wrong thing to do, though. Macrocannon broadsides have significant penalties to accuracy at long range, so Imperial tactics are mostly to get in good and close and try to cross the T so that both sides of the ship can bring their macrocannon batteries to bear on the enemy. ![]() Imperial ships have a very limited quantity of turret armament the bulk of their firepower is to be found in their macrocannon 1 broadsides, and so they’re the faction that plays most like a set of 18th century ships of the line. The Imperium’s thing is that they’re basically a gigantic religious cult based around the figurehead of their immortal God-Emperor, and so their ships look like gigantic floating cathedrals – plenty of gothic arches and spires hanging off the sides, and each ship is fronted off by a gigantic aquila prow for ramming into things. The single-player campaign of Battlefleet Gothic is set during one of the numerous Black Crusades that 40k’s big bad Chaos faction makes into the Imperium of Man. ![]() Fortunately the Warhammer 40k universe is intentionally quite barmily anachronistic so that it can steal gameplay ideas from all over the shop and jam them all into the same setting, and BF:G is no exception it’s actually a little surprising at how well the concept slides into place if you’re at all familiar with the material. There’s also a tiny element of WW2-era fleet actions sprinkled in - you can get disposable escort ships whose torpedoes are the only weapons they have worth a damn, and some of the larger capital ships are configured as carriers - but probably 80% of BFG’s ruleset could be cut and pasted into a game about the Napoleonic Wars with no modification whatsoever. Said rules painstakingly replicate precisely the sort of ship-to-ship engagements that you might have witnessed during the golden age of sail, complete with broadsides, boarding actions and ramming. The core skirmish environment of Battlefleet Gothic the videogame matches up pretty well with those rules, albeit somewhat altered so that it can work as a real-time game. It’s a something of a credit to how well BF:G does this that I didn’t realise just how direct that adaptation was until I downloaded and read the original BFG rulebook. Battlefleet Gothic is very much in the vein of the first two, however rather than licensing the universe for a traditional video game (like Dawn of War or Vermintide), Battlefleet Gothic is an attempt to directly adapt a set of board game rules to a video game environment. They already did Blood Bowl – twice - and while Space Hulk was a bit of a bust I’m still very much looking forward to Deathwing. However, two decades later we’re living in a magical era where all Games Workshop properties that do not directly compete with the tiny plastic men business are being dusted off and licensed out as video games as the parent company desperately scrabbles for more money. Unfortunately the financial mileage in selling people a mere dozen ship models was deemed unsatisfactory in favour of doubling down on the potential profits to be found in selling people two hundred tiny plastic men at £20 for five, and so the Battlefleet Gothic boardgame was discontinued after a couple of years. ![]() To be precise, it’s set in the increasingly-overdone Warhammer 40k universe and it’s based off of an actual board game in said universe that Games Workshop made back in the mid-90s. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an 18th century tall ships naval combat simulator that just so happens to be set in outer space. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |