A Majestic Omen (BFG)

[Josh]

And on further examination, nova imba is greatly exaggerated, they do have accuracy limitations. Basically some noobs who like bunching flotillas of ships up took a beating before realizing that piling all your destroyers up in a nice smashable lump when you have big AoE on the table ain't the brightest of ideas.

Also, fighters swiss cheese assault boats.

So, pretty cool so far. Torps are pretty feeble right now, to the point of being not terribly useful.

(I still use the shit out of them, though. It's just fun seeing the salvos streaking out and it gives me great joy whenever I see a few actually hitting something.)

[Josh]

Woot!

Way to go, Sword of Light!

Had a major league cruiser clash, max points on the table. Take an Emperor class BB, an Overlord and a Mars, which are BCs, a Gothic-class cruiser, and a Dauntless light cruiser that has the favor of the Navy and can port in a Cobra for backup.

That poor destroyer, I port it in right in front of a raging Chaos battlecruiser that's showing untoward affection toward my poor light, tenderly caressing it with long-range lance fire and generally blowing it shit. Destroyer lasts long enough to put a single spread of torps into the battlecruiser and fire off a couple of bursts of macro before vaporizing, which buys the light just enough time to warp out.

(It's now lost in the warp, heavily damaged, so it'll be five turns or so before I get it back. Worth it, though.)

In exchange, though, concentrated fire forces an enemy cruiser to jump out. So I'm just ever so slightly ahead on tonnage now, and I go to work with that. End up battering them down with assault boats and fire, until I have the battleship left, slightly beat up. I've cleared their battleship off the table, so now my somewhat battered ship, the Sword of Light is facing a somewhat damaged Chaos BC and a fairly intact light cruiser.

It took some dancing and it took a beating. But I blew that fucker straight to hell, then when the light cruiser was too stupid to run, I blasted it into scrap shortly thereafter.

For my game on my office computer, I've dedicated one ship to Khorne and one to Nurgle. The Khornate vessel has spikes and a higher quota of skulls than usual, while the Nurglite has all these funky moldy growths and tentacles and shit. Cool shit, man.

[Josh]

Coolest Imperial favor is Mechanicus, at least aesthetically. The Omnissiah all up on the bow, wicked green mood lighting.

RIP, Sword of Light, you were too beautiful for this galaxy. But you took a battlecruiser and a cruiser with you and let the rest of the fleet gangbang that battleship into near-scrap and get away with the data. I hope it was worth it and not fucking Abaddon's catering plans for the 14th Black Crusade.

"Remember that Kharn has gone vegan, so we're going with tofurkey for him."

[Josh]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORKS!

Just barely played a little of them, but it's like bumper cars with light kroozas. WHAM! BAM! CRUNCH!

Good times.

[Josh]

...I feel kind of treasonous for admitting that orks are the most fun thing going right now.

Set boarding to auto, aim your pile of ships for the enemy fleet, microjump around and spam lots of boarding torpedoes and ram enemy ships as often as you can.

Yeah, your fleet is full of disobedient gits who run at the drop of their freeboota hats, but shit happens.

[Josh]

Haha Cobra swarm fail.

I mean, I won the battle and all, but still...

I was playing a station defense mission, all my light cruisers are kitted with the Imperial Navy favor. Which means that every three minutes or so they can warp in a fresh Cobra-class for backup. Add in that the station as of last patch can also bring in three by itself means that three minutes into the battle you're dropping a fresh 220 points worth of destroyer swarm into the fight.

Cobras are pretty flimsy junky pieces of shit, but they're nice for distractions and occasionally the torps can come in handy (wiped a retreating Chaos BC with a pair of torps from a reinforcing Cobra a couple games ago.)

So mostly I just set them to bow-on auto-attack at minimal range when they pop in, hoping they'll last long enough to let the big boys do the work.

So I had five of them surrounding an orky cruiser, just pounding the living shit out of it. Cruiser goes to escape, they put the last shots in, cruiser goes nuke, massive meltdown explosion and... five Cobras get vaped in the process.

In the meantime, my LCs and my snipey little Firestorm team up with the station to wax the enemy BC, so it's all good.

[Josh]

Ooooh Eldar just dropped.

Let's see how Admiral Poofy Space Git does.

[Josh]

Well, got too busy to test the Eldar out much. Movement is funky, they slalom about like cars on gravel which is, ah, interesting.

The Planetary Bombardment mission I tried at the office is tricksy as fuck. Pulled one off as the defender, Chaos vs. Chaos, just barely managed to nuke the final Chaos BC before it got off the third and final bombardment mission. YOU'RE WELCOME, GROPOS.

[Josh]

God I love orks even when they fuck me around.

Running my Imperial fleet, standard purge and cleanse cruiser clash. Got my horde of Dauntlesses in to provide me with a continual supply of Cobra cannon fodder.

Smashed the ork fleet pretty hard, at the price of a couple of badly beat-up Dauntlesses, got one ork cruiser left. My battleship is crossing in front of it to do a broadside, got three Cobras to the other side set on forward fire just hammering away.

And the fucking ork hits the gas, T-bones my battleship. Now my BB is in fine shape and can absorb an impact like this, while the ork had been in the process of melting and this ram is a suicide by battleship, basically.

But in the process of ramming my battleship, it proceeds to smash it into all three destroyers. BOOM BOOM BOOM and then it disintegrates and I win, so the win screen is my battleship, disintegrating ork ship on one side, and the explosion flares of two of the three Cobras, etched in frozen frame glory.

Admiral Borgia's fleet, where Cobras go to die.

[Josh]

Said battleship is Sword of Light II, btw. Successor to the original and most badass of battleships, it has actually survived 46 consecutive skirmish battles now.

[Josh]

Bringing out the Eldar really highlights the virtues of the Imperium, that much I can see. They can't brawl like the Orks, they can't range Chaos, and they can't zip around Eldar or hit them with lances.

But what they can do is brawl Chaos and Eldar and range the Orks.

HOLOFIELD THIS, SPACE ELVES! *lobs shells the size of the Empire State Building through space.*

[Josh]

Campaign is fun enough. You can't protect all your worlds, but you can make strategic choices about which ones you want to fight for any given turn. Then the Inquisition steps in and starts laying down the exterminatus smackdown, making your choices a little more critical.

Dun fucked up and gave one of my stupid cruisers the Admech favor by accident when I meant to give to a shiny new BC. Ah well.

Imperial buffs come up nice, too. Sending the crews out to paint red stripes down the side to make them go faster (IT'S TOTALLY IN THIS STC, GUYS, IT'S ESTABLISHED ADMECH PRACTICE!) and painting the torpedoes red to speed them up (DITTO TO LAST) are some nice touches. Kinda meh on the melta torps, though they are fun to lay into the orks and watch half their fleet blazing out of control.

[frigidmagi]

So the Imperialium is a generalist faction?

[Lys]

They are the generalist faction, but they also get something nobody else does: Nova Cannon. Basically it's a gigantic piece of fuck-you space artillery which will take out escort ships and damage everyone else from across the map. It is awesome.

[Lys]

The man who named this fleet is the hero of our times:

[Josh]

So the Imperialium is a generalist faction?

Very much so. What works against Chaos and somewhat against the Eldar (get up close, shoot them lots of times with big guns) will get your ass kicked all over town by the Orks. With the Orks, you want to extend out and shoot them from far away with lasers. Fortunately, the Imperials have ships that work for both, plus in the final release patches they're the only ones that can buy speed boosts for the ships. Speed boosts make the engines more vulnerable to critical hits, but in exchange you can about keep up with Chaos and you can outrun Orks more easily.

Mind you, that's somewhat situational. When you're facing a Nurgle-flavored fleet, you really don't want to get too close or else they'll start eating your ships. So you try to hold them more at middle range, still effective for your guns but not close enough to smell them.

Man, boss battles are a bitch in this game. Especially because I'd already pivoted the fleet toward Chaos-killing configuration (BECAUSE SOMEBODY TOLD ME WE WERE THROUGH WITH THE ORKS!) and then I had to go kick over some more Orks.

Then we finally meet up with Abby in the grand finale. I lost three quarters of my fleet, with only the flagship surviving (because it's slow as fuck and only arrived in time to put the final salvos in.)

My beloved Mars BC went out like a boss, ramming Abby's flagship pretty much to death and dying in the doing. Those of you know know the history of the Gothic War and the 12th Black Crusade know what pimp ride Abby was rocking for this battle, so... yeah.

[Josh]

So... Tau.

I would've preferred the Tyranids for the first DLC because we've already got an excellent long-range shooty faction in Chaos, whereas I'd love to see how they implement the Nids just reaching out and chomping on shit. But c'est la vie, we'll see how it goes.

At least that means I get to kill filthy space commies.