"BFG 3rd game" Topic

Another escalating engagement, chaos vs navy

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We must ask ourselves, is the space hulk overpowered when the mission doesn't involve transports?

Any game against a hulk is going to be painful,keep the long range novas going and dump plenty of ordinance as a good counterbalance.Try the same imperials vs a grand cruiser, a murder and a styx.

Nice AAR.

Really nice space hulk. How did you do the ork skull?

it's a shield from fantasy orks

I don't think that the Space Hulk is unbalanced, I think that the scenario was. The Imperials only out-pointed Chaos by 20 or 30, but the hulk was able to engage them in detail and do enough damage to them one at a time that it was bound to win the battle without truly terrible luck (like rolling doubles on its first Reload Ordnance attempt). Those cruisers have tremendous advantages in speed and maneuverability and should be able to control the range most of the time. In a more normal battle, they would all have started at long range and could have bombarded the hulk from long range with the Nova Cannon and torpedoes while advancing at minimum speed. Use direct-fire weapons against the Chaos attack craft and probably use fighters against them as well (instead of launching attack craft to supplement the fighters). If you keep the range open, you have a decent chance of evading torpedoes through maneuver, and hulk really has a hard time dodging anything …

The actual Escalating Engagement scenario requires you to assign at least one ship to each contact marker (and escort squadrons still have to be deployed as squadrons), so space hulks are very chancy in them. You either have a really big fleet or your non-hulk divisions are really weak. If your weak divisions appear first, they're all too likely to be defeated in detail with hardly any loss to your opponent.

Also, Escalating Engagement was written before there were Space Hulks in the game, so the initial roll for who places the marker first doesn't contemplate them. Anybody facing a hulk would pretty much automatically be able to choose starting range and position. If the hulk was the first randomly-chosen division and it automatically had to be placed on the board first, the other side could at least play keep-away until the cavalry arrived.

That's BFG for you!