The Dirge class Raiders are extremely similar but trade a point in Lightning Arc offense and the loss of the Portal for an additional 10 cm of speed and a points decrease to 40. They play a similar role without needing to close the enemy fleet to take advantage of the Portal. Suffice to say, the Necron escorts are powerful for their size. The Tyranid Hive Fleets Why You Should Play Tyranids

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Similar to the Eldar, the Armada expansion brings a number of items to the Ork Roster that establishes it as an actual battle fleet vs just a raiding fleet. This includes massive Ork-infested asteroids, a series of battleships, and a BattleKroozer. The result is an Ork list that suddenly has a great deal of both character and depth. Notably the Necrons do not bring Ordnance to the table. They have a number of special abilities and capabilities that are different from the rest of the fleets out there, but they do not rely on any type of squadrons or torpedoes to bully opposing fleets – just brute force and speed. Special rules If trying to pronounce those names doesn’t cause small capillaries in your brain to burst I don’t know what will. The models are awful, and there just isn’t anything exciting about these ships. Some of them have special rules all their own, but for the most part, your capital ships only serve to bring more Orcas to the fight. The Kroot Warsphere You could of course use the Armageddon Sector list for any other narrative where the Navy are working closely with Marines, and it’s very much a ‘best of both worlds’ situation where you can have the Marines doing what they do best while the bulk of the work is handled by the Navy. That said, if you want to double down on a pure Codex Astartes fleet, there’s more to be said.In addition to the Impaler, the Dark Eldar launch bays grant access to regular assault boats but with the typical Eldar difficulty of removal by enemy turrets. The torpedo tubes may be equipped with an alternate torpedo type called Leech torpedoes but these torpedoes do not cause any damage- instead a single hit reduces enemy movement by 10cm – and while it’s not cumulative, each additional hit must be cleared before the speed penalty is lifted. The remaining Dark Eldar weapon batteries, fighters, bombers, and torpedoes are otherwise similar to the Eldar Corsairs. On the board, these are inexpensive, defensive, vessels that move fairly randomly. They always move 10cm in their current direction of travel but may automatically go on All-Ahead-Full at 2d6 in any direction. If you happen to roll a 10+ then the direction you go becomes the new direction of travel in the following movement phase. Blast markers and crippling does not impact movement speed for these big boys, and critical hits only add more damage. They essentially are up-armed Roks with an all-around 12 weapon battery. Chonky Leadership. Marines get their own leadership table that basically means you’re looking at a hench leadership of 8-10. Now, weapon systems. You get broadside batteries with a respectable firepower of 12, and an equally respectable range of 45cm. You also have two systems in the prow: the capacity to launch 3 Thunderhawk gunships, and 6 torpedo tubes. The big draw with this vessel, though, is its dorsal battery of bombardment cannons. These chonkers weigh in at firepower 8, can fire left/front/right, and will dispense serious punishment to enemy capital ships. Make sure your target is within 15cm and closing or moving away for maximum effect, or you’ll be wasting a lot of your damage potential. The Armageddon class is basically the Victory ships of the Imperial fleet and are meant to be mass produced. Largely refurbished or salvaged Lunar class vessels – they’ve been upgunned to provide some additional punch at longer ranges but are otherwise functionally equivalent to the Lunar class cruisers.

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Similar to the Eldar Corsairs, a fleet must include a Dread Archon if it is over 750 points who provides all the same benefits and re-roll options as the Eldar Pirate Prince. The Dark Eldar Corsairs list can be comprised of up to 12 customized cruisers and any number of customized escorts – the customization helps to add some flavor to what is otherwise a single cruiser option and a single escort option. Planetary assaults & exterminatus. Astartes vessels are literally twice as good in planetary assaults, earning 2 assault points per turn rather than the usual 1 when they spend their turn landing troops or bombarding the planet. In the Exterminatus mission, a battle barge can take the role of the exterminator without having to sacrifice its prow weapons and gains a +1 for its roll to exterminate the planet. The Necrons are a fleet that was designed to be tough, aggressive, and more than a match for their opponents in a fair fight – something about being super old technological elitists. The caveat here is that Necrons are counter-balanced (maybe?) by always giving up victory points at any level of damage which then cascades from untouched, damaged, crippled, to destroyed or left drifting on the table. To get a feel for what this might mean, a Tomb Ship that is left as a drifting hulk may be worth up to 1,650 points to the opposing fleet and if you’re a Necron player you’d seriously struggle to overcome that kind of deficit short of utterly wiping your opponent – which is possible. For that reason a big part of playing Necrons is striking that balance between pounding away with your awesome weapons and preventing incoming damage via Brace for Impact (more on this momentarily).

These have all the strengths and weaknesses we covered in the last article, with the added advisory that they’re a little more expensive here thanks to the extra leadership and boarding action fierceness. It’s also worth remembering that the cobra-class destroyers can fire boarding torpedoes. This is a pretty typical battleship chassis with 12 hull points and a turning circle that’s only just better than a straight line. Beyond that, everything else is at least somewhat different. Like all Astartes vessels it’s faster than its navy equivalent, and goes at 20cm a turn rather than the 15cm you’d expect from an Imperial battleship. It’s only got 3 turrets and 3 shields, but on the upside it’s got 6+ armour all round. That’s pretty epic, but it does mean that while you can laugh (or at least chortle semi-nervously) at enemy weapons batteries, torpedoes and bombers, the enemy’s lances are a serious threat.

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Are these things great or even good on the table? Highly debatable. But are they awesome? Unequivocally. It’s a somewhat tedious way of playing and will feel like you’re constantly chasing, but it’s kind of fun in a “Man I hope this plan works” sort of way and carries some real schadenfruede potential if you ever hit on the bulk of the opponent’s fleet. Special rules I do want to take a moment and thank some of our dedicated readers for pointing errors in our previous article – we did not account for the BFG FAQ (which I neglected out of sheer laziness) that does apply some changes to things like Nova Cannons and max ordnance among other things. I make note of this now and state simply that for detailed rule breakdowns, please refer to the actual rulebooks and FAQs that were linked in the original article. Meanwhile, we are just overjoyed that people are reading these articles and have hopefully renewed interest in this fantastically fun game. Core Fleet Expansion ShipsOut of the four core rosters, the Eldar received the fewest new options by far at only two light cruisers and a battleship. However, the Corsair fleet was already a dynamic fleet and it didn’t particularly need anything further for flavor, but did need something to anchor a line of cruisers that would enable a full fleet style engagement – and that’s exactly what they got. In fact, so perfectly suited to the fleet are these vessels that unlike the other entries in the Armada list, some combination of these ships will usually always appear in a fleet-sized game. The Eldar light cruisers are similar to their bigger Cruiser counterparts although neither carries any launch bays. Instead the Aurora carries a pair of Pulsars and a four-capacity torpedo spread (which, I remind the reader, Eldar torpedoes are fantastic) while the Solaris carries an 8-strength weapon battery. Both options are fantastic acting as individual hunters or squadroned up with some Eldar escorts – plugging a gap in the roster between the hugely expensive cruiser classes and the cheaper but expensive for their size escorts. The Green Tide In a charming role reversal to the terrestrial 40K experience, Imperial Space Marines in Battlefleet Gothic get to be an unusual fleet that you genuinely don’t see as much as the Imperial Navy (in this writer’s experience at least). Partly this is down to model availability, but it’s also because they are, quite rightly, rather specialised. While Heretic Astartes make use of the regular Chaos fleets to which they’ve had access since the days of the Great Crusade, Imperial Marines post-Heresy were given fleets designed with one primary purpose in mind: planetary assaults. Indeed, they have unique bombardment cannons specifically for this purpose. Space Marines get a whole pile of special rules, pretty much all of which can also be applied to Chaos fleet vessels crewed by Heretic Astartes: The Dark Eldar fleets have a lot of the same feel as the Eldar Corsair fleets but the differences in movement make them play much differently than their more nimble cousins. While still having some of the fastest vessels in the game with an excellent turning radius, the Dark Eldar do not gain a second move and cannot benefit from the same hit-and-run style maneuvering – instead they gain a slight armor bonus that gives them an understated but significant durability boost against weapon batteries while still benefiting from the holofield mechanics (here called a shadowfield) that protects them from other weapon types.

Battlefleet Gothic Part 3: The Best Expansion to the Best - Goonhammer Battlefleet Gothic Part 3: The Best Expansion to the Best -

Chaos ships may also now choose to add Chaos Space Marine crews which provides the vessels with a leadership bonus as well as boarding and hit-and-run bonuses at no additional costs – however, it limits the types of marks a ship can take, and additionally limits the fleet to a specific Marine legion unless you pay for additional Chaos Lords to lead alternate legion vessels – and even then certain legions may be not be taken in the same fleet. Classic GW fluff focused roster building. The roster overall provides an extremely limited selection of vessels, but this is offset slightly by the customization options for each ship. However, the base of all vessels is a series of high-powered weapon batteries which combined with their increased speed and maneuverability makes the Dark Eldar fleet an exceptional counter to the Eldar Corsair fleets. Finally, each ship can can be provided with a mimic engine that provides the fleet with a first strike advantage. Special rules These are essentially Cobra class escorts but with a larger weapon battery and slightly more armor. Not a big ship who cares. The Traitor FleetsThis is your workhorse gunboat, with the same stats as a sword-class frigate but with +5cm movement and a well-trained crew. In the lore, these things rarely have more than a single squad of marines on board, overseeing the human crew and gently expressing themselves all over anyone foolish enough to board it. Being a gunboat, this thing is of no use in a planetary assault, so weirdly is kind of the Astartes’ main line ship, despite being an escort. This says a lot about how little the Imperium wants Space Marines to have naval autonomy. Keep collections to yourself or inspire other shoppers! Keep in mind that anyone can view public collections - they may also appear in recommendations and other places. The rules for both kits are included, so you can start playing with them in your games of Aeronautica Imperialis right away. Win a T’au Empire Manta