BFG is Awesome!!!

After more than 3 years of routine patrols, anti-pirate actions, and a couple of small xenos cleansing operations, Battlefleet Farquhar fought its first large scale fleet action since the Arenxis campaign.

After some sweeping real and warp space manouvers, the battlefleet translated into real space abreast of Jeff's Nurgle fleet. His fleet had a tough roll for sub-plots, and translated right into a meteor shower, with a couple of ships severely damaged. My sub-plot was to rescue an Imperial spy hiding aboard the Horrific. And being a pretty standard gun-line IN fleet, I would need to board the enemy ship!

I must admit my deployment was quite bad, straddling the fleet with the various squadrons too far from each other. My weakness is in ordnance - I have only 1 carrier with 4 launch bays, whereas Jeff had 2 carriers with 6 or 7 launch bays. So I should have really clustered together to bring my gun superiority to bear. To make matters worse, in my first turn my first attempt to order Come to New Heading failed - and I really needed that to bring my carrier and light cruisers, which were on my far right flank, back to the rest of the fleet.

Anyways, I won't go into much detail here. Some highlights was my over-successful salvo to soften up the Horrific and prepare it for boarding. Essentially, the enemy ship was hit by both Nova cannons in my fleet, immediately crippling it. The next turn, Jeff successfully withdrew the Horrific from the battle!

Jeff's escorts were aggressively employed, delivering a torpedo alpha-strike on the Dominator squadron. Combined with assault boats and bombers, the Dominator-class cruiser Intrepid was crippled in a single round of fire. Return fire from my Sword frigates, combined with the cruisers snd the battleship Redoubtable itself destroyed all but one enemy escort from both the enemy escort squadrons.

The Redoubtable locked on to the enemy cruiser that was damaged pre-game and was fighting without a bridge, and reduce the ship to a hulk. But return fire and further swarms of assault boats soon took its toll, and eventually both my Dominators were burning, and all 3 Sword frigates were destroyed. It was time to bug out and save the rest of the fleet.

That was quite the brawl. I think I made 2 fundamental mistakes. First, my deployment was too spread out and it halved my fleet's effectiveness. Second, my biggest weakness was the enemy's superiority in launch bays, and it was the repeated assault boat and bomber strikes that eventualy won the day for him. I should have focused fire on the carriers and tried to even out the balance in ordnance.

At any rate that was a lot of fun. My fleet lost 2 Dominator crusiers, and 3 Sword frigates. Jeff's fleet lost 8 escorts, 1 cruiser and a crippled Horrific. Like I said, that was some brawl.

I had a 40k game after that - my Windriders vs Faizal's revamped Space Wolves. With 5 drop pods, and termie, Long Fang and wolf cavalry support, it was quite a formidable army. I managed to use the Windriders' speed to switch flank and stay out of range of the Long Fangs to be able to deal with the deep striking mon-keigh one at a time. It worked, and the Eldar won, though I lost 2 tanks, the Dire Avengers and 1 jetbike squad.

I'll be out of action for the next couple of weeks. But definitely looking forward to see how my Eldar will do against the new Space Marines!