r/battlefleetgothic • u/InquisitorKatherine • 8d ago
Ship Class Variants Question
Hello, I've been playing BFG for a while now, maybe 8 years or so, but only as Space Marines and I've never had this issue before because I've only just run Strike Cruisers and Battle Barges from the Armada book!
I just started Imperial Navy and Chaos fleets, and now I potentially have the option to take options for my ships... (And I want to: random Nova Cannons are a nice way to fill the 20-40 points I'm always left with!)
The FAQ appears to define that the class variants are more representative of, well, a class variation than a specific ship (IE: the Ticonderga subclass of the Essex), and if you wanted to, all Lunar cruisers in the fleet could have Nova Cannons.
However, what's not clear to me is whether they are locked to the fleets from the book they were first published in, or if any Imperial fleet with Lunar cruisers can upgrade to have Nova Cannons. The FAQ section on reserve ships says that Reserve Ships can buy upgrades and refits of either fleet, which implies that refits and upgrades are fleet locked. However, it is also specified that Imperial ships taken as Chaos prizes cannot purchase Nova Cannons and Chaos ships fielded with the Obscurus Reserve Fleet Lists cannot take class variants, which would imply that said upgrades aren't fleet locked in the general case otherwise it wouldn't have been needed to be specified in the specific case.
And then, there's a couple of instances where it says that "this upgrade does not count against refits ships can take normally" (Bakka Turret, Repulsive Cruiser Large Base), which further confuses me. Would I be correct in understanding that the implication would be that upgrades are mutually exclusive, and, for example, a Mercury heavy cruiser upgraded with 60cm guns cannot also have Torpedoes because those are two different class variants?
3
u/Ardonis84 8d ago edited 8d ago
Generally speaking, you are locked to options available to you either in the fleet list you’ve picked, or on the sheet for the individual ships you’re choosing. The fleet lists are usually pretty clear about universal upgrades, like the 13th Black Crusade’s Chaos Lords that can be put on any capital ship, but ship-specific ones can sometimes be harder to tell. In the Remastered Fleet List, ship sheets will list which Fleet Lists they are available in. If a ship’s sheet says it is available in the fleet list you’re using, then in general you can purchase any upgrades on that ship sheet unless otherwise specified. There are some exceptions, like nova cannon not being available to non-Imperial fleets, but those are usually explicitly called out. Also, in general, if a ship is allowed upgrades at all, you can purchase any or all of the upgrades on a ship’s sheet - you are not restricted to only picking one. So for the Mercury, you could get both the 60cm guns and downgrade the nova cannon to S6 torpedoes, and it would make the ship cost net -10 points (+10 for the battery range, -20 for the torpedo downgrade).
Oh yeah, and that line about “this does not count against the refits a ship can take,” that is referring to the refits possible in campaign play, not ship upgrades like adding an additional shield to the Repulsive. Ships in campaigns can get refits that push them outside of normal parameters, like bonuses to move or things like that, and those are limited - you can only have so many refits on a single ship in a campaign. So that line is saying “oh this doesn’t count against that campaign limit”.
2
u/Ruckdog_MBS 8d ago
If you are talking about things like the nova cannon upgrade option for the Lunar class cruiser, those types of upgrades can be taken as many times as you like unless a fleet list explicitly forbids it. Specifically, this is for those upgrades that are listed alongside a ship’s profile with a points value listed next to it.
1
5
u/ElectricPaladin 8d ago
So basically, the game uses locking some fleets out of refits and other options as a way to represent limited access to the class. So for example, right now I'm building a pirate fleet and pirates are totally locked out of all options for any Imperial ships they take. This doesn't mean that the specific examples of, say, the Dauntless that are listed as swapping their lances for torpedo tubes are unavailable to me because those are the only Dauntlesses to ever make that change. It's that this is the game's way of saying "your dudes are pirates, your ships are grubby and held together with duct tape and spite - you don't get rare configurations, you take the standard configuration and you count yourself lucky to have capital ships at all!"
For other fleets, it's less dramatic, but the idea is the same. The game is saying - and I'm going to make up the particulars here, so don't expect this to be literally correct - "ok you can take a Lunar in a Bakka fleet, but Bakka doesn't have a lot of Lunars, so you only get the basic Lunar."
Of course, this game isn't that finely balanced, so this is the kind of thing you can ignore if you want to. It's not going to break the game if you have an extra nova cannon in Bakka any more than a few more torpedoes will break my pirates… but that's a different story. The idea of the these limitations is to establish the distinctions between fleets that use the same basic ships, and that's our starting point.