As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve started a project to convert the Battlefleet Gothic (BFG) campaign system for use with Firestorm Armada (FA). This post is going to deal with a few specific problem areas that will need to be addressed in this process. These problems stem from the key differences between the games, and are unavoidable given the difference in features and game mechanics between the two systems.

Leadership

The first thing that I will have to account for is BFG’s Leadership mechanic. This is a stat given to ships in BFG that ranges from a 6 to a 10 that players would have to perform a 2D6 test against to perform certain actions. This leadership value was tied to the Special Orders mechanic, which were a set of options players could use to improve a ship’s firepower, speed, turn rate, etc. For example, say you need to reload your cruiser’s torpedo tubes, and that ship had a leadership of 7. You would roll 2D6, and if your result was 7 or less, your reload was successful.

FA does not have a lot that corresponds to this aspect of BFG. There are a couple of nods to crew quality, such as the Elite Crew MAR, but for the most part all ships are assumed to have essentially the same leadership/crew capability. So, how to account for this? Well, I’ve seen other attempts to convert the BFG campaign system to FA that have ported over the system to FA, essentially making it an add-on to the game. I think this approach is probably a good one, but it has to be handled somewhat carefully.

What it really comes down to is player progression. As I discussed last time, one of the things that makes the BFG campaign system so intriguing is that both the player, in the persona of their fleet commander, and ships in their fleet develop as the campaign progresses. In the original BFG, the progression of a ship was either in Leadership or Crew Skills; players got to chose. The problem with just bringing this system over to FA is that just advancing the Leadership stat won’t do much, as there is no intrinsic value in the ship’s Leadership (or Experience, or whatever we choose to call it) to be found within the FA rules, in the way that there is in the BFG rules. Thus, ship crew progression will need to be tied in with the skills advancement system. However, there is another problem with ship progression that must be addressed…

Ship Survivability

Bottom line, things go BOOM! much more regularly in FA than they do in BFG. In a game of BFG, ships of cruiser size and above could typically expect to survive the battle, while similar ships in a game of FA have a better than even chance of being destroyed by the end of the game. This is due to a few reasons. First, the damage potential in FA is much greater; attacks tend to hit home more frequently, and the critical hits table is much more punishing (every critical in FA results in hull damage, while only a few criticals in BFG did the same). Additionally, ships in FA carry fewer hull points. A BFG cruiser has 8 HP, and a battleship has 12. Comparatively, FA cruisers weigh in at 4 HP, and BBs get 8. This is a problem, because under the BFG system if a ship is destroyed than it loses all the experience and skills it has accumulated. Makes it very hard to maintain that sense of progression!

What to do? Well, there is always the option of boosting HP numbers across the board to be more in line with the BFG ships. This is not a very desirable option from my point of view; for one, it only addresses part of the problem because even at those boosted HP numbers, ships will still be taking damage much more quickly than they could before. To make matters worse, this option buys me into a partial re-stating of every model in the game, which is well beyond the scope of this project, and has the potential to have many unforeseen and unintended consequences! Instead, I am pursuing some sort of “save” that destroyed ships can employ after the game is over. If the ship passes this saving throw, then it can be brought back into the player’s roster with 1 HP. I’m planning on calling this a “Narrow Escape!” test, and it will represent a badly damaged ship that got knocked out of the battle but whose crew managed to patch it back together enough to limp home. Obviously, ships that are blown up or captured in boarding actions will not be eligible!

Game Sizes

The basic issue here is that models in BFG tend to cost more points than their FA counterparts. Frigates are bout the same, but cruisers are 2-3 times the cost in BFG, and battleships are about twice as much (before upgrades, at any rate). The BFG campaign rules use points sizes in two key ways. The first is the game size (small vs. large), and the second is in overall fleet size. While not a perfect solution, I assess that merely adjusting the game size values to roughly 66% of the values listed in BFG will probably work fine, at least as an entering argument. So, that means that a Raid-style game, the smaller of the two game sizes, will be set at a value of 500 points for FA, vice 750 points for BFG. Starting fleet sizes are a little trickier. The BFG rule book recommends players have 2000 points worth of models to start, which using my above ratio yields about 1400 points of models. That is a pretty big fleet, and quite a bit more than many players will probably be able to field. So, I’m going to (gasp!) not re-invent the wheel and use the fleet construction requirements out of the faction books by requiring players to field a Battle Fleet from their respective faction. That should also help address any fleet composition issues as well.

Conclusion

Of course, these are not the only issues that will need to be resolved over the course of this project, but I do believe that these three represent the greatest hurdles to clear for bringing the BFG campaign system to FA. That will about do it for this installment! Until next time…