Battlefleet Gothic Basic Guide

A basic guide for newcomers introducing and clarifying some of the things the game doesn't tell you

Introduction

This is a very basic gameplay guide to help people get into the game.

A lot of the information and tips in this guide is something I've blatantly stolen from other peoples posts. I can't recall all the names however, so I'm just gonna say thanks for helping to the community in general.

1. Fleet Building.
When playing campaign, skirmish or multiplayer you level up.
You start at level one and the max level is 8.
When reaching level 8 you will have:

1 Battleship 4 skills
2 Battle cruisers 3 skills
3 Cruisers 2 skills
4 Light Cruisers 1 skill

Each ship can get 9 crew points and 5 upgrades.

Each escort type can have 3 upgrades that will benefit every escort of the type, even summoned ones.

3 upgrades for transports, these are only relevant as defender in convoy missions.

If a ship is destroyed or heavily damaged it will be unavailable for 1-2 rounds of combat but it won't lose any upgrades or favours or levels it have when it comes back.

Charactaristics

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/448482024261966116/6816A383E04178E4F50D1FFB543B98285F5BE83B/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside|256:*

1. Characteristics.

This shows you the basic stats of the ship. Hovering over each will give a tool tip that explains the stats in depth.
Be aware that shields don't benefit from armour and so will always take damage from each hit. (unless you are Imperial Navy and have the right upgrade).
When depleted shields will recharge at a rate of 2% per second, after this the ship will get full shields again, if the shield is hit it will start regenerating at 2% per second ten seconds after it took damage, this will stop if it's damaged again.

2. Weapons.

The weapons the ship is equipped with. Again hovering over them will give you a tool tip as well as highlight the weapon on the ship.

Number of attacks: the number of shots the weapon will fire
IMPORTANT: If the weapon is a battery it will say 1 shot, this is 1 shot PER barrel, so you need to count the number of barrels yourself to get the true amount of shots from a battery.

Damage, the amount of damage each shot does.
Rate of fire, how many seconds between each shot
Range, the range of the weapon.
Critical chance, the chance for each shot to make a critical hit.
Angle, the weapons facing and arc of fire.


3. Traits.

These are the traits of the fleet and the ship.
When hovering over accuracy you will see numerical values for every 3000 units. Be aware that the progression is linear, so at 1500 units you will have 90% hit chance, not 100%.


4. Orders.

These are the basic orders and abilities the ship have.

The special orders; Reload, Lock On, Brace For Impact and Running Silent does not count as skills for the purpose of cool down reduction (from crew or Reload).

All orders and abilities can be set to auto cast by right clicking on them, and the AI is mostly adept at using these at the right time.

Boarding.

Boarding works like the following. For each boarding attempt you will have a chance to cause a critical hit. This chance is based only on the opponents stats and have nothing to do with your ships.
Your succes chance is 100 minus enemy troop strength and, in the case of boarding or assault boats, minus the number of enemy turrets.

All ships have 1 Lighrning Strike, unless you upgrade or use favours, this means you only get 1 attempt to crit, it does however have a 500 360º range and can be used on any ship without shield (so all eldar).
Regular boarding gives you 2 attempts from a light cruiser, 3 from a cruiser, 3 from a battle cruiser and 4 from a battleship.

Detection

Detection is, perhaps, the most important aspect of the game. You can't shoot what you can't see.
A ships detection range is shown with a green circle around the ship.

There are three stages of visibility in this game.

1. Undetected, this usually happens if the ship is running silent, hiding in a gas cloud, hiding in an asteroid field or using a favour. An invisible ship will not show on the map.

2. Unidentified. This is the default state of ships at the start of battle. It will show as a red dot on the screen. You cannot shoot at an unidentified ship, but you do know where it is.

3. Identified. This is the state where you can see the enemy ship and shoot it.
Your ship is identified if it comes within detection range of an enemy ship or if it's pinged by a probe or beacon or if you use a special manoeuvre.

Hints for detection.

If a ship launches fighters they will be visible to the opponent, so even an invisible ship will reveal it's position if fighters are flying around it.

If you see bombers coming towards you, you can hit silent running to force them to abort their run, this will still put his planes on cool down.

If a ship has it's shield offline, or it's an eldar, you can use the beacon skill directly on the ship to attach a beacon to it for the duration of the skill.

If you use augur disruptor to lower the enemy's detection range to 1000 you can shoot at his ships without being shot back at for 25 seconds, just b sure to get them all so some pesky escort don't sneak up and reveal your ships.

A ship can only use the Micro Warp Jump skill within it's own detection range, so boosting or disrupting this will affect the range of the jump.

Once you've identified a ship you can click on it.

Enemy ship traits

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/448482024261966520/A17645CB7CCCF7D0871869A5091C0D7BE25E7D50/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside|256:*

1. Priority selection.
This let's you give the enemy a priority, your ships will always try to fire at the highest priority target in range, unless you manually target another ship.

2. Critical focus.
Selecting a system to focus. If you have a system selected your crits will disable that system.
NOTE: This only works for weapon crits. Boarding, Assault boats and Lightning strikes will always be random.

3. Enemy stats.
Here you can see the basic stats for the enemy ship.

4. Upgrades.
This shows you what upgrades your opponents ship have. It's always good to skim these to an idea of what the enemy can do.

5. Weapons.
This shows the ships weapons, it will also show you what weapons have been destroyed.

6. Favours.
This shows you if the enemy ship have a favour and which one.

Basic Tactical tips

Basic Tactics tips.

1. get some skills to help you with detection, this is alpha and omega, you will stand a much higher chance of winning if you know where and what you are fighting.

2. If you're playing Orks be aware that their bombers deal only 2 damage as opposed to the normal 30.

3. If you have high energy turn you can use it to shoot a broadside and then turn to fire prow weapons and then the other broadside and the swing back in time for the other broadside to go off cool down. This will effectively let you double your firepower.

4. Torpedoes have an arm time, when hovering over the torpedo button you can see the direction of the torpedoes, notice that the start of the line is red, if they hit something within this distance they will do nothing.

5. Ramming is based on ship size and speed, the bigger you are and the faster you go, the more damage you will do. If you hit all stop after a ram and then All Ahead Full again you can do multiple small rams.

6. Don't bother spending renown on repairing ships. This is a waste of points you could use to upgrade and improve your ships. When you reach level 8 there is a massive difference between someone who has spent 800 renown on repairing and someone who spent them on favours and upgrades.

7. Destroyed ships get no experience after a battle, so unless the ship will make the difference between victory or defeat, get them out of there before they die.

8. When an opponent uses a special order it will show over the ship. If a ship is using Brace For Impact you will often get a bigger benefit from switching targets.

9. Asteroid Belts works in the following way.
You take 10 hull damage per second while moving in an asteroid field, this can be negated by from armour, so an imperial ship using Brace For Impact will have 95% chance to negate the damage. You take no damage while standing still.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

I cannot find anything on what the actual leveling system is for ships themselves. Like how does it even decide what amount to give each ship in XP? And no I am not talking about renown or my admiral level, I mean the specific ships' levels. It appears to me to be almost completely random how your ships are leveling up, with some of them immediately going to a full level up, others just get a tiny tiny amount of experience, and other ships getting literally nothing at all.
It seems to me almost like it's some kind of dice roll to giving your ships XP and leveling them up which *sucks* because that's literally how you get the upgrades and additional crew.

Perhaps it's something unintuitive? Because I swear I am having all my ships get good shots in and kills but it'll allocate the XP--if it gives any at all--completely randomly, with some campaign missions not even giving me any XP on my ships after a victory.

[depl92004]

if you have a fully leveled up, kitted out imperial navy fleet, what is the best ship combination, on average?

[oso.Matic]

thanks, very usefull

[Æsheron]

2. Critical focus.
Selecting a system to focus. If you have a system selected your crits will disable that system.
NOTE: This only works for weapon crits. Boarding, Assault boats and Lightning strikes will always be random.

This is not true. When you board you randomly roll to see which system is hit, but if it lands on a system you havn't targeting it rerolls and uses the second result no matter how it lands. Unless you're using the Space Marines, they reroll as many as 3 times, so that's 4 chances to hit the right system.

[stuh42asl]

Can a downloadable guide be created , with the desriiption of each ship class per faction and a description of each weapon, skill, upgrade etc so we can read and better select our ships and skills. I like to be able to study what works better for each ship, anad for each fleet

[Barry Bee Benson]

I found the tips at the end to be very useful. Maybe you could add more of that?

[Bribe Guntails]

Elementary, yet useful. Further fill out the guide and give it a nice polish.

[Ranfarel]

Nice ! :)

[lav666]

nice and clear

[DEM0N_TIH]

really well and accurately expained !!! Nice work !!!