The following diary is the story of how I build my ork fleet for Battlefleet Gothic. Now this isn't the only or even the right way how to build a fleet, but it might give you some ideas when you do the same.

My first game

I played my first game of Battlefleet Gothic at my local gaming club. Rolf is a long time Gothic veteran, who tried to lure the rest of us into the game. One day I decided to give it a try as I liked the idea of large space battles and could imagine building a fleet for one of my 40k forces.
Rolf had two fleets, Chaos and Imperial, basically from the boxed set plus some extra. The fleets were about 1500 points each, and we played a straight on battle. I took the Imperial fleet and - not surprisingly - lost badly. I liked the overall feel of the game, but the Empire didn't catch my fancy. Apart from that I was pretty sure I wanted either Orks or Black Templars, as these are my favourite 40k armies.

At home I read through the main book I had lent from Rolf to get a better idea of the game and the different fleets. I also had the WD with the Space Marine fleet list, so I could take a look at that one, too. Orks had a feeling about them that I liked, even though the models looked only so-so to me from the pictures I found in the book and on the GW pages. Still the ork list sounded more interesting and what I might like to play, so I decided to give it a try.

My second game

A week later I played my second game, again with Rolf and the same models, but I used the imperial ships as stand ins for ork ships. My list looked like this:

- Deathdeala with waaaghboss, boarding parties, maniac gunners and two extra re-rolls
- Hammer class battlekroozer with waaaghboss, improved turrets, boarding torpedos, boarding parties, maniac gunners and two extra re-rolls
- Kill kroozer
- Terror ship with torpedo launchaz and boarding torpedos
- 4 brute ramships

I am aware that there are some mistakes in the list. I put a lot of points into upgrades and had almost no escorts. The lack of escorts was due to the models at hand, and I used upgrades to raise points and try some things out.
This game went better for me than the first, and the ork fleet was fun to play for me, but I lost badly in the end. I felt my lack of escorts and learned how difficult it is to actually ram another ship. The only boarding action I made caused the same damage to me as to him due to some lucky dice rolls on his part, and having rolled extremely bad for leadership didn't help either.
On the other hand the deathdeala took his toll. While not able to handle things on his own, he is very tough to bring down and a fearsome opponent when accompanied by kroozers and escorts. At least that's what I hope he will be in the future. This game also convinced me that I would like to play an ork fleet, which was all I needed to decide against a space marine fleet.

Back to the drawing board

Now that I had a first idea of what orks were like in Battlefleet Gothic I took another look at the ships. Some of the guys on The Waaagh! had posted pictures of their ships, and they looked better than on the GW pictures. I also started thinking about scratch building the ships, but did not find the time to give my ideas a try. Another problem was that I lacked BFG and epic bits that would help me with conversions - it's hard to convert something if the bits you use are completely out of scale.

The setup

In the middle of my plans to scratch build the ships some of my friends decided to give me a wonderfull birthday present: A Battlefleet Gothic fleet! Not only that, but I could choose the models myself! This was too good to be true.
To cut a long story short, I spend some nights thinking and calculating. A quick look on e-bay told me that I could get some additional ships for a good price there, so I came up with the following:

1 deathdeala battlekroozer
1 slamblasta battlekroozer
2 kill kroozers
2 terror ships
16 brute ramships
3 onslought ships
6 ravager ships

I am aware that this list could still use one or two more kroozers and more onsloughts, but for now it would have to do. It should still give me a flexible list with a good mix of kroozers and escorts. I must admit that I just couldn't resist getting two battlekroozers. They just look great and make a fearsome appearance on the field. Time will tell how often I will use both of them in a game, but if I was lucky I might find some additional models on e-bay later on to enlarge this fleet.

The next step was choosing a paint scheme.