Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Maruders Fleet Manual Pt 1: The Oroshan

Hi all! SeerK here once again. So I have been going through the new Marauders Fleet Manual since Spartan was good enough to put it back up with some fixes in it. Most of the updates were just omissions and such and there were not any real major changes. With the impending drop of Planetfall this month I wanted to kinda go through the Marauders before the obligatory series of Planetfall posts takes up the blog for a bit.

So Lets start with my personal favorite in the book. The Oroshan. I have always liked these models. The Armageddon Dreadnought is big. The Defiler Cruisers are also have a good heft to them. The only ship I am not a fan of design wise is the Slayer class frigate. The snail like design is a little weird to me. I am hoping when they eventually release the new models we have a big more consistency in design. I digress a bit though.

The Oroshan are strait up mercenaries, which means it does not matter if you have a Kurak Alliance or Zenian League fleet. Even though the Blood Tribes of the Oroshan hail from Directorate controlled space they work for anybody who has currency. This means any fleet can have up to 25% of its points total made up of mercenary ships. For the Dindrenzi and the RSN this works out rather well as the Oroshan add some major fire power and have a fleet tactics rating of 3. SO Dindrenzi and RSN fleets do not suffer from a lower tactics rating by including allies. Lets take a look at the ships.

The Armageddon class Dreadnought lives up to its name and class in every sense. This ship is big, extremely well armed and very tough. The Armageddon sports impressive and long range fore power in pretty much all of its arcs. Range band 2 is lethal distance for all of the weapons. For max fire in the fore arc you need to be at 20 inches. In the side arcs you need to be about 16 inches. You have many options for your 3 hard points. I personally like to take weapon shielding, +2 move and second assault. I then add the Special Forces MAR and give the Torpedos Decimator Warheads. Being able to force disorder checks on individual ships and squadrons is nice. You can also add wings and more AP, which is nice if you give the ship Grief Escorts. The escorts are armed decently and you have the choice of adding point defense or assault points. I usually give it the point defense upgrade as I tend to use the escorts to bolster the Armageddons point defense and take out small ships. I love the Armageddon. The couple games I have fielded it, the ship has really decimated my opponents tier one vessels. Its ability to engage several targets effectively is impressive.

Sadly you cannot take the Armageddon in a patrol fleet. So we have a new addition to the Oroshan fleet in 2.0. The Harbinger Battle Carrier is your Patrol fleet, any fleet really, tier one choice. The Harbinger is not really lacking for fire power. It has slightly less dice in each arc when compared to the Armageddon. It does lack the torpedo weapons though. It has a max wing capacity of 9 wings with a hard point upgrade. I would use one of the hard points for this upgrade. The other I would use for weapon shielding. I personally think you get more for your points giving it the weapon shielding upgrade rather then a second shield die. You can take Grief Escorts. I would probably take at least two geared for point defense. This ship, on paper, looks like it can tangle with most battleships and other battle carriers. It would need support though. I have yet to use the Harbinger in a game. So I will reserve any major judgments or comments until I have a few games under my belt with it.

The Oroshan's only tier 2 choice is the Defiler Cruiser. I really like this ship. You can take them in a squadron of 4 and give them the Pack Hunter MAR. Its Beam weapon is only in the fore arc, but it does go out to range band 4. With the Pack Hunter MAR this gives you 7 dice and 40 inches. Not to bad. The Torpedos can be fired in any arc. They can also be given Decimator warheads. The Defiler is on par with a heavy cruiser in terms of fire power. It cannot take fire like a heavy cruiser though. It does have a DR of 4 and a CR of 7 with one shield die so they can take some fire. I like to send my Defilers after big ships as they have 22 beam dice in range band two when they are at full strength. This can really lay the hurt on even dreadnoughts. The only real issue is they become targets after one good volley of fire. All in all the defiler is a real solid cruiser class vessel.

The Tier three choice is the Slayer class frigate. These ships can be fielded in squadrons of 6 and have the Pack Hunter MAR. They are decently armed, but only have a fixed fore weapon. This can mean it can be a little difficult to get all the Slayers lined up on some targets in a full squadron. The other issue you can run into is the fact they only have 1 crew point. This makes the ships unsuitable for hanging out in debris fields, surviving boarding assaults from pretty much anybody and also makes them easy pickings for assault robot torpedoes. The Grief Escort also has one crew point so be wary.

All in all the Oroshan are a good hard hitting fleet. They are a good anchor for a Marauder or mercenary fleet. They also are great additions to regular fleets. I am going to be using them a whole lot more since I acquired a fleet. I may start running them in tournaments once I also get another frigate squadron. The minimums for a battle fleet fit into 900 points as fate would have it. A dreadnought, 4 cruisers and 12 frigates. Not to bad.

Until next time crush the Alliance and as always



REMEMBER DRAMOS!!!!!!

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