Finally got a game in. Tough to say how different it felt, as it's been about 6 weeks since I last played, so the fine details are a little soft.
The game was at 750 with DE (Torture and 2 Succubi all with Impalers, 6 Subjugations with Torpedoes) vs Chaos (Slaughter, Murder, Devastation with Warmaster, and 6 Iconclast). When we called the game (mostly due to time), he had 3 Iconclasts and an undamaged Murder, while my Torture and one Succubi were crippled and I had 3 Subjugation left. So it was 19 to 9 hull damage inflicted, but 12 to 12 hull points remaining. The DE won on VP, but the Chaos player had incredibly bad dice rolls for shooting the first half of the game, and it could easily have been a closer game on VP.
Somewhat random thoughts:
Mimic Engines getting 2 turns seems almost superfluous, though that may be due to us having to use a slightly narrower than 48 inch table. I suppose for certain scenario deployments this might matter, but we've mostly been doing cruiser clash, as several of our BFG players have not really internalized the rules yet (lots of us only play every few months).
Holofield with the range-based modifiers still continue to feel more unhelpful than I'd like. I don't think I was ever outside 30cm after the first turn of the game, and only rarely outside 15cm, so I got rather little benefit from it. The only thing that helped offset the absolutely crippling lack of hull boxes was that I could usually at least get to places where only one opponent's ship could fire on me, thus letting the shields do some work. In a larger game, where the opponent can spread out a bit more and has enough hulls to get some overlapping fire fields, it feels like DE are just going to evaporate. It's so easy to cripple a DE ship, and once they are, they're pretty easy pickings.
Salvoes of 12 torpedoes from a squadron of Subjugations is pretty ridiculous with Eldar torpedoes. You're paying for it, but I definitely felt I did more damage with those than anything else. That said, this was against Chaos with 5+ armor and not SM with 6+ armor like most of my previous test games, which is a huge difference overall. The Chaos player noted that he generally demolished the SM, while the SM fleet was incredibly difficult for DE to damage, and then in turn, the DE tended to rip up the Chaos fleet.
On the next table over, the SM player went up against an IN fleet. It was noted that Thunderhawks as Fighter-Assault being able to kill d3 bombers per round of engagement is really just too much. Leaving pure fighters at d3 and dropping fighter hybrids to d2 seems like it would balance out better.
I'm definitely looking forward to getting a fully revised main book, with all the rules in one place.
