Battlefleet Gothic questions

[Stark]

I've never played BFG, and I have no interest in doing so.

That said, I'm curious how it plays (is it fast, is there bookeeping, is it full of fiddly rules/exceptions) and how it's designed (what mechanics they use, how they inter-relate, and how these inform the play and tactics).

Again, I have absolutely no interest in playing the game, I just want to learn how they did their whole naval combat in space stuff. I've read some of the BFG books (the fleet supplements off their website) and the combat seems like it could be either fast or slow depending on how the resolution works and the scale. I'm not sure how much bookkeeping per ship is required, except it's less than SFB (lol).

[Kuja]

They tailored the game to try and match how they saw space combat in 40K: slow and stately and at times unreliable.

Unfortunately, this translated into a slow, finicky game that I, personally never got into. BFG never had the kind of draw I found in the tabletop. The amount of rules for movement, weapons and damage were obscene, and my friends and I could never get through a game, even after weeks of practice, without consulting the books at least once or twice per round. Not per game. Per round.

BFG sank under the weight of its own complexity. Playing straight up 40,000 was like an FPS by comparison.

[Stark]

Like I said I've only really looked at the fleet books, and while it's not SFB-bad it still looks pretty complicated and slow. I'm interested in a more boardgamey-style, faster, simpler sort of spaceship game (which doesn't really seem to exist). It's a bit strange that BFG is so 'simmy' when 40k itself (especially these days) is pretty simple.

What sort of mechanics in particular weighed the game down or required complicated rules? What di they get wrong?

[Kuja]

What sort of mechanics in particular weighed the game down or required complicated rules? What di they get wrong?

Well, without getting into too many specifics, (because I can't recall many, it's been awhile) let me just make a comparison:

Guy shoots guy in 40k: you roll to hit, roll to damage, if you make both the guy dies. Heavy units get more complex, but that's the essence of the game.

In BFG, let's say you launch a spread of torps at an enemy ship. First you need to make sure to intercept the other ship (IE don't send them flying off in the wrong direction) then he rolls to see how many his turrets shoot down, then you roll to see how many hit and don't go flying past, then roll to damage, roll to see what kind of damage effects the ship takes, find out if there are any secondary damage effects, if there are roll to find out what they happen to be, then next round roll to see if you can reload your torpedoes, or choose to acceletare your ship, or turn wildly for a broadside...

You get where I'm going. The lists of status effects for the ships and the amount of rolling you had to do just to play the game was titanic. It slowed the game down to a glacial pace.

[Venator]

Personally I never had the mentioned troubles, and managed to pick up the system after only a couple of trial games.

In a lot of aspects, it's less finicky than, for instance, "mainstream" Warhammer 40k, for example allocating hits from shooting and anything related to close combat.

Again, I have absolutely no interest in playing the game, I just want to learn how they did their whole naval combat in space stuff.

The designers basically said "fuck it, let's make everything EPIC HUEG", and built the game around that. In a conventional tabletop game, base contact usually means close combat range; the difference with Gothic is that this point-blank/boarding distance is described as approximately ten thousand kilometers.

There's a lot of gameplay is based on predicting where your enemy is going to be, rather than the target's current location (mainly in launching torpedoes, but also in how to maneuver your ships for the best results, due to the effect of not just distance, but relative heading, on weapons' fire, and the like).

[Stark]

Sorry, 'being huge' isn't a design decision; base contact being xyz range is totally irrelevant to mechanics. You're confusing fluff with the way the game is actually played.

Anyway, what's the 'preferred' ship count in a group (I understand smaller ships are abstracted squadrons)? At which point is it faster, and when does it crumble under the weight of paperwork? In an odd question, does it use 'hidden orders' for things that take time to happen but the opponent is not aware of?

[Venator]

Sorry, 'being huge' isn't a design decision; base contact being xyz range is totally irrelevant to mechanics. You're confusing fluff with the way the game is actually played.

Sorry, I really should have expanded on the point. Mechanically, this comes off in how ships maneuver and engage. Torpedo salvos can take a couple turns to get where they were aimed, only to have the target moved half the board away, fearsome broadside firepower can be cut down to nothing because of which way you're going, and the like. Admittedly, they could have just said that everything shoots slower projectiles than Halo plasma guns for the same result...

Anyway, what's the 'preferred' ship count in a group (I understand smaller ships are abstracted squadrons)? At which point is it faster, and when does it crumble under the weight of paperwork?

Small vessels (escorts) function as individual vessels in-game, but they must be grouped into 'squadrons'; larger ships may be grouped into squadrons at the player's discretion. The maximum size of any squadron is six ships, and in most respects it's just a few more dice to roll.

The biggest headache comes from ships firing their weapons from different headings (ship A firing at the target abeam from range X, ship B firing at the target from astern at range Y).
A major upside of squadrons is that it allows you to combine ordinance into salvos, which have pluses and minuses of their own, while a downer is having to maintain formation when you might want to break it up.

In an odd question, does it use 'hidden orders' for things that take time to happen but the opponent is not aware of?

There's not much to that to that effect in the rules; one or two fleets have the allowance for ships to enter play after the game has started, but there's no under-the-table work in the core rules (I can't comment on mission-specific rules).

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I never really had any problems with the game, either. In fact, it is my favorite GW game to play (so far). However, the main difference between my experience and Kuja's is that I never tried to play with all the rules. In an early chapter of the rule book, they introduced the reader to a simplified version of the game to give the players some practice with the basic rules. Instead of playing with all of the later, more complicated and confusing rules, my friends and I just played the simplified version and looked up whatever other rules we wanted to use, should the need arise.

For example, the simplified version of the game leaves out a lot of the rules about the orders system and boarding actions and the real nitty-gritty stuff that slows the complete game down. All it really included was moving, shooting, ordnance, some rules about blast templates and "terrain" and some victory conditions. Typically, we would measure our movement distances and angles, which is pretty quick unless you need to be anal about being accurate to the nearest millimeter, then declare which ships were shooting what and at whom. We might have to refer to the shooting tables if we didn't already know the amount of dice we were supposed to roll based on range and bearing of the target, but usually it was pretty easy to keep track between turns. After rolling to hit, we would work out the damage (rolling to hit was the same as rolling to damage) and if necessary, refer to the critical damage table. Sometimes an explosion would start a chain reaction and destroy an entire squadron, so you might end up using the table a lot.

All in all, the game was a lot of fun and usually much, much quicker to play than a slow board game, like Monopoly or Risk. Of course, my friends were more interested in the narrative aspects of the game than the rules-lawyering aspects. If you are just playing to win at all costs, and using the full set of rules, it would probably take much longer to play and involve a lot of rules-checking.

[Stark]

In what was is Monopoly slow? Monopoly has almost no rules and a game played to the rules (with no extra silliness) would be unlikely to be longer than an hour. It's not 'slow' when players keep stopping to engage in haggling or whatever.

While I'm not sure how playing the simple version means the game isn't slow, why are there so many rolls for hit/damage/critical/etc? Is there a reason they couldn't just build a nomogram or something?

[Ford Prefect]

In what was is Monopoly slow?

A game is won when all but one player goes bankrupt. Assuming that they gain no money during the course of the game except passing go and land poorly, this can be done between two people in an hour. This is an ideal condition; with more players and a more realistic view of how the game goes, players will gain money faster than they'll lose it. Beyond a certain point it becomes essentially impossible to knock a person out of Monopoly. There's no way to do it fast enough.

I used to play a lot of Monopoly not so long ago. At one point I was playing it a couple of times a week, in some sort of bewildering cycle of endless marathons. While extremely long games that last for six or eight hours and sap all the money out of the bank are rare, the game does not lend itself to conclusion, let alone speed. I don't think I've ever actually seen a game of Monopoly properly end, at least before we started inventing increasingly bizarre rules representing economic collapse, alien invasion and the apocalypse.

why are there so many rolls for hit/damage/critical/etc?

I think there are even rules to represent gravity wells!

[Bob the Gunslinger]

In what was is Monopoly slow? Monopoly has almost no rules and a game played to the rules (with no extra silliness) would be unlikely to be longer than an hour. It's not 'slow' when players keep stopping to engage in haggling or whatever.

I've never had a game of Monopoly take less than 2 hours, but the people who always used to insist on playing were very much into the rules and into the haggling, a combination that rendered the game very repetitive with a strategy consisting of "don't be the first person so bored that he or she gives in to a bad deal just to end the damn game" and "don't land on orange."

Slowness may be relative, but Battlefleet Gothic feels like a faster-paced and more interesting game to me when playing, and usually only took about an hour, maybe two depending on the number of players, to play.

While I'm not sure how playing the simple version means the game isn't slow, why are there so many rolls for hit/damage/critical/etc?

Because it's a Games Workshop game?
Seriously, I think there is less rolling in BFG than in WH40k. For one thing, there weren't separate rolls to damage or saving rolls (usually), just big bucket-of-dice rolls and then you count how many 5s and 6s there are (or whatever numbers count as hitting, depending on your target). Once you reduced a ship down to half strength or killed it outright (most ships had 2, 4 or 8 hit points from what I recall), then you would roll on the critical table (one die) to determine if the ship was too fucked up to fight properly or not, or if it was killed to determine if the ship remained a burned-out hulk and hazard to navigation or if it exploded.
There was more measuring than anything else. Most of the game consisted of maneuvering to the best position, trying to find an ideal spot to shoot from while avoiding leaving yourself too vulnerable to return fire.

The Ordnance Phase was pretty darn simple, too, despite what Kuja says. You just move your torpedoes or your fighters across the board (fighters could maneuver, as well), and when they come in contact, roll to see if the fighters kill the torpedoes. If the torpedoes come into contact with a target, roll to see if the target's point defense shoots the torpedoes. If not, roll to see if the torpedoes hit. This may sound like a lot of rolling, but it really isn't since you don't have to keep track of all the stuff that a 40k game requires for its shooting phase. One die per torpedo, fighter, or turret. Count the 5s and 6s, depending on what you need to hit the target. After 2 or 3 turns you won't even need to look at a chart.

And the rules we played by were rules that the designers felt were complete enough that they called the full, later rules for BFG the "Advanced Rules," indicating that they expected many players just to use the simplified rules.

Is there a reason they couldn't just build a nomogram or something?

By Nomogram, do you mean the table wherein one can look at the target's distance and heading to determine the number of dice rolled and the required results for a hit? Or do you mean an actual template that just tells you "you hit it" for certain values of distance, etc.?

I don't really understand what difference a nomogram would make unless you are just trying to remove dice from the game or something.

[Serafina]

Battlefleet Gothic is a lot about planning your next turns and maneuvering.

While you can play main-40K on a turn-to turn basis and still look like a competent player, this is imposible on BFG.
Why?
Well, simple - your ships maneuver slowly.
If you want to get the maximum out of your big battleship, you have to plan its maneuvering - or it will have no targets.
Given that a ship needs a couple of turns (4 for battleships, 1 or 2 for cruisers) and a lot of room to do a 180° turn.

Then you have stuff like "crossing the T", which works in BFG against some opponents, but also has disadvantages against others (Imperial Ships have very strong front armor, orks have a lont of front-arc weapons etc.).

What i really love about BFG is that every place plays totally different.
In 40K, a Eldar Aspect Warrior and a Space Marine use the same rules for nearly anything - they move the same way, they shoot the same way and so on. They are better at various stuff, but they are still directly comparable.
In BFG, a Eldar starhship and a Imperial Cruiser use totally different rules for movement, shooting, shields, critical hits and so on.
Imperial ships are slow and pounderos, need combined-arms tactics and have a good mix of medium and long-ranged weaponery.
Chaos ships are more maneuverable, prefer short and medium-ranged weapons and have some very neat special rules.
Ork ships maneuver totally different, have very strong bow armament and are totally unreliable.
Eldar starships use totally different rules for maneuvering, can move in ways that is utterly impossible for everyone else, but are very fragile.
Tyranids go into close combat (in space!), and their short-ranged weapons are mostly complementary. Instead of pulling of "ship of the line"-tactics, they always go straight towards the enemy. Oh, and you have to keep them together, or they will act on instinct.
Necrons are just - well, they maneuver better, are tougher than anything, have god-like firepower (a necron cruiser can outshoot a battleship). However, they have very small numbers.
Tau prefer long-range shootouts (surprise!).

You have everything from "ship of the line"-like tactics and "full speed ahead, ram them!" (orks) to aerospace-fighter like hit-and run tactics (Eldar) or gunship-like maneuvering (Necrons).

[Stark]

A nomogram would be used to reduce the rolls per attack (ideally to one) by combining the constant lookups into one roll. The way the game appears to handle torpedoes and point defence seems to be designed to soak up as much player time as possible. If the game is about planning ahead due to delays etc, how can this be effective without hidden orders?

As much as BFG infodumps are irrelevant, I'm interested in MECHANICS, and how the game is played, and what the design succeeds at and what it fails at. I'm not interested in fluff.

And if you take ages to play Monopoly it's not Monopoly's fault. The end terms are horrid - which is kind of irrelevant since nobody plays to them - but the actual game flow is simple and victory is basically determined by a single trip around the board and randomness unless you indulge in out-of-rules silliness. If you stopped every shot in BFG to talk about it and discuss with your opponent what you're doing, then it might be a fair comparison, especially if he can exchange die rolls with you.

[Acidburns]

The gothic rules are similar to Warhammer Historical's ship combat stuff, BFG wants to be Trafalgar in spaaaaaace.

I'd say that a battle between 4-5 cruisers, a battleship and escorts takes about the same length as a game of Warhammer Fantasy, so a couple of hours I guess. Movement can be a bit fiddly, but resolving shooting isn't any more complicated than Warhammer shooting / combat. Calculate to hit modifier, check chart, roll to hit, check chart, roll to wound, calculate armour save modifier, roll armour save, roll wardsave, roll regenerate. I think a bigger contributor toward the games slow pace is the fact that 2 equal capital ships can barely damage each other without getting lucky. It takes a serious bit of focus fire to bring a ship down.

The planning ahead part supposedly comes in for ship movement. Ships that are flying straight towards you are easier to hit. Ships moving perpendicular to your ship are harder to hit. Ships are dead 'ard right, so if you just spread your ships out and don't think about what's doing what your firepower will be spread out over many enemy ships and you'll do fuck all. Whereas if your clever and concentrate your firepower on key enemy ships you'll chew them up pretty good. Capital ships must move a certain distance forward before turning, this gives them bloody huge turning circles without special orders. Undergoing special turning orders halfs your ships firepower for that turn so it should only be done to quickly reposition your stuff or to correct a mistake. Once a ship gets down to 50% of its HP all it's weapons and defences get halved. They die much faster at this point and can't contribute much. Smart players often retreat these crippled ships because if they escape the battle they are only worth 25% of their Victory points, not half. Crippled ships are easier to damage and thus need to brace for impact more. A ship that is crippled and braced may as well be out the game completely.

Another interesting rule is the "brace for impact" special order. This makes your ship really tough for the rest of the turn, but halves it's firepower next turn and it can't do any other special orders. You can do this order during the enemy turn of course. You need to decide to brace before your opponent rolls to hit. This can mean the threat of damage can force someone to brace. You might appear to be about to focus on a nearby enemy ship and your opponent will brace in respone. After he braces against your first volley you can then ignore that ship and threaten another ship with your remaining volleys. While it protects your ship for this turn it's possible to get stuck in a bad cycle. If your ships are bracing every turn you might be taking little damage, but your doing less in return. If you are bracing every turn you are probably losing. You can also focus fire on an enemy carrier ship to force it to brace and stop it from reloading its fighters and bombers, allowing your own fighters and bombers to cause havoc.

Some scrap paper to keep track of ship damage and criticals was quite important. There's not much to note down unless some git is using assault boats and starts racking up a half dozen mini-crits per ship.

I think the best part of BFG is the critical system. Ships in BFG take loads of punishment before going down and criticals have a potential to do a lot of damage, when one comes up it's often pretty exciting. When the lone surviving bomber from a wave causes a bulkhead collapse critical on an enemy ship taking it from almost full health to desctruction and then said ship explodes causing even more carnage is awesome.

If you want fast you might look at the escort combat rules. Ships are grouped into squadrons where each ship has 1 HP and 1 Shield. Hits are allocated to attempt to destroy as many ships as possible per volley. No critical hits either so it's fairly straightforward. Got lances? Roll 4+ to damage. Got firepower? Check the chart, roll 5+ to damage. Ships die, simple. Escorts ignore most of the movement rules, they simple move and can turn (usually) up to 90 degrees at any point. A game with only escorts would be a bit of a shin-kicking match I fear unless you slowed down the movement a bit more.

That brings me back to movement I guess. I think BFG is built around a predictable movement phase and a much more random shooting phase. The movement allows some forward planning (it doesn't often feel decisive unless your opponent stuffs up however). Lots of dice rolling means the shooting is pretty average from turn to turn but you do get wonder-shots like the one mentioned earlier. Both BFG and Warhammer Fantasy have a much more important movement phase than 40k, this often gets them a lot praise and folk claim this makes them a more "advanced" game. Movement in fantasy feels more decisive to me than in BFG because one wrong move (or smart one) can completely remove a unit from the game. On the other hand this means in BFG a single mistake doesn't decide the battle.

The different fleets manage to be very different in play without a gratuitous amount of special rules (unlike Warhammer Fantasy) with the exception of the Eldar anyway. For example the Imperial Fleet has very high armour and torpedoes on the front and strong broadside armament. They often burn straight towards the enemy fleet and launch a wave of torpedoes. The enemy fleet has to decide whether to fly through and take damage, or spread out and risk being picked off. Having closed with the enemy fleet the Imperials use close to short range and can move perpendicular to the enemy fleet whilst still dealing good damage. Chaos fleets on the other hand are very fast and long ranged. They can attempt to engage beyond the enemies range before closing in with speed to deliver serious focus fire.

Anyway this has turned out to be a bloody long meandering post but hopefully it has given you some idea of how the game is played and not a bit fat post of gibberish. I don't know if I've really helped on the good / bad part of the game design. I hope this has helped & I'll try and think more about good / bad later.

[Azazal]

You read the fleet books, but did you get the rule books as well?


** PDF WARNING **

Basic Rules

Advanced Rules

[Imperial Overlord]

I found the rules to be quite simple, even the advanced ones (admittedly, I have a good memory for these kinds of things). Resolving torpedo to hits is really simple and not time consuming.

Some of the Fleets do get a little fiddly. Eldar have some (fairly straightforward) special rules as do Necrons and Tyranids are a real pain in the ass. Resolving actual shooting is pretty fast and easy.

Maneuvering is important without using hidden orders because the different special orders affect maneuverability and performance and combining that matching your strength against your opponent's weaknesses and you can try and force your enemy into an unfavorable position. One of the common Imperial tactics, for example, is to launch a volley of torpedoes at long range in order to force the opposing fleet to break up and maneuver away from the spread and give the Imperial fleet a positional advantage.

[Stark]

This is probably a strange question, but what's the average hit rate per gun in BFG?

I mean, how many times do you have to shoot to get a result? With all the soaks and saving throws and to-hit rolls etc, is one in ten shots fired effective? One in twenty? I'm curious, because I remember 40k was pretty random (a round of shooting from a squad could annihilate another, or do jack shit nothing) and sometimes lots of fire could be wasted achieving nothing. I'm curious because I'm interested in what level of die-rolling for failure is tolerable in a game like this - ie, do people get pissed rolling a dozen times for a single decent hit? Does it add to theme to miss a lot/fail to penetrate a lot/etc?

[Imperial Overlord]

This is probably a strange question, but what's the average hit rate per gun in BFG?

I mean, how many times do you have to shoot to get a result? With all the soaks and saving throws and to-hit rolls etc, is one in ten shots fired effective? One in twenty? I'm curious, because I remember 40k was pretty random (a round of shooting from a squad could annihilate another, or do jack shit nothing) and sometimes lots of fire could be wasted achieving nothing. I'm curious because I'm interested in what level of die-rolling for failure is tolerable in a game like this - ie, do people get pissed rolling a dozen times for a single decent hit? Does it add to theme to miss a lot/fail to penetrate a lot/etc?

For the most part there isn't the barrage of dice rolls there are in 40k. You roll to hit, the hits eat up shields and then go to hull. The additional rolling to make the hits go to damage and save against damage that 40k does are rare in BFG. Shields tend to eat up a lot of hits and regenerate every round so it generally takes several exchanges of fire or several ships concentrating on one to knock a ship down to crippled. Hit chances go up with advantageous positioning and special orders and you're generally rolling a handful of dice for each ship so bad luck on a couple of dice won't screw you. About one one out of three volleys tends to hit hard, but lesser results can still result in useful effects like damage, knocking down shields so another ship can fire and inflict damage, or forcing the other guy onto Brace for Impact orders.

[Serafina]

The firing sequence is quite simple:

If you are firing normal guns, you do the following: Take the number of guns shooting, look at the relative position of the target, look at the chart and then roll the dice - every dice that is equal or above the enemies armor is a hit.
This takes about 10-20 seconds for each ship/squadron.

For lances, you simply roll a number of dices equal to the strenght of the battery. Each roll of 4+ is a hit.

There are some more complicated weapons (nova cannons, eldar puls weapons), but they are not that much harder to use.

Every hit knocks down a single shield. For each shield knocked out, you place a blastmarker at the target.
And once there are no shields left, you inflict damage on the ship itself - each such hit is rerolled, causing a critical hit on a roll of 6.

It takes about 30-40 seconds to resolve this, propably longer if you do not have much experience.

[Pikarov]

For once I can't resist the urge to add my comments, so here I go. I'm afraid that this won't be very well structured but I'll do my best.

BFG rules have been written to reduce bookkeeping to the bare minimum with a lot of neat ideas. Only capital ships need bookkeeping and the only thing to track is the number of remaining hit points (average of 8 for a typical cruiser) and the occasional critical damage (something like "starboard weaponry damaged").
Escorts (destroyers, frigates...) are grouped into squadrons and require no bookekeeping, once on the board, the only thing you need to know is their class and the leadership value of the squadron, that's all.
Likewise, fighters and bombers are easy to handle. Once launched you don't have to keep track of anything. If a fighter squadron intercept bombers, torpedoes or other fighters, both squadrons are removed without any dice roll (it is assumed that losers are shot down or scaterred and victors need to refuel and reload).
Bombers who reach a capship make one attack run and disappear from the board.

If you are familiar with them, a lot of Epic40K rules have been reused for BFG (antitank became ion lance, etc...).
They are in my opinion quite simple and well generalized. For example for all ships, the loss of half hit points results in the ship being "crippled" and losing half of each characteristic. This is true for any ship in the game.

Direct fire use a variation of the chart which gives number of damage dice rolled in function of the situation and the firepower.
An average capital ship will roll 6 dices in direct fire and each usually does damage on a 5 or 6. This is just enough to knock down the two hit points shield of the average capital ship.
The firepower of several ships will often be needed to score damages on the hull, so keeping formation and concentrating firepower is important and this may frustrate a new player who spread his fleet too much, but not for long anyway...
When a ship is targeted it may try to "brace for impact" which is a special order. This will gives him a save roll ability on 4+ and reduces dramatically its effectiveness on the next turn.
Finally one dice is rolled for each damage taken on the hull. Each 6 on this roll become a critical hit.
In the typical GW fashion of rolling dices, keeping success and rolling them again for saves, then for critical. I must admit it doesn't bother me, I rather like making enough rolls to let the law of average settle in and I find this easier than piling a lot of modifiers on the roll.

And btw there is also a stupid guesstimate range weapon that we house-ruled away.

The nice touch is that you don't have to keep track of the status of shields on paper. If you hit a shield, you put a 'blast marker' in contact with the ship. As long as the ship is in contact with one or more blast markers, the same number of shields are down.
When the ship moves next turn his shields are restored as he's not in contact with the blast markers and this lets on the battleground a nice cloud of smok... of expanding plasma which reduces lightly accuracy and speed and dissipates slowly.

The two most meaningful parts of the game are the "brace for impact" order and the low maneuverability of the ships.
The "brace for impact" mechanics allows the player to either spread their fire just enough to make as many enemy ships as possible brace and reduce their effectiveness on next turn or concentrate everything for a kill on a ship which will soak an awful lot of firepower before going down.
The low maneuverability means that if some ships break formation for any reason they will take a lot of time to resume station and this may be exploited by the opponent to overwhelm them. Breaking the enemy formation is a good tactic. It can be done by using torpedo volleys (torpedos bypass shield, so even one torpedo has the potential of scoring a crippling hit with some luck), damaging and slowing some ships or simply if the opponent tried desperatly to concentrate its fire (on a bait ?) and some of his ship lost formation while doing this.
Moreover, the slow and inexorable course of the ships reduces the turn effect that bothers me in most GW games I know (the "I stand just out of your range, if you try to advance during your turn, you won't reach me and I'll be in charge range next turn...")

There are a lot of fleets with different feels, but those with super-maneuverabilty are less interesting in my opinion.
Typical fleets for an evening game will consist of less than 6 capital ships and the same number of escort squadrons.
Bigger game are possible without too much trouble. An interesting mechanic is that your admiral can issue special orders until a leadership roll is failed. That means four to six orders each turn max. You can give orders to more ships by grouping them in squadron for a bigger game because you give orders to squadron but you also lose the capacity to micromanage (they will all brace for impact together for example) them and this can be an interesting aspect in a two small versus one big fleet scenario.
And you can also do some very nice planetary assault with BFG, orbital defences are as easy as escorts to manage.

There's an important point though. BFG feels very WH40K, but it doesn't feel like a space wargame at all. More like a part late age-of-sail part pre-dreadnought naval battle in the caribbean ("Watch out for reefs around this island... I mean asteroid belts around this planet") game.

The only other space wargame with simple and good rules that I know is the last version of Full Thrust, which feels much more spacey (with a crude inertia rule and simultaneous movement and fire). And remains simple enough to do small fleet actions (unlike Babylon 5 Wars and Starfleet Battle and their ship sheets which put an entire party of RPG characters worth of sheet to shame). But you'll need a good campaign or background, because the game itself is much less fun than the over the top 'space is full of flames' style of BFG.