Battlefleet Gothic Armada, the first few missions

I finally started playing Battlefleet Gothic: Armada last night, and it was fun. Sort of.

There were a few problems, but I suspect it has more to do with my gaming laptop (which is an Aurorus with a freaking Nvdia GTX graphics card) than the game itself. The cinematic stutters and the dialogue and the video are not in sync. Basically the dialogue moves faster than the video, so they finish speaking (and the sound effects explode right before the screen of the explosion...what the hell?) before the video ends, and there's a long stretch of silence as the video plays catch up.

I'm not sure why...I had a similar problem with Titanfall where I take over a minute or two to load the game, and by the time I load it, the game has already begun long ago and either team has about 100 points. That's even though I was already from the lobby from the start.

There probably is something wrong with my laptop. But it's a gaming laptop!

Anyway, bugs aside, the game itself is sort of fun. I play as Admiral Spire...okay, I start out as Captain Spire in charge of a Dauntless class light cruiser, checking out Aleph Station, finding out that everyone in there has been murdered after sending a boarding party of shock troopers (are they Cadians?), which then proceeds to be a trap. I hope those Cadians get out alive and safely back on the light cruiser.

Anyway, we encountered a couple of destroyers, which got destroyed by me, only for an entire Chaos fleet to warp in and force us to make an emergency warp jump. That's the tutorial, I believe.

The next mission has Spire promoted to Admiral (with me once again experiencing the same stuttering in the cinematic), and sent to take out a seditious crusier. Another pseudo tutorial, which forced me to take a Dauntless MKII light cruiser and Firestorm Frigate alongside my current Dauntless light cruiser. We were doing fine, but I lost the Firestorm, and for no reason the captain of the Dauntless MKII panicked and thought we were going to lose, even though both my light cruisers had a lot more health than the heavily damaged enemy cruiser (each of them has more green bars than the red bars of the enemy), and I was forced to execute him. Lieutenant Krast (I think) was promoted to captain for shooting the former captain. Yay. After this, the Dauntless MKII became a staunch maintstay in my fleet.

When I first unlock cruisers, I immediately chose a Tyrant cruiser. I favor broadside weapons, and the Tyrant has about 8 broadside macro-cannons, 4 being plasma. Ideal for moving alongside and unleashing a heliish broadside bombardment. YAY! So my standard fleet now comprises of a Tyrant cruiser being my Admiral flagship, a Dauntless MKII cruiser being my ship of the line, and a Cobra class destroyer. I like destroyers more than frigates anyway, but it's just too bad the Cobra lacks the lance weaponry the Firestorm has. But it's cheaper! Yay!

The next mission was escort, and I did that by trying to pummel all the Ork ships to oblivion. Unfortunately, it was too difficult to do so and I only destroyed one before 2 of my transport ships escaped (I lost 1). If you're having trouble with this mission, one advice is to split them up and have them run from three different positions on the map. For some reason, all the Orks converge on a single convoy ship first.

Then data recovery, which I used my standard Tyrant cruiser along with my Dauntless MKII light cruiser and Cobra destroyer, turned out to be easy after several tries of me screwing up and trying to destroy all the other ships, not realizing I only have 3 minutes to chase after the dude to board him. Oh, and another tip - only your cruisers and light cruisers have boarding parties, so don't make the mistake of going for speed and massing 4 Firestorm frigates with a single Dauntless light cruiser, only to find out that the frigates can't send boarding parties. Ugh. Plus the Tyrant cruiser can soak up lots of damage, so he will survive and make the warp jump before the enemy can board him. HA HA HA! The Dauntless MKII light cruiser (and I suspect the normal Dauntless) can't - if you don't destroy the other ship fast enough (and most of the time you will not), he'll board your damaged light cruiser and steal the data back. Oh well.

There are side missions, and I took the escort mission again. This time I destroyed 3 Ork ships and saved 2 transport ships (ugh, always losing 1). But for some reason after I completed and beat that side mission, I can't take the other side mission that involves destroying Chaos ships. Huh? What's going on? Am I restricted to a certain number of side missions or something? Anyway, I stopped there (just before the orbital platforms mission, where I've to defend them), and that's that.

I'll post more details as I play further through the campaign.

Oh yeah, there's no base building, which is kind of fresh and cool. I can upgrade and select my ships before each mission, so I don't need to go through the tedious motions of base building and waiting for my ships to be built. I can't wait to unlock battleships and larger ships!