Is anybody interested in trying out the BFG campaign rules? It's probably easiest to have a quick look at them (BFG campaign rules), but basically it's a loosely map-based system which is pretty much an excuse for admirals and ships to gain experience and upgrades. The number of systems you control affects how easily you can repair damaged ships, and the amount of experience ('renown') your admiral gains affects how many reinforcements, ship upgrades or other handy things you get. Ships also gain experience, which translates into improving their Ld rating or getting special crew skills. I can't say for sure how well it'd work, but I reckon it looks like it's worth trying.

The following stuff probably won't make that much sense to anybody who hasn't had a look at the rules link above, but there are a few things I'd probably change from the basic system:

• Any fleet can choose to either be a 'normal' fleet or a pirate fleet
  (arr!), as opposed to Imperials and Chaos being normal, Eldar and Orks
  being pirates and everybody else being undefined.

• All fleets start at 2000pts, not 1500 for pirates and 2000 for normal.

• Pirate fleets that roll a 3-6 on the Incoming Orders table can choose to either play a major raid or a battle, rather than being limited to raids only.

These are basically intended to let people choose to play a wider range of scenarios, otherwise anybody playing a raiding fleet (Orks/Eldar/Necrons/etc) would be stuck playing only half the scenarios. Anybody who thought they'd play BFG reasonably often could be a normal fleet; if somebody only wanted to play the odd game, they could be a pirate (since they don't take up any space on the map).

Clarifications I'd make:

• If you get a refit or crew skill you can't use (ie Turbo-Weapons on a ship with no weapons batteries), roll again.

• Presumably everybody uses the same refit and crew skill tables, even though that may seem a tad odd (ie for Necrons). Exceptions would be Tyranids using their biomorphs instead of crew skills and refits, and possibly Orks using the custom (kustom?) Ork refits and crew skills (skillz?) from Armada.

• I'm pretty sure Necron or Tyranid 'admirals' don't gain Ld/rerolls, given that neither actually has admirals in their fleet list. I'd count their fleet-wide rerolls as part of their overall roster, sort of like a ship. Necron/Tyranid players would still accumulate renown, though.

• You can get squadrons of up to 6 escorts rather than 5 with a reinforcements appeal, otherwise you can't get squadrons of 6 escorts (which seems odd).