Warship Build Special — Halo-themed Fleets for Intercept Orbit
After the builds I’ve done long ago and the more recent additions, I’m now ready to share the fleet listings I’ve been working on for my Halo-themed fleets. There will be three fleets: UNSC, Covenant, and Banished. These are the fleets I use for my games in real life. Hope you find these interesting and helpful for you to run your games and have some fun!
Intercept Orbit in itself is a great game, simple to learn, with mechanics that are accessible to anyone, and freely available. More importantly, you can make fleets using any construction bricks you have laying around. See my listing and the builds in the book as examples and inspirations and make your own! It makes for a good entryway into wargaming, easy and affordable.
For the purpose of this post I’ll just lay down some principles. In IO fleets have three types of combat units — companies, frigates and capital ships. All are or can be equipped with defense and spotting systems, plus catapuls to launch companies and weapons to attack enemies or defend themselves. Plus, there are also green movement dice companies have as a system and frigates have as a bonus. In my lists companies are represented by the generic fighter builds, while the Ace companies are represented by the light corvette builds. There is a fourth type of ship too, the High Value Assets, representing the objectives all factions are fighting for.
Additionally, all factions will have several types of units but you don’t need to use all of them in your games. Pick and choose according to the size of the game you want to play.
UNSC
This will be the fleet with more ships, as in the past I also added the Insurrectionist Fleet as a faction, but have since decided to fold them into a single fleet. The UNSC didn’t really fight against itself, so if two players want to play with human ships you can then say one of you represents the rebels. Covenant and Banished did fight against themselves often.
When you make different fleets for this game is fun to have a theme. The UNSC is based on Spotting and Weapons. This makes them good in damaging enemy ships but rather squishy against incoming attacks. This should balance them out against the sturdier enemies here. On this topic, frigates and destroyers come in squadrons of two although in game they work as a single unit to represent how weaker human ships are compared to the alien ones.
With this said, these are the stats I’m work with.
Freighter — HVA
Gladius Corvettes — Yellow Ace Company
Lancer Corvettes — Red Ace Company
Frigate Squadron — Yellow System, Assault Range Weapon, Point-defense Range Weapon + Green die
Destroyer Squadron — Yellow System, Support Range Weapon, Assault Range Weapon + Green die
Cruiser — Catapult, Support Range Weapon, Assault Range Weapon + Green die
Light Carrier — Catapult x2, Yellow System + Green die
Battleship — Yellow System, Support Range Weapon x2, Assault Range Weapon
Covenant
While the humans focus on firepower, the Covenant focus on defense. Their ships are larger and all have defense systems to represent the energy shields they have in lore. I also mixed things around here and gave the Covenant the Heavy Destroyer, a medium ship for the Banished fleet.
You will note that this fleet is dependent on the Squadrons for scouting, so you will need to coordinate your assets really well to make your attacks count. Also, most ships have catapults as dedicated carriers are too large for the scale I worked on here, and it also makes each ship less specialized in order to give the Covenant that extra flair.
Stealth Ship — HVA
Storm Cutters — Red Ace Company
Heavy Corvette — Catapult, Combined Assault and Point-defense Weapon, Defense Shield + Green die
Heavy Destroyer — Yellow System, Support Range Weapon, Assault Range Weapon, Defense Shield
Battlecruiser — Catapult, Support Range Weapon, Point-defense Weapon, Defense Shield
Banished
So, I’ll need to apologize on this one. There’s one ship missing in the picture above as I lost the original file for the Dreadnought and wasn’t able to remake it on time. That said, the Banished are even more focused on defense and specialized than the Covenant, using more short-ranged weapons as they like to get close and personal to their enemies.
The Karve has two shields as it is meant to escort the other ships and shield them from damage. The same goes for the Drekar corvettes. This makes you turtle, so to speak, protecting your assets while trying to reclaim the enemy ones. I also added the Heavy Corvette in the mix as the Banished are known to capture Covenant ships or accept deserters.
Kig-Yar Raider — HVA
Drekar Corvettes — Blue Ace Company
Karve — Assault Range Weapon, Defense Shield x2 + Green die
Dreadnought — Catapult x2, Point-defense Weapon, Defense Shield
This makes for my Easter gift to you all, going along the tradition of these Halo builds to come up on holidays. Hope you enjoyed this and that you will have fun with these builds and lists. Also, my thanks to ThatBroDad for helping me again in my sillyness.
In the future I would also like to add the Constructed faction to round-up the fleets. But that will be my last post for Halo at this scale. Later on I would like to make larger fleets at a much smaller scale, similar to my recent Homeworld builds. But that is a plan for later.
If you like stuff like this and want me to keep doing it consider leaving me a tip on my Ko-fi account. Or check my RPG work, original or otherwise.
Now go out there play games and enjoy your lives!
