Enlightened Overview
Below are my thoughts to the current 3.03 Enlightened Orbat. I’m not going to go deep into the options each unit brings to the table, you have the pdf yourself. Rather, this is aimed at exploring what you can build with the options in front of you, and what choices I think are the way to go. Also vibes.
Overall, I’d say Enlightened are an elite generalist faction. Your ships tend to have a lot of firepower in multiple range bands, are tough unless your opponent has the right tools to ignore your defensive tricks, but tend to be expensive.
This was edited a bit for Errata 3.05, which had some changes for the heavy weapons.
Cruiser Armor
Just to cover this up front: Armor 5 vs Armor 6 is not a huge deal, due to our low citadel value. Against a single volley, A5 gets crippled at 20 hits and dies at 30, but A6 gets crippled at 22 with the catastrophic explosion, and dies at 36. To reliably cripple, your opponent will in most cases need to invest the same amount of weaponry.
Special Rules
While there’s a lot of different things here, mostly it boils down to your ships being somewhat tougher than their profile would indicate. Your defensive abilities are better against smaller dice pools, so if you can deny your opponent big combined volleys, go for it.
What’s actually important here is Wavelurking. It’s disguised as another defensive ability, but don’t let that fool you. What’s important is the “deployed as submerged unit” part. This means that you can, if you choose to, deploy your wavelurking models after your opponent’s aerial and surface ships. In a regular game, this should be most of them. Reactive deployment is a very powerful ability, since it lets you put your units where they can optimally engage the enemy units they are good against. Note that real redeploy abilities happen after submerged deployment, so Shadow Hunters and Sabre Rattle still beat it.
Weapons
Turrets
The Particle Beamer is one of the best turret options in the game. It provides solid output at all ranges. If you don’t have a very good reason otherwise, you should be using it. The Pulse Emitter is your shotgun option, at Point Blank against surface targets there is little better. You lose a lot of flexibility taking it over the particle beamer though, so unless you have a plan in mind stick to the basics.
The other three turret options are generally niche. The sturginium agitator will only really outperform your other choices at point blank against M3+ targets, or you want to try some sort of disorder stacking. The caloric oscillator gives you an AoE option if you get to point blank. And finally, the Molecular Disharmonizer is worse on efficiency than the particle beamer, except in one specific case that someone on the discord pointed out, Crossing the T. If you can get in position for it and the opponent can’t counter the valor effect, you can do some obscene damage out to closing.
The Aetheric Lance, our only light turret option, and can only link with particle beamers. Downgrading to a lance from a beamer only really loses you the long range profile, which doesn’t matter too much since you probably won’t have a side or rear target on turn 1 anyway. The lost lead dice at point blank is also fairly irrelevant. As such, don’t be afraid of the downgrade in most cases.
Heavy Weapons
Nothing says the shooty faction like having an even larger gun mounted on your cruisers. The Heavy Particle Cannon is probably the best option (with SRS support), but everything here has a role.
The Heavy Particle Cannon with SRS support is the most flexible blast option in the game. The Valor Effect lets you reliably buff a single shot high enough to wipe a frigate unit, even at suboptimal ranges or with crippled ships. At optimal range, you can throw separate 15 dice attacks, which should critical any cruisers under it. Or combine them for a larger blast to cripple anything under the template. Without SRS tokens, it’s still good, but loses much of the flexibility since you’re locked into closing range for your best work. The 3.05 Errata nerfs this a bit, since you can now only use the valor effect once per unit, but this is primarily a loss of flexibility, not power.
The Sturginium Atomiser is the Heavy Particle Cannon without the SRS buff, but a more flexible range profile, focused on point blank and closing. As with all Agitation weapons, they support poorly, equal to the mass of the target. Against a cruiser initial target, you’re throwing 8 dice, which is not great, but if you can target a Mass 3+ the resulting blast is worth it. As such, I’d consider using this version on single heavy weapons that plan to be up close, without SRS support. Also, this won’t be able to deal with a frigate squadron unless you have a higher mass initial target handy.
The Magneto Encapsulator is your long range option. Magnetic is the only quality that applies a critical results to all targets of the blast, so this is mainly a disruption option.The Valor Effect can then allow you to mess with positioning and spread some disorder, though it does not change facing and thus is only mildly relevant.
The Gravitronic Imperilator is the sole non-blast option, with a Valor Effect for extra damage. I think Frigates and Cruiser squads are a bigger part of the game than deathstar flagships, so I value the blast options more, but if your meta is different it could be worth using.
Flagships
As a general rule of thumb, our flagships are slow and not very maneuverable. As such, where you deploy them has a huge impact on what they accomplish. Deploying late or wavelurking them is recommended.
Archimedes Vault Ship
Role: Brawler.
What a beautiful model. Sadly, the rules don’t quite get there, even with the recent buff. It’s the toughest model in the orbat, but the firepower it puts out is the same as the other flagships and the price is astronomical. The chrono lathe’s party trick of pulling a unit from reserves can be done fairly consistently now via Priority Signals and Valorous Conduct, but with the Archimedes’ slow speed I don’t think it’ll be in a good place to use it at the end of Turn 2. Healing via the chrono lathe relies on your opponent damaging but not crippling multiple models in a unit, so that’s also iffy. The Chaos Orb’s card draw is nice, but not 400 points nice, and a valor effect heavy particle cannon can’t be buffed with srs tokens. The Schneider is even more expensive, brings worse weapons, but does have Fortunes.
Nansen Explorer
Role: Skirmisher, Brawler
My flagship of choice. Boring, fairly tough, and reliable. From my games, it tends to survive to the endgame, and can then clean up. You probably want to back it up with another SRS source or two, but 6 tokens does let you buff 2 heavy particle cannon shots in 1 activation already.
Daedelus Fortified Tethership (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Support, Sniper
A very interesting ship as well. Tough, with a stack of defensive abilities (Fortunes of War) on top of a good profile. The Heavy Particle Cannon gives you an interesting secondary blast option, though otherwise firepower output is somewhat anemic. Consider running it alongside SRS to at least push through critical damage on a unit of cruisers, or to wipe out some frigates at non-optimal ranges.
The aerial defensive buffs are hard to evaluate, since our aerial models are unreleased and might still change significantly. My best guess at the moment is that it will be a useful bubble for protecting your aerial units Turn 1, but that you should not try to stay in it since the UFO’s are focused on close range engagements.
Icarus Aeronautic Fabricator (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Support
You want a real fleet carrier? Here you go. Incredibly fragile, this thing encourages the worst sort of non-interactive gameplay. You can probably make some new players have a horrible game against you with this, but against a competent opponent this should be, at the very least, crippled turn 1.
Descartes Control Ship
Role: Skirmisher? Support?
Somewhat of a confused design. The defensive profile says fleet carrier but armament and token capacity says battle carrier, and then they throw Command Codes on there to hand out a short range buff as well. Always take the orca tokens so you can engage at 40” at least. If you’re running the special battlefleet for Physeter Assault, I would suggest taking 2 extra tokens to hit a 20 dice stack, which should hit max results on most targets. The named version gives you a buff to your assault tokens and worse weapons, your mileage may vary.
Hypatia Generator Ship
Role: Support, Brawler
If you want to build a defensive deathstar, this is your choice. After the obscured/shield nerf, your generator choice should probably be shield/magnetic/chrono. I’m not a fan of playing deathstar builds, but this is one of the stronger flagship options. The named version is slightly cheaper and gets a mostly irrelevant debuff, so if you need the points why not.
Thule Sky-Fortress (Not Wavelurking, but what a sight that would be)
Role: Skirmisher, Brawler
The idea of powersliding 10” makes me giddy, but I’m not sure that will survive on release. It is the only model we get that can deploy SRS and fire a Heavy Particle Cannon in the same activation. Aerial units currently look a little weak in general, since they can’t hide behind terrain, but once more are rolled out we’ll hopefully get some guidance on that. Cloud banks or treating larger terrain pieces as aerial might be the way to go.
Frontline Units
Copernicus/Antarctica
Role: Brawler, Sniper
Take a cruiser’s worth of firepower, and then you add a blast weapon on top. Perfect. I love the Heavy Particle Cannon, supported with SRS tokens for precisely calibrated damage as needed. My usual play with them is advancing on a strong concentration of the enemy, trying to activate late in order to get optimal closing range and deployed SRS tokens. If you want more of a sniper unit with debuff, you could consider the Magnetic Encapsulator here as well, but for long range damage output the Quintilian is probably better.
With the 3.05 Errata, the two options are basically even at this point.
For 15 points, the Antarctica upgrades the rear Aetheric Lance to a Particle Beamer, and gains Heavy Firepower. This lets you work better unsupported, and if you run SRS as well, can let you evade FoW to some degree.
As for the case for the Copernicus, since your main weapon is Front arc only, your priority is going to be getting that on target. Side arc shots are secondary, and you only lose out at long range anyway. You’ll only be at long range turn 1, where you probably won’t have a side arc target anyway. Heavy Firepower nets you 6 dice on a full 3 cruiser volley at optimal closing range. You know what else nets you 6 dice? SRS Tokens! With 1 cruiser, if necessary. The flexibility of using SRS tokens to buff instead cannot be overstated. An argument could be made for heavy firepower on the particle beamers, but if your heavy weapons are living long enough that your broadsides firepower matters you’re already miles ahead.
Stiletto
Role: Skirmisher, Objective Holder
Cheap and very fast. I like having a unit along to hang out on the flanks to deal with issues as they pop up. This would probably be the platform to try point blank weapon options on.
Lovelace/Chatelet Recon Cruiser/Ulysses Vanguard Cruiser
Role: Skirmisher, Brawler
To me, these all hit similar points with slightly different profiles, point costs, and bonus rules. I haven’t really found which variant I prefer, more research is needed.
Merian Automata Frigates
Role: Skirmisher, Objective Holder
These have gotten nerfed in every new orbat since I’ve started playing. They are still amazing. I currently lean towards Germains over Merians (Particle Beamer instead of Pulse Emitter), but both are viable. It’s just a choice whether you want to be best at Closing or Point Blank. The other weapon options are probably not viable. Maybe 6 Caloric Oscillators for a 7xMass Template?
Support Units
Note that the seeker missiles and weirding torpedoes on all of these are best at closing and long, and focused on the front arc.
Plinius Support Carrier
Role: Skirmisher, Brawler
Now that’s a support carrier. A forgiving degraded profile and front facing weapons means this carrier won’t just melt when your opponent gets a bead on it.
Quintilian Bombardment Cruiser
Role: Skirmisher, Sniper
Blast at long range with a tough profile. You’ll want to bring a Supply Depot ship (Claudius or Zumeena) along to deal with limited. I prefer the Copernicus, but this is also perfectly viable.
Claudius Merchantman
Role: Skirmisher, Objective Holder
65 points for a tough cruiser with serviceable weapons. A unit of these will put a lot of hull points down for very little points, and puts out enough fire that your opponent can’t just ignore them. Note that their main output is Front arc at Closing and Long, so they aren’t the best at brawling up close. Q-Ship might be interesting on a full unit to drop a Tacitus in to deal with point blank targets, or a Plinius/Quintilian to finish off targets at extreme range and out of arc. You do get to pick the generator, so you can use this as a sideboard for a null generator. On singletons it’s going to be too easy to cripple it and waste your points.
Tacitus Assault Cruiser
Role: Brawler
I generally prefer the frontline cruisers, but if you want something to get in close this is a good option. Their secondary weapons however are going to be somewhat superfluous up close.
Diogenes Torpedo Submarine
Role: Sniper
Very impressive damage, and doesn’t take up a Surface slot if you want to run a single battlefleet. Note that Weirding Torpedo Salvos don’t have Extreme Range, so you’ll have to be a little closer than usual. If you want a long range frigate, this is it.
Praxilla Hunter Submarine
Role: Assassin
Wants to be up close, but has no good way of getting there. If they do connect, you can bury an opponent in criticals and disorder.
Advanced Units
Origen Lathe Ship (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Support
Makes your Merians even more obnoxious to deal with, and the profile is all things considered fairly tough as well. I haven’t tried it yet, but now that the Daedelus has arrived I plan to.
Newton Voidship (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Assassin, Support?
The current iteration added some interesting rules. I think the profile is still too fragile for the point cost and firepower it brings, but at this point that’s more of a tuning issue.
Note that you can’t use the Void-Engine on the turn you use unexpected arrival/enter from reserves.
Vesalius Cetacean Surgical Ship (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Support
Ends up being a high damage support carrier, albeit with a poor crippled profile. Can hit hard if you make it work, but you’ll have to hide them out of LoS.
Zumeena Capacitor Ship (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Support
If you can make the positioning work for you, this ship can add a substantial amount of firepower to your blast options, or any other units. Buffing Quintilians is probably your best bet (and easiest), since extreme range lets you hide further from the enemy and position yourself better, but you can make the buff work for anything.
I would not suggest attaching the Zumeena, since attached units are required to deploy together.
If you bring a TED, you can throw your used up Zumeena at your enemy and hopefully hit them with the final explosion.
Lotan & Ketos Myriapoda Colossus Automata
Role: Assassin
Our Colossi are probably the weakest released, at least for popping up and crippling something. You can expect either version to deal 3-4 damage to a cruiser when using Unexpected Arrival. What you’re paying for is the Ventral Atom Smasher, which you can’t fire on crippled and is point blank only. See the problem? They’re too fragile to sit near the enemy for a turn, and too slow to deploy on the board. Amazing model, but if you want to play colossi pick another faction.
Personally, I hope they get a speed and turn buff so they can keep up with your fleet and act as a countercharge unit. Turn 0 and deciding your facing at the end of movement is torturous if you stay on the table.
Preview Models
Amo Carrier Frigate (Not Wavelurking)
Role: Support
Do you have 66 points left and want some more SRS tokens? These are pretty easy to kitbash if you want to try them. At 4 though you can afford a Plinius, and you should.
Euclid Scout Saucer
Role: Skirmisher
I could see this thing doing work. Damage/Point is less than other enlightened options, but you do get full turret weapon options, high speed and maneuverability, and a fairly tough frame.
Pytheus Recon Saucer
Role: Support
A good rate for 2 SRS tokens, in the aerial slot. With 40” it might be able to stay away well enough to survive, but who knows.
Mass 3 Saucers
Role: Brawler, Skirmisher
At the moment these only vary in weaponry and a few abilities. Most of their weapon options only really work at point blank, where they will probably get shot down way too quickly. 2 Valtars with Heavy Particle Cannons might get there though, with a Turn 1 28 Dice Blast ignoring non-aerial terrain (SRS Tokens, Zumeena).
Battlefleets
Faction Battlefleet/Strategic Reserves
I haven’t seen any discussion on using Strategic Reserves with Enlightened, which I find a little strange. The orbat did gain the Turbo Encabulation Drive at around the same time, maybe that took up everybody’s attention. But instead of a gimmicky 58% chance of doing the thing, Strategic Reserves is guaranteed.
So, what do we have that wants to come in from the flanks? Since Reserves happen after Special Operations and Launching SRS, carriers are right out. That leaves us with the Daedelus, Hypatia, and Archimedes. The Hypatia will certainly help keep your reserves alive, and depending on what generators you bring could help get you closer, while the Archimedes could theoretically pull another unit in, closer to the enemy (that depends on how the chrono lathe functions exactly, however. RAW is a little unclear). But the Daedelus brings a Heavy Particle Cannon, which you’ve seen me gush about earlier, and missing Fortunes turn 1 shouldn’t be the end of the world. Another upside is that the reserve models don’t need to have wavelurking to do a full reactive deployment.
Consider: deployment zones should be free of terrain. If your opponent hangs back, you should have a perfect shot along the back of the field at their fleet. If they come forward, you can hopefully still draw a line from at least one of the sides, and whatever nastiness is in your main fleet should have an easier time engaging. Your main battlefleet could have already prepped SRS tokens for your reserves to use. Range wise, 4” ship + 9” movement + 20” optimal range means that unless your opponent is hiding their entire fleet in the 6” inch strip in the center of the table, you’ll be hitting at closing.
Edit: This can be the Antarctica's time to shine, if you're not running SRS tokens. A unit of three should be able to line up a clean shot coming in from Strategic Reserves, and then buff that with heavy firepower. Who knows, you might even get lucky enough to use the rear Particle Beamers.
Other Battlefleets
Otherwise, the battlefleets generally flow from which flagship you want to take, or perhaps if you want a certain bonus or extra slots. I try to go for at least 6 activations at 1500, which is tight but doable with a single battlefleet, but harder after the latest point bump.
Builds
I’m not going to go into detail on Hypatia + Cruiser Spam or Whale tokens, since they don’t especially interest me at the moment.
Heavy Particle Cannons/SRS
This is what I’ve mainly been playing. The name of the game here is flexibility. SRS Tokens let you engage out of LoS, or buff your Heavy Particle Cannons. Generally, you want to activate your heavy particle cannons late to give your opponent time to get into range and LoS. Before the point adjustment, I ran a unit of Diogenes for an extra activation, but I like the extra firepower from the full frigate packs.
Enlightened Frontline Battlefleet
Nansen Explorer
Plinius Support Carrier x2
Copernicus Heavy Cruiser x3
Merian Frigate x6
Germain Frigate x6
1494 pts
Now that I finally got my hands on a Daedelus, the outflanking strategic reserves option discussed above might also be worth trying. This isn’t optimized yet, the main issues being the 3 Germains and maybe trying to find a way to throw in an extra Copernicus.
Enlightened Frontline Battlefleet
Nansen Explorer
Plinius Support Carrier x2
Germain Frigate x6
Germain Frigate x3
Enlightened Faction Battlefleet (Strategic Reserves)
Daedelus Fortified Tethership
Copernicus Heavy Cruiser x2
1494 pts
A note on the Icarus vs Nansen. If your opponent has a counter for fleet carriers, which they should, your Icarus is going down hard. If I wanted to downgrade to a cheaper option, I’d look into taking a Hypatia for extra defense and make up the lost SRS Tokens with Pliniuses.
Automata Spam
Now that the Daedalus is released, frigate spam with the Autonomous Research Battlefleet might be a thing worth trying. Grab a bucket full of Germains, an Origen, and have fun. The Daedelus doesn’t really combo with anything here, but it does give you Fortunes to hopefully protect your murderous AI babies.
Autonomous Research Battlefleet
Daedelus Fortified Tethership w/ Escort, Magneto Encapsulator
Origen Lathe Ship
Merian Frigates x6
Germain Frigates x6
Germain Frigates x6
Germain Frigates x6
Diogenes Torpedo Submarine x6
1495 pts
That fits just under 1500, highly maneuverable and hits hard. It’s definitely a skew list, so don’t just bring this to a friendly game. I wouldn’t attach the Origen, just to get another deployment, but that’s a personal choice. 7 activations is also very nice to have. Since you can’t buff the Heavy Particle Cannon, I’d switch the Daedelus’ main gun to the Magneto Encapsulator for some disruption.
The orbat does preview that there will be another Flagship for this, the Loew class. Sadly, there’s no further info on it. The Archimedes doesn’t really have any synergies with automata, other than possibly pulling a squad from reserve (for which you want Valorous Conduct), and is very expensive.
Archimedes Shotgun
The basic idea is to rush forward with your Archimedes, then pull in something scary from reserves. The problem is that the Archimedes doesn’t rush, it saunters. With Valorous Conduct and Priority Signals, you can do a fair bit to ensure your Valor Effect goes off, and there are plenty of strong options to deploy from it. But for the blast options you’ll want SRS Tokens, and don’t need to be in Point Blank anyway, and for the Archimedes’ price you could just fit more of the units you actually want to run.
Enlightened Frontline Battlefleet
Archimedes Vault Ship
Merian Frigate x6 (Reserves)
Copernicus Heavy Cruiser x3
Lotan Myriapoda Colossus (Reserves)
Stiletto Fast Cruiser x2
Diogenes Torpedo Submarine x4
Note that you can pull the Lotan with the Archimedes, but you have to not use Submarauder on Turn 2 to do so, which could lead it to coming in from an edge if your Archimedes gets exploded.
Closing
I hope this post was useful to you. If you have any questions, or want further details, feel free to ask in the comments or write to me on the Discord. I’m planning to put together a starting out guide for Enlightened next, and maybe finally simulate out whether smaller Heavy Particle Cannon shots are worth doing. Thanks for reading!
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