Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Sojenus
Dec 28, 2008

Slyphic posted:

Also, something I never noticed before now, when I wanted to check the PHR names because I get them wrong often. The PDFs have those list of 'famous ship names' for every class of ship, and the first famous name of a Medea strike carrier is Castor.

Never noticed that one, but there's also a famous Banshee going by Nosferatu. Can't blame them for reusing it, it's a good name.

While double checking just now to confirm I was remembering correctly, also noticed a Strix named Chang's Doom and a Succubus called Chang's End. Someone had a bad day it seems.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Slyphic
Oct 12, 2021

All we do is walk around believing birds!
All of which is to say nothing of that time they just straight up named two units the same thing. BFE had a Tempest class resistance behemoth, they used that name for a fast mover, then just straight up changed the name when it came out to Colossus class because of that fuckup.

Or, IIRC, there's like 4 different things called Avenger.

Toalpaz
Mar 20, 2012

Peace through overwhelming determination
Happy to have gotten an e-game of dropfleet. Relearning the rules as a result of watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1989). (You can see the fleet action that inspired me by clicking through.) I took 11 Toulons at 1k.



The Toulon Frigate swarms devoured those PHR light cruisers, almost two a turn. The squadron guns rule makes them very good, but I didn't realize while making the list that you couldn't stack two 'squads' and benefit from the squadron rule. They get grouped up at the start of the game into a larger squad called a group. :I 2d6 less squad guns, but still very good fun.





Luckily they never catastrophically exploded. I imagine it could set off a huge chain reaction. I might play them differently in the future, but UCM is much more intuitive to play compared to space shaltari. X9

I did the dice calculations on shaltari, and it's almost always better to take disintegration compared to those weird particle guns. Critting on 5's really evens out the dice rolls in a way I didn't understand back when the game was released.

Shields are also much better than I realized, saving crits is important but it's hard to understand the tradeoffs of everyone in the table getting to shoot a shielded ship.

Those are all my thoughts, I'll be trying to play a larger game, shalteri list, 1500 and focus on disintegrators + using shields to make enemies focus on my larger ships while crowds of frigates set up.

Toalpaz fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jul 29, 2023

Flipswitch
Mar 30, 2010


Been listing my hawk stuff to sell off as I'm not going to be playing these again sadly but the new wave of UCM Titania stuff is very cool.

Sojenus
Dec 28, 2008

Flipswitch posted:

Been listing my hawk stuff to sell off as I'm not going to be playing these again sadly but the new wave of UCM Titania stuff is very cool.

Zone I'm guessing? The Titania ships are nowhere near the same league as the UCM cruisers, but I always thought the Condor was too spindly and like how the Titania version is a bit bulked up.

Toalpaz posted:

The Toulon Frigate swarms devoured those PHR light cruisers, almost two a turn. The squadron guns rule makes them very good, but I didn't realize while making the list that you couldn't stack two 'squads' and benefit from the squadron rule. They get grouped up at the start of the game into a larger squad called a group. :I 2d6 less squad guns, but still very good fun.

A bigger group does let you keep squadron going through some attrition, and you can trigger it per target if you fire enough guns at multiple ships, so it's not all downside at least!

Toalpaz
Mar 20, 2012

Peace through overwhelming determination

Sojenus posted:

and you can trigger it per target if you fire enough guns at multiple ships, so it's not all downside at least!

:aaa:

Does anyone know how you do shaltari?

It seems really hard to actually land a granite all weapons, are the disintegrators considered more reliable than the particle ships?

Slyphic
Oct 12, 2021

All we do is walk around believing birds!

Toalpaz posted:

Does anyone know how you do shaltari?
In my limited experience against dropfleet Shaltari, Shields Up 100% of the time and heavy use of particle weapons sure felt effective vs both UCM and PHR. IIRC, granites swung wide early, and then cut across the board wrecking whatever they could line up for a WF full fusillade hit, which took enough pressure off the board other weapons could do some mopping up.

Flipswitch
Mar 30, 2010


Yeah was for Zone.

I'm listing my fleet off as well sadly. Fun game but it just hasn't got a scene here to kick-start with.

Slyphic
Oct 12, 2021

All we do is walk around believing birds!
I've become numb to the constant feeling of vague disappointment with DZC, but I gotta rant about the topple bus.



The turret is behind the rear axle. And there's nothing else going on in the model to possibly justify it. There's just a huge empty space where the gun should be if the person designing this thing had a single loving clue how basic physics or vehicles worked. And that's assuming it fires straight ahead, and not to either side (it's not like it's on a turret mount or anything). Maybe that empty space could have some stabilizer legs. Or ammo crates. Or crew.

Sojenus
Dec 28, 2008

In light of the silly bus, I decided to analyze the situation and make an authoritative and exhaustively researched assessment of the quality of recent Dropzone sculpts. My findings are published below for peer review and subsequent disregard of opposing opinions.

NC Wyeth Death Cult
Dec 30, 2005

He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.
I always thought the Shaltari stuff was hit or miss but it was unmistakably trying to do something different so got a pass.

skaianDestiny
Jan 13, 2017

beep boop
It's on Facebook, but TTCombat released some teaser stuff about likely a new faction, with Dave writing some accompanying short stories.



https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pfhvu3whxVTrU4uBwnkVEQRu1pp-qecn/view



https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MmAEEqlpRWo24rgbCylj_Ej7H2oV1mXd/view

Sojenus
Dec 28, 2008

The design is similar to PHR, with an interior of busy mechanical bits broken up by smooth surfaces, which I like. Worried about how mold slips and other issues will be impossible to clean off the ship in particular looking at that render.

Still been enjoying painting...




But haven't felt compelled to play either game in some time. For Zone in particular, been looking around at other systems around this scale and none have scratched the same itch or had a similar focus, so my main hope is that this new faction comes alongside a new version. Either it's also bad, in which case I can justify spending the mental energy and time digging into more things to play around with the models I like, or it's good, so hurray.

Slyphic
Oct 12, 2021

All we do is walk around believing birds!
It kills me that I haven't found a different 10mm SF wargame I like as well as the beta edition of DZC, but it's also complicated enough that it feels daunting to really try to fine tune.

Weirdly, the more tidbits I hear about Dystopian Wars: Armored Clash, which changed scale to 1:160/10mm and is coming out next year, the more it sounds like it's based off DZC.

I'm also holding out a teensy bit of hope for Horizon Wars 2nd edition (it has some ridiculous colon name).

Slyphic
Oct 12, 2021

All we do is walk around believing birds!
Got Dropzone to the table for the first time in a long time this past weekend. I've been meaning to try a less urban table for a while, and it actually worked just fine, except for we made the smaller/lighter buildings a smidgen too easy to blow up. We also had to play at only 750pts due to some time constraints.

Best photo of the game (new camera sucks significantly less than my old one)


Turn 1 vs Turn 6



There's a few more pics up on my blog - https://yadzcb.friestman.net/br-dzc-2024-01-20.html

Was also looking at updating my quick ref sheets for playing Dropfleet again this year only to find out the chucklefucks at TTC have made the Hiroku, the models I am currently painting, literally unusable. As in, it has rules for modified ramming, but they removed the ramming rules from the game without updating the ship, so it just refers to stuff that doesn't exist now.

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
The TTC buyout really does seem to have been an absolute disaster for drop(thing).

MCPeePants
Feb 25, 2013

Slyphic posted:

It kills me that I haven't found a different 10mm SF wargame I like as well as the beta edition of DZC, but it's also complicated enough that it feels daunting to really try to fine tune.

Weirdly, the more tidbits I hear about Dystopian Wars: Armored Clash, which changed scale to 1:160/10mm and is coming out next year, the more it sounds like it's based off DZC.

I'm also holding out a teensy bit of hope for Horizon Wars 2nd edition (it has some ridiculous colon name).

The upcoming Epic Warpath from Mantic looks pretty good to me, though isn't trying to do the same thing as DZC at all as far as I can tell. I like the order token allocation system, get a little bit of risk/reward play. Kickstarter launches next month, hopefully we'll see some actual models and not just renders.

Sojenus
Dec 28, 2008

Slyphic posted:

Got Dropzone to the table for the first time in a long time this past weekend. I've been meaning to try a less urban table for a while, and it actually worked just fine, except for we made the smaller/lighter buildings a smidgen too easy to blow up. We also had to play at only 750pts due to some time constraints.

Beta rules I presume? I've been thinking about trying the current set with the experimental rules to see how it feels with the landing transports in particular, but can't be arsed to actually schedule a game. Right now I actually have everything set up on the table to do a solo run of Horizon Wars with my DZC poo poo (hopefully) this weekend at least. I don't think that'll scratch the same itch, but could be a serviceable small scale game, we'll see.

Also, painted my presumably final behemoth and accomplished that stupid goal:


Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Slyphic
Oct 12, 2021

All we do is walk around believing birds!
We used the Experimental Rules for the current version. We always like to give current DZC updates a real try; transport and collateral rules are good improvements, but they don't feel like new designs, it feels like the game is reluctantly admitting v2 wasn't that good. We also looked at each other on turn 4 when my commander died and we both realized we had completely forgotten command cards, despite us both taking commander upgrades.

Also, your Shaltari behemoth is amazing. That pose is killer.

Slyphic fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jan 26, 2024

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply