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Ugleb posted:What PHR PDF? Dave made a blog post about building and painting his own personal PHR behemoth model which for some inexplicable reason is a PDF. I haven't done much of anything with zone in months now, but we've been getting in games of Fleet. Finally scored one of the sets of expansion monorail track TrollTrader has been auctioning on eBay for sufficiently cheap to be excited about it. Did you know the pieces use weird cast chunks of metal for bases?
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Aug 26, 2022 14:57
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https://community.ttcombat.com/2022/09/07/wip-wednesday-new-ships-spotted-on-the-horizon/ TTC has a new sculpt of the Rio they're teasing. Calling it a 'Titania' pattern, which for zone meant the old patterns went OoP. Considering it's resin and I hate it and TTC is a bunch of tightwads, I think this is the first alarm they're abandoning the plastic sprues. 
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Sep 7, 2022 13:43
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So glad Dave is back. His version blows the store model out of the water. But that's probably most down to the paint job, the garish colors on the new schemes just grate horrifically with all the parts of the game I like.
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Sep 8, 2022 15:29
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TT is soliciting feedback and suggestions for the next revision of Dropfleet - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y6NBPwk0__dOscDebVBBjtEgEE0g1vkvTYTGLaj6-ik/edit Seems pretty lively. No idea what will actually come of it.
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Sep 13, 2022 15:01
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New Dropzone unit updates and errata got posted. PDF I really like what I see so far, lots of good fixes and nothing obviously broken. And thank the gods, they brought back changelogs. Scott Burns (the person that posted this to the TT blog), you are a good person.
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Sep 16, 2022 14:47
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I set my expections to "probably not a worse game overall" so I'm thrilled with the outcome. PHR EM stacking is at least curtailed. The Flail is no longer a steaming turd mocked by all. The alt-broadsword (nee Claymore) is decent now. The Wolf is less useless. Ronin got hit hard with the nerf bat, nearly doubling in points cost, which they deserved every bit of. Mortar Teams no longer outrange dedicated artillery units. The Bomb Bus actually functions again, Hallelujah. I still regret explaining how the original wording at launch had a targeting exploit to TTC, because they broke it in the next update and it's taken 3 revisions and 2 years to arrive at a set of rules and stats that actually loving workings and it looks basically like it did before I opened my fool mouth. But the change I'm most excited about is the CQ Defenders Advantage stuff. I recognize 'no simul-CQ' is a hill TTC is ready to die on, and I think I can compromise with them here. There's still plenty more that could use fixed. They forgot the Osprey exists and still hasn't seen the UCM railgun changes from last revision, the Corruptor is still missing a M&F restriction, the Storm Wagons are still a pale un-fun shadow of their Barrage selves, the Circe can't Dev walkers for some ridiculous reason, etc. Behemoths are done. A good update has been released. OK, let's move forward and see faction command cards now.
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Sep 17, 2022 04:07
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I'm really confused by the contents. Surely either resin or plastic is cheaper for them (and surely the answer is plastic, right?), so why the mix? But also, there's a silhouette of a humanoid figure there in the layout. ... Are they going to throw in a 28mm model as well? Why solicit feedback on rules a bare week before printing a new book? That's basically 0 time to actually test anything that arises from the feedback. Just so many questions.
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Sep 27, 2022 21:48
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Ugleb posted:Where are you seeing the silhouette?  Maybe they're implying it's a bonus for buying direct? idfk
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Sep 27, 2022 23:18
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Z the IVth posted:Enjoy having whopping great seamlines and mold-slips through all that intricate detail!
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Sep 27, 2022 23:19
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Z the IVth posted:Their resin casting team leaves much to be desired.
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Sep 28, 2022 14:23
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Dave himself, and a couple of the early people he roped into starting up Hawk Wargames, were all former Spartan Games employees. At least one of them was a mold master for them (I believe Dave did the split APC, but this guy came onboard for the plastic sprues). There's a gently caress of a lot more people out there that know how to do molds for 28/32mm models than for the smaller scales.
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Sep 28, 2022 16:42
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Loxbourne posted:If you cornered Dave at a convention he'd usually tell a few stories about his Spartan Games days, mostly about early Firestorm Armada sculpts.
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Sep 28, 2022 17:54
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Dropfleet v1.5 is out - https://community.ttcombat.com/2022/09/29/dropfleet-commander-1-5-update/ A couple clarifications on special rules, a good many and varied tweaks and changes to ship stats and rules, a bunch of new single piece cruisers coming out and some 'experimental' rules for the plastic sprue combinations that were physically possible but not in the rules (like a UCM heavy cruiser with a laser AND turrets). Initial thoughts on skimming the changes: Wasn't expecting quite that degree of doubling down on the Haemetite. "Being able to burnthrough-12 on a 2+ while turning on regular orders is cool and fun and and and you're the ones that are wrong!" Bloom is better than the nothing that is the 25 point increase, but these changes don't actually address any of the repeated problems brought up about it. Also wasn't expecting to see the 6" thrust on the Istanbul without any other changes. Reyk deserved that nerf batting, and I think that was the right amount. I'm reserving opinions til table time. Sig reduction across the board for BBs I'm not a fan of. Makes little sense, a hull increase of a couple points would have been better. Fusillade-2 on the UCM BBs should make them more of the threat they should be, rather than the current meh they represent when they enter the board. All the PHR changes are either minor/ok or nice little tweaks. A little surprised the Belle gets a buff with no points increase. Agrippa seems reasonable. I'm going to assume they Traffic James and completely forgot about the Harpocrates, because that ship is still an unfun coin flip that belongs in a shorter sillier game. Not enough table time with Scourge yet, but they at least addressed the elephant in the room that was the Parasite. Despite a decent number of games against them, I can't readily tell what the changes to Resistance will look like on the table. I wish they'd have simplified the token system on the Galileo. I really wish they'd have waited a couple weeks, or asked for feedback earlier, and done something about the core rules that were brought up in the feedback.
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Sep 29, 2022 15:05
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Randomly saw a new episode of CV1 posted, like 2 years after their last one. Link Third hand and all, but apparently Dave is back in charge of both Dropgame rules. Which got them excited enough to start podcasting again, and has me equally excited for it to be true. Come on Dave, drop v3 and lets put this mess behind us. (Please please please give me an excuse to stop working on porting Sam Mustafa's Rommel system to DZC, I'm making a hash of it, just fix your broken CQ/collateral/game-pacing)
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Nov 23, 2022 16:48
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TTC needs to take their adderall, focus on fixing zone and fleet. The world doesn't need another 28mm skirmish game, it's the plain chicken tenders of wargames. Behemoths were a boondoggle of a mistake, but at least they were daring. This? This is boring. 
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Nov 27, 2022 16:01
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https://asciolist.org/index.php/2022/11/28/dropzone-resin-buildings/ The resin buildings are 2 pounds of SOLID RESIN I figured for sure they'd be slabs you glue together, but no, it's a monosculpt loving brick of resin.
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Nov 29, 2022 16:22
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Z the IVth posted:make them semi-hollow and save on material
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Nov 29, 2022 18:25
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Ugleb posted:
That's not even a unit in the game right now, at least not one I recognize. Spandex crotch is edging towards fodder for the Uninspiration thread. Head looks lifted pixel for pixel off the gas mask alien lady from Mass Effect.
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Dec 10, 2022 23:06
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 Nothing really matches 'Siren Corps' sirens for me. On the other hand, Valks are just junior sirens, per their description: quote:The Siren Corps is an elite group of women, capable of utilising the multiple viewpoints of their weapons and their superior training to deadly effect. The ability to make the grade is rare however, owing as much to genetic makeup as it does to personal ability and mind-set. Hundreds of PHR warrior women do not make the grade, yet are highly trained and implanted with top level military modifications. This enhanced dexterity and athleticism is used by PHR forces in the form of Valkyrie squads. and helmet looks most like the new Valk sculpts (not so much the old ones), and the rest of the model sans armor. 
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Dec 11, 2022 15:35
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New BBs coming next year - https://community.ttcombat.com/2022/12/13/advent-calendar-2022-day-13/ UCM Hanoi  Scourge Beelzebub  We've jokingly called my Perth 'The Compensator' for a while now, but he's nothing compared to the Hanoi. Looks like it's still prow magnetizable to me, but unless there's another piece for a BB kit #2 that's much cooler I think I'll probably pass. Need a better view of the ventral side of the Beelzebub to pass judgement, but 'big hanging gun' looked dumb on the Remus (and the Slaughterer in zone, and the Eradicator's Bio-Mortar variant ... and the Obliterator's stupid hat gun. Man, I really hate big weapons hanging off models) and I'm not feeling it either. That said, I was also down on the initial [strike]Brigand[/strike] Corsair with Arc Caster, and it got better, so fingers crossed Dave tweaks them til they're better.
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Dec 13, 2022 14:40
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Sojenus posted:Scourge one feels a bit front-heavy with that head:body ratio, but might just be the picture. It's definitely a rendered picture issue. The lack of focal length really skews models like this. You can see it in the UCM one as well. It'll look way better when they get a test print out. At least the prow. It still has ship dong.
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Dec 13, 2022 16:54
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https://community.ttcombat.com/2022/12/16/advent-calendar-2022-day-16-drop-universe-news/ 32mm models are on sale now. There's no game for them yet.  is coming 2024(?) but in the meantime there's a coup[e side projects in the dropverse, one of which is a boxed game named 'hunter' about picrel 
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Dec 16, 2022 17:19
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Dropfleet Famous Commanders Released - PDF Link This feels less like a well thought out expansion to the game and more like Flightwing Commander. Something to mostly ignore after January. I'm pretty disappointed, there's basically nothing here that would change force orgs, and the abilities are per TTC's usual all over the place from extremely meh to "did you fuckers even playtest this? Even once?" And many of them don't even really make much sense. I want to especially call out Quetzalcoatl for an ability that has no mention in his blurb whatsoever, isn't limited to his ship's weapons, and you can see the entire thought process on display 'dur, it's named uranium and uranium is radioactive'. That's it. That's all the further they thought this through. They based the ability off the name of the ship class, not the commander. It's like if there was a commander whose backstory is about superlative time-on-target munition use, but his ship is named the Fiesta, and thus his ability is some poo poo about piñatas. Please for the love of god tell me this is from before Dave took over and TTC didn't infect him with their mediocrity! Slyphic fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Dec 20, 2022 |
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Dec 20, 2022 15:53
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Sojenus posted:Did they develop Rumbleslam on their own? Lewis Clarke posted:“Have you got experience using Adobe Suite?” “Yep, I’m very well versed in all of that.” And they’re like, “Cool because we’ve got this game RUMBLESLAM, and we’re sort of 50-60% of the way along, but we’ve got no idea how to turn it into an actual game”.
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Dec 20, 2022 17:16
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Toalpaz posted:What's the enth year reflection on dropzone commander like, is it an obviously broken/boring game or is there an accepted fair rules/missionset? Without recounting the whole storied history, the best received edition of the game was the public beta from 2018 that was beingly widely played in the great lakes region of the US. That was the height of the game's popularity. The 2017 tournament pack was the best missionset.
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Feb 12, 2023 15:49
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Toalpaz posted:Thanks, this is really helpful. I'd love to take a slice of those rules and try and decide if I can sell this game to friends again. Scroll down to the Beta section, it's all there. https://wiki.friestman.net/dzc/files 2.4.1 was the last official release, but while the company was going under and being bought out by new management, the playtesting group was still iterating and expanding to cover all the units, but it's in raw text and tables marked 2.5.7. And there's been quite a few units released since the Beta was taken behind a woodshed and executed.
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Feb 12, 2023 16:51
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The UCM don't have many good counters to the PHR hexapod walkers. Mostly the Broadsword which is a single die attack and still feels swingy, but that's your can opener. Sirens are also a problem, they're one of the baddest rear end CQ units in the game and the UCM just kinda doesn't have anything like that. You kill them with fire, crashing vehicles, or by dropping buildings. 6 Rapiers should have been making more of a dent than that, barring EM Field bullshit or bad luck. Wolverines vs PHR were always going to be a struggle, they're just not built for taking down that heavy of targets. Now vs Scourge light flyers, they make great fly swatters. This was a first game? at 1750pts? Who built the forces? You typically start off with a 999pt almost symmetrical game for good reason, there's absolutely lists that just dominate others. In regard to the Beta rules though, the biggest difference in the game you played would be the Sirens would be less overwhelming, as they take simultaneous CQ damage, so they can't just alpha strike their way through 10 bases of infantry. They were also more limited availability.
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Feb 13, 2023 04:06
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I forgot to call out the mess that is Collateral. Blocked it out of my mind. They replaced the simple blow through damage that's deadly to infantry with a convoluted token tracking system that hits weakly, is meant to kinda-sorta represent the building crumbling AND fire spreading , which it never does, it only represents fire dying out which is lame and boring. I hate it. A person that isn't good at designing games wrote that garbage. Scroll down to 'Demolition and Collateral' - https://yadzcb.friestman.net/dzc-houserules-v220.html if you want to drop-in some rules corrections to v2 that fix demo. I'm going to preemptively respond to any cries of 'but that makes buildings too deadly to infantry, too easily destroyed', yes, that's the point, that's how it should be. Dropzone works best in a rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock pentagon of intermeshing systems. You shoot down air transports with your AA, you shoot AA with anti-tank, you shoot tanks with heavier tanks, you ignore heavy tanks to drop infantry in buildings to capture objectives. If you ignore enemy tanks, yeah, buildings fall. Got a problem with falling buildings? Shoot some damned tanks.
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Feb 13, 2023 06:14
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Buncha new units came out today. https://community.ttcombat.com/2023/03/10/multiple-armour-battlegroups-are-available-today/ They actually went through with the Dingo that got leaked 2 years ago, that has a concrete cannon it fires to reinforce buildings. Scourge and PHR new units look fairly cool. Meh on the Shaltari and UCM, and the resistance walker doesn't work for me at all. But also, the worst typos I've ever seen. Like to the point they have to be taking the piss, right? The Scourge box was so bad I threw it in a text editor to track everything wrong with it.  Oh yeah, still have the 2021 leaks of the Dingo and Jackal, for comparison's sake.  
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Mar 10, 2023 14:59
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I think I might actually get one of the Scourge boxes. A spazzing cat caused two of my models to break in unfortunately unfixable ways; a ravager and a stalker, leaving me with 2 of each which is completely loving worthless. So I need to replace those. And another Harb would be useful, I have the other other big walker but not this one, and I kinda like the new scourge models.
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Mar 10, 2023 15:45
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New Version is happening, gently caress yeah. Dave is righting the ship. Now, to compile my spittle flecked hateful rantings into a coherent document I can show other people. This may take a few days.
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Mar 21, 2023 13:56
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Sojenus posted:He did say it was harder to get comments about things people like over dislike, so having your manifesto include comments on the good from any version of the rules will probably get it more weight from him. Good note, I can definitely do that. My own houserules is like a collection of the best bits from all three editions, so there's definitely things I can put forward as "I love this, here's why" as opposed to just making GBS threads all over v2. But there's exceedingly little I actually like about v2 that wasn't in the beta first. ... non-deviation of indirect attacks (with tweaks) and objective passing (with tweaks)... yeah, I've got literally nothing exclusively positive to say about Clarke's rules. ETA: sky posted:Sky here. Effectively I have been asked to collect data and feedback on all versions of the rules, and fan addendums as well. As such, I am trying to facilitate as much as possible by putting the different versions of rulesets I was asked to focus on out there for the community. Hence the addendum to 2.0, and also the 1.5 Beta. Other folks addendums and homebrew stuff is good for testing too, I just need feedback and testing info to be clear and balanced so I can put it all together for review at an unspecified time later in the year. Part of this is awkward because there is no NDA, just a pre collection of feedback and testing before we (Dave himself) go to outlining the next step, and we then test that a little before we probably make an big change. That and I don't want any of this to seem like it in any way invalidates the current rules, but just helps determine what the DZC community loves and doesn't. I shall write my magnum opus of dropzone criticism, fit to make Harold Bloom shed a tear of admiration. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 16:22
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Necro Played a game of dropfleet yesterday, 1k of my friend's PHR vs some shamefully underpainted (except for two cruisers) Scourge of mine. Just a refresher game mostly, as it's been a while since had DFC on the table, and we all had new models. But also, TT made some major changes to both of these factions and we were curious if it was as bungled as it looked.  Scourge burnthrough lasers are either a colossal fuckup or typo but that's a meaningless distinction so let's go with colossal fuckup and leave it at that. The Daemon scourge BB there did 16 points of damage with a single shot on turn 2; 9 crits from the 4 atk 3+ lock burnthrough 10 corruptor lasers, and then because those were all crits, 7 of 9 failed saves during cleanup for damage control. loving evaporated the damned thing. Which lead us to go hol' up, wtf, seriously? and check the rules and stats and sure enough that's what Corruptor does, those are the stats in the PDFs, but NOT the stats in the builder which had it at lock 4+ and no corruptor so we had to check the FAQ and sure enough, the bullshit version is what they intended. Immediate summary houserule, and game continues. The PHR without fusillade and with so many linked broadsides has no good reason to go WF ever which feels very meh. My big dude opened up WF on turn 3 and crippled three ships (one of them would have been another 14 damage if we had used the busted B5 Shadowtech laser), which then ate everything the PHR could throw at it with a flared up signature and it died before the end of the turn. A blaze of glory. Calibre H hurts. Frustratingly, the ground game was pretty boring because nothing could really reach opposite side clusters, and the center was basically a stalemate. We were really careful to get all the debris field penalties and checks right, which is something we often forgot. I like the Scourge stealth play style, and the ships are gorgeous, but more than ever I feel like if we're going to play this more than once in a blue moon we really have to knock up houserule stats. TT updates them about about half as often as we play and there's always seemingly some dog turd in them we have to step around.
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Jul 24, 2023 05:09
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I don't miss the random CAW rolls at all, and the bombardment I'm kinda sad we didn't get to try out at all because I think it was a good change. It's just really overshadowed by the stuff they screwed up for no good god damned reason in our minds. Don't feel the smooth parts, just all the snags and snarls. I didn't mention in earlier, but the ships that downed the Daemon, that damage was pretty evenly from a pair of Castors on weapons free (100pts, fusillade guns), pair of Electras on weapons free (130pts, heavy calibre guns), and a single Ajax on standard orders (90pts, light broadsides). 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.
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Jul 25, 2023 14:47
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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.
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Jul 26, 2023 05:01
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Toalpaz posted:Does anyone know how you do shaltari?
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Aug 3, 2023 14:43
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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.
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Oct 13, 2023 16:26
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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).
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Dec 31, 2023 03:53
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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.
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Jan 24, 2024 18:15
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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 |
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Jan 26, 2024 03:05
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