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IIRC DFC launched without fighter caps and they very quickly faqd them in, I'm guessing this edition will be a repeat of that.

You're thinking of BFG. The original v1.0 DFC book most certainly had launch caps. They've gone backwards

The Mantle Monitor weilds one of the Bioficer's most perculiar weapons in Dropfleet. The Gravitic Pulveriser affects a targeted area with a field of oscillating gravity. When used against ships this can cause them to shake apart as the gravitational waves wash over them. The lingering effects cause havoc with navigation, reducing a ship's thrust until its dissipation. The Gravitic Pulveriser can also be turned downwards, bombarding cities and causing them to crumble to dust under their own weight.

That sounds like one of those overly complicated special weapons that either does nothing or neuters dreadnoughts. Why do the coolest looking designs always have to be the annoying ones?

While the firing arc might be limited, the Mamba Laser is certainly worth taking in your fleet!

Oh hey, finally, a statline we can compare to v1.





Still no solid idea how burnthrough works now, but I'd hazard it's a reroll of some kind, or armor save reducer. The 'Focused' special worries me, I hope they didn't just port over that same exact rule from DZC. TTC loves that rule, and I despise it.

I understand the desire to speed up gameplay by reducing rolls, and in a vacuum (ba-dum, tish) Burnthrough looks like low hanging fruit, but I actually liked how the mechanics invoked the feeling of cutting deeper and deeper into the hull of a target.

 slyphic wrote:
I did my best to capture and collate readable copies of the pages TTC had up, and it's a good chunk of the book, enough to form a reasonable opinion.

Thanks! My inner Ork is annoyed you can't spend AP to make the ship explode...

It seems like a good chunk of the rules must be in the faction books. If the page numbers and chapter divisions are correct, then the special rules aren't in the core book. But the website also says the rulebook is 64 pages, but the previews go to 67. That's odd. 64 is a common number in cheap book print runs for a good reason, those extra pages cost a disproportionate amount.

Either I'm not clocking it or it's on one of the missing pages, but I also don't see how drop assets move around once on the ground. Could just be they don't now?

Maybe we'll see one of the alluded to demos this week?

I think that sectors are now gone and you deploy to clusters directly, so there isn’t really anywhere to move to (unless the shaltari keep their ability to redeploy troops between clusters)

I'm downloading all the current unit profiles and rules and holding on to them. I'm not a fan of a number of the changes ive seen so far. I have very large fleets so playing 1.0 will be an option if 2.0 doesn't do it for me.

So clusters are now called Dropsites which encompasses space stations and cities, which are the old 2/3/4 circle tokens. Features go on the circles. Battalions go on features. It says you assign battalions to features to destroy them, but there's no limit and it's always better to assign them to the nebulous city pool because of how dropsite damage is assigned. I can't figure out how you would end up with any 'leftover' battalions assigned to a feature beyond just not understanding how the resolution rules work. I'm finding that section difficult to parse.

I hope TTCombat, or more likely some fan, releases Bioficer stats compatible with 1st edition.

Join Dave Lewis as he takes us through each faction's light ship sprues that will be available in the latest edition of Dropfleet. You'll tell from the enthusiasm in his voice how excited Dave is!

The video ends before he gets to go over any of the sprues.

Trying to sell the game on literally hype alone.

I have wanted this game to take off for so long, and I need to give that dream up. The new rules are not intuitive or even an improvement from what I've seen so far.

I'm just waiting for a gameplay video or demo on youtube for the new edition. I heard they're working on one. I can't really get a feeling for how the game will feel and flow based on what info i've seen. I have built a couple of the 1st edition PHR and UCM cruisers recently and i'm a big fan of these models.

Hopefully they don't screw things up, with SW armada being dropped and no BFG return on the horizon there isn't really a whole lot of other games like DFC.....or at least not many with such good miniatures.

There are always other rule sets if you just want the miniatures.

I haven’t heard enough about the new rule set to figure out if it will be easier to play than the 1st edition rule set.

 Thargrim wrote:
I'm just waiting for a gameplay video or demo on youtube for the new edition. I heard they're working on one. I can't really get a feeling for how the game will feel and flow based on what info i've seen. I have built a couple of the 1st edition PHR and UCM cruisers recently and i'm a big fan of these models.

Hopefully they don't screw things up, with SW armada being dropped and no BFG return on the horizon there isn't really a whole lot of other games like DFC.....or at least not many with such good miniatures.

DFC should have already swept the market up after BFG and Firestorm Armada ended before. Starwars Armada was a new-face on the scene and should have entered a market of space combat games dominated by DFC. Of course Starwars is an insanely powerful IP so it was always going to at least sell well. But yeah I really hope that this might be turning point that DFC actually makes it outside of its shell and into the open. Not just because it looks like BFG and FA are likely to be a very long time before they return to the market (IF either returns); and SW Armada closing shop again means that DFC basically has the entire market to itself barring much smaller one-man-band setups like FullThrust and Billion suns

The miniatures were always the best part of DFC. The rules were always too fiddley (especially the ground combat rules). I’ve played three games using the actual rules and about 50 games of Starmada using the ships. I’m hopeful the new rules are decent, but if not, oh well.

 Duskland wrote:
The miniatures were always the best part of DFC. The rules were always too fiddley (especially the ground combat rules). I’ve played three games using the actual rules and about 50 games of Starmada using the ships. I’m hopeful the new rules are decent, but if not, oh well.

Do you use the drop objectives when you play using Starmada rules? Or do you play it as a straight space-combat game the way the diehard players insist is wrong and ruins everything?

I ask because every time it comes up, some diehard player assures me the worst thing TTCombat could do to widen the game’s appeal is remove those fiddly tournament player-friendly objectives and complex mechanics.

Generally it’s a straight space combat game. I’ve run it with drop location objectives as a con game (8 player with GM), but it’s not easily balanced in one on one.

Scourge ships of light tonnage are some of the fastest combatants in theatre and frequently pack a punch beyond their size. Packs of these slippery killers are rightly feared by experienced opponents, often above the more obvious might of capital ships.

I don't believe I've ever encountered someone that really defended the ground game in DFC. It's been pretty universally recognized as a pain point in the game.

And as always whenever someone asks why it isn't yet another deep space battle game, I have to wonder if they even read the rules, because that has been a supported playstyle since release. The scenarios without dropsites are right in the rules. No one has ever stopped you from playing DFC sans drop.

Also find it odd to call Starmada significantly simpler, I'd peg the two about even. It's certainly more detailed ships and movement.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Video up with some better shots of the 2P starter contents. You can almost make out the stats for some of the new ships on the quickplay sheets, but the printing on them is actually pretty hard to read https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm0yhM8nSDA

I feel like I’ve been bombarded by gamers defending the ground game/objectives as the big thing keeping DFC from being some generic failure. Heck, Dave himself talks about how the objectives are what make the game good in one of his videos.

That attitude definitely comes across in the rulebook and any discussion of the game online.

The ground game is very much one of the USPs. It's also been the area most in need of revision,damned near universally agreed upon.

There's no need to remove the systems from the game because you can just play in space without them to no detriment whatsoever. Removing them from the game would be dumb, just cutting out cool mechanics for no gain (RIP nuking and ramming).

What they need to do is advertise how you don't have to use the ground game better. But TTC has always been colossal failures at communicating.

I agree the ground game parts shouldn't be dropped, but if its a key part of the game then they need to provide more model content for it to help make it more engaging.

At the same time a few live video games and marketing shots of full space battles would be great.

I agree, they don't have to drop the ground game and it would be a mistake to do so; but they do need to market the full space game side of just big fleets fighting each other. Hit both markets and in theory get more people in for straight space fights and then get them tempted to use more ships for the drop-games.

If someone wants to squint and guess, these are the clearest frames I could extract from that video of the quickplay sheets.

 slyphic wrote:
The ground game is very much one of the USPs. It's also been the area most in need of revision,damned near universally agreed upon.

There's no need to remove the systems from the game because you can just play in space without them to no detriment whatsoever. Removing them from the game would be dumb, just cutting out cool mechanics for no gain (RIP nuking and ramming).

What they need to do is advertise how you don't have to use the ground game better. But TTC has always been colossal failures at communicating.

Yes, I agree.

The messaging from TTCombat, the fans and even Dave has made this a sore spot for me.

Here are the sprues from the starter set.