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I think what hey mean is that you can only take 1 Faction Admiral and 1 Famous Admiral, but they've worded it like you can only take one or the other.


That would explain the restriction on abilities not being duplicated between more than one Admiral. Otherwise its a waste of a comment as it would only apply to non-standard games (more than one admiral if one admiral is the real hard limit)

Game's not even out yet, and there's already 6 pages of FAQ up. The first page alone is a bunch of "add these sentences to the rulebook", not even explanations but just missing content. Those imbeciles really did publish the rules before playtesting them. Again.

Absolutely pathetic launch mates.

I'm (sadly) more surprised that the 3rd party stores don't appear to have any stock.

Firestorm, Incom Gaming and The Outpost have nothing; Wayland is showing preorder for the25th; Goblingaming is also showing preorder (no date); Ebay only has TrollTrader listings;

Which is surprising considering they shut down orders and such for over a month. A period of time I figured they'd use to build up a huge order so that 3rd parties and own store would have stocks for launch day a plenty.

Now I've no idea if any of those stores got stock to send out to customers (though its odd that they'd all only get exactly the pre-order allocation and nothing for the shelf); but it sounds like they just sent out stuff today possibly to 3rd parties (at best)


At least TTC is showing stock for everything (or at least no out of stock)

 slyphic wrote:
Game's not even out yet, and there's already 6 pages of FAQ up. The first page alone is a bunch of "add these sentences to the rulebook", not even explanations but just missing content. Those imbeciles really did publish the rules before playtesting them. Again.

Absolutely pathetic launch mates.

So... not a lot different from most companies then.
The latest Bolt Action v3 is being panned on all the Facebook groups, and, well, anything GW releases in print is like this.

As tabletop gamers, we seem to be accepting this when we purchase, much like video game players do with all the crappy bugs on release.

Nothing good comes out of Facebook, especially discussion. But yes, BA3 already having errata is another sign of a bad publisher. Though BA3 has actually been well received around here except for that one WAAC donkey-cave that hangs around the tables at our usual store whining about something that might require him to actually exercise strategy and tactics instead of staring at a list with a calculator.

But much like TTC's track record, I expected nothing better out of Warlord after the absolute dog's dinner that was Cruel Seas launch (boat movement was wrong, AA weapons didn't work, airplanes only half worked...)

British isle's certainly not taking any trophies this year.

Folk from TT were telling people earlier today on FB that they should be able to get it from Wayland on release and didn't understand why they'd changed their date (and they weren't saying buy direct from TT either)

I'd thought TT would be distributing Dropfleet itself, but i guess they could have put it into 'normal distribution' and whoever is doing that has messed up

Is Wayland sabotaging the release to try to steer business towards dystopian wars?

chaos0xomega wrote:
Is Wayland sabotaging the release to try to steer business towards dystopian wars?

I doubt Wayland would want to bother sabotaging, they stock SO many model lines and Dropfleet isn't even in anything Warcradle does (and its going to be years before they are in a position to bring Firestorm Armada back into their game roster)


EDIT 0 Firestorm are now listing stock on a bunch of stuff

The new rules are different enough that I don’t have any kind of a feel for them. Would the new drop/battalion rules transplant onto 1st edition easily?

Have all the weapons been nerfed? Even with weapons free, it reads like it could take 3 or more turns for a cruiser to kill another cruiser.

Wayland are saying TT changed the release date (image from FB):
.

I've got two orders with DFC pre-order in them with TT - I received a shipped notification for one of them today (arriving Monday) but nothing on the other. People on FB started getting their pre-orders from Wednesday.

Are Shaltari shields now scald-proof? Otherwise, are they only useful against C-damage attacks?


I can see why the new edition would be really frustrating for gamers who want every decision to matter and bad decisions punished. A lot of the big trade-off choices have been reduced, such as WF for a F(N) ship, or shields vs PD.

The ships all seem to be more survivable due to the change to crits, and in addition the weapons seem generally weaker.

Got to play a few games this weekend, so I wrote up a review of DFCv2.

https://yadzcb.friestman.net/dfc2-review.html

tl;dr I don't like it more than the 1e with houserules for ground combat I've been playing for years, but I think the new strike craft system might be worth backporting.

Thanks for the review. I’m interested to hear your thoughts about the Bioficers.

Personally, I would houserule Aegis ships to have the scythe ability or some way of killing bombers, as that is what they were doing in V1 with their PD. It feels wrong for ships covered in weapons designed to shoot small targets not to be able to shoot small targets.

The whole save situation seems off to me, mostly because it makes the combat feel very different than 1.7, where the number of shots and lock meant more. Now I don’t see as much difference between two different K guns when one is, like 2 2+ and the other is 4 4+ when crits don’t matter.

That Aegis ships can't swat fighters feels deliberately left out, it's such an obvious thing. Might mean they need to cost a lot more, or they have to disable it until they activate again, which would actually be pretty cool now that I'm writing it out. I like decisions like that.

The energy types is something I just revised the review to expand upon:

The new energy types system is designed to make weapons differently effective against targets. Differences not in behavior or usage, but in raw stats. It's a system that can work, Dropzone is actually a good example here. You can broadly categorize weapons into low, medium, and high energy, and each is best against its respective targets. But importantly there, every faction has a mix of energy types and armor types. Building an even mix is important, exploiting holes you blow in the enemies list is important.

The problem in DFC 2e is that the distribution is uneven within factions and at the same time integral to each of their design ethos. PHR has better energy armor. UCM has better Kinetic saves. Scourge has mostly energy weapons. UCM has mostly kinetic weapons. There's a darling here that needs to be killed, and I don't know whether it's faction save consistency or the new system. It's a problem that overshadows everything else in the game. It's too central to scrap, and it's why I think it will take years and many revisions, if it ever happens, to see it really work well.

For the different armor saves, could they just change Aegis to reroll K or E hits? In 1.7, PD defended against Scourge plasma CAW just as well as it stopped missiles and bombers. Well, except for scald.

Otherwise, yes, the different fleets seem more designed for rock-paper-scissors than matched balance, so far as I can tell.

I don’t enjoy the. tough risk-vs-reward choices as much as you do, but wouldn’t mind your Aegis idea.

Changing Aegis to apply to both K and E wouldn't really fix it. Scourge have no Aegis whatsoever, you still have the 2 point spread of average armor saves. And fundamentally I don't think removing the differences between attack types is 'fixing' the system so much as removing it.

I think it's doable. I think it's not going to be any simple change any one place, but a whole lot of carefully balancing stats holistically. The problem is that TTC doesn't want to do that.

Has anyone yet statted up the Bioficers for 1.7 rules?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Has anyone yet statted up the Bioficers for 1.7 rules?

From FB:

Nathan Gee wrote:Project Bioficers v1.7 update!

Everything, except for the Genitor Tower should be playable in some fashion. Are the stats completely balanced? Doubtful. Are the points perfect? Nope. But its an ongoing effort and any feedback/suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Additionally I am sure there are countless typos. so don't be too harsh. 😃

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/84kpt0pwhmts9c39pjhn9/Test-Bioficers-v1.7.pdf

I got “this item was deleted”.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I got “this item was deleted”.

Try:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d5wt02uktc8u6bx8457df/Test-Bioficers-v1.7.pdf?rlkey=gpsgf6oll84buhbhtid8x1rzj&st=0zzgnsn9&dl=0

Thank you.

I hear the fire ships got nerfed this week. Where does that leave Resistance? Are they the big losers of 2nd edition?

Fireships, Senecas, and more a cleanup of sloppy build rules than a nerf for the cruisers. But it was an update exclusively to the Resistance.

Fireships are still frankly the strongest weapon in the Resistance's arsenal. They're basically a dedicated Close Action cruiser class weapon. On cruisers they have an alt-fire mode of bulk landers.

Thanks for the writeup, mostly mirrors what I've been thinking. Never got around to V1, but I might try it just to compare after getting some games in for V2.

It sounds like a community updated V1 will be the way to go.

Plastic Battleships confirmed

https://imgur.com/a/eg09tzc

Interesting that Battleships are plastic whilst the battlecruisers were resin. Interested to see what they come up with for the different factions and what the Bioficers get! We know from the video they get at least one that has the array of "cut your ship in half" lasers

I could not get the Imgur page to load, so I snapped some screenshots off FB.

My thoughts: they all look good. I don’t see a single dud here. The Scourge one looks radically different from any other Scourge ship—more like a Babylon 5 baddie—yet it still works. The UCM diverges the second most from its resin sculpt with the double-prow look of the cruisers, which I find a bit of a downgrade. The Bioficer BB looks beefy and badass. It might be my favorite of this batch.

Which ones do you like best? Which ones dollars a downgrade from the resins for you?

The Scourge one reminds me a bit of the Andromeda Ascendant -

Yeah those all look awesome and that scourge one almost looks like a whole new faction design!

definitely love the new style of Scourge, I was a bit meh on the previous designs despite liking them as a faction but I can see myself getting a fleet of those beauties