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To be fair, in the FAQ on the website he does give you a good idea what to expect in terms of background.


next to other games out there, I'm not too upset, firestorm armada doesn't have a ton of background either, but it's still an interesting universe. The visual in the case of DzC makes it almost compelling enough. If it gets fleshed out later/over time, I'm ok with that. This looks like a game that's really going to be carried by its rules and mini's more than anything else, whereas 40k has always been carried by its background.

Druidic wrote:Fyi, I've done a little number crunching today as I'm looking at getting the large army deals for PHR and UCM.

Long story short, on Hawk site each set is £140 without KR cases, I've worked out the discounted prices on Maelstrom.
To get the UCM as parts works out to £152.55, 10% discount. as you spend over £100 you get a further 2% discount so £149,50. If you buy the starter set AND bits to make up to large set does save a little extra, £146.31 with discount.
However they also give you 1% loyalty so £14.63 loyalty.
Doing the same with the UCM gets to £142.79, but if you take off the loyalty the total price for both sets comes to.... £274.47
So in short... you CAN save a little over £5 going to Maelstrom AND use the second purchase loyalty to pay for most of the rule book.....

Worth the hastle? Not sure! Will it arrive later then direct from Hawk, probably.... But you do have the option of changing the set arround.... hmmm....
Just thought I'd share!
(OK I'm a sad little finance guy... sorry!)

I'm hoping to stock DZC real soon - I have been talking to the guys and I am on their list. So if it's any use I'd see what deals I can compile to make it a bit more tempting.
And changing sets around is something I've got a reputation for

Bugger, I mentioned previously that I thought I had the incorrect foam shipped as part of my premium starter army. Now I've had a proper chance to look at it (too distracted by the models ) it turns out the foam in my case is the PHR set rather than the UCM one.

Oh well I guess I get to test how good Hawk's returns system is.

Shae-Konnit wrote:

Druidic wrote:Fyi, I've done a little number crunching today as I'm looking at getting the large army deals for PHR and UCM.

Long story short, on Hawk site each set is £140 without KR cases, I've worked out the discounted prices on Maelstrom.
To get the UCM as parts works out to £152.55, 10% discount. as you spend over £100 you get a further 2% discount so £149,50. If you buy the starter set AND bits to make up to large set does save a little extra, £146.31 with discount.
However they also give you 1% loyalty so £14.63 loyalty.
Doing the same with the UCM gets to £142.79, but if you take off the loyalty the total price for both sets comes to.... £274.47
So in short... you CAN save a little over £5 going to Maelstrom AND use the second purchase loyalty to pay for most of the rule book.....

Worth the hastle? Not sure! Will it arrive later then direct from Hawk, probably.... But you do have the option of changing the set arround.... hmmm....
Just thought I'd share!
(OK I'm a sad little finance guy... sorry!)

I'm hoping to stock DZC real soon - I have been talking to the guys and I am on their list. So if it's any use I'd see what deals I can compile to make it a bit more tempting.
And changing sets around is something I've got a reputation for

Hawk will only allow a 10% discount. But that wont stop you from making your own large and mega deals or equivalent and taking 10% off that.

If you do quickly enough and offer free shipping in the UK, I will buy a UCM mega and a PHR mega, and that is a promise.

I asked Firestorm to match the mega deal and they couldnt/wouldnt. You want my custom?

Orlanth wrote:

Hawk will only allow a 10% discount. But that wont stop you from making your own large and mega deals or equivalent and taking 10% off that.

If you do quickly enough and offer free shipping in the UK, I will buy a UCM mega and a PHR mega, and that is a promise.

I asked Firestorm to match the mega deal and they couldnt/wouldnt. You want my custom?

Dang, I did not know that about the 10% - still waiting on the Ts&Cs

But yes, for the UK I will do Free postage and make all kinds of mix and match deals!
And yeah, if you fancy giving me a try then I would love to provide you with toys!
And it ain't just DZC, I can do pretty much anything Maelstrom can Just PM if you have any questions about anything!

Can we get pictures of the models people have recieved?

Mick

Shae-Konnit wrote:

Orlanth wrote:

Hawk will only allow a 10% discount. But that wont stop you from making your own large and mega deals or equivalent and taking 10% off that.

If you do quickly enough and offer free shipping in the UK, I will buy a UCM mega and a PHR mega, and that is a promise.

I asked Firestorm to match the mega deal and they couldnt/wouldnt. You want my custom?

Dang, I did not know that - still waiting on the Ts&Cs :/

But yes, for the UK I do Free postage and make all kinds of mix and match deals!

Hawk have been very clever, by only allowing 10% discount it means that Hawk themselves have the lowest prices via their mega deals (20% off), thus Hawk sells diorectly as much as possible, maximising profit. However Hawk does allow sale of Starter deals at 10% also, so you get the saving of the starter deal plus the 10%. Therefore the only way to undercut Hawk is to match the deals Hawk do then take up to 10% off those. This shouldnt be a problem as you are directly reducing only by the agreed 10%. Hawk do not do a large or mega deal box, its all normal stuff just sold as a set.

Read the T%C documents carefully, trading regs ensure Hawk must allow a genuine opportunity to allow permitted third party retailers to undercut if only by an agreed amount so you should be able to match Hawk's army deals, even if not make your own.

I had to search your posts to find your website. Can you place www.shaekonnitgames.co.uk in your signiture so people can find you.

turns out my sample army will cost £86 direct from Hawk, so that kinda sucks, would be great if hawk or a 3rd party offered "Squad & Transport" combos, but given the T&Cs that Hawk are imposing, that seems unlikely.

Well I got a wind fall which I am instructed to spend on myself, and while I COULD buy 2 mega deals, I don't want to invest that far... have some plate armour I want to buy instead, however 2 LARGE armies give me and the wife something to go with which we can expand on later for a reasonable price and buying from Hawk gives me the cheapest deal.

Despite the quality I am deeply concerned about the pricing.

Now a Sabre or an ares is roughly similar to a 40K infantry figure in size. They are broadly similar in effect.

From what I am reading a Sabre hits on a 2+ (Ws roll) has an energy to match against opponents armour (S and T) and unless the unit is Shaltari or a Zeus it doesnt get a save. Units have a W stat but most have only 1 and a good S vs T roll may cause double damage.

So broadly speaking on a model to model basis it works broadly similar to 40K.

Ok then.

PHR 'counts as starter army'

2 'marines' £10.50
Jetbike sized transport £11

2 'marines' £10.50
Jetbike sized transport £11

2 'epic heavy tanks' £10
Jetbike sized transport £11
4 double sized stands of 'epic infantry' £11

We might be going wow at this game, but I am not happy wirth the cost of the buy in. with regards to the actual number of ground units on the tabletop this game makes GW seem like a cheap bargain.

How many models would you field in a '1500pt' equivalent game? It may cost more on a per model basis, but if you need far fewer models, then that's fine. Lots of games are like that, Heavy Gear and Infinity are typically $8-20 model, but you only need like 10-15.

Seems weird to me that people keep comparing it to 40K, but if you insist:
2 "marines", £20
1 Jetbike sized model: £12.30

another "Jetbike sized transport": £38!

1 Epic Heavy Tank: £12.30

It's all about perspective. Compared to skirmish and low-model-count wargames with multiple manufacturing centres and a largely plastic model range? yeah, it's kind of expensive. Compared to other games of a broadly similar scale (Epic, Flames of War - especially FoW) it's actually relatively cheap, if you want to construct a PHR force out of Epic models, go right ahead, but for the same cost someone else could buy an army twice that size from Hawk direct.

Right.. aren't the starter boxes ranging from 60-80GBP for the basic starter and premium starter packs respectively? If the game is designed to be played/enjoyed at that level, than that is several orders of magnitude cheaper than 40k/WFB. Flames of War as well for that matter.

I think the game is designed for the large army sets. Dave mentioned that somewhere.

Starters are like two squads a side intro games.

Yet again the starters themselves are intended as army boosters providing meat and potatoes units that players can and should have in volume.

I am seeing large army deals as a minimum game, even with the extra dynamic of dropships a large army deal is a small army by model count.


Doex the rulebook say anything about how to force org games over 3000pts? Is 3k a recommended hard cap for any reason?

xole wrote:I think the game is designed for the large army sets. Dave mentioned that somewhere.

That's what I reckon... Just like Epic40k, the bigger the force the much cooler the game will be.

And like anything else comes down to "What is it worth to you" and "is that more then the asking price"

Have 5x40k armies, 3 warhammer armies and all editions since rogue trader, plus gods know how much other stuff. Gradually over the last few year the "fun per pound" has decreased for me so I've baught less and less new stuff.

I just shelled out £355 on DzC... not sure if its worth it, but willing to invest to give it a solid go. To me its worth it.... I'll let you know if my gamble pays off!

Orlanth wrote:Starters are like two squads a side intro games.

Yet again the starters themselves are intended as army boosters providing meat and potatoes units that players can and should have in volume.

I am seeing large army deals as a minimum game, even with the extra dynamic of dropships a large army deal is a small army by model count.

I'm really not seeing any evidence of that in the book itself, if anything I think 1500-1999pt Clashes will emerge as the dominant game size, just because of the way everything scales up at Battle size making everything quite unwieldy and powerful - I certainly wouldn't expect to see 3 Desolators in a "minimum" game, and that amount of infantry is not a pleasant prospect when it comes to working out sprawling CQB. Still, if your local group wants to play 3K battles as the norm, go right ahead. The fact the scenarios are designed to scale at each level makes things interesting at any scale of battle.

Doex the rulebook say anything about how to force org games over 3000pts? Is 3k a recommended hard cap for any reason?

Over 3K you break the army up into as few rosters possible of one of the existing sizes. It doesn't say they can be different sizes but there's nothing restricting it (just that the examples given are of smaller armies of the same size). so your 4000 point force is organised as two Battle Rosters, not 4 Clash rosters. The scenarios don't scale past Battle level though, so very large armies could find things a little too easy

OOOkay, just got back from gaming night where our first game happened.

First things first: we played the "Targets of Opportunity" scenario, in which there were 3 buildings along the centreline of the table all of which held an objective. A player who retrieved 2 objectives won. None of our battlegroups deployed on the table, we were all waiting to come via dropship (or crawl on slowly in the case of the Taranis).
The forces were:

PHR (Me):

1st Battle Pantheon
1 Ares Walker & 1 Phobos Walker (with md dropship)
1 Ares Walker % 1 Phobos Walker (with md dropship)

1st Immortal Phalanx
2 Immortal squads in Juno IFVs (with md dropship)

2nd Immortal Phalanx
1 Immortal squad In Triton A-1

1st Heavy Pantheon
1 Taranis squad

UCM

1st Armoured Formation
1 Sabre Squad (with md dropship)

1st Legionnaire Corps
2 Legionnaire squads in Bear APCs (with md dropship)

1st Special Ordinance Section
1 Gladius Squad (with md dropship)
1 Rapier Squad (with md dropship)

1st turn: Not much happened. All the dropships entered via friendly table edge, I sent my 2 Juno Infantry squads centrally between the central and right-hand buildings, my opponent made a play with all his Infantry towards my left hand building. I was going to send the Triton’s squad there, but realised they’d be outnumbered heavily so decided to reinforce my centre (and hope to get 2 objectives to his 1).

2nd turn: Folly! I’d placed one of my walker squads on an elevated roadway to cover the entire middle of the board. Unfortunately, the articulated railguns on the UCM sabres popped up high enough to deny me any cover and they blasted the Phobos to pieces. This meant I had no AA cover in the middle of the board. Fortunately in this turn I was able to get all my infantry into the central and right-most buildings. My opponent’s Rapiers had now deployed fairly centrally though, and was covering a good deal of the central area.

3rd turn: The Rapiers went first and destroyed the Triton, stranding half of the Immortals in the central structure. If this wasn’t bad enough, the Gladiuses finally rolled round from where they had been dropped and destroyed the Juno the other half of the Immortals had arrived in. This meant I had 4 squads centrally looking for the objective, but no way to get them out of there! My other walker squad had now deployed and was repelling an infantry assault from my left, but I failed to consider the articulated turrets of the Sabres yet again and they started pouring fire into my rear from their position behind a crater. With the Gladiuses about to gain a bead on them, they wouldn’t last long…

Fortune struck as I was able to play the “Call for Extraction” card. This basically replaces a destroyed transport, and I gave it to the Immortals who had found the objective in the central building. A new Triton zoomed onto the battlefield, staying “close to the deck” to avoid AA fire.

4th turn: The objective carrying Immortals bundled out of the building and into the new Triton, which shot off towards a friendly board edge. The UCM forces continued their advance forward, the Rapiers blowing my medium dropships out of the sky. The Gladiuses took out the last two PHR walkers, and the UCM forces had retrieved the objective from my left-hand building. Overall, things were looking grim as I had had to pretty much concede the centre of the battlefield, and yet I still had the advantage...

It was now boiling down to the PHR squad in the right hand building. Having spent a turn already searching, they had a slightly easier roll this time and were able to find the objective. They immediately fled the building into their Juno (which had hidden for 3 turns from the UCM Sabres near it) and my last medium dropship came and picked it up. I now had 2 dropships with objectives a single move from safety, but my opponent’s Rapiers would get to shoot at at least one of them before they got the chance to get away, and if I lost Initiative he'd get a crack at both!

5th turn: Obviously, I lost Initiative and my opponent was able to move his Rapiers to take 2 shots at the Neptune and a single shot at the Triton. He only had to destroy one to put the game back into the balance, and if he nailed both (a strong possibility) then there was no way I could pull it back, with all my other forces destroyed save my Taranis battery.

He rolled on the Neptune first… 2 damage points! Not enough by 1, and with no other AA covering it had to concede that objective was coming my way.

I was worried about the Triton though, as it only has 1 damage point. He had 3 dice, needing 3s to hit and 4s to take it out, but only managed to hit once, and failed to damage it! In my next activations I got all my dropships out of there, winning the game (though leaving a lot of wrecked metal behind)!

Nice. I cant wait to begin playing.

How long did it take you to run this game?

Sounds like it was a blast, Riquende! Congrats on winning your opening match

Is it still too early to demand our own sub-forum?

Nice report Riquende. I should be getting my first game on Monday. It will be just a starter army vs starter army game, so there will be quite a large points discrepancy. However I think for learning the rules it should do the job.

Initial thoughts on the game/system

UCM armour (as in the armour that their armoured vehicles have). Wow. Even their lighter tanks and AA batteries are armour 10. In practical terms this is huge. For a while I was considering taking on the Sabres with my Juno IFVs until I realised that with an Energy 8 main gun it couldn't actually hurt them. I don't know how you'd go about clearing away a UCM AA 'nest' without bringing ridiculous amounts of ground-based firepower.

Dropships. Mid game we were both using our dropships as makeshift gunships to try and do a bit more damage to things, but you do need to keep an eye on the fact you may need to get off the board quickly. I was lucky in my last turn not to have moved my Infantry's dropship too far away pursuing missile targets.

Terrain. We'd rustled up a lot of buildings (a complete set of the old Epic stuff and a few small box-based buildings; supplemented by some 28mm-scale craters and hills), and Lines of Sight were suitably blocked. However they were all too short really, and when the UCM AA tanks got into the middle of the board they had pretty much unrestricted field of fire to shoot at whatever I had in the sky. I haven't checked out Hawk's paper buildings yet, but I hope some of them are 6" tall at least to allow fliers some respite from AA that gets to a central position.

PHR Walker squads. I tried to be tactical and split my walkers into having some AA and some Anti-tank in each squad. I'm not convinced it was a good idea though, when the Sabres activated I had to suffer 3 railgun shots coming in, and when the Gladiuses activated I had to endure 4. Meanwhile I only ever had a single railgun to fire back with in any squad's activation.

The cards. Given we weren't using command vehicles, and using the most basic commander level, we didn't get a lot of use out of these (most cards effect something in your Sphere of Influence, which for us was just 4.5" and with no other commanders or scouts to use as relays). However I was able to essentially win the game off playing "Call for Extraction" which replaced my destroyed Triton for free, as without it there was no way that squad was getting out of there. My opponent also played a card at tis point "Espionage", which would have cancelled my free Triton, but I had an "Espionage" card of my own and cancelled that!

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Orlanth wrote:Nice. I cant wait to begin playing.

How long did it take you to run this game?

2 hours I think... maybe 2 and a half. Obviously we were suffering from "flick through the rulebook continuously" syndrome so hopefully that'll start coming down in subsequent games, although I'm sure when we bring in Fast Movers and CQBs we'll stretch it out again!

Riquende:

Thanks for the awesome write-up on your battle! Since I am going PHR too, I realy appritiated to get a fellow PHR:ers' view on the first games.


But there must be others who have recieved their stuff and gotten a couple of games played?! REPORTS people! Please?

Armour 10 is as high as it is supposed to get. I don't like it that Hawk decided to cap out on armour with basic units, it means that to bring out big stuff like mega-tanks/titans/battlemechs or even a more ordinary siege tank equivalents you have to rewrite and expand the core system.

Not really, between Damage Points, Passive CM and special rules (which you would expect such mega-tanks to have) you can have pretty mega units within the core rules. The armour cap of 10 is mainly to ensure you don't encounter a situation where vast amounts of enemy fire have no chance whatsoever of hurting it

Armour 10 itself is pretty damn tough - you need something MBT-grade to crack it (barring specialist anti-armour weapons or special rules), it can only ever take one damage point per attack (except from a Scimitar) and can basically ignore anything else. An Armour 10, 6+DP vehicle with any kind of passive CM is going to be massive and dominate a battlefield, but it's not going to be unstoppable.

Really, don't you think you should read the core system before declaring that "you have to rewrite" it to represent something?

Been experimenting with scenery.

I have some old plastic signs which I use for stuff, cut and shapped into a box then stuck printed buildings onto... I think it works quite well! About 30 minutes per building and zero cost!

Druidic:


Great work! I had simular plans, but how did you get exact sizes for the box? Pro-cutting board and stuff or just got an eye for getting it right?

I mentioned earlier in the thread that I recieved the wrong foam with my premium starter army. Well I got a response to my email this morning. Not only are they sending me some replacement foam, they're also letting me keep the incorrect foam rather than having to return it.

Top notch customer service there.