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What amazing timing. I was just asking about this in Misc-Games.

It looks soooooo good. I would drop a pile on this in a second. Any rumored release dates? Are they going the Kickstarter route (one site I saw had that briefly rumored)?

I get the impression it's nearly ready to launch. About October?

Looking closely at pictures I definitely see a lot of "retail" boxes and apparently army starters.

Still, October is right around the corner, and yet no one has preorders up? Is that par for the course from Spartan? Do they tend to announce/put up orders in advance?

Pre-orders usually go up month before release

Been playing dystopian wars since its release it has never been put on the back burner even with the firestorm v2.0 release.

There 2 major games is dwars and firestorm armada. Dystopian wars being a run away success for them and with a massive model count now and decent to good rule set. If only they worked on designing the rule book better without the bold .

The rest of there games should be dropped in my opinion as not worth while but they have served as test beds for the company
As far as I can see.

As for any one looking at Spartan games go for dwars or FSA until this release. Only time will tell if they fixed the rules and such but it has been beta tested by Spartan forum members for a while so should be decent set of rules.

Think dzc but with backing to expand quicker and bigger could be a run away success fingers crossed.

Founds some more gems in the Spartan forums. The playstyle synopsis is by Delboy

Terrans are Grinders, capable of shrugging off lots of damage and revel in getting close.....they also use lots of off board artillery.

Dindrenzi are Hit and Run specialists with a singular 'Right tool for the right job' mentality....they also use lots of Sky Drops.

Aquans are also Hit and Run Specialists with the ability to shoot round corners!....using prisim technology......

Directorate are of course the baddies, with lots of Cyber Attack capability, and a punishing Air Cadre (...their Leviathan is a Flyer!)

Relthosans are a Swarm/Drone Force, with lots of combination and nodal units that boost their effectiveness.....and their infantry are my favourites!

Sorylians are unusual in that they are better at range than up close....until you get really close (CQB range) where they are awesome

and finally a terran APC

The Firestorm models (6mm? 10mm?) look VERY cool. Looks like the Exodus Wars might have some real competition at the regimental engagement level.

Anyone have any insight as to how it plays yet?

10 mm (to the eyes) is the scale. The infantry stands are 40mm wide by 30mm deep. According to Spartan Alex.

With those dimensions, 10mm sounds right. Very cool. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

 Absolutionis wrote:

 Overread wrote:

privateer4hire wrote:
Times like this I wish Mantic and Warlord would combine and Spartan and Hawk Wargames would combine.

If I recall right I think the Hawk guy used to work for/with Spartan and then went off on his own direction.

Yep.

http://www.thatsyogarbage.com/wargame-interview-david-j-lewis-director-of-hawk-wargames/

Huh. Don't think I knew that.
Still wish they'd combine (maybe all four companies).

I'd prefer they didn't. Hawk seems to be dedicated in growing it's nascent game and lowering the price point.

Spartan meanwhile is fixing up it's old, nearly unplayable rules (FSA v2 for example is a massive fix), and continuing to shotgun new product lines out there

I like Spartan's games, but seriously, they have 6 games running on extremely similar (in most cases, nearly identical) ruleset:

Uncharted Seas (and the various revised versions)
Firestorm Armada (v1 and v2)
Dystopian Wars (v1 and then v2)
Armored Clash (Almost the same as DW)
Dystopian Legions
Planetfall 10mm
Planetfall15mm
Planetfall Infantry Game Thing.

My hope is that the vehicle sizes are similar so I can use PF minis for both games because I am not a fan of the DZC aesthetics. I only like the look of the PHR. I know some people who are invested in DZC and others that want PF.

 neiltj1 wrote:
My hope is that the vehicle sizes are similar so I can use PF minis for both games because I am not a fan of the DZC aesthetics. I only like the look of the PHR. I know some people who are invested in DZC and others that want PF.

DZC is also 10mm scale.

I'll admit, I'm glad they went with a conventional scale for this. Although I love it to death now, it always irked me that Firestorm was so out of scale with most other space fleet lines.

Being 10mm means there are going to be a good amount of terrain options for it (might have to grab some of the stuff from Hawk actually).

And although I love 15mm scale, I'm also glad they decided to pick one scale and go with it instead of try for both. As much as I would have loved some of the models in a 15mm force for Tomorrow's War, trying to handle both at the same time is an exercise in madness.

So, wait, is Planetfall 15mm or 10mm? I'm seeing people saying both.

I like the designs. I think I could be tempted to pick up a few kits here or there if they're not too expensive. I rather like those funky little hover tanks. A lot of what they've shown has a very nice Command & Conquer vibe to it.

Speaking of, I'm surprised that nobody's made a C&C tabletop game.

I also noticed that in those demo shots, their 28mm game is taking place within the same setting as the Planetfall game. That could be kind of a cool idea for tournaments, having multiple games at different scales going on within the same battle.

Did they settle as 10mm for real? Because last I heard, Spartan wanted to create THREE ground scifi games. 10mm, 15mm and infantry 28mm.

It was called Planetfall, Invasion and something else. All of which were different scales of the same universe. Which I found redundant as hell.

The project stands a much, much. much better chance of success if they just stick with the 10mm Planetfall they showed earlier. They simply aren't going to compete against other 28mm scifi skirmish games by not being different enough.

I agree. Doing both 10 and 15mm definitely seems redundant. There's a great synergy between having a Regimental-scale system and a squad-scale system (look at the campaigning possibilities with 6mm Epic and 28mm WH40K, even if GW utterly failed to realise what they had), but I don't really see the need to treat Regimental-scale (10mm) and Company-scale (15mm) differently.

I recall an early interview with the head of Spartan and yes it seemed like they wanted to hit every possible scale with their model line. I think their intent is to use their creative and mould making capacity to try out multiple lines within the same world setting/theme and then see what sticks in the market.

It's not a totally daft idea - there are a lot of 10mm scale wargames that have never gotten off the ground nor beyond a very niche market. Indeed Dystopian Wars and Dropzone Commander are almost in the market alone with wide spread appeal.
Indeed Planetfall started life as a side-release not even under the main Spartan Banner so it must have sold well and generated lots of interest back then for them to consider pushing it into mainstream production.

The only downside is Spartan spreading their resources too thin internally - although I think and hope they've learned from this in Dystopian wars and they will be able to better support multiple lines. I think they've also learned a marketing lesson in not releasing info on new releases too early - one thing that plagued Firestorm Armada was constant news/hints of future releases that never came or which took far far far too long to ever come - heck we are still waiting on Leviathans to appear.

 Killionaire wrote:
Did they settle as 10mm for real? Because last I heard, Spartan wanted to create THREE ground scifi games. 10mm, 15mm and infantry 28mm.

The original plan under Studio Sparta was for all three. In making Planetfall a core game it looks like 10mm is a lock. The 28mm game is called Spec-ops or something.

But it doesn't look like they'll be doing a 15mm one at least (not from anything I've hear in the past year or so at least).

one thing that plagued Firestorm Armada was constant news/hints of future releases that never came or which took far far far too long to ever come - heck we are still waiting on Leviathans to appear.

Yeah this was a big one. They previewed a whole lot of minis for Firestorm that never, ever came to pass. I still remember when they were still mostly in to doing historicals alongside Uncharted Seas... Xyston or something, and they put up preview shots of Firestorm ships that would become the Dindrenzi. There are some transports and a few small ships in those shots that never saw the light of day. The Leviathan is another good example.

In the early days they were really scattershot about previews and let a lot of dates and releases slip. They are a hell of a lot better on that front these days, and hopefully their experience with a large line like Dystopian Wars will help juggling future endeavours. But I really hope they give Spec-Ops a lot of time after the release of Planetfall.

Oh and on that note, apparently Dystopian Legions is getting an announcement soon, so looks like it isn't quite dead either. I guess we'll see if they can pull it off.

I've seen the whole "preview too much too early" from a fair few companies. I suspect the problem is that they really do want to share news and keep customers in the loop - but at the same time if a model has a setback or if its canned or if a million and one other things happens that slows or prevents its release they don't want talk about it.

So their marketing ends up all one day (like big companies) but without the eventual delivery.

In that light they tend to learn one of two lessons
1) Don't say anything till its pretty much if not actually finished and will 100% be out the door unless we close down

2) Actually fess up and say "something went wrong and its not coming."

The latter of which being not ideal in marketing terms so most learn lesson 1.

I look forward to Planetfall.

And i hope it will be in 10mm en be combined with 28mm skirmish.
15mm is to much of a "between-scale", it competes with both 10mm and 28mm.
6mm/10mm is, tactically speaking, the most interesting scale if you want to play big battles.
28mm or bigger is for skirmish.

My favourite game still is GW's Epic (Armageddon); that is/was 6mm on paper, about 8mm in practice, so close to 10mm.
Dystopian Wars (1/1200 scale) is since it exists one of my "newer" favourites.

15mm (like Flames of War) is already a lot toward 28mm and already as far from the same large scale feel as Epic or DW gives you.

I hope for 10mm and 28mm Firestorm and, unlike GW has ever done right, a combination of all scales.
And, like more potential players have done, i have communicated this to Spartan Games as well.

I have most GW armies on 40k, Epic and BFG level, partly for this reason.
But GW never got to supporting this as a whole and Epic and BFG now officially don't exist anymore
A combination of 3 levels, space, large scale battle and skirmish is what i would love above anything, wargaming at it's best.
Add resources and you have strategic level gameplay to tactical wargaming on different scales.

I hope Spartan will take the time to do it right and to create "a whole".
Even if done slowly, they can do this in a few years.


In regard to some of the posts i read here I must also add that Spartan 2.0 (since Dystopian Wars) is a company i like a lot.
I don't understand "they quit game systems", they only have a few and these still exist.
I have most GW systems and most are not supported anymore, even worse, most systems i have don't exist anymore, some exist again (like Warzone).

The game systems Spartan has are or have become mature now, they listen to the community and if there is imbalance in rules (there sometimes is), they listen and actually fix it.
And the current versions of Dystopian Wars and Firestorm Armada are good and balanced systems.
To be complete: Dystopian Legions is balanced, but i would like to see another ruleset that is model-based, not unit-based which is perfect for DW and FA, but feels a bit weird IMO when playing skirmish.
I have a collection of DL models though.
Many Spartan miniatures are at the top of quality and originality of what i have seen in 25 years of wargaming, only GW's early days and Rackham come to mind as peaks in miniature design.

Planetfall also has a few models that are exactly what i like to see in sci-fi.
If i wil only buy the models or play them game depends on the rules.

Don't forget price too - Spartan charges a very fair amount for their models. You can build big armies if you want and you can get something for £10 or less that actually makes a difference on the table top. Although granted they are shifting toward more large boxed sets as opposed to smaller unit boxed sets (to lower their shelf footprint to get into more stores).

I'll be honest, no matter the scale I am very excited for this. I've been with Spartan games for about 4 years now and I've seen this slow and steady creep of them working their games to great production level. Their models have always been pretty good and like what @Overread said their prices are great, easily able to get starters in each set.

My Faith in them was restored with the recent edition of Firestorm Armada and that essentially told me that whatever they are releasing now is golden. I cannot wait for this release, my Aquan Prime will now have FISH TANKS....get it? Fish tanks?...Cause...they're fish?

I'm new to the party, as Firestorm Armada 2.0 is my first Spartan game, but I do know that I have long wanted a space-fleet scale game, and a 6/10mm scale game to compliment my seemingly endless collections of 28mm games.

Had GW not evolved into an evil empire, I have no doubt I would have been a Battlefleet Gothic/Epic Armageddon/40k player for life, and would have run endless tier'd campaigns, but the reality of two of those games being dead/oop/unsupported means i've been looking elsewhere.

X-wing has been a fun gate-way drug for space-scale, but I needed a meatier game, and Firestorm Armada found me at the perfect time.

That leaves me hungering for a 10mm game (non-historical), but with very very few more widely available options. I've heard good things about DzC but hate the aesthetics, and Dystopian Wars was about to "win" by default despite my not being interesting in the alt-Victorian-Steampunk-kinda setting...

Planetfall thus seems perfect and perfectly time. I am so incredibly excited, and will be going in hard as soon as pre-orders pop up. As such, i'll be the guy who takes one for the team and i'll make sure I put up plenty of early-days bat-reps, etc...

Only dilemma is... I find myself liking different faction aesthetics in Planetfall versus FSA, which will complicate any longer term campaign concepts.

I just started FA, being a long time BFG player.
In a couple of aspects they are quite similar.
But one thing sets FA far apart from BFG in a good way: deployment, coming from hyperspace, "flanking"; this is space, everything can happen! This alone makes it a game with an unending number of possible battles.

I also play X-Wing, i like it. But i agree, it's beafy enough for a real tabletop wargame. For me it's a snack between other games.

And @Avrik_Shasla: LOL regarding the Fish Tank concept!

10penceman wrote:
Pre-orders usually go up month before release

Been playing dystopian wars since its release it has never been put on the back burner even with the firestorm v2.0 release.

There 2 major games is dwars and firestorm armada. Dystopian wars being a run away success for them and with a massive model count now and decent to good rule set. If only they worked on designing the rule book better without the bold .

The rest of there games should be dropped in my opinion as not worth while but they have served as test beds for the company
As far as I can see.

As for any one looking at Spartan games go for dwars or FSA until this release. Only time will tell if they fixed the rules and such but it has been beta tested by Spartan forum members for a while so should be decent set of rules.

Think dzc but with backing to expand quicker and bigger could be a run away success fingers crossed.

I've been collecting and playing Dystopian Wars since just about three months after its release. I just recently bought a small fleet of Firestorm Armada as well, but that's mainly to get prepared for Planetfall.

I very much am of the opinion that Dystopian Legions and the Planetfall are the best games that Spartan has made. There were only a couple of weaknesses I felt was the command rules were a bit complicated and the melee can be slow yet holds up all units involved.

I very much look forward to the full rulebook and new factions which have been stated to be relooking at these rules, enhancing the vehicle combat, and I hope streamlining the use of the game cards as was done in DW 2.0.

Planetfall was similar, but a bit more fast paced, with some additional rules showing more of the technologically advanced abilities, such as unlimited range, reactive fire, and bringing in reinforcements through predetermined landing zones.

I guess I can say that my main gaming system for the past 15-16 years was 40k, until I realized that I was just bored playing all my games in the past 4.5. I was tired of fighting against untold numbers of Space Marines, I didn't like GWs habit of relying upon producing big flashy gimmicks for each codex to try to draw the easily distracted people in, with all of the big over the top deathstar units and then big flyers/huge walkers for every army.

Things like the flyer rules felt very forced in and didn't really mesh with the game, especially with the existing flyers be as hard to hit as a supersonic interceptor yet more heavily armored than the medium tanks.

I had spent the year or so before DL was announced trying to find a game to replace 40k, Dust was just slightly to abstracted for me, Warpath was MUCH to simplified, I hated the gameplay of Warmachine and its aesthetics, I have never been able to find the same enjoyment out of skirmish games because I have more fun thinking through the squad level tactics and more general strategies. FoW was to expensive and I find historical games to restrictive.

I just started playing Firestorm with a buddy a couple of months ago, and we're both really excited to give Planetfall a whirl. The campaign possibilities are endless. I hope it gets well supported!

The models look snazzy, but I have a hard time seeing them as hard sci-fi. They lack the utilitarian miltary aesthetics that I've grown fond of, but this is just a matter of personal taste.

That said I am interested in how game-play will work. What sorts of tactical operations will this game best convey? Do we know what list design is like and what the variety of models available to each faction will be at launch?

*Edit for clarity.

 Nightwolf829 wrote:
That said I am interested in how game-play will work. What sorts of tactical operations will this game best convey? Do we know what list design is like and what the variety of models available to each faction will be at launch?

Exactly. I'm all for great-looking models, but tactically challenging manoeuvre warfare is what I'm really looking for in games like this (I'm a huge 6mm fan for this reason).

Very much looking forward to learning more about how the game plays.

For those who had the Studio Sparta one, what were the rules like in terms of mechanics? Was it quite different to the naval based games?

The rules were more similar to Dystopian Legions.

First of all, building an army you split it in half, and then split one of the halves between two reserve groups, which entered the game through two RTZ's (Reinforcement Target Zone or some such) each player designates at the beginning of the game.

The activation of units alternates by player but each player sets their order of activation at the beginning of the turn without knowledge of their opponents order.

The attacks use pools of dice set up from the contributing weapons and trying to get a number of successes to match the targets Kill Rating, so that is similar to the naval games, but like Dystopian Legions the game used a colored dice mechanic, so the weapons would be designated with a number of black, blue, or red dice. Each black die gets one hit on a 4+, the blue dice get one hit on a 4+ but a 6 counts as two hits, and the red dice acts as in the naval games where a 6 counts as two hits and allows another dice to be rolled.
The dice color can be modified either up one color by forfeiting movement to lock onto the target or down by firing at long range.

This is one of the big things that has been stated to change for this new release, Spartan said that they were unable to provide the variety in units due to the low KRs and effective dice this mechanic required, so they have said they are moving back to the full exploding dice mechanic found in the naval games.

I myself worry about this because how it is implemented in DW makes sense when talking about massive naval vessels with their redundant and isolated systems, but I hope they will keep the fast and bloody feel of Planetfall.

Terrain also of course is of much more use with units able to interact with it better.