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slyphic wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
If i could find the video of the chap building the dropship in dropzone commander scale I would...

Sadly purged from the internet. The youtube channel hosting the videos got wiped a few years after the TTC acquisition, the internet archive doesn't have the videos saved, no one at TTC nor Dave himself (the chap from the video) can find any original copies, and the general attitude about the channel from current employees seems to be "that person won't talk to us".

So yeah, R.I.P. the UCMS Avenger build vlog.

The Hawk takeover wasn't a pleasant one - the only person who was kept on was Dave and the entire rest of the staff were let go after assurances were made they wouldn't be....so yeah I can see why

slyphic wrote:


I seriously wonder if all the angry ex-Hawk employees went through something similar when TTC bought them out. It would explain a lot, if Justin is correct in that TTC tried to help SWG fail so they could buy the corpse cheaper.

From having friends that worked there at the time, it's certainly how it was presented to me at the time.



I REALLY want to get back into Dropzone but it seems to be far more unstable than when Hawk had it. Stuff has pretty poor stock, and the community engagement (the crowning glory of why Hawk grew so fast) just isn't there anymore. Considering these were teased literally years ago I'm finding it hard to get hyped for it at all and think that the game is going anywhere.

Shaltari Behemoth Scuttling In

This is an entire-ass board, not a miniature

I really like it, and I really don’t fancy building it.

I'm getting Ghost Ark flash backs just looking at it.

RE: Shallie behemoth

I think TTC messed up the preview stats, or at least I hope they did. 3 shots, strafe-3 is 9 attacks, plus the 2 destroyer shots, plus the strafe-6 destroyer, all at sufficient energy values to threaten armor, vehicles, buildings, and basically everything on the board. It's too well rounded. It's basically an entire armor group of walkers and skimmers Voltronned into one giant model able to do anything with no weakness.

 winnertakesall wrote:
From having friends that worked there at the time, it's certainly how it was presented to me at the time.

* checks on the Secret Weapon/TTC drama * Ooooh, a countersuit. I'd love to see this go to trial and gawk at all the aired dirty laundry. But I've probably got my hopes up too high over the three ring circus that was watching the Alex Jones trial a couple weeks back. (he's from my city, I grew up prank calling him when he was on the public access cable channel in the 90s, and his schtick was mostly an homage to Art Bell. I still see him occasionally downtown and on campus.)






Automatically Appended Next Post:
Check it out, Dave talking about the Shaltari Behemoth model. That dude is infectiously authentically excited about the game in a way that no one else at TTC is.

I fervently hope his reemergence in this video, the Twitch stream, and the the PDFs herald the dawn of the third age of Dropzone with Hawk Dave back at the helm, evangelizing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOeEF6ev7hk

The behemoths are now available, as well as a new scenery piece: https://ttcombat.com/products/crashed-escape-pod

I like the Crashed Pod, but I'm having a hard time working out exactly how big it is...

I have the event exclusive escape pod that is intact. It's not huge, and I doubt they scaled it up. I would bet the entire scenery piece is about the size of a small resistance hovercraft.
It makes for a great objective!

WIP Wednesday – New Ships spotted on the horizon!

Titania New Rio


Kalium KNC-12 Fleet Carrier

Interesting to see them doing alternate sculpts! That Rio looks like a super aggressive frontal ship!

beast_gts wrote:
Titania New Rio

That post has got me worried. Titania in zone meant the old sculpts were no longer available. Like the old Albatross is 100% OoP.

They've had low stock on a lot of plastic sprues, and between TTC's love of cutting costs at the expense of quality and Brexit et al, I'm extremely concerned this is a testing of the waters for ditching plastic altogether.

Also I detest the new sculpt. It looks so generic. I've seen that ship profile a thousand times and I'm bored to death of it.

I can't see them dropping plastic. More likely this is them expanding the model range without bloating the rules.

 Overread wrote:
I can't see them dropping plastic. More likely this is them expanding the model range without bloating the rules.

Between Brexit, shipping costs, their acquisitions tieing up the up-front investment necessary for plastics, the litigation with Secret Weapon, offshore manufacturing of the plastic sprues, their self-admitted-in-the-blog inability to get printed paper products at a viable cost, I absolutely 100% can see it.

I hope it's alternative sculpts and not money saving. They even released the resistance plastic starter after acquiring hawk, so I am not sure it's likely they would want to ditch that. The plastic starters are what keeps the game alive (for me at least).
They released a whole range of resin alternate models for Dropzone resistance and the (admittedly not plastic) Original sculpts are still available.

Brickfix wrote:
They even released the resistance plastic starter after acquiring hawk

If you mean the Dropfleet starter, my understanding was that was already in the works when Hawk was acquired. If you mean the Dropzone resistance starter, it's the one starter NOT in plastic.

TTCombat & Warmill BIG NEWS!

We are very excited to announce some fantastic news!

Last month we were approached by Warmill to discuss purchasing their IP and MDF designs. The owners had commitments elsewhere but (considering its popularity) didn’t want the range to simply be discontinued. Considering both companies’ desire to make a deal happen our negotiations were brief! We are delighted to announce that the Warmill MDF range will become part of the TTCombat product line in the coming weeks. We will even be making some new kits to compliment the current ones too!

slyphic wrote:

Brickfix wrote:
They even released the resistance plastic starter after acquiring hawk

If you mean the Dropfleet starter, my understanding was that was already in the works when Hawk was acquired. If you mean the Dropzone resistance starter, it's the one starter NOT in plastic.

I mean the dropfleet starter (but i see that the sentence was a bit confusing). My understanding was that Dropfleet resistance was off the cards for Hawk and got only made after the purchase by TTC.
I still don't think they will replace the plastic but i could be wrong. The fact that TTC doesn't produce anything else in plastic kind of speaks for itself ...

I have currently a hard time to get my group motivated to give DFC a chance. When the argument that many ships are plastic kits is gone I see no real chance to get anyone to dip in to it. For games like Carnevale, ok, few models that profit from the resin cast details. But a game that is like all about fancy sci fi ships I really dislike the bendy resin sculpts.

As much as I love these new ship designs, the plastic kits are what keep me coming back to Dropfleet and Dropzone.

Plastic kits are such an integral part of each faction that dropping them would mean they'd have to take on an insane number of resin kits to replace them.

It just doesn't make sense unless they are considering shifting Dropfleet to a game on lifesupport. Which is almost baffling to me considering that they've got the whole space market to themselves outside of Battlefleet Gothic 3D print stuff

I think theres a lot to unpack in terms of Dropfleets "failure to launch". Its the only actively produced game in its genre/what should be a wide open market. That it isn't succeeding indicates theres something wrong, what that something is is anyones guess, but I'm guessing marketing has a lot to do with it.

I can't speak for others but for me the game itself is lacking in several places.
To name some examples: Not enough differentiation between weapons. It is very easy to find point efficient guns for each class of ship, leading to very similar lists.
Not enough differentiation between the different ship types. Why take a cruiser when the light cruiser can do the same but better.
Battleships just suck. Nothing around it.
I don't want to get to indepth, I love dropfleet for just the availability of great, diverse and interesting space ships, but the game ... Uff

My opinion is that the rule set is designed for Real Gamers, not Dirty Casuals. The drop portion of the game is too important and just not what many want out of a space battle game. I’ve house-ruled the game to just the shooting bits, but those should have been front and center in the rule book.

It also doesn’t help that the rules and minis are hard to buy in the US. I don’t know how many people are willing to order direct and place hundred-UKpound orders for the free shipping.

That’s not getting into the community freaking out at the kickstarter for the usual kickstarter issues.

True I think the lack of a regular ship to ship battle has possibly held it back. By all means the dropship part shouldn't be shelved (yay I avoided saying dropped!); but when a game has a whole market to itself it doesn't need to be a specialist to survive. If anything offering a more generalist system would work better at gathering up all the various market groups for itself; esp the general ship vs ship space battle (which is likely the largest block)

chaos0xomega wrote:I think theres a lot to unpack in terms of Dropfleets "failure to launch". Its the only actively produced game in its genre/what should be a wide open market. That it isn't succeeding indicates theres something wrong, what that something is is anyones guess, but I'm guessing marketing has a lot to do with it.

TTC is doing less than the absolute minimum to drum up player engagement compared to Hawk. DFC was core to Hawk, but it's just a fun side hustle for Troll Trader.

Brickfix wrote:Battleships just suck. Nothing around it.

H E A R D.

I want to love my magnetized UCM BB, but it just doesn't do what you want a battleship to do. We've been kicking around the idea of upping the hull for all faction ships of the class as a starting point.

Disagree on the rest, but we're still fairly new (3 players, 4 factions, a dozen games) into the game so maybe that'll come with time.

I would agree about the "drop" aspect of the game not appealing to many who just want to bash spacefleets, its definitely kind of a square peg/round hole situation where the game has a solid ruleset but doesn't necessarily appeal to many players because the way you have to play it is almost nothing like the way many people *want* to play it.

I feel as iff being based in a country with no way to get outside of direct ordering is what caused the game to peter off.
Like TTC was nothing and still is. Carnevale and Rumbleslam where games no human has heard of before they bought the Dropzone IP.
Its honestly sad to see a game that could have rivaled GW in some spots, fail because
1: Hawk had eyes bigger than its stomach
2: it was bought by people whose main buisness is selling MDF terrain

Warmill got some damn good Mdfs designs! Some of the best I have seen for sci-fi. I wonder if TTC will keep or reduce the prices.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I feel as iff being based in a country with no way to get outside of direct ordering is what caused the game to peter off.
Like TTC was nothing and still is. Carnevale and Rumbleslam where games no human has heard of before they bought the Dropzone IP.
Its honestly sad to see a game that could have rivaled GW in some spots, fail because
1: Hawk had eyes bigger than its stomach
2: it was bought by people whose main buisness is selling MDF terrain

I thought TTC was an appendage of one of the larger hobby distributors in Europe (Golden Distribution or something like that?)? I would have thought that would have been helpful in terms of getting their products into stores on that side of the pond. Otherwise I agree, failure to establish any sort of reasonable distribution outside of Europe has definitely stunted growth in the US. I would imagine TTC continuing to waste resources on Rumbleslam and Carnevale is also dragging on their ability to develop DzC and DfC properly. I'm sure Rumbleslam and Carnevale are profitable, but neither of them will ever be popular or truly "successful" - I'm sure the ROI if they invested into DzC and DfC is much higher, and the IP in general has a much higher potential ceiling.