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Here's something that should interest all those ship-to-ship fans:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heavygearblitz/jovian-wars-resin-spaceship-miniatures

It's small, a great game, and should deliver in May!

Nurglitch wrote:
Here's something that should interest all those ship-to-ship fans:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heavygearblitz/jovian-wars-resin-spaceship-miniatures

It's small, a great game, and should deliver in May!

Yeah, got their promotional mail from the HGB KS, even though I'm banned (guess they would not mind if I gave them money anyways ). Already commented about it on the HG thread at Misc, games ^^.

Looks interesting. Got some better pictures of the models?

After over a decade of complaining about DP9 only working on Heavy Gear and not releasing a single Jovian Chronicles mini, I should probably pledge for a set now that they're actually working on the (much superior) game again.

Fire_Broadside! has a thread over on Lead Adventure Forum showing off his painted fleet-scale Exos and some renders for the ships






I like the change in scale for the Exos and fighters, but I'm not sure why it's necessary to go with larger versions of the same ships when there's so many ships that have never had miniatures. It would also have been nice to have the other 2 main factions (Mars and Venus) fleshed out for release so we weren't stuck with the same 2-faction game

The Exo suits in the pics, is that its own game, and added with larger ships, or are both together? And can you buy the suits separate already? I checked out that link and they were playing on a hex space map.

I have a million ship games, but I don't have exo suit games...so im very interested in info on that front

Jovian Wars is a new rebranding/reboot of Jovian Chronicles, which started in the late '90s as a Mekton Zeta RPG setting, then became it's own independant RPG w/ an option to play with miniatures in the late '90s. In 2000/'01 DP9 released Lightning Strike to turn it into a full miniatures game without the RPG stuff, although the RPG stayed and kept miniature rules elements. The miniatures they made were to support both the RPG and the Lightning Strike rules, the ships were 1/5000 scale, roughly 2" to 3" long, and the Fighters and Exo Suits (the mecha) were 1/500 scale, roughly the size of a 28mm infantry model or a battletech mech/Heavy Gear mech. They released 2 supplements for the minis game that included rules for Martian ships/Exos/fighters and Venus ships/Exos/fighters, all of which had stats for the RPG and for the minis game but only a handful of minis. The setting is kind of a relatively hard-scifi westernized Gundam setting and is actually fairly similar to The Expanse books/TV show (except with more mecha and no space zombies, thankfully). The RPG focused on a squad of Fighters or Exo pilots and their mechs/fighters whereas the minis game was a combined arms: you had a few ships that were slow but could takemore hits and had more firepower, fighters were fast with limited fire arcs and followed inertia and turn arc rules based on speed, and Exos were slower but extremely manueverable within their range and could change facing at-will, so each had it's own role.

Back in 2006 DP9 teased a smaller fleet scale version of the fighters and Exos that were about half the size of the existing Exos (still nowhere near same scale as the ships, the Exos would only be about 2mm tall or the ships would have to be 2 feet long, but now the Exos would be about the same size as a Flames of War infantry model) and had some prototypes done up for the GAMA tradeshow, which apparently garnered zero excitement from anybody who was not myself. DP9 promptly forgot about the whole thing until recently they found those old prototypes and decided to redo the major minis in that half-scale and see how they sold. They've been available as mail-order only on the website for a few months

Long story short: Apparently the small scale stuff sold well enough for DP9 to redo all the old hand-sculpted models in CAD and rerelease the game with new rules focusing on fleet combat similar to Star Wars Armada. The small figs on the hex map you see are actually new models being used for the old RPG

So I guess I'm still a little confused. I see the link you have goes to the 15mm figs which were ones painted up on single stands in the pics. Which game goes with those? As id like to just use the exo suits in a space combat game. By game I mean do they have rules they Ican use just the suits if I want? Do the suits need to be 3 to a base as a squad or can I do 1 a base? If yes to this is the game good? I liked Heavy Gear 2nd edition, but sold it off as they were all metal. And a pain (15mm metal is easier)

str00dles1 wrote:
So I guess I'm still a little confused. I see the link you have goes to the 15mm figs which were ones painted up on single stands in the pics. Which game goes with those? As id like to just use the exo suits in a space combat game. By game I mean do they have rules they Ican use just the suits if I want? Do the suits need to be 3 to a base as a squad or can I do 1 a base? If yes to this is the game good? I liked Heavy Gear 2nd edition, but sold it off as they were all metal. And a pain (15mm metal is easier)

The single stand "15mm" minis don't really go with any game, its just a conversion.

The "singles" minis that you could just use the suits if you wanted would be the tactical part of the old Jovian Chronicles, for which they releaased a line of "28mm" exos:




Those would work perfectly well for a game in the scale of X-Wing, for example.

The new minis, OTOH, are meant to be used as squad markers, the same way as you would in SW: Armada, for example (the ones depicted below stand besides old scale JC ships):



All the "15mm" exos and fighters are already on sale, and they even have a full range of ships:



But it seems like they want to make them bigger (and blockier, and expensiver ), and they are developing a new fleet scale game to go with them. These are the two prototypes shown so far:



As I said on the HG thread, a dogfight game using exos (or well, Gundams or Macrosss stuff) would have greatly interested me, but I'm already tapped of fleet scale games, and even if I weren't, DFC seems like a much better investment of my moneys.

str00dles1 wrote:
The Exo suits in the pics, is that its own game, and added with larger ships, or are both together? And can you buy the suits separate already? I checked out that link and they were playing on a hex space map.

I have a million ship games, but I don't have exo suit games...so im very interested in info on that front

The original JC miniatures game, called Lightning Strike used much larger mecha (similar in size to a 28mm figure). The game mixed the large mech with much smaller scale ships, which bothered a lot of people and it never really took off. DP9 has been doing a once a year production of the old figures but I'm not sure if they would continue to do that with the new game using these smaller scale mecha but the big mecha can still be found on eBay fairly often.

If you are only interested in mecha on mecha action without the ships, you might be better off with the older game and figures.

Whats the average model count for lighting strike?

Also is it on a grid only(hex) or freeform?

If its low for normal games that's interesting, but the 15mm ones are half the cost for 3 so was more appealing

It's been many years since I played, I think an average game of Lightning Strike was 300 to 400 points and you could expect each side to have around 4-8 ships, 4-12 Exos and maybe 2-8 fighters, depending completely on how you built your force. Games were played on an open field and IIRC ships turned similar to BFG/ACTA. The miniatures rules in the RPG uses a hex-map

There's a quickstart demo PDF that gives a very basic breakdown of how the old LS rules worked, and the KS has some youtube videos up of the new game

http://dreampod9.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/JCDEMOGAME.pdf

and the rulebook is up on Wargamevault for $6
http://www.wargamevault.com/product/1004/Lightning-Strike-Rulebook-2nd-Edition?manufacturers_id=19&it=1&filters=40110_0_0_0

DP9 added a new pledge level this week, that give you the basic original pledge, plus a complete set of the Jovian and CEGA exos and fighters. I went ahead an upped my pledge to the new amount, as the offer was a bit of a discount over buying the new exo and fighter miniatures from the DP9 store.

Interesting, hope they do a scale comparison with other spaceship games

No scale comparison next to other spacecraft, but they did offer a scale comparison with a ruler.

9 days left, they've broken a couple stretch goals.