Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

This system hasn't seen much discussion on Dakka recently, other than rumors of its demise. I'll try to keep everything updated as often as I can. However, TTCombat's new site is difficult for anyone using an Apple product who wants to share photos.

First of all, Battle For Earth is the latest expansion for both games, with DZC 2nd Ed rules and DFC rules for destroyers, monitors, Dreadnaughts...and the Resistance faction. The Resistance fleet has some of the best spaceship miniatures ever released in my opinion, so well worth checking out. If you just want to play DZC, there is a rulebook for 10 pounds.

New releases:
There is a new 2 player starter set:


New starters with TWICE as many minis for Scourge, UCM and now Shaltari, each 35 pounds (about $50).


They are also selling the cardboard terrain for 20 pounds per pack, both in whole and ruins form.


They have also released variant tanks and air units for each faction over the last few months. Not going to link them all.

Rumors:
The behemoths are in the rule book, and some pictures of them are floating around the web. Each faction gets 2 options for heavy and light mechs.

There have also been images of Kalium vehicles spotted, and possibly a plastic Resistance starter on the horizon.

The huge anti-starship laser has a model in scale with DZC out there, but I'm not sure it's official or upcoming or what.

=====
For Dropfleet, they released some new play mats:
https://community.ttcombat.com/2020/06/05/new-releases-gaming-mats/

And for anyone who hasn't seen the Resistance fleet, here you go:
Starter:



Grand Cruiser:


Grand Battlecruiser:


Grand Battleship:



Rumors:
Resistance have yet to see destroyers and monitors. Every faction is getting a Lighter. Some other type of vessel is also upcoming, possibly a minelayer or boarding vessel. And Andy Chambers confirmed he is working on something for TTCombat, most likely Dropverse-related.

They are the best faction for creating your own...er, “chapter”. The background for the two official flavors is really fun, while blowing the potential sandbox way open for players who want to do their own thing.

On the FB group there are people converting Resistance fleets Modeled after BSG, B5 and even Star Wars. It’s a tremendously versatile kit.

I’ll see if I can find and link to the images, but there were a couple guys who used the Resistance and station kits to create “close enough” facsimiles to Earthforce One, Omega Class Destroyers, Hyperions, and I think a Nova Class? Ironic because none of them made a Warlocke Class Destroyer even though that should have been the most straight-forward conversion.

Also, a lot of Scourge conversions take visual cues from the Shadows or Minbari.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Can’t get the pictures to copy on my phone. I’ll try the computer tomorrow.

The plastics are the same, but each starter comes with a resin leader vehicle and a special (resin) dropship, which you’re probably right about being new. (The Shaltari get a far-gate or something.) However, there is also a new UCM Titania pattern dropship (in resin) that looks like a buffer, more angular version of the plastic drop ships for anyone who doesn’t like those.

We’re still waiting for the reboxed PHR starter and hopefully a Resistance starter in plastic.

 privateer4hire wrote:
Cool news.

For comparison with the original DZC starter, did the old one include a mat and cardboard buildings along with the book and 2 forces?

Yes it did. The new starter doesn’t come with the cardboard terrain, but it comes with leader minis ...and I think it’s cheaper than the old one was. (I forget the retail price because it’s been years since I’ve seen the old starter not either discounted to move or jacked way up on the algorithms.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kalium is a colony that broke off from the UCM early on by reconfiguring their Foldspace Nodes. They had a massive shipyard capable of building all the prewar ship designs, and they’ve kept it going for 170 years.

Kalium has a heavily-militarized population and extensive espionage network. They seem to be recruiting some of the worst “feral” warlords on the (Scourge-held) Cradle Worlds, and have gone to great lengths to acquire Scourge tech, including cloning vats.

Early on they experienced a lot of coups and civil strife before settling into the current totalitarian regime. Visually, Kalium takes a lot of cues from the Soviet Union and North Korea. (This leads to one blurb where Kalium insisted on taking Moscow and then got caught in the infamous Russian winter until the UCM sent cold-weather experts with proper gear to save them.) Anyway, their inclusion gives a template for what a colony isolated from the UCM might have looked like militarily. Many players have Resistance fleets that are at least in part composed of Kalium defectors or governments-in-exile, that kind of thing.

 Ragsta wrote:
Thanks for starting this page, Bob. I really like the look of those Resistance ships for kitbashing potential. To be honest I'm more of a BFG man but the possibilities ALL of the DFC kits presents are very good indeed.

Is there any way you can post pictures of what others have done with these kits without me embracing Facebook?

I’ll try. For some reason, Facebook won’t let me direct link to images or save them on my phone to upload here. I do have a collection from around the web, but it’s limited. Are you mainly looking for Resistance builds? Also, I have a blog in the Painting and Modelling section with a few DFC kit bashes mixed in, and so do Kid Kyoto and Kestral.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Danny76 wrote:
Resistance looks great.
Still haven’t even played the game, despite backing it from the start.
Made several Scourge, and UCM are ready to build.
Just never got round to looking at what’s best for a list..

Depends how competitive you want to be. There’s a tactics page for Dropfleet on ...4chan?... that discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of each ship in a faction, although it’s pretty heavy on the meme-speak. Typically, the gamers on Facebook recommend you have 2 strike cruisers per “starter set” (~500pts) and one troop ship per 1000pts (2 if you’re PHR), as well as plenty of fighter and bomber launch capacity. Resistance (And to a lesser extent Shaltari) is the odd faction out for this kind of list building. Resistance heavy frigates are very good gun-brawlers, along with the grand cruiser, but the cruisers seem to be most effective as troopships and launch carriers.

But for me, I just build the ships to look cool and then proxy them as whatever sounds fun. I don’t ever plan to play in a tournament.

Ok, I contacted the guy with the awesome B5 conversions and got the files directly. This post’s for you, Intgaer.

Scourge have that great Shadow/evil organic tech design, with a dash of Giger. They make such fun baddie ships.

As for what their ships do and how they play, I’m mostly going by FB discussion and the Tactics page (if Dakka doesn’t mind this link), but Scourge are basically the sneaky-stabby faction. The two heavy cruisers have partial cloak (so they can’t get major spikes from scans or lasers or going weapons free) and stealth (so they can still shoot some of their guns on silent running). Very sneaky. Their carriers hold more bombers than the UCM equivalent, and the bombers have scald (reduces armor effectiveness). Their frigates can all hide in the atmosphere until ready to strike, like Zergs buried in ambush, and their close action cruisers are glass hammers.

If you still have a lot of your leftover bits, you can also convert some corvettes pretty easily and maybe even some destroyers or monitors.

The starters really are the soul of the game. However, I bought a resin battleship for $40 in the last year, and paid $35 for a BFG battleship in 2005, so I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say Dropzone is that much more expensive per mini than OOP BFG. And they would probably be too expensive for me if they didn’t come with so many extra bits, especially the Resistance Grand Battleship. The destroyers and monitors seem to be the most pricey for what you get to me, which is why I would convert them from plastic rather than buying the resins (except for the PHR destroyers that really speak to me). (Most UCM players can get about 8 destroyers out of the resin blister and a bunch of plastic leftovers.)

I’ve seen PDFs of the rule books online—don’t think I’m allowed to post them—but the original KS rulebook is still the main rule book. The errata are added to the fleet builder on TTCombat’s site, so you can print all the current stats for your faction and be completely up to date.

https://dropfleetcommander.com/builder/

Pick a faction, go to the fleet building page, choose view/print, and then the last option is to print all ships. Gets you everything you need in addition to the original book.

I’d love one, too. The larger plastic starters are great for kitbashing.

The big news today is that TTCombat now sells Vallejo Game Color paint, which is great for those times one is just shy of the free shipping threshold.

And TTCombat has updated the Dropzone army builder program.

The TTCombat blog has a preview of new ships going on sale this Friday: lighters.. These are smaller ships, six per pack, with specialized roles,

The UCM get a stealth lighter that can drop off troops and perhaps attack with minimum detection.

The Scourge get a boarding ship that latches onto enemy cruisers.

The PHR get some kind of E-warfare ship that messes with enemy ships’ functions.

The Shaltari get a little attack ship that can use void gates to teleport itself all over the board for surprise attacks.

The Resistance get a cargo ship full of explosives.

From the blurb it sounded like maybe the cargo ship could detach the explosive containers and remote-pilot them in...but it sure wasn’t clear. The rules will hopefully go up on Friday.

I enjoy reading Dave’s design thoughts, but the pictures and stat tables would be a pain to copy over, which is why I don’t copy it over. If you want to bring it over, I’d appreciate it. Thanks for posting up the links.

Wow, that was pretty fast. Thanks for posting all that!

Each of those ships seems to add something new and interesting to me, not something I really felt about all of the destroyers and monitors. The UCM and Resistance Lighters are the most conventional of them in terms of effects, but at least they play strongly to the factions’ background flavor.

That cargo hauler is pretty sweet. I wonder what one would look like if it were rigged for torpedoes or a Close Attack death blossom.

They are atmospheric and outliers, so they should be able to pull a Djinn-style pounce attack. And if they are close enough to each other and their target, then any enemy who blows one up risks taking out their own vessel(s) at the same time.

These lighters seem surprisingly dangerous for their size.

 RiTides wrote:
I love them all except the PHR one... unfortunately that's the fleet I have!

What would you prefer them to look like?

Looks like one could convert a PHR lighter proxy from one Calypso ECM wing and some cruiser optional prow bits. If you’re looking for something more like the monitors, two of the frigate launch hoods could make a “shroom-slice” prow for you to glue the Calypso bit on, along with a spare Grav-fin or two. Or you could just take a Medea but and smooth it down or something. There’s an unfortunate shortage of spare fins in the PHR plastic range, so that might limit your options.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ImAGeek wrote:
I actually bought the starter for Dropfleet because of this thread, it arrived this morning. Haven’t had a proper look because of work but initial impressions were good, so I guess thanks Dakka!

Welcome! Glad to hear you’ve had a good first impression.

RITides, I’ll see what I can convert from a few bits. Sadly, spare fins are precious and few.

Anyway, I printed out some BFG ships in scale with DFC. I’ll try printing a different Sword.

I put together a few tentative conversions based on the concept of the PHR lighter.

I forgot to mention that I left spaces on the torpedo ship and small lighter to add some of the Space Station kit’s small “fins”, when I get some more of them.


@ Warboss, awesome! I’ll have to investigate. I’d love to have an Omega or Sharlin in DFC scale for scenarios. Hmmm. EAA forces fight the Battle of the Line.

Great googly moogly. That guy’s got both of the mutually-exclusive Dilgar ranges.

The new event exclusives have been teased. They go on sale Friday.

https://community.ttcombat.com/2020/08/04/teaser-exclusive-tuesday/?fbclid=IwAR0amTnJnnE-r8Nx3UDRehgGkTdP1gx6_fA-NoB_Ak446K0E0gCpnk8sN_Q



I’ll see if I can get some pictures over, but it looks like the Pungari Thresher is back (as well as all of last year’s exclusives) and we get:

A gunship for Dropzone.


Sector tokens (buildings) based on Scourge-infested NYC.


A Rumbleslam character named after the most infamous typo in the Dropfleet Rulebook: Traffic James.

 Barzam wrote:
So, that exclusive Resistance cruiser won't be available? Or will it?

The exclusive Centurion will not be available again. That comes directly from Lewis Clarke. Which really makes me sad.

I plan to buy the retail Centurion and modify it to look like the exclusive version by cutting off the prow sensor fin and repositioning the mass driver turret. I’ve seen it done online and it tends to look pretty close.

I believe we will see the Princess liner and both UCM exclusive light cruisers, though.

Here is a photo I found of a similar conversion.

beast_gts wrote:
I'm struggling to get a grip of the size of the Osprey Gunship - does it have a two-level cockpit (with two windows) and oversized chin guns, or is it an enclosed / armoured cockpit?

That is such an odd design choice. The cockpit area looks like a Dropfleet ship more than a Dropzone dropship. Hmm... I may need to get one for kitbashing.


And a Traffic James for the memes. (I need to use him for Urban Manhunt.)

I think that’s the new command vehicle that comes with the new starter. It’s bigger than the recon buggies are.

 UnstableDominus wrote:
I think it makes sense that the Osprey doesn't fit as well as some of the other units aesthetically. It was an early design that was eventually scrapped in favor of the original raven chassis.

Also, I'm in love with that Scourge tower. I hope they come up with some thematic rules to use with it (as an orbital elevator or something similar).

Someone on FB is already floating the idea for ramming that tower with strike carriers or corvettes.

It’s too good to be merely a token. I’m going to have to get it (next time because budget) and use some Scourge Station Upgrade bits to make a proper vessel out of it.

There are photos floating around of some new Resistance units, including g a slightly different version of the lifthawk. Speculation is that these sculpts are for a plastic starter. However, everything went on hold for Coronavirus. The Behemoths were supposed to come out earlier this year, and they still haven’t. On Facebook, one of the head honchos stayed that the Resistance fleet cruiser and frigate boxes were being put off for now, too. I believe they’ve also said the new PHR starter was deliberately delayed also, although some online speculation runs that they are having trouble with the plastics manufacturer.

So, no one really knows when anything will come out.

Oh hell yeah. I’ve been waiting for this updated starter for a while.

At the current exchange rate, these starters are about $50. Two of them and some terrain and you get free shipping.