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 RiTides wrote:
I'd give you UCM, but as far as top finishes I think Scourge have shown to have much more potential. Here are the Invasion 2015 results, for reference:

Spoiler:

I was just speaking from personal experience that local players found them slow and unforgiving... but I do think the speed of Shaltari and Scourge give them an edge (and if I wanted a human faction, I'd personally go with Resistance).

If just depends on what style you like to play - Shaltari are obviously extremely solid, Scourge are glass cannons and very dynamic, whereas PHR are extremely "tanky" and hard to kill. I like the differing styles and I think the new releases will likely level the playing field a bit, along with the tweak to Shaltari (which hurts, since they're my faction but is probably needed).

Eh, you can't just look at one tournament, take a look at the trends.

The TL;DR


PHR gets played a lot and along with being tanky, Space marines is probably an apt comparison.

PHR are looking more awesome with each new release...
it is getting harder to resist picking up some of these minis to do little, action-packed, dioramas...

UCM are not quite grabbing me for DZC, but their ships for Dropfleet are looking amazing, especially the big ones...
i look forward to seeing more previews of this new game...

i've been looking, but haven't found anything official...
are there any alternative schemes for PHR or UCM???

cheers
jah

 jah-joshua wrote:
PHR are looking more awesome with each new release...
it is getting harder to resist picking up some of these minis to do little, action-packed, dioramas...

UCM are not quite grabbing me for DZC, but their ships for Dropfleet are looking amazing, especially the big ones...
i look forward to seeing more previews of this new game...

i've been looking, but haven't found anything official...
are there any alternative schemes for PHR or UCM???

cheers
jah

Do you mean color schemes? There's several. The main rulebook gives examples and justifications of maybe a dozen different paint schemes you can use for each army (Resistance gets that treatment in the expansion). Personally my UCM are desert camo (ala GDI from Command and Conquer), and my Resistance are going to use an Alpine camo scheme (ala Nod from C&C 1).

thanks...
it looks like there are some nice alternate color schemes in the rulebook...
some fun camo variations on the PHR and UCM models, that look like they would be a treat to paint...

cheers
jah

nobody wrote:
you can't just look at one tournament, take a look at the trends.

PHR sits in second place for number of tournament wins. In addition, PHR sits in second place (losing out against the Shaltari of course) as far as number of times they've appeared in the top 3 after the last round of errata.

This list is based off of tournaments where I was able to get full faction representation information and only includes tournaments of 6 or more players. Unfortunately it is a small representation, however I work with what I can get.

That is a very interesting link! But I'm not really sure if that is persuasive (to me personally) since the events listed are so small - the only event won by PHR of more than 8 players was one where it made up almost half the field (6 out of 14 players).

In that respect, Space Marines is a good comparison... but with tournies that small, it doesn't really prove out faction strength - I mean, I won an X-wing tourney at MechaniCon last year after only having played it twice, but that's just because it was a 6 person event! It wouldn't point to anything about the strength of my list because the field was so small - and 14 of these 22 events have 8 or less players.

It's still a really impressive list just not sure if it can help point to non-Shaltari faction strength more than even a single bigger event...

On that note - I looked and couldn't find the Invasion 2014 results, and I don't see it on this list either - did they never post them?

 RiTides wrote:

nobody wrote:
you can't just look at one tournament, take a look at the trends.

PHR sits in second place for number of tournament wins. In addition, PHR sits in second place (losing out against the Shaltari of course) as far as number of times they've appeared in the top 3 after the last round of errata.

This list is based off of tournaments where I was able to get full faction representation information and only includes tournaments of 6 or more players. Unfortunately it is a small representation, however I work with what I can get.

That is a very interesting link! But I'm not really sure if that is persuasive (to me personally) since the events listed are so small - the only event won by PHR of more than 8 players was one where it made up almost half the field (6 out of 14 players).

In that respect, Space Marines is a good comparison... but with tournies that small, it doesn't really prove out faction strength - I mean, I won an X-wing tourney at MechaniCon last year after only having played it twice, but that's just because it was a 6 person event! It wouldn't point to anything about the strength of my list because the field was so small - and 14 of these 22 events have 8 or less players.

It's still a really impressive list just not sure if it can help point to non-Shaltari faction strength more than even a single bigger event...

On that note - I looked and couldn't find the Invasion 2014 results, and I don't see it on this list either - did they never post them?

I'll dig them up, but Hawk had lost the faction breakdown so I never included it.

Here's the link (they hadn't called it Invasion). The top 5 armies are on the next to last page and were Shaltari/UCM/Scourge/Shaltari/PHR.

And I'm cool with that, the small sample size isnt ideal but I've found a lot of tournaments just don't like posting their data. I'm constantly looking for more data.

By the way, I didn't see these angles of the Scourge ships yet: https://gemana.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/dropfleet-commander-new-scourge-ships-revealed/

Those things are beautiful. I keep saying this, but I really, really hope they fold in the differences in aesthetics from the ships into the ground units over time. The Scourge ground units have their own charm, but these ships and the UCM stuff are a step up in terms of design sense.

Resistance ATV rules now up

Interesting rules for the chem grenades

 Vertrucio wrote:
Those things are beautiful. I keep saying this, but I really, really hope they fold in the differences in aesthetics from the ships into the ground units over time. The Scourge ground units have their own charm, but these ships and the UCM stuff are a step up in terms of design sense.

I can see the similarity between scourge dropfleet and dropzone... UCM however look entirely different to me and I absolutely dont like that (IMO their Dropfleet designs are clearly superior).

Forgive me if I missed it, but the full twenty-minute Dropfleet Discussion / Shooting demo (we had a short clip of it previously) has been released by DZC Commenter.

Yeah I saw that.
Good stuff. The shooting mechanics do seem interesting.

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:
Only the core units will be plastic, the rest resin.

Looks like I'll be buying only the core units.

If they have at least as much variety as the DZC plastics, then it won't be so bad. If the fleets are only a couple of plastic ships and the rest resin...there's this new Halo game.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:
Only the core units will be plastic, the rest resin.

Looks like I'll be buying only the core units.

If they have at least as much variety as the DZC plastics, then it won't be so bad. If the fleets are only a couple of plastic ships and the rest resin...there's this new Halo game.

The Scourge and UCM starter ships (the cruisers) are supposed to be modular with several variants capable of being made in regards to each. That is at least what was said on the Hawk Forum.

I just watched the video. Why must we wait so long to play this beautiful game?

As I understand it only the starter UCM v Scourge will be plastic (and presumably expansion kits based on those ships) The starters will contain small/medium sized vessels and will be based on a modular design that allows you to build a variety of ship classes from a single kit (similar to Imperial and Chaos cruiser kits from BFG). All other ships (larger/more specialized ones particularly) will be released in resin, including (as I understand it) the PHR and Shaltari ships.

If thats a dealbreaker, then I guess go enjoy Halo. Personally, I plan on playing both, though Im less interested in Halo because it seems rather stupidly expensive.

I hadn't even checked prices on Halo - is it really that bad?

Because if you're saying that vs. what I've heard about Hawk's prices...

What's wrong with Hawks pricing? I play alot of different game systems and have never thought Hawks was out of line with what I would expect to pay for the models.

DZC is the most inexpensive wargame I've ever played...

http://firstwave.podbean.com/p/how-to-get-started/

I found that to be a pretty helpful rundown for what the game would actually cost. As with most fleet games, we can anticipate it being much cheaper. From the earlier video Interview, it looked like 1 big bad ship, 6-8 cruisers and 4-6 escorts would be sufficient.

I believe they said that 2 starters and a battleship or dreadnought would get you tourney legal.

Without price points, its difficult to make any judgements right now.

Dropzone is kind of stupidly cheap compared to a lot of the other games Ive played. It might just be perception but between cheap plastic starter boxes that actually form a solid core to your army and $15 blisters of specialist atuff that you dont need a ton of ita a pretty good deal. The only items I find expensive for what you get are the heavy dropships at $30.

Halo Fleet Battles is expensive IMO. The starter is $140, and then expansion sets are either $40 or $50 depending on which one they are. While you get a considerable amount of stuff for the money (iirc the starter alone contains 49 ships for 2 factions) its kind of a steep buy in IMO, especially since its supposed to be a "mass fleet battles" type game that needs a pretty considerably large amount of models to be played correctly.

chaos0xomega wrote:

Halo Fleet Battles is expensive IMO. The starter is $140, and then expansion sets are either $40 or $50 depending on which one they are. While you get a considerable amount of stuff for the money (iirc the starter alone contains 49 ships for 2 factions) its kind of a steep buy in IMO, especially since its supposed to be a "mass fleet battles" type game that needs a pretty considerably large amount of models to be played correctly.

While I agree with you that $140 is too high a price point for a starter, calling it stupidly expensive is IMO a big exaggeration. You yourself said it contains alot of models for that price and is meant as a mass battle fleet game. "Stupidly" expensive would be accurate if neither of those was true. A skirmish fleet game that sells you 49 ships* or a fleet game that has only 10 ships total for bith factions combined would be stupidly expensive.

*the 49 ships number is padded significantly by 27 UNSC frigates that are smaller than any xwing fighter.

 Nightwolf829 wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:
Only the core units will be plastic, the rest resin.

Looks like I'll be buying only the core units.

If they have at least as much variety as the DZC plastics, then it won't be so bad. If the fleets are only a couple of plastic ships and the rest resin...there's this new Halo game.

The Scourge and UCM starter ships (the cruisers) are supposed to be modular with several variants capable of being made in regards to each. That is at least what was said on the Hawk Forum.

That's good news. I love being able to convert or kitbash entire fleets of plastic ships.

Depending on prices, I may pick up one or two super-sweet resin ships, but I am not a big fan of the medium and will purchase plastic before anything else.

And don´t forget that you need the Halo-expansions to get the alternate base-overlays. You won´t get them in the starters.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Dropzone is kind of stupidly cheap compared to a lot of the other games Ive played. It might just be perception but between cheap plastic starter boxes that actually form a solid core to your army and $15 blisters of specialist atuff that you dont need a ton of ita a pretty good deal. The only items I find expensive for what you get are the heavy dropships at $30.

Oddly enough I thought DZC was expensive until I bought an army for it.
With mini market's pricing and splitting a starter with a friend I got a tremendously huge UCM army for under $150 in the end

Price was a very common concern raised when DZC came out until they got the plastic starter (and later plastic faction boxes). They did a good job with the plastic sets and used them for the right reasons.

The individual resin blisters are a little expensive, but you don't need as much stuff to play as say, GW games.

Plus as Warboss has said, both the starter box and individual starter sets have been well put together and contain stuff you will actually use unlike say, GW batallion boxes.

I believe that Hawk have said that plastic starter sets for both PHR and the Shaltari are likely to be stretch goals for the Kickstarter.

 Flashman wrote:
The individual resin blisters are a little expensive, but you don't need as much stuff to play as say, GW games.

Plus as Warboss has said, both the starter box and individual starter sets have been well put together and contain stuff you will actually use unlike say, GW batallion boxes.

My UCM consists of two starter sets and 5 blister packs so about £150. I sold the starter set scourge for £30.

Not sure if its a secrete sale or some glitch, but MiniatureMarket has starters for DZC for 15 bucks, and the large 30$+ vehicles for 15$

Probalby the single best time ever to get into it