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 Overread wrote:
Honestly after seeing the infantry weapons its my one worry with the new faction that the ships, land and infantry are going to look so similar to each other that they'd almost look like just borrowed parts. Which will mean loads of conversion fodder at the same time.

The loads of conversion fodder is why I’m okay with it. However, I do hope the 28mm minis show off the Bio artiFicers’ craft a bit more than ‘big guy and little guy’.

Honestly the design of the "event exclusive" ship side wings already suggests that you can do a fair bit of customising with their positions alone

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

Scourge faction video is up. No new ships or info seen compared to the PHR one.

First look at the new rule book. It’s supposed to be 64 pages, which seems small to me. Maybe it’s just the starter set rulebook?

The current rulebook on the TTCombat website is 58 pages (lore and ship stats are in separate pdfs). The contents page suggests that the ground combat is no longer a separate phase; perhaps it is folded into the rest of the launch asset phase or has been more significantly reworked. I never had that much of an issue with it personally but know that was a common complaint people had.

It seems equivalent to the current mini rule book which has been around a while (the original v1 book was 224 pages)

Credits has the usual TTC cast. Louis Simpson is the owner of Troll Trader and TTCombat. Jason Beckerleg gets that same credit in all their games, looks like he's in charge of the graphic design and overall 'style' of the books. Scott Burns is their MDF expert, but he gets a lot of other credits so hard to say what all he really did, but he's principally an operations dude for sure.

David J. Lewis, natch.

Never seen the name Robin Gillie before.

I don't think there's anything to be gleaned from the credits we didn't already know. Sad to see Andy's name gone though.

I guess they realized paying to have Andy Chambers name on it wouldn't make up for their lack of proper support or marketing for the game to push sales.

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PRE-ORDER DROPFLEET 2.0 THIS FRIDAY!

We're thrilled to confirm the key dates for Dropfleet 2.0 as we prepare for this huge release. All new and returning products will be available to order from our website including the updated core starter and physical rulebook. We'll reveal the starter contents and key rule changes before Friday and have an interview with Dave Lewis next month.

Seems a pretty long preorder window imo.

I’m glad for the advance notice.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Seems a pretty long preorder window imo.

Honestly based on their rough stock estimations for Dropzone on their website I'm guessing they aren't geared up for big order volumes right now.

They also decided to launch on the last day of the month which makes the window feel longer than it is than if they'd waited till the 02-09 on Monday.

I do agree my first thought was it is a long window; but if it lets them deliver reliable on the date and also have time to bulk up on marketing and such without it impacting other lines they produce then it might well be the best course of action. At least we have fixed dates to work with and come end of this week we'll start seeing fresh stuff and details to get hyped on

TTCombat wrote:What's in the Box?
It is 2679, and war rages on a galactic scale. After almost a decade of the offensive against the vile alien Scourge, the United Colonies of Mankind are battle-scarred but unbroken. Now a previously unknown threat has emerged. The Bioficers - ancient, corrupted artificial intelligence's are hunting humanity.
*Box Contents*
9 Plastic UCM Ships
15 Plastic Bioficer Ships
1 Rulebook
24 Bases
10 Dice
1 Space Station Sheet
2 Debris Sheets
2 Token Sheets
3 Quick Play Cards
These ships are finely detailed, multi-part, plastic miniatures and can be assembled in a wide range of variants. The fast-play sheets will quickly get you playing with recommended builds and ship stats. Dropfleet Commander 2.0 will be available to pre-order this Friday from the TTCombat website.

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Damn those are some ugly ships, I like the UCM frigates but the rest just look hideous to me.

 ingtaer wrote:
Damn those are some ugly ships

Yeah - I play Scourge & Resistance and nothing in that box is calling to me.

Agree with the above. The AI ships have a very likely purposeful hint of Necron style asthetics IMO but I'm not a fan of them overall. UCM (especially) and PHR are still my favorite design styles in the family of games personally.

Those UCM ships are fine, generic sci-fi... and I have no idea what the other fleet is supposed to be. Terrible designs on their own already, but putting this junk into the starter set?

Plastic ships for space combat games are always great to have around, and I wish this game all the success it can get, but I feel they shot it in the head right away with this starter offering.

UCM look great, an improvement from the previous good sculpts. Not sure what they were going for with the bioficers, but maybe there's a way to build something useable when we see the sprues.

The bioficer ships put me somewhat in mind of something my kids would make with their hama beads.

Not sold.

Hope there will be an uptick of interest in the game overall though.

I like 1 of the bioficier cruiser designs, and 1 of the cells, and the frigates in geberal. The rest are a miss for me aesthetically speaking.

Will prolly pick up a starter box for the UCM side and keep the bioficiers for demos, but I can't see those ships helping push the game too much.

Just slightly too blurry to read the quickplay cards and get a gander at the only thing I really care about, the changes to the mechanics.

And in one of those minor acts of TT laziness, am I wrong or is that the exact same cluster and debris field sheet from the original game? I was actually looking forward to maybe getting a different set of shapes and they just chucked in the exact same old one. FFS TTC

Hmmm those Bioficer ships have some very interesting parts but I hate the triangle wings and when you pull them off, the midsection is really weirdly two dimensional. They look like those 2.5d models that come in the form of a punch-out credit card.

The small, vertical standing ones are really nice, so a shame.

Just realized what I thought was a cruiser is actually another frigate, so make that 0 cruisers.


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As for the rules, I don't see any indications of any major changes mechanically. Main takeaway is that the other new UCM cruiser (the one that's not the Bruges, or the already existing San Francisco) is an Edmonton.

I just noticed there's no pics of the flight stands. Also it looks like only atmo tokens on the sheet, no high/low orbit.

I like the UCM ships a lot, although they look a little too sleek compared to the originals to overtake them in my opinion.

The Biocifer ships all seem really samey here. We’ve seen teaser pictures of some cool Biocifer designs, but these ones just look like someone tried to make resistance cruisers out of Sci Fi circuit boards. I suspect they’ll be like the Scourge in that the ships will look better and a lot more varied when half of them have the wings glued on “sideways” and other details kitbashed or removed.

The very tiny Bioficer ships are the small craft that attach to the larger ship hulls, as seen on the Anomoly, so they might also add some variety to the break up the sameness.

Sadly, they’re not as immediately captivating as the Scourge and Shaltari designs, so a poorer choice for the starter set.

I was planning to order the starter, but now I might wait to see if factional fleet boxes are available and cost effective. The DZC army starters with twice the plastics for the same cost were a great idea I’d love to see brought to DFC.

Could it be they dropped the "starships humping city tokens" focus of the game?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Could it be they dropped the "starships humping city tokens" focus of the game?

Given the token sheets. No. But as has always been true since day 1, you can just not use the 10% of ships that are 'dropships' and play a bog standard deep space battleline game. It's even a scenario in the core book.

*waves the lone flag of liking the Bioficer ships*

They are very clearly going to be a "all guns forward" faction and honestly I like them. They are quirky alien and strange looking, but have a sense of some degree of alien functionality about them.

The only way they feel lesser is the lack of clear smaller weapons or side weaponary compared to the other factions. So right now they very much feel like they'll be a sniper/eldar style faction in combat.



Also I hope they improve their bases.
I got the event exclusive Bioficer ship and:

1) The resin ship itself looks great and goes together easily though one or two panels need a little hot water to flatten.

2) The wings are fun as you can adjust their position very freely on the model. The downside to them is that they put a LOT of detail on the inside of the wing so in general you kind of want to paint them separately before attaching

3) The stem and top of the base are their normal ones - so good.

4) the bottom of the base is a really thick chunk of badly cut out round plastic with some badly scored markers on it. It's not even fully circular.



Also those larger Bioficer ships look really different if the central segments are glued in as opposed to free standing. Interestingly they chose to put them free standing in the image. The resin one isn't built for magnets so it will be interesting to see how the rules and models turn out in plastic.

I hate A-C, I just can't stand the 'bottom of the lego' huge sections of open connector points.

D and E are fine but don't do much for me.

F-I are pretty neat looking but again the ones with fewer giant connectors look better.

F-O all the cores I just kind of don't care about? J and N are the exact same, right? Are J and O the same thing just flipped around? So are there only 4 kinds of core?

I actually like the connector look. It emphasizes the modularity of the design, which makes sense for AIs who seem to love tinkering with their weapons.

For the cruisers, I’d probably reposition the panels on some of them, and I’d love to see how they look with the cores attached.

The frigates are all over the place for me. D and F I really like. H and I are fine, but not great. The rest, I’d assemble them differently even if it means cutting. This is a better like/hate ratio than I have for the Scourge frigates and about the same for the Shaltari frigates. Dropfleet aliens just build ugly frigates.