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No way, how'd you get a preview kit??

Some kind of black magic I'm sure!

That’s a build I’ll avoid.


Of course, the mix of close action and main weapon means it gets more from standard orders than other likely heavy cruisers, so I guess the game is still pushing ugly designs on the players.


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I wonder if it would look better with two of the heavy cruiser mounts, each glued horizontally on each side…

Within the mighty UCMF, ships of light tonnage contribute the largest numbers and the greatest tactical flexibility. These mainstays come in dozens of classes such as the Rekyavik, a fast and lethal hunter, to the Vienna, a tough defender.
Many offer unique and useful capabilities such as the Lysander which specialises in stealth or the Santiago’s atmospheric strike power. Most are specialist vessels that excel at certain missions while offering the economy and evasiveness that comes with their compact size.

I wish they gave more destroyer parts on the sprue, because they all look awesome.

As we get closer to Dropfleet 2.0's release next month we'll start covering some Bioficer weapon rules! Let us know in the comments what you think of the Bisector?

I only heard about this dropfleet commander recently. Its been such a long time since I got excited about a new spaceship mini game, I totally want to get some kind of starter box for it. Looking forward to seeing what will be available to get.

BanjoJohn wrote:
I only heard about this dropfleet commander recently. Its been such a long time since I got excited about a new spaceship mini game, I totally want to get some kind of starter box for it. Looking forward to seeing what will be available to get.

If you like the UCM and Bioficers, they have a new 2-player starter coming out in October. Otherwise, it looks like a rulebook and a core box of cruisers and frigates will be the best option for the new edition.

If you’re interested in 1st edition, you might be able to find the UCM and Scourge starter, or the old rulebook and fleet boxes on sites like Kick-Ass Mail Order, Noble Knight or Gopher games. The old fleet boxes were a better deal you wanted to get battlecruisers and corvettes along with a solid core. Hopefully they’ll bring them or something like them back when/if they redo the core plastics or heavies in plastic for all factions.

The Battle Cruisers for the bioficers are in resin so I think anything large is going to remain a resin product. I'd expect to see battleships and dreadnoughts remain in resin.

I would have expected that, too. However, we have the artwork of the redesigned UCM battleship they’re saving for another wave, so there’s still a slight chance.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
I only heard about this dropfleet commander recently. Its been such a long time since I got excited about a new spaceship mini game, I totally want to get some kind of starter box for it. Looking forward to seeing what will be available to get.

If you like the UCM and Bioficers, they have a new 2-player starter coming out in October. Otherwise, it looks like a rulebook and a core box of cruisers and frigates will be the best option for the new edition.

If you’re interested in 1st edition, you might be able to find the UCM and Scourge starter, or the old rulebook and fleet boxes on sites like Kick-Ass Mail Order, Noble Knight or Gopher games. The old fleet boxes were a better deal you wanted to get battlecruisers and corvettes along with a solid core. Hopefully they’ll bring them or something like them back when/if they redo the core plastics or heavies in plastic for all factions.

nice, thanks for the info! Those are some nice looking ships I see in the preview for the new starter, I might just get that.

 Overread wrote:
The Battle Cruisers for the bioficers are in resin so I think anything large is going to remain a resin product. I'd expect to see battleships and dreadnoughts remain in resin.

Huh I missed that, I assumed they were fully plastic

(The bioficer battlecruisers/faction as a whole I mean)

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Overread wrote:
The Battle Cruisers for the bioficers are in resin so I think anything large is going to remain a resin product. I'd expect to see battleships and dreadnoughts remain in resin.

Huh I missed that, I assumed they were fully plastic

(The bioficer battlecruisers/faction as a whole I mean)

I thought that too, but the Battlecruisers page says "Resin miniatures supplied unpainted and unassembled".

There is the potential that its just a cashflow choice. They are putting out a new plastic sprue for every faction and two for the Bioficers. It might be that, along with the other costs of the 2.0 release; they just couldn't budget for another plastic sprue. So they went with resin and might go into plastics in the future or with a future update to the battlecruiser kits.

Or its part of a plastic battlecruiser wave that will come in the future for all factions at once.

The Caracas is a hulking Heavy Destroyer equipped with Orca Missile Bays ideal for close action combat and the HB-8800 Bombardment Spikes for those looking to attack cities or ships in atmosphere. What do you think of this ships unique design?

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Dave Lewis has answered your Dropfleet 2.0 questions!

I’m about 20 minutes in and it sounds like the rules have really been shook up. Shaken up? I guess we’ll see how the community reacts…

Did a quick transcribe from the YT auto-transcription of the non-joke answers. Some paraphrasing for clarity because Dave rambles and stumbles a few places.

Q: "What problems with 1.5 were you most concerned with addressing when writing 2.0?"

Its major problem was it just took too long to play. Now instead of rolling 20 dice you roll two, or instead of three separate dice rolls there's now just one, that sort of thing.

Fighters and Bombers stick around now. They behave more like actual Fighters and bombers, so you deploy them, they can move independently, you can build up a big wing from multiple carriers and the big wig will hit harder for various reasons in the rules but you can then fly those around asteroid belt scenery, things like that.

Q: "How does the new activation work?"

Battle groups are gone. There's no not battle groups anymore, it's done by group. You're going to have more activations than you used to have maybe 10 I don't know 15 Max.

You're not doing the planning phase anymore, that's gone so you're reacting more in real time. The planning phase was one of those stop the game moments. I did like it strategically, like that whole feel that you're planning out everything in advance, I do like that, but also it's just another layer that wasn't really necessary and you can react more to your opponent in real time which you know there's pluses and minuses there.

Crucially you can't out activate your opponent cause there's a new rule, pass tokens, that if your opponent has more groups left than you, you gain a few pass tokens. So you can spend a pass token instead of activating so you can't write a list to take advantage of this new system because your opponent's just going to get pass tokens to get past that so you can't break the game that way.


Q: "What happened to close action weapons and point defense?"

Close action weapons still exist, they're still in the rules, they still fire at scan range just like they used to, but now they're more like regular guns. They take up normal gun firing slots, so if you can fire, say, two weapons and you've got three guns and one of them is close action, one of those is just treated like any other gun now, apart from the range there's a few other things that affect only close action weapons but that's getting into the nitty-gritty.

Point defense is now rolled up into your kinetic and energy saves which are a new mechanic in this Edition. We haven't just taken things out we've added stuff too, so now all weapons are either kinetic or energy weapons and you use the appropriate save against them. There's also core weapons that bypass both and you can only use backup saves against those. Point defense is a prime example of slowing the game down, there's a lot of moments like right I've been hit by this close action weapon I roll two point defense dice that are on a five plus and maybe you'll get one and then you've got to apply that. That's all gone now, fluffwise it still exists, it's just rolled up into that save effectively. The ship has a ton of Point defense lasers, say it might have pretty good kinetic save because it's got a ton of Point defense lasers, that that kind of thing, it's all wrapped up into those stats now which makes things a lot more streamlined.

Q: "Has strategy rating been removed from the game altogether?"

Yes. You have an admiral value and your admiral value does make a difference to certain things like initiative. Your admiral generates command points and you can spend those on certain abilities during the turn so having a high level commander is relevant, but yeah, strategy rating is no more. There are certain moments where heavy ships go later, it starts getting into the nitty-gritty.

Q: "How is Fleet building going to work in the New Edition?"

You build your Fleet around medium ships, that's Cruisers largely, so the number of Cruisers you take then dictates how many things you can take of other things like light ships, dreads, battleships, all of those kind of things. You can't have a whole Fleet of battleships, you can't have a whole Fleet of frigs, you've got to have a core of Cruisers and you build around that. There's a few other restrictions as well but in general that's what you're looking at

Q: "will the rule book be free online?"

Yes, at some point it will be free. Downloadable rules are nice because people can look at the game before they play it which is cool. It's not going to be there at lunch but it will be there at some stage because we know it's important.

Q: "Are we getting faction specific launch asset packs?"

[No] I'd like to do faction specific ones at some point. It's actually much more worthwhile to have tokens for launch assets now than there used to be. Half the time in the old Edition they would resolve and they'd be gone, now they're sticking around and they're doing things so it's cool to have Miniatures for them. So yeah there's there's a damn good reason for us to do them so we'll see


Q: "What specific changes have been made to speed up ground combat?"

Ground combat was a prime example example of something that a lot of players were like yeah this is it's cool that it's there but oh god there were multiple different versions and there was movement and it was clunky.

Now you're literally resolving one against the other. It's a single dice roll or sometimes no dice roll, it depends on certain things. There's only one type of ground token, it's a battalion now. They can do a bit more actually in this Edition than they could before and in some cases they're more important but the resolving of combat is very much simplified. Most of the time, seven times out of 10 perhaps, the end result is the same with the new rules than it would have been with the old rules it's just taking you a ton less time to resolve. End of turn you still resolve your ground combat at the end of turn like you used to but it's the case of go around resolve this one boom that's done next one boom that's done there's still a little bit of movement within um within sectors and thing within um drop sites, they're called drop sites now that cities and space stations are all drop sites, there aren't separate sectors necessarily in every one anymore so that's simplified as well, but there's there's more to it than that there's Features which I'll be covering ... they're going to be a major part of this Edition and they're new and factions will be able to deploy features which is a new thing so ground combat has being shaken up but not necessarily is still there and it's still an integral part of the Game


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Q1 (v1 problems) - I like rolling fewer dice. I like the change to launch assets. I'm here for both of those.

Q2 (activations) - I do not like these changes at all, they are a mistake that is literally the dumbing down of the rules he said he wasn't doing in the opening. The feth, Dave?

Q3 (close action) - indifferent? As part of the fewer dice rolls I'm here for it, really need to see the details still.

Q4 (SR) - Not a fan of cutting SR, it was a cool mechanic. But I like the idea of ditching the deck for admiral abilities, but have to see how it's handled

Q5 (force org) - Cool with it.

Q6 (free rules) - Get the feth outta here. "important" no it fuckin' ain't if you aren't doing it.

Q7 (faction launch) - still the models I most want. And LOL that even Dave sounds like he's frustrated with TTC about it.

Q8 (ground combat) - I like where this is going, sounds good so far.

I expect the community to create a hybrid rule set with SR, battlegroups and all that, but with the new launch, armor saves and drop. Maybe TTCombat will even support it as some kind of advanced rule set or something after the third or fourth FAQ and rules update.

TTCombat may not plan to release the rules for free online at launch, but I bet someone will.

Equipped to the Fresco Frigate, The Winnower is a savage piece of Bioficer technology!

The Monarch Monitor is a truly unique-looking ship even by Bioficer standards. It is not particularly fast and its signature makes it a tempting target for enemy ships, Yet, thanks to its load of Fighters & Bombers, it's certainly worth taking. What do you think of this ships sculpt?

So the launch element of the ship wasn't the dorsal Bay looking things, it was the conning tower. I just do not get the bioficer design language.

The conning tower looks like it has hatches on the back?

Maybe the Bioficer ships have no consistent up or down internally?

If so, then I guess the forgot to paint them on this one? Because they kind of resemble the ones on the cruiser, but those were painted silver, and iirc had a split to them like they opened. These are just raised squares. I dunno, "forgot to paint the mission operant part of the model" is a very TTC thing to do.

Whilst I like bioficers I am going to say that their visual language for launch capable ships appears to be lacking/confusing.

The lighting ships are exactly what I thought, ships with weapons that can arc to the sides giving them their broadside options in the fleets. Short range ,but made up for by the Bioficers being swift and speedy on the battlefield.

It's terrifying to think the Bioficer's improved upon the technology used in Drone troop's rifles and applied it to a ship!

Big simple lots of dice gun! Love the idea that it just reduces a ship to not even a dust-cloud but a molecular cloud (though part of me wonders how they bioficers harvest when ships moving through space would keep moving so now you've got one really long cloud noodle of molecules)

The last one had an ATT of 5. This one is 12.

Either they wildly changed the core attack mechanics and that doesn't mean the number of dice you throw, or that part at the beginning of the interview where Dave said "Now instead of rolling 20 dice you roll two" is greatly exaggerating the 'dice' savings, or this is the toned down version and the initial design was something crazy like 50 dice.

The messaging around this game is bizarrely contradictory.

The thing is this is a battlecruiser and it seems like it basically has just this one big gun rather than lots of sub-guns. So 12 for a singular very big gun that you might only have one or two of in an entire army isn't too bad dice-wise

I assume the dice reduction bit was hyperbolic and probably didn't necessarily reger to the dice you would roll at once but rather eliminating a series of sequential rolls and reducing it to just one roll, etc.

 slyphic wrote:
The last one had an ATT of 5. This one is 12.

Either they wildly changed the core attack mechanics and that doesn't mean the number of dice you throw, or that part at the beginning of the interview where Dave said "Now instead of rolling 20 dice you roll two" is greatly exaggerating the 'dice' savings, or this is the toned down version and the initial design was something crazy like 50 dice.

The messaging around this game is bizarrely contradictory.

I got the impression he meant reducing the number of times you needed to roll saves or whatever, not that each ship would roll fewer attack dice. This is a battlecruiser after all.


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chaos0xomega wrote:
I assume the dice reduction bit was hyperbolic and probably didn't necessarily reger to the dice you would roll at once but rather eliminating a series of sequential rolls and reducing it to just one roll, etc.

Yeah, this was what I was trying to say.

No, I trimmed the quote, but Dave mentioned both reducing the total number of dice and the number of times you rolled as distinct changes. If that's a BC/BB and its only gun, I guess I can see that as reducing the number of dice you roll?

I really hope they haven't made a whole faction of big forward guns, because as we've already seen with the same design in the PHR, it makes for boring sucky alpha strike gameplay. Which has me wondering if Orders are still in the game, because one big guns means no need for WF, and I haven't seen anything like Fusillade on them that would make the order matter. I really really hope they didn't ax orders, that would an instant write off for a lot of people I play with.

And if that's not the only guns, then it's pretty close to the same number of dice as before. Skimming the BBs, not counting CAW, they're throwing 12-18 dice.

I'd just like to see a demo somewhere, or any of the 'playtesters' to break NDA so I can decide whether to be genuinely excited or not. I've had a couple people locally ask about the game, which has lead to them kind of fading back into lurking when the few people that do still play talk about the uncertainty of the new edition and all the houserules we've had to adopt for the 1st edition. People want to like this game, but I'm watching it wither on the vine with all the needless uncertainty everywhere I look. Twice now I've found myself the least upset with TTC in a conversation which feels real weird.