Dropfleet Commander – Beta Test Day!
Come share in Hawk Wargames’ Dropfleet commander Beta Test Day – with our good friends at Tiny Plastic Spacemen.
An abridged review by Tiny Plastic Spacemen’s: Frank
Ok first things first. Tiny Plastic Spacemen Facebook page, has a huge pile of event day pictures for you to enjoy. They also have an Imgur album, so give them some love.
Ok, onto the review. Take it away Frank:
Beta Test Day!
Wow, what a cool day. I don’t often spend a whole day gaming in a large room full of wargamers, but thanks to a friend who ponied up the cash to get the top ‘Admiral’ level of the Dropfleet Commander Kickstarter Campaign, I was able to attend the beta test day to take part in Hawk Wargames’ biggest day ever with 68 other folks eager to be among the first in the world to try out the Dropfleet Commander rules.
I haven’t been able to play that many Dropzone Commander games but the rules and gameplay are very very similar, with battlegroups and movement being pretty important to getting the right movement and advantage on your opponent.
I’ve been answering questions online so I’ll put the questions and answers here for those that are interested – but not too much detail, as the Hawk guys are still twiddling with the rules so not only are things subject to change, but it would be a massive betrayal of their confidence to share rules scans and all the details before the game is released. Suffice to say we enjoyed the games, it’s quite brutal and there’s lots of depth to the gameplay.
As soon as we registered, we were given random table numbers to sit down at. After a quick intro from Hawk Simon, we had our first games. Mine was UCM vs UCM using identical battlegroups – everyone had a full resin fleet (with UCM using a couple of the white metal show-only strike craft that were released last year). All the Scourge ships were completely resin, only UCM and Scourge fleets were used for the day but the beta test books have full statlines for all four factions’ fleets.
I won my game, amazingly, thanks to surprisingly bad armor check rolls from my opponent. We got to see how movement works and how scan and signature ratings add up to give you a shot on the enemy. We also were able to see the burnthrough weapons in action – they are brutal when you roll well! Real ship-killers.
After the first game, which took about an hour and a half, it was time for lunch, which was a fairly basic carb-heavy gamer’s delight of nacho chips, chicken burgers, pasta and curly fries. Tea, coffee and drinks were free all day, which was handy!
In the afternoon there was time for a couple more games, which I did with my Admiral buddy – I tried Scourge and he played UCM and after zooming up the middle of the board he hung back and blasted an entire battlegroup out of low orbit because he could hang back and get a firing solution thanks to my double move (which increases the ship’s signature rating significantly). My remaining ships tried to sneak on after that but were in the middle of a total wipeout when we decided to restart the game using the same fleets. We both hung back but a couple of goofs on my part (typical, bad tactics!) meant that I was still taken apart ship by ship while UCM lost a single ship and a few hull points off of a couple of larger ships.
We didn’t get to try orbital bombardment or ground combat purely because we didn’t have time and we were starting to get tired (looking at a 3-hour drive back as well!). These are very abstracted, as you can imagine each strike craft carrying hundreds of drop ships (only a few of which appear in a Dropzone Commander game) can unload a whole campaign’s worth (or more, probably) of DZC ground forces!
So to sum up our experience of the day: the game is fast-moving, not too complicated with the starter fleets and provides a deep experience that meshes well with the Dropzone Commander universe and game. The integration rules that allow you to merge DFC orbital battles and DZC ground fighting aren’t in the beta packs but hopefully we’ll get to test those as well. The rule are abstracted enough to keep the game flowing smoothly, but not SO abstract that you don’t really get a sense of what’s happening. With the signature/scan ratings, varying heights or layers of ship-to-ship combat and the fact you have to cover off cities/clusters on the ground, there’s quite a lot to the game, it’s not as simple a game as something like a modern naval wargame with just surface ships.
If you’re familiar with the Dropzone Commander rules, they’re written by the same guys, Hawk Simon and Hawk James, with additional input from the legendary Andy Chambers (yeah, the guy that wrote the Battlefleet Gothic rules among many other things for Games Workshop and Blizzard), all under the eye of Hawk Dave – you may have seen Dave and Simon on the many Beasts of War videos demonstrating and showing off the Dropfleet Commander stuff!
If you’d like to check out pictures from the day, they’re all on the Tiny Plastic Spacemen Facebook page, but there’s also an Imgur album!
The Q&A (but just a little…)
Now, I said I’d post questions and answers I’ve had so far, so here we go:
It looks like there were 7 ships per side for the initial games? Is that about the average size they are going for?
Yeah these are the starter fleet sizes, the scourge have no carrier in the starter but otherwise each ship has a rough equivalent on the opposing side, with both sides having burnthrough guns. The scenario is a beginner one on the starter set maps (about 3′ by 4′ but not exactly) with 3 clusters or objectives, so signature ranges etc don’t matter a huge amount as it basically comes down to a big fight in the middle, but the normal scenarios on 4’x4′ maps have the objectives spread out much more, so signature/scan ratings really matter in the regular games.
Did you get to use the UCM fighters/bombers? What role do they play?
Yeah, UCM is the only starter fleet with the Load characteristic, which denotes fighters/bombers, torpedoes, bulk landers or dropships. Everyone gets dropships in the starter fleet because that’s how the games of DZC start, but so far UCM is the only one that gets fighters & bombers.
So fighters add to any ship’s point defense value, they give you extra dice to defend against missiles and bombers. They’re really interceptor aircraft, if you’re familiar with modern naval warfare – interceptors like the F-14 attack bombers. Point defense is like the phalanx defense systems on a modern aircraft carrier, the Gatling guns the track and shoot down missiles heading for the ship. This is represented by between 4 and 6 dice that you roll for PD depending on the ship, any 5+ roll blocks a hit, and for every 2 successes you can block a critical hit. After that you still have your armor rolls you can do, so PD is really helpful and adding extra dice thanks to your fighters is very helpful. Your fighters have to return after a turn though, but you can just launch waves of fighters every turn…as long as your carrier is still chugging along.
Bombers are basically attack/strike fighters because they attack the ships, but for game purposes they’re called bombers. They can’t actually bomb ground targets. You launch them after the firing phase is all done and they can go quite a ways to attack an enemy ship, which can only defend itself by using PD, which is why fighters are helpful.
What were your impressions of the movement rules? Didn’t really see much of them in the videos so far.
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They’re good, and are an important part of the game and tactics. They integrate really well with the Signature and Spike rules. You can do an all-out move and move up to double your Thrust rating, but that gives you a Major Spike (making it possible to hit you from farther away than normal), or do Silent Running to reduce your signature to zero by only moving up to half your Thrust, not turning and not firing, which makes it really hard to hit you unless the enemy can get really close. In between these options there are things like firing everything (Weapons Free), but you can’t turn and must move between half and full Thrust, or you can do up to a 90 degree turn and fire one weapon only, so there’s a lot of options that affect what you shoot and what can hit you after you activate a ship. Andy Chambers had a lot to do with the Signature and Scan rules, the other designers that did DZC did a lot of the other bits (if I’m remembering it right).
Are there any details you could share about the roles? The one with the guns seems obvious.
I assume you mean the roles of each type of ship. Yeah, there are gunboats and ones that are just massive flying guns, but if you’re familiar with modern naval combat there’s many similarities, and the UCM I think have the most familiar-looking fleet style to modern navies, but the other factions have pretty cool ‘alien’ styles that are cool and unique in the same way that Shaltari have mostly forward-pointing weapons and the PHR have mostly broadside weapons. Some examples of different ship roles:
- there are ships that are designed as escorts that add to the defense of nearby ships
- some ships have Air-To-Air weapons so they are meant to fire within atmosphere at dropships (firing energy weapons in atmosphere gives you a penalty to hit)
- some bigger ships have weapons that can fire normally at ground targets (rather than the standard rule of a 6 to hit ground targets)
- some ships have a rule that let them use Active Scan for free (see below) without getting a spike token
- dropships are able to ignore coherency rules and split off to drop their payload
- some of the big gunships have guns that are designed to affect a particular size of ship, so instead of a 4+ to hit you would have a 3+ against that size of ship – so they’re basically like tank hunters
I assume we used the starter fleets but even those are a bit varied and like DZC once you pick up the other ships you see a lot more variety and specific functions.
Ok guys this game from Hawk is looking great! Give it up for Frank and go visit Tiny Plastic Spacemen for:
The Full Unabridged Review with MORE Pics and FULL Q&A!
Here are some previous images from the Kickstarter:
