Leaks! edition

Oh hell, saw someone say it was a strike carrier and got all confused. Resaving the image now so that later reposts won't lead to more confusion. Still crazy durable, but slightly less hilarious.

The key to the Shaltari frigates will definitely be the range. With 12" scan and 2" signature it'll often be putting shots downrange without receiving fire back, with careful maneuvering.

Of course the weapon is also front arc, so... yeah, they're gonna be finnicky to play.

Current thoughts - this has the weakest scan range of any ships listed. Could really use a comparison to a non-stealth Scourge cruiser and a UCM heavy cruiser to see if that's going to be a theme with them or a side-effect of stealth in particular.

Also holy crap that's a lot of gun with high lock.

adding on rule pages we have so far.

might be its 8 inch movement that causes it to have such a piddly scan range. might also be the weakness of scourge, considering they want to get in close all the time.

8" seems about where I would expect a heavy cruiser movement to be, since the UCM BB is 6" and the PHR heavy is 7", and they're said to be the slowest faction.

Also, does anyone know if you can choose to shoot then move or move then shoot in this system like with DZC? Or do you have to do your required moves first before firing?

I like the addendum on keeping ships with less than 4 hull points using active scanning, I'm going to assume most frigates are going to have around 4 hull points. Keeps your frigates from just pinging a ship to massive amounts to show where it is really early for battleship firing.

This does tell us the Shaltari frig can active scan, but the Voidgates can't (makes sense).

Isn't that pretty much the whole point of the Lima though?

Lima might have a special rule around that addendum.

Lord, imagine active scan Voidgates with a lot of long range firepower. slap 2 minor spikes on their most critical ships, pop them with particle cannons at max range, have a little giggle as they shoot your voidgates in response.

Has there been anything mentioned about boarding actions at all? Is it just not a thing in this system?

Scourge Torpedos are actually filled to the brim with thousands of biological weapons in the razorworms. That's the only boarding that's been stated to occur so far in the system. Scourge torps do extra effects because of that, but we aren't sure exactly what that effect does from what I'm aware.

That I knew about already and that's fucking AWESOME, I'm definitely taking at least one of the Scourge torp BBs. But I was wondering about general boarding actions from ship to ship.

Unfortunately if there are rules for that they've not been shown. They might add it at a later date, but those torpedos are the extent of boarding action.

>The last paragraph is repeated immediately

>"Max Thrust" referred to as "Full Thrust"

Am I missing something here or are there typos all over the fucking place? I haven't slept in a while so I may be misreading it. Doesn't look very professional though.

Hawk is around 5 people. This is amazing.

current guess is these are some pages from a test rulebook. There's a delay at the printers, and its not hard to imagine that the problem is the books being properly printed with problems like these being removed.

No you're absolutely right.

Check the sidebar bit too, it says "Dropfeet Commander".

My guess is that these scans are from an early printing which had to be sent back and redone and that's why the kickstarter cited waiting on print materials as the delay holding up the shipments.

I kind of hope that's the case because these should not be shipped out with all the typos and mistakes as is.

>Dropfeet commander
>The upcoming 30 mm scale game of foot infantry in the dropzone universe

Yeah fair enough actually.

I hope they get it right soon so they can send it out and shortly afterwards start selling it to people who were too stupid to get on the kickstarter train, like me

from the pre launch event

...

I see how the Torps work. The New York for instance can launch 1, but has L(imited):2.

Whereas I'd imagine that the Minos will have Launch 2 and L:2. As will the... Dragon is it?

On the subject of the Minos, we know it's got a CA weapon with crippling, but it looks like that weapon only has a front arc.
Does this mean the Minos will have two CA class weapons? One the forward firing neutron missiles, the other the standard CA weaponry with all round arcs?

And can you fire both without going weapons free?

Consider what says:

>Close Action weapon systems can always be fired IN ADDITION to any other weapon systems permitted by a ship's order. If a ship may not fire weapon systems it may not fire its close action weapon systems either.

So, I'd guess yes? But the question as to how PD works in conjunction with that if you have 2 CA weapons with overlapping arcs. Do you defend against both with your full PD value? Or do you have to split your PD success between the two attacks?

Of course, the easiest way for this to resolve would be the Minos has the Neutron Missiles as it's F arc CA weapon and the Wasp Drones only have a Starboard arc. Neatly sidestepping the whole problem.

Don't think spikes stack. May have changed since the kickstarter, but two minors don't make a major.

...is it me, or is there like NO good reason to ever use the first alt mode on the Ifrits BTL? You have a MUCH better chance of getting 3 hits (which will be crits on a 4 or more) with the second mode, which will also minor spike your target?

The first mode, you'll get 2 hits on average, they're much less likely to be crits, and if you're lucky you MIGHT get a third hit, but it's less likely than the first alt mode.

>Seattles are Rare and have AWFUL CA scores.

It's still too early to tell if a launch value of 3 is good or bad though.

>The BTL on the Berlin is 3+ to hit, 2 attacks and max Burnthrough limit of 6 with flash

Okay, so no alt modes for the UCM. To be honest I think this is the best of both worlds anyway. Critting on a 5+ and with a decent damage limit.

Can someone remind me what critting BTL's do again?

I believe if you're shooting down into atmosphere, all shots hit on a flat 6+... in that case, the 4 shots of the first mode become the superior choice. But yeah, it seems like you would rarely use it otherwise. Much more consistent results out of the second mode.

First alt mode is 4 shots though, while the second mode is only 1. Along with the higher burnthrough value there's the potential for more hits overall.

Don't know what Flash does though, so it's hard for me to truly judge this.

Flash gives the target a minor spike I beleive.

Also, the odds are pretty even between the two modes about how many hits they'll do, but the second one is more likely to crit.

Also, apparently BTL's use to work in that the to hit roll got worse for every extra dice, and that if you rolled 1 crit all hits after that were crits as well. They've apparently removed both of those rules in favour of a static maximum damage output for ease of play.

So, let's consider both modes.

Mode 1: 4 hits, needing 4+ to lock on. Interestingly the worst lock on score in the Scourge fleet we've seen so far.
So, the first roll will get on average 2 hits, with a 1/6 chance of any dice scoring a crit. Second roll should average a third hit, and a 50/50 chance of scoring a fourth one over that. Statistically you probaby wouldn't expect to score a crit.
So, let's say 3/4 damage on average.

Let's consider the second alt mode.

1 roll. But it's a 2+. This means you will hit 5 times out of 6, but each roll has a 50% chance of a crit.
You SHOULD be able to expect to hit 3 times, and at least one of those should be a crit, maybe even two. Plus you'll be minor spiking the target as an extra bonus.

So, overall, the two work out like this

Mode1 : 3 to 4 average damage with no crits.
Mode2 : usually 3 damage, with 1 or maybe 2 crits.

Against the UCM and PHR with their generally heavier armour or Battleships in general you'll want mode 2 to get through that armour with some reliability. Whereas for Shaltari, other Scourge and frigates in general with their lower armour scores you'll want mode 1 with it's potential extra damage (plus I beleive Shaltari ignore crits when their shields are up)
Although with their lower signiature ratings you may want to use mode 2 against the Hedghogs just so you can give them minor spikes.

Other scourge though, mode 1 all the way, as access to cloaking and stealth makes the flash rule less effective.

Good analysis. Just to muddy the waters further, the Raiju heavy cruiser looks like it's got the Wyvern's stealth gubbins and the same gun as the Ifrit (it seems they're being consistent with weapon profiles across classes). With stealth/cloak, and more hullpoints from being a heavy cruiser, it may be able to get in close enough to activate Scald on its burnthroughs. It may be that the 4 shot mode of the gun is better for a Raiju that's got in close, while the 1 shot is better for plinking away at range.

Looking at that Cruiser breakdown, and based on what we now know for their statblocks I think we can actually work out how many variants of Scourge Cruiser you could theoretically make.

So, basically the only thing that matters is the "head" of the ship. A Stealth Crest can be added to the top of any cruiser to make it a heavy cruiser (or Battlecruiser if you use that ships gigantic stealth crest)
As of now we have 4 "lower jaw" configurations:
1) The Furnace Cannon
2) The Plasma Tempest
2) Double Oculus Beam Arrays
3) Empty (seen on the Hydra and Chimera)

Carrier bays are a kind of wing attachment it seems and the Mothership mouth goes underneath the ships jaw area, like a beard.

Finally the difference between a light and normal cruiser are the addition of wings.

So.

This gives us 6 possible combinations for each lower Jaw type: Heavy, Cruiser, Carrier, Light Cruiser, Heavy Carrier, Light Cruiser with Stealth Crest (Stealth Cruiser?) So that makes 24 configurations.
Each of which can have the Mothership Beard for and additional 48 different possible configurations.

Conversely, with the Battlecruiser crest you can create a total of 4 variations without the Mothership Beard, and 8 if included.

Personally, I'd quite like it if there was a stealth/partial cloak version of the Wyvern, as that ship would have some fantastic synergy out of being able to fire 1 weapon whilst running silent (keep in mind that Scourge ships have a signiature 2 points higher than the UCM does across the board) would be incredibly effective.

A stealthy carrier, able to launch fighters without spiking itself would be cool as well.

Posting some calcs I did yesterday, comparing the effectiveness of varying lock values versus varying armor values.

>Schlong Heavy Cruiser

While everything you said's true, you also have to keep in mind that with burnthrough six and 4 shots you have the potential for 24 goddamn damage. For someone with a gambling addiction you can get some big goddamn hits, and there are gonna be some folks that slap that button like it'll bring back their dead parents.

It would make sense if they did, as they're linear; minor spike is +6" to sig, major is +12" to sig.

Likewise, a standard orders ship with a major will drop to a minor, so it can be assumed that since major -minor =minor, that minor +minor =major.

>Can someone remind me what critting BTL's do again?
That damage ignores armor saves, and all subsequent hits after that ignore armor.

I've never played this game, but that statline looks suspiciously like something out of Battlefleet: Gothic.

I'm not quite sure if that's how burn through works; if the burnthrough-value limits the amount of damage each ATTACK does, then it's limited to six.

However, if it tracks "dice-lines" and limits the amount of damage per those, then yeah, it would be 24 damage; but you would be better off modeling this as 4 different weapon profiles that can fire together.

I think it's probably going to be the first one, since 24 damage is 33% more than a goddamn New York.

That's because the rules for this were co-written by Andy Chambers, user.

Thing is, in DFC more weapon profiles requires you to go Weapons Free (with the associated Major Spike) in order to fire them all. 4 shots from one weapon can be fired on standard orders.

Of course, I know that, but I was more talking about the amount of damage done by such a weapon can be easily modeled as four burnthrough-6 lasers firing together.

That being said, I really do think that overall its limited to 6 damage, with all 4 shots. Anything else would be absolutely insane.

Yeah I suspect this is an early set of rules that got leaked by one f the playtesters.

Nah, it's very obviously their production scan, just an early version.

Why would they give playtesters all that lore and so forth?

Here's a question, if an attack does 2 damage and doesn't crit like the occulus arrays on the Harpy, do you roll 1 or 2 armor rolls?

Mechanically it makes more sense to be limited to 6 damage, fluff-wise it's a bit weird ("laser 3 has done sufficient damage, deactivate lasers 1, 2 and 4") but the potential for 6 damage rather than 3 is still a pretty good carrot - that'll cripple most cruisers in one shot. I suspect you're probably right.

One semi-related question, do we know if there are command cards in DFC? One of the pages makes reference to rerolls, so if there's a command card that (for example) allows you to reroll to hit with a ship then that bumps the 4 shot up in quality as you can try for those criticals.

>leaked
Aren't these all the preview pictures Wayland games has up on their page for the rulebook? They appear to be a 1:1 match.

At a guess they were producing early runs to check typesetting and so on

Just one armor roll.

Yeah, but they're still leaks since Hawk themselves haven't given them out yet.

So does this seem like the probable pattern (for cruisers)?
>UCM: scan 6, signature 6
>PHR: scan 8, signature 6
>Scourge: scan 6, signature 8
>Shaltari: scan 12, signature 3-4 (was 3 in BoW video, but that vid also said scourge signature was 6)
>Battleships about double signature, frigates about half.

Yeah, looks about right.

Also

With UCM as the baseline.

>PHR: -1" Move, +1 HP
>Scourge: +2" move -1 Armour
>Shaltari: +2" move

This seems roughly consistant as well.

I see where you're coming from, but i think the idea of not having them stack is to avoid a situation where it's too easy for ships to be on a major spike.
if your opponent can just spam major spikes onto you, the risk/reward of using orders like weapons free is gone.
An extra 6'' range is significant, 12'' is massive. you'd just have ships shooting each other from all over the board

Fair point, and it may very well be non-communitative

As in, a major minus a minor is a minor (from standard orders), but a minor plus a minor is still a minor.

Either one is likely, however.

Anyone knows how the objective battle is going to look ? In this game I think it will be all about the objective grabing (sort like dzc) and thus the rules for it should be awesome !

It's more of a land-control objective system, rather than a secure-and-extract system.

Your goal is to maintain orbital superiority over strategic areas, and to deploy ground forces in order to secure control.

Yeah, there's a strong emphasis on taking and holding ground locations via Strike Carriers which transport the traditional DZC dropships to the combat zone and Troop Transport/Motherships which carry the larger Bulk Landers which contain large numbers of troops and Planetary Defence Lasers.

We know these strategic areas consist of 2 to 4 or so "nodes" which can be things like Residential Areas, Industrial Areas or Military Zones. Whether these are for flavour or capturing them yeilds differing effects is unknown as of yet.

So your troop transports are very important and have to be kept safe.

As usual, the Shaltari are playing a completely different game. As instead of strike cruisers, they just use a network of jump gates and a Mothership to download troops onto the ground.
They're also the only race that can undrop their troops and teleport them to a different location along the network (I think?)

Well, the Dropzone Facebook group already had a pic-dump for today's events that included some looks at games in progress.

Mind posting some?

I think the difference with the Shaltari is that they can teleport troops from point to point on the ground; every other faction must reload the troop transports, move them into orbit over the new target, and then drop them once more.

The Shaltari thus have significantly improved flexibility on the ground, and can react to a changing situation much more quickly.

They should also be much less susceptible to ground based defenses because of this mechanic.

There's no point to reloading troops, since you have a functionally infinite number of them.

Shaltari just have the ability to move troops because their mothership can only deploy 3 at a time.

In the beta, each mission type had objectives in two categories: the ground battle and the void battle -- void battle had things like scanning areas, critical points, bombardment +/- points, and controlling space stations, ground battles was controlling sectors, getting access to ground based huge guns, etc. And in between is what the effect on points for using nukes was.

I thought (mistakenly) that there were only a limited number of troops per ship.

Even so, that still renders their troops more or less immune to ground defenses, as long as they can get a void gate over the target.

>no 30mm skirmish game
>no 10 or 20mm 3d dogfightan (air or space) game
Droptroop Commander when
Dropsquadron Commander when

>mfw I think combat in buildings should be done with 28mm models on a 1x1 board
It sounds retarded, but I think it'd be fun

That's retarded

You're retarded

>mfw DropTroop

Not yet, I'm hoping they'll get the dropfleet stuff filled out to a similar extent to dropzone before hopping onto another project.

>play dropfleet
>troop landing, ground combat
>play a 20 game campaign of dropzone to resolve it
>play a game of droptroop for every CQC
>instead of rolling to see if fast movers are available, play a game of dropsquadron
>play a game of dropsquadron for each launch asset action in dropfleet

One game of Dropfleet Commander could last a week or longer with those mechanics.
Where do I sign up, that sounds awesome.

>Play games of Operation to recover injured troops between dropzone games

>Hawk wargames runs an official event
>Theatre of war is a moon, let's say the one where most of the shit is underground so orbital bombardment isn't effective
>Dropfleet players start playing first across multiple tables representing the moon's surface, trying to get troops onto the sites on the ground
>As armies land other players start games of dropzone to resolve who actually takes the cities
>Some objectives need to be extracted into orbit following capture in a dropzone game
>A friendly dropfleet ship over that city picks up the objective has to try to run off the board
>If it gets shot down that becomes another objective location
>Can land troops to try to put the objective up from the wreckage
>Leading to another dropzone battle...

Fucking kek

>Hawk actually sets up an ovaloid super board separated into segments to represent the entire moon
>travelling off the edge of one board brings the ship to another board.
>fleet commanders in a faction must work together to reinforce each other with battlegroups

You forgot -2 Armor baseline for Shaltari. Glass cannoneers ahoy!

That's not what I'm seeing on the sources we've been shown.

The Shaltari frigates have the same 5+ armour everything else has.

So from what you say - Scourge will be the stealth faction - based on using fast attacks and not geting hit back due to mitigation of spikes

Sheltari will be glass cannon sniper faction - that can shoot from affar but once hit they will have problems

PHR will be the slow behemot faction with great resilience and huge guns that are less manuvrable but if you fight over objectives with them - you loose

and UCM as always will be jeck of all trades and count that your opponent doesnt utilise the full potential of his troops faction :D

Pretty much. I wouldn't rule out UCM and scourge in a brawl though, UCM have a LOT of guns, and can put them all on one target, and up close scourge have the same armour as everyone else due to Scald. Shaltari are probably a bit buggered if they don't have enough fighters to let them put their shields up, plus narrow arcs on their weapons won't help.

Same here.

Actually, here's how I would run it:

Get a venue with a two-floor set-up, with like a mezzanine/balcony as the upper floor overlooking the lower floor. Upper floor gets a huge Fleet table, lower floor has dropzone tables arrayed across the floor in the same pattern as the objective markers on the Fleet table. Start with your whole teams at the upper floor spectating the fleet game (led by your admiral, who calls the shots, with a captain in charge of each battlegroup who moves the models and rolls the dice and can make independent decisions within the parameters of the admiral's orders), and when a drop action is deployed send down a lieutenant to command the battle on the ground floor, with walkie-talkies to communicate.

Bonus points if you get everyone to show up in officer dress attire cosplay and stay in character the entire time.

UCM baseline armor is 3+.

The higher signature on Scourge means they'll probably be running silent a lot. I'm anticipating a lot of rudeltaktik in their future.

Not on their frigates. It's 5+ there. But then again it's the same for Scourge frigates as well, so it's possible all Frigates have that armour level.

We don't know for sure at all what Shaltari cruiser armour will be like. If I'd have to hazard I guess, I'd go for 4+ like the scourge (as this means we'd have two with 3+ and two with 4+) with the option of popping up the shields and going to 3+, but at the disadvantage of going to a monstrous signiature 18.
Then there's the Battleship, which would get a sig rating of 36 with the shields up.

Oh, and a 2+ armour save that cannot be critted against.

So yeah, everyone can go weapons free on the Diamond if they like, it won't make a blind bit of difference though.

I was going to post the same idea. I like the walkie talkie part tho, clever.

>28mm skirmish DropSquad is made
>take the above idea and GO EVEN DEEPER
>have even more tables set up to represent the buildings of DZC where the Sergeants(?) play out the infantry meat grinder for objectives.
>Communication goes from Sarg>Lt>Capt>Admiral.

Maybe have a halfway point between Sarg and Lt? to have the Lt act like the Captains?

I assume the highest you'll ever see with base shields is 3+, because otherwise the opal frigate could push a save to 1+ (admittedly only against one attack) and that's just silly.

I'm doubtful they'll have shields going up to 3+ myself though. 4+ (ignoring crits) is still a lot better than 4+ armour.

UCM frigates are 4+ tho

Oh yeah, forgot about the Opal. Good call.

>I'm doubtful they'll have shields going up to 3+ myself though. 4+ (ignoring crits) is still a lot better than 4+ armour.

Yeah, but that signiature increase is huge. As is losing your PD and I think there are some weapons you can't fire if your shields are up?

I thought it'd be cool to see a 40K/Infinity scale game set in the DropX universe, but after looking at the Dropzone minis I'm not so sure.

That 30mm PHR Walker they released is really sexy though.

I know particle lances do 3 damage rather than 2 if the shields are down, don't know about anything you can't actually fire though.

ok, well there have been some leaks of more recent stuff, so I feel more confident about talking about the beta rules. In the beta UCM frigates/light cruisers are 4+, and everything else is 3+, EVERYTHING phr is 3+, scourge are one worse armor than UCM on everything, shaltari EVERYTHING is 5+/4++

This doesn't sound great honestly. Not enough distinction between targets.

Okay, that clears up a lot.

>PHR are 3+ across the board

Oh god. Their Strike Carriers are going to be impossible to shift in Atmosphere.

>All Shaltari is 5+/4++

Huh. Yeah those are total glass cannons all right. It seems like you'd only ever consider shields when everyone can see you already anyway but you have the fighters to negate the loss of PD, or you have an Opal nearby.

and how about weapons of different factions ?