/dcg/ Dropzone/Dropfleet Commander General

While not a great titan-killer in general, it's the UCM's only answer to things like the hades. It's a good one-of or two-of to bring if you're fighting PHR, since every hit will pop one of their smaller walkers if it does damage.

It's not a mainstay unit, but definitely a needed addition to the UCM's arsenal.

Potentially solid if you know your opponent will have good targets for it, but probably won't see much tournament play.

>it's the UCM's only answer to things like the hades
Uh, Falcons? Longbows? Playing the objectives and just avoiding the Hades? It's a good counter, but certainly not the only one available.

Longbows don't seem that great, they only hit as hard as a sabre. Never really saw the point in having to set up scouts and so forth for some extra E10 hits.

But I agree that there are other tools in the UCM arsenal to deal with the scorpion walkers. Most of them flying, I guess the broadsword provides a ground option maybe?

By "only answer" I mean "direct answer"; Besides the Eagle, the Broadsword is pretty much the only unit in the UCM's arsenal that can blast off 4 DP at a time. The Falcon is nice, but it can only plink away a max of 2 DP per activation.

Of course, there's always the Ferrum as well.

The broadsword has the most alpha-strike potential in the UCM arsenal, what with doing 2 damage per shot. In terms of a single unit, it has the most damaging weapon per shot.

There's no reason you need to have one unit blast off 4DP at a time. 4 units blasting off 1DP at a time is just as effective.

Except that they have to successfully hit four times, as opposed to just once.
The broadsword has a 5/6 chance to hit, with a minimum damage of two.
The Gladius has a 25/36 chance to hit twice, with a minimum damage of one per shot.

Four damage is four damage, but the Broadsword is more likely to get it all off in one shot, as opposed to a bunch of little units plinking away.

The Broadsword is also much more likely to do jack shit.

True, but that's just the tradeoff it has to pay for having such a powerful shot.

>letting thread get to page 8
pls

One of the nice advantages of the Broadsword is you only have to take one. It functions better in a support roll than the gladius does.

This as well; An individual gladius may be more efficient points wise for getting out 4 damage, but a minimal squad of them is a serious investment.

In addition, a gladius is likely going to get popped in one hit by anything big enough to warrant both it's and a broadsword's attention, while a broadsword has the posibility to tank it and keep firing.

Think we're in a bit of a calm before the storm, people are maybe waiting for their models/for rule leaks.

It's pretty amazing how powerful an Overseer/Opressor tag-team is.

>Overseer +6" range boost
two E11 shots at 24" with demo-2
one E11 shot at 24" with demo-2 and two E11 shots at 15"
four E11 shots at 15"

>Overseer double shot boost
four E10 shots at 18"
two E10 shots at 18" and four E10 shots at 9"
eight E10 shots at 9"

Stacking an Opressor up with an Overseer (which also provides some amazing AA) is terrifying.

The Overseer looks a little too good. It won't make scourge OP, but I kind of see it as being must take.

I tossed this together real quick, how does it look?
Standard Army
Clash: 1499/1500 points
Standard Army
Scourge Standard Roster [1499/1500 pts]

Oppressors [486 pts]
Oppressor: Oppressor, Harbinger(+Mini Arc Caster, +2 Vampires) [226 pts]
Overseer: Overseer(Master) [260 pts]

Vanguard [222 pts]
Hunter Squad: 3x Hunter [105 pts]
Reaper Squad: 3x Reaper [117 pts]

Vanguard [159 pts]
Hunter Squad: 3x Hunter [105 pts]
Reavers: Reaver [54 pts]

Warriors [296 pts]
Warrior Horde: 2x Warriors, Intruder Alpha [94 pts]
Warrior Horde: 2x Warriors, Intruder Alpha [94 pts]
Reavers: 2x Reaver [108 pts]

Occupation Patrol [336 pts]
Eviscerators: 2x Eviscerators, Intruder Alpha [140 pts]
Minders: 4x Minder, Intruder Beta [56 pts]
Eviscerators: 2x Eviscerators, Intruder Alpha [140 pts]
Definitely, if only because it's a far more useful commander than the Desolator.

Yea but it think it is significantly better than both.

I think I would always take one. I might even take two. It effectively turns every dropship you have into a gunship. 12 inch range plasma hose is worth the points alone. 30 inch range annihilators. This isn't even including all the tanks.

I feel like one should be in every list. May not as a commander, but the buffs it gives is just too great to pass up.

Do remember, though, that it's aura is only 9"; it means you'll have to clump up your forces to maximize its potential, and that you'll have to decide if you want it in the backfield to boost annihilators, or upfront to help out tanks.

It's very good, but it's not going to turn your entire army into a rape machine at once.

9 inch aura with 12 inch move.

No I don't think it will break the army. It is just I feel like a scourge player would be like well Overseer is a must slot, the question today is do I take an oppressor of the shelf?

It is an internal balance concern. Kind of like how the Ferrum is for UCM. I think desolators will disappear, but the Oppressor might as well.

Absolutely, I'm not denying that it'll be an almost mandatory take. It'll be interesting to see how powerful it really does end up being, especially after the obligatory balancing.

...

How big is a bulk lander supposed to be compared to those bays?

I wonder if Dave'll give the Desolator a small buff. It's never been a massively powerful ship, and I personally wouldn't mind a small mv and mf increase to help it act in combat.

The Osaka is probably my favorite UCM ship, outside of the Beijing

No idea, enough to land a few thousand men at a time; the troopships themselves carry tens of thousands (or maybe even a hundred thousand) soldiers.

Dave is said that the core units will never be updated; why? beyond me.

Are you sure about the core units never being updated? Weren't a bunch of them changed after phase 1? That was only just over a year ago and involved changing all the Shaltari's transport costs. And there have been updates before that.

Do you guys think bulk landers are just going to be in the first DFC expansion or what?

I don't know, they might have to end up tweaking the core units (and I really hope they do); restricting future design space for the sake of not having the core units be totally units seems like a bad idea.

But hey, maybe there'll be a full balancing of all units, core and phase1,2,3... when the fabled 2.0 is finally put out.

>Do you guys think bulk landers are just going to be in the first DFC expansion or what?
What? They're already in the game; they're just giant dropships.

strawpoll.me/11297065

Poll to pass the time and to see if the thread has good taste

...

I really hope there's a light cruiser with just mediums.

I'm just interested in seeing what kind of new weapon systems the PHR ships might get in future expansions.

Broadside mounted drone bays for better CAW would be pretty cool

Daily reminder that if you're not going to model force fields on your Andromeda's hangar bay, you're a pleb

Post the most avant-garde ship names you can think of, let's get Post-human up in here.

>Sober Cannibal
>Drizzly November
>Call Me Ishmael
>Asks No Omen
>Naught Weaker than Man
>Speak Not To Me Of Covenants
>Blame the Gods
>Counterfeit of Death
>Told Hereafter
>Go The Spoils

It's a shame that the Shaltari language is "inscrutably complex" while the Scourge probably don't grasp the concept of given names in the first place. I wonder what fun nicknames the Robo-antiquiboos have for aces of the Scourge and Shaltari fleets.

But how, user?

>Sense no Evil
>Mocking the Devil
>All Under Heaven
>Ready Or Not
>Song Of the East
>Unto The Breach
>Fair Weather
Honestly, looking up Halo UNSC ship names works well. Most of those are various UNSC ship names. You even get UCM ones like
>Glasgow Kiss
>Two for Flinching
>Las Vegas

>Deliverance Engine
>Manifold Skein
>Given Sufficient Velocity
>Stood Far Back When The Gravitas Was Handed Out

Transparent plastic and some very fine glazing airbrush work

or airbrush work*

On the whole it is going to be interesting to see how the game grows.

The Shaltari will have some wiggle room and to a lesser extent the scourge. However, UCM and PHR are more confined. Like the standard UCM ship has either a bunch of guns or a laser. Same with PHR. So where do you go from there?

Meanwhile, aboard the republic cruiser Very Little Gravitas Indeed:
>Trierarch, the surviving bridge crew of the UCM vessel are signalling surrender. Your response?
>That depends. Have we broken last week's killstreak yet?

>Half of a Quanta
>Prejudice and Precognition
>Uniquely Positioned Dust
>No Time Like the Present
>Tactical Analysis

I have a feeling that there's still a bit of wiggle room left for the UCM and the PHR.
In the former's case, we can already see their heavy use of highly specialized and combined-arms ships. It's not entirely unreasonable, for example, to see ECM/ECCM/EWF modules on cruisers. Another possibility are just more variants of their current weapons; maybe a super-heavy mass driver turret, or a focused BTL with only one shot but higher damage potential.

As for the PHR, their broadsides give them huge flexibility in terms of combinations. Ignoring obvious stuff like CAW modules or ECCM modules, I could see the PHR possibly getting spinal weapons mounted to their sides as a further development, or some really esoteric stuff like area-weapons that work in space, taking up an entire broadside for a single system.

>Very Little Gravitas Indeed
>Zero Gravitas
>Absence of Gravitas
>Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall
>Stood Far Back When The Gravitas Was Handed Out
>Gravitas, What Gravitas?
>Gravitas... Gravitas... No, Don't Help Me, I'll Get It In A Moment...
>Gravitas Free Zone
>Low Gravitas Warning Signal
>Absolutely No You-Know-What

Still gets me, every time

They could always just go for fancier guns, or maybe fancier missiles. There's a lot you can do with those things. And I wouldn't put it past either of them to bring out space flamethrowers.

This as well; remember, they've got a lot of unused special rules in place already, and they can always add more.

>space flamethrowers
I'd always imagine the Shaltari to do something like that.

>Moonstone class heavy cruiser
>all three prongs have a strange array mounted on them, gracefully curving to form a sort of cage
>single weapon profile
>fires
>every enemy ship within a hard range in the F(N) arc is caught in the super-sized version of the Firedrake's distortion cannon
>weapon is so powerful that it gives a major spike to the ship after every firing

Is it worth taking 4x Thor without scouts to sight for them?

...

Is there any information on what the Ravager's "AA weapons" actually are in fluff? They're not explained in the unit description or even given a telling name, which is pretty out of character for DZC. Based on the stats they're most likely just big shard cannons, but my autism would prefer confirmation.

Yknow, I never figured that out either. It is strange that they've never been given a name.
Probably just an oversight that's too small to properly worry about.

>taking indirect fire unit without a spotter

Baseline spotted.

Why would you take 160 points of IF without a good spotter? I mean they could still potentially do good work, but they'd do much better work with a way to more reliably hit their target.

>tfw you ask a stupid question and immediately regret asking it

hyped for drop fleet

>get so hyped for Dropfleet that you blow a couple hundred on Dropzone to hold yourself over for a few more weeks

>tfw want to get into Dropzone, but there's barely any wargaming presence on campus anyways
>can't justify spending enough on Dropzone to run actually fun demo games
>will have to do with Dropfleet and the decent sized fleets afforded by it
>hoping to God that anyone who's interested in Dropfleet will also have disposable income of their own to get a fleet of their own

I'm honestly surprised there's not a wargaming club on campus, since my school is nerdy as fuck.
Ah well, I suppose I'm glad anyways; I think I'll much prefer the strategy of DFC compared to the tactics of DZC. Urban and cover never really appealed to me; I just like the models.

I've got no actual experience with the system and no one around who openly wants to play the game in the first place... but I just flush magnetized the cruise missiles to an Athena on the first try and it it's making me feel like goddamn Archimedes.

Holy hell I'd forgotten how much I love magnetizing. Get over here Apollo, my hotshot juices are flowing and daddy hates committing to a single weapon option.

Now that I mention it, is there a preferred size of disc magnet for PHR dropship sockets?

>Now that I mention it, is there a preferred size of disc magnet for PHR dropship sockets?
Unfortunately, I can't say for sure.
I'd say the size of the little nib on the dropship sockets; cut those off, embed a magnet into it, and sink a magnet into the hole on the walker slots.

>one more day until dispatch has been going on for a week.

>urge to cosplay Immortal Longreach sniper rising
There's something about smooth plated armor with a cape that really entices me, but I don't know if I could do that helmet right.

Scourge ships are now my go-to example for any chucklefuck that claims it's impossible to make nice, detailed models via CAD.

If they still don't buy it, then I'll show them pic related.

>it's impossible to make nice, detailed models via CAD
People actually believe this?

Yeah, some claim only handsculpting can make nice minis, and that CAD models are bland/soulless/have less character/are less detailed, or some shit.

My view is CAD is a tool, and it can be used badly to make bland models, but it can also be used well to make great models. It's about the skill of the user, not the tool used.

There is no reason this should happen.

You should be taking Valkyries anyway. You have a spotter.

>claims it's impossible to make nice, detailed models via CAD
Do they just not know how CAD works? What possible basis could be given for this claim?

Can they spot from inside buildings?

You have to go to the wall I believe.

And doesn't that mean not searching or CQBing?

Going to the wall does not prevent searching.

CQB does, but all the means is your spotters are occupied for a turn.

>all the means is your spotters are occupied for a turn.
Usually more than one turn

Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.

Slow down there, Iain Banks

It is so aggravating that ship names allowed in EVE are generally too short to fit many of Banks' wonderful ones.

If one of your battleships isn't A Lever Long Enough, you're doing it wrong.

>IFF reading coming in now sir. She's one of ours, sir!
>Are you trying to tell me that that scourge strix is "one of ours"?
>Yes sir! The name says so!
>...
>Man in black, please dispose of this idiot. Gunnery, prepare a firing solution.

>Right, ensign, welcome to the communications desk and congratulations on your surprise promotion. What have we got?
>"Please don't shoot that ship sir it's full of orphans and puppies."
>For fuck's sake.

>>Man in black, please dispose of this idiot. Gunnery, prepare a firing solution.
>every UCM ship has a MiB standing in the corner of the bridge looking menacing

[Hotrod Intensifies]

On a related note, the fact that the Azurite is vectored, meaning that it can turn at any point during its movement, means that the effective arc of it's weaponry is the front arc, +/- 15 degrees .

What campus? I just killed the one here off because we had myself and 1 other uninterested person who only made it half the time.

As great as that model looks it's going to be a bitch to get those spars properly parallel.

UT Dallas; huge MT:G presence on campus and some TTRPGs, but I haven't seen any wargames. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, but it's bit annoying.

...

user pls. I was all settled on the jellyfish, stop posting sexy hedgehogs.

No

I will not stop

YOU MONSTER.

:^)

VERTICALLY
CONFUSED
TRILOBITE

...IS HAPPY TRILOBITE.

>check DFC facebook page
>people still saying that DFC's scale is 1:15,000 or 1:20,000, rather than 1:9,150
>except that when dividing the given lengths of the ships from the leaks by the model length, you do in fact get 1:9,150
Are these people allergic to research or math or something?

Spiky lionfish is better tbqh

>keep thinking that ships are bigger than they are
>even the Heracles, the largest ship in the game, is just shy of 7 inches from nose to fin
>PHR cruisers are about 4.33 inches
The amount of detail on these things keeps making me want to think that they're at least 50% bigger.

It's going to be terrifying actually getting the models in front of me.
>holy shit, I actually have to paint these tiny, tiny details?

Drybrushing is your Friend!