Sun Sep 14, 2014 6:05 pm
I play a lot of Firestorm Armada. There's a whole conversation elsewhere on the forums where DZC partisans are trying to explain why DZC is an inherently superior game to FSA - and therefore, presumably, to Planetfall, the FSA universe's answer to DZC, much as DFC will be an answer to FSA - but I don't personally buy it. Spartan's games certainly have a more bombastic, over-the-top feel. They are more beer and pretzels games - though better written than some other companies who claim to be producing beer and pretzels games (*cough* GW *cough*) and less hard tactical games, which is what Hawk is going for.
All that is by way of saying that what I can guess about DFC from playing FSA limited by the fact that when Hawk designs a space naval game, it's probably going to be a very different game from the one Spartan designed.
Down to the brass tacks... among other things, the space ships in FSA don't move in the way real space ships do. The way movement works - turning templates, for example, don't really make sense on space ships, or the fact that ships come to a halt if they stop moving forward - has got more to do with the way boats move in water than the way a space ship would move in the void.
FSA also has wonky scale issues, both in the models and in the game. The ships are hundreds of kilometers apart, but missiles move at the same speed as laser beams, for example.
All this is fine for FSA, though, because it's basically a naval game in space, a riff off the gone-but-not-forgotten Battlefleet Gothic.
The fact is that we have no idea and no way of knowing what DFC is going to be like. Will we see movement that actually follows Newton's laws? Weapons that make sense for the scale? For that matter, what is the scale going to be like? Will the ships be enormous behemoths of the void, like FSA and BFG before it, or will the biggest capitol ships be "merely" the size of aircraft carriers? How will the ships scale down from there? What kind of weaponry will they carry?
We don't know way more than we know.
Space Hedgehog