DropfleetCommander

I was wondering if anybody had any news on DfC or if they had any good tactics learnt from similar games?

I have not seen any news on any of the gaming forums I frequent. I suspect with the launch of the Resistance and Reconquest underway DFC is probably on the burner but simmering. Once everything is rolling and the boys from Hawk are done with the launch/Con circuit they'll start dropping morsels and tidbits for the next game.

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.

Now, if the question is what do I want to see out of DFC?

• Realistic thrust-and-inertia style movement (rather than "naval game in space" style movement).
• A hyper-consistent approach to scale, both in game play and in model design.
• Similarly, weapons rules (ranges and tabletop behavior) that are consistent with the weapon types and scale.

In other words, all those things that I said I don't mind at all about FSA, but pidgeonhole it as a categorically unrealistic beer-and-pretzels game? Yeah, I'd like to see the exact opposite in DFC. Hard-minded, hard sci-fi, semi-realistic space combat.

And also I want my Shaltari ships to be able to teleport around the board, as well as pose the most realistic boarding threat thanks to teleporting Braves and Firstborn.

Thanks!

I would really like a tie in to Dropzone Commander in that how do the dropships and other units leave the "mothership" and get to the "dropzone". Are the space battles a simulation of the attackers breaching the enemies defenses for the planet and then protecting the dropships and their cargo? Space is big, very big, and with the nodes, it seems a military would be guarding nodes and planets while leaving the rest of space empty. Can a military force completely guard a planet? Or a military's assets spread too thin?

I would also like to see a nod to logistics and strategy not only on a world scale but on the faction scale.

uhm, there is a topic for this already, with quite a few number of pages :p

Could you send a link? Also do you think as the resistance could not participate here the EAA should be added?

http://www.hawkforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4698