Drop Spam Commander

Hi there!

First of all, I like the concept of Dropfleet Commander... signature-scan range stuff, orbital layers, activation cards, the overall core mechanics of the game are really good IMO.
Somehow it happened that the rest is... a bit unripe. (I try to be polite )

Second, I´m a gamer who likes to play games "the way they are meant to be played" and not like "my ego is so small I need to humiliate someone and unluckily I have tendonitis from farming in WoW so I´m back into miniaturewargaming" ...

That said I think there´s something fundamentally wrong with some basic stuff in DfC... and these flaws have to be actively avoided by some restrictive house-rules.
There are a lot of threads here that deal with probability calculations.... so I´ll leave that out
(although... I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT THE FOLKS @ HAWK DO SOME MATH WHEN CREATING RULES FOR UNITS/SHIPS)

anyway... there´s still some (relative simple) math to be done:

In most missions you can get twice the number of victory points "by dropping stuff onto the ground" compared to the points you can get from "parking in space" (aka cluster-f**k).
Generally I like this because it makes sense fluffwise and gives (potential) room for layered tactics.

Then comes the fleet roster...
While Dropzone was overly restrictive and unnessecarily complicated Dropfleet is WAY TOO OPEN.

So... from a military-economical point of view -> Why should I invest only 15% of my army-resources (points in the form of roughly 6 strike-carriers) for objectives that give me double VP compared to "space parking" (85% of my army invested for that objective)???
Why should I do that? Because I want to play the game the way it´s meant to be played?
Come on... this is soooo far off that I don´t recognize how this game is meant to be played...

To give you a taste...try this army list:

UCM DropSpamCommander - 1232pts
UCM - 0 launch assets

SR12 Vanguard battlegroup (227pts)
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
1 x Moscow - 163pts - H

SR9 Line battlegroup (207pts)
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
1 x Madrid - 79pts - M

SR9 Line battlegroup (207pts)
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
1 x Madrid - 79pts - M

SR9 Line battlegroup (207pts)
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
1 x Madrid - 79pts - M

SR6 Pathfinder battlegroup (192pts)
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L

SR6 Pathfinder battlegroup (192pts)
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L
2 x New Orleans - 64pts - L

Why the madrid? ...you have to take some M-Ships and they are by far the cheapest...
I want to try that list next time I play... if my gaming-partner agrees... but I guess he will answer with IMBAltari

To sum it up...
1st -> I think the mission-design needs to be... well... redesigned. (and plz remove overlapping 6inch-radius...ses for CL -> they give you "hotspots" for cluster-f**king which forces me to remove the beautiful models and flood the board with tokens that I stack on top of each other...)

2nd -> I think there has to be a "drop-asset" limit (I don´t know how to calculate tanks vs infantry). I just think that limiting only strike carriers doesn´t fix the problem... due to shaltari (they have no strike carriers and gates can´t be compared on a 1:1 basis) aaand due to PHR (because they have the only valid troopships in the game... they aren´t overpowered... the PHR just has the highest amount of USELESS ships in their roster.... yes I play mostly PHR ^^... actually I play Ganymedes, Orpheuses, Bellerophones and Echoes... so, the less broadsides the better... broadside-faction....pfff)

anyway... my 2 cents

I agree that spamming groundassets is a problem, however I think that the list your preset here is optimised and brings too much strikecarriers especially for a tournament set of scenarios.

Overall I think the most obvious and best way to balance this is to 1.) make Corvettes actually usable for what they were designed in the first place. They need to be cost effective in Atmospheric battle while not being OP in Orbit - several approaches have been discussed already. 2.) Include some stuff that can also fight atmospheric ships from low Orbit effectively. 3.) Include some more diverse scenarios, this of course only helps when playing a set of scenarios... balancing one scenario is anyway hard if not impossible as monobuilds are much easier to build.

I don't think a Groundasset restriction would solve the problem and even think it would create other problems because of balance shifts. It will just bring the number of assets down to the same number while the rest is filled up with the top-tier fighting ships in Orbit - the game will get boring very quick. Introducing ingame mechanics / scenarios that hurt mono-builds will increase variety in lists and will also make it much harder to build optimal lists. If someone wants to play mass strikecarrier-lists I'm fine with it as long as it hurts him in certain scenarios or against other builds.

I totally agree that there is a problem in Dropfleet as described. I really like Shikatanai's thoughts on it.

Cheers,
Sword

personally i think it could be fixed by making it 50/50 victory points. 50% for ground control and 50% for space control. in reality if you own the ground but have lost control of space your ground assets are going to very quickly run out of supplies and thus be useless. the fact that atm you can spam ground and win but have nothing controling space seems weird to me. how the heck is this owning the ground going to help if they all starve or run out of munitions and fuel?

personally i think it could be fixed by making it 50/50 victory points. 50% for ground control and 50% for space control. in reality if you own the ground but have lost control of space your ground assets are going to very quickly run out of supplies and thus be useless. the fact that atm you can spam ground and win but have nothing controling space seems weird to me. how the heck is this owning the ground going to help if they all starve or run out of munitions and fuel?

Or get nuked out of existence from Orbit.

I have suggested quite a while ago now, that making CLs worth 3 vps might change the balance up quite a bit, without changing the game too fundamentally.

Seems like a good idea. We should play some games using that to test it out.

personally i think it could be fixed by making it 50/50 victory points. 50% for ground control and 50% for space control. in reality if you own the ground but have lost control of space your ground assets are going to very quickly run out of supplies and thus be useless. the fact that atm you can spam ground and win but have nothing controling space seems weird to me. how the heck is this owning the ground going to help if they all starve or run out of munitions and fuel?

50-50 does not change anything as it is much easier to deny / gather some of the Space VP with a dropheavy list against a orbitheavylist and vice verca. There are already scenarios where you can potentially gather more VP in Orbit and it does not help much.
On the other hand one needs to be careful not overbuffing Orbitcontrol in general because it would quickly get rid of most groundbased game imho. I don't think shifting the game from one extreme to the other helps.
Giving solid ships for hunting atmospheric ships and additional scenarios are key.

I agree with Shikatanai. Limits will not help the game the way counters for every tactic would. If drop spam would be an easy target to fleet with some combat ships, the need for defending combat ships would arise. That would make the game more "realistic". Buffing corvetes in atmosphere (for example air to air weapons can reroll misses while in atmosphere), introducing ships that can fight atmospheric assets from orbit and placing all CL 12" apart could be a good start and hopefully the end of a problem.

Good Ideas here. I think that an overhaul of corvettes and the implementation of "orbital atmosphere hunters" can change a lot to the better. But then ppl would still take a lot of strike carriers to compensate for the losses... so hand in hand with these changes I see the BIG NEED to buff ALL TROOPSHIPS. They need more resilience/protection. Also the 6" radius of CL is a problem IMO... but has nothing to to with DropSpamStuff.
I have high hopes for the destroyers... maybe they full the needed role.

I agree with Shikatanai. Limits will not help the game the way counters for every tactic would. If drop spam would be an easy target to fleet with some combat ships, the need for defending combat ships would arise. That would make the game more "realistic". Buffing corvetes in atmosphere (for example air to air weapons can reroll misses while in atmosphere), introducing ships that can fight atmospheric assets from orbit and placing all CL 12" apart could be a good start and hopefully the end of a problem.

i dont think making corvettes better in atmo is helpful, if anything they need to be worse in orbit. at the moment they work to well against other orbit ships. creating new types of ships to fill niche gaps i dont think solves the problem, it does not solve the objective inbalance and i feel would lead to even less of the 'big' fleet ships being on the table, which is a pity as i think the game has more apeal when we are using battleships and heavy cruisers, against dozens of small ships spending most of the game trying to avoid each other while geting to the ground.