Jovian Wars - Hard Sci Fi Spaceships - Kickstarter Funded!

The ships in the basic pledge.

Long time readers of Fire Broadside knows that I've been a fan of Dream Pod 9 in general and Jovian Chronicles in particular since nineties when the first (proper) edition of the roleplaying game was released. After getting the core book I managed to snag the Ships of the Fleet line of books that I read and re-read several times as the ship designs not only looked great, but were well thought out from a scientific standpoint as well. I highly recommend them to anyone with an interest in spaceships, regardless of your thoughts on Jovian Chronicles.

Later as I discovered more of the miniatures line I was sad to see that none of the ships from those books had ever been made into models. Sure, the rules for them were perhaps a little over the top, and certainly took away from the earlier mecha centric position of the core book and supplements, but they just looked so cool! Since then I've slowly grown my collection of books (still missing, Spacer's Guide, Nomads, Mars and Mercury sourcebooks - drop me a line if you want to get rid of yours!) as well as added to my collection of ships and exo armours and I can now field pretty much anything from the core book and mechanical catalouges.

Still.... those newer designs from Ships of the Fleet kept haunting me so when I heard from Robert Dubois (head of DP9) that they had been 3D designing them and were preparing a kickstarter I was overjoyed! And now it's here and almost at 200% funding as I write this!

Not only has Tony Baltera, who also rendered the new fleet scale exos, created some great looking models from the design in the books but DP9 has actually scaled them up as well. The old models are 1/5000 scale while the new ones are 1/4000 - about 25% increase in size! Not only does this make them more imposing on the table, but it allows for more detailing and extra touches like having the habitats on the Valiant being posable. Just look at this picture and you'll see the difference:

Quite an upgrade I'd say! You can see the new bases that are used for Jovian Wars as well. Also, the Poseidon has been beefed up slightly to give it more of that battleship look. While I like the old design just fine the new one certainly feels more battleship-y.

As I mentioned above the funding right now is just shy of 200% meaning we've unlocked all the actual combat ships from the books as well as a large amount of extra pieces like habitation modules and cargo containers you can use to customize the models. Up next are fleet tenders and transports which might not sound all that exciting but they're always good to for scenarios and just look at that Gagarin fleet tender - it's huge!

Another four ships unlocked.

Now, about the new game itself; Jovian Wars takes the setting from the default cold-war-going-hot of the 2210s to full blown solar war, which makes for a great excuse to beef up your fleets a bit so more ships and exos are on the table! Hehe!

The rules have been designed by David McLeod who made the well received new ruleset for Heavy Gear Blitz and is quicker and a bit more abstracted than Lightning Strike while still retaining a lot of the flavour and details that makes the setting unique. This is primarily through the use of exos and fighters but also the way you take damage and keeping track of the general state of the ship in some detail. For example, while there are hitpoints they are almost secondary to a ships systems and how well they are performing - a ship without working point defence is a sitting duck for close assaulting exo armours!

The rules are still in beta phase, undergoing playtesting, but I really like what I've read. Of course, I really like Lighting Strike and the tactical rules in the rpg as well so with Jovian Wars I'll have three different games where I can use the same miniatures. I guess depending in what kind of mood I'm in and how much detail I want.

The latest unlocks including the small CEGA anti-exo Hydra defense boat!

Still, new smooth rules are cool and all but in the end it's all about the ship models. And I know there will be a number of people who aren't interested in the Jovian setting at all and simply want the gorgeous models for some other gam - and that's perfectly fine! I mean, there aren't all that many hard sci fi spaceship designs out there and with The Expanse growing more and more popular (remind me later to talk about how close that setting is to Jovian Chronicles!) I think there's a growing market for ships that are not Star Trek, Star Wars or just your general boat in space kind of deal like virtually all other spaceship battle games out there!

Not unlocked yet, but should be soon. Did I mention that the Gagarin is yuuuuuge?!!

There is a lot more to see on the actual kickstarter page, like all the extra parts added in stretchgoals and all the exos and fighters that are available too if you want a good starter fleet to get going quickly. There's another 12 days to go and I feel confidend we'll see all the CEGA and Jovian stuff unlocked at the very least, and I've heard Tony has been rendering some Venusian ships as well....

During the coming couple of weeks I'll be posting more about Jovian Chronicles, like a session report or two from our ongoing campaign, some talk about the expanse, pictures of my painted exo armours and, if all goes according to plan, a Jovian Wars battle report!

So head on over to the kickstarter and check it out and I'll be back soon with more space goodness!

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The Future of Jovian Chronicles - Interview with Robert Dubois of DP9

Today I have a treat for you, dear cosmonuts! With new releases being announced for Jovian Chronicles/Lightning Strike I contacted Robert Dubois, the CEO of Dream Pod 9, to see what the future might hold for the game(s). It turns out that there are a number of exciting developments in store and I have started prepping my ship models for battle.

Before we move on I'll just mention that we are mostly refering to Jovian Chronicles in the interview which, if you want to get technical, is the rpg (which has tactical rules that use miniatures) while Lightning Strike is the dedicated miniatures game. However what we are really talking about is Lightning Strike or a future version of Lightning Strike, although it may end up with a different name.

Alright, so lets just get to it!


Fire Broadside: Hi Robert, I'm glad to have you hear to talk about what's going on with Jovian Chronicles and what the future might bring. But before we get into that could you just tell us briefly who you are and perhaps a quick recap of the Jovian Chronicles game?

Robert Dubois: Hi Martin. Well, I'm Robert Dubois, the president of Dream Pod 9. The company has been around since 1995 when we published our first Heavy Gear book, the roleplaying and tactical game. Since then the company went on to team up with Activision for a couple of computer games based on Heavy Gear and made a tv-series together with Sony.

When we go back even further into our history we were actually a company called IANUS Publications who published the Protoculture Addicts and Mecha Press magazines, that were all about anime and manga. We started working with R. Talsorian Games back in the early nineties to publish some Mekton books and that's how Jovian Chronicles came into being. We were doing some Cyberpunk stuff for them, and then we published Jovian Chronicles which was our tribute to Gundam, giant robots and all that stuff.

Later, after Heavy Gear was published, we decided to re-do it with our own system - the Silhouette core system. We came out with a bunch of books and miniatures for Jovian Chronicles and one thing that did very well for us was Lightning Strike, which was a tabletop miniatures game based on the Jovian Chronicles setting. You had fleets of ships and exo-armors fighting it out on the table and now we're actually working on an updated version of that that will allow you to field smaller scale, about 15mm tall, exo-armors instead of the old large scale ones.



FB: Yes, this announcement really put me over the moon! I remember coming across the first edition from DP9, back in 1997, and flicking through it realized I had to have it. While I hadn't really seen much Gundam at this time I was familiar with Macross and loved the mecha. However, what really amazed me was the solid hard scifi, adhering to proper physics (most of the time), and the both deep and broad background setting for the game!

RD: Yeah, our team from way back then, like Marc A. Vezina, all come from an engineering background. They really like to have the hard science, with the ships designed properly with gravity only coming from thrust or through centrifuges or actually spinning the ship. There is no gravity plating like you see in Star Trek.

FB: Exactly, there is no space magic. And I love that especially as it feels lite something that's fairly rare, not only in roleplaying games, but in movies, books and on tv as well. There's usually some handwaving going on to explain all the "unrealistic" things.

RD: That's the beauty of Star Trek - technobabble explains everything! Somebody sneezed and they go back in time; "Yeah, we'll just write something around that. Physics, no no, we don't need that.". But with Jovian Chronicles we tried to have the physics working, which is also true of course, for Heavy Gear. We wanted to have the hard science as that was the background of the guys in our company. We had just got out of college and we loved tabletop games so we decided to start our own company!

FB: And you're still here! So, focusing on the Jovian Chronicles and the miniatures for a bit, I got the impression that one reason for having the larger 30mm exo-armors in the beginning was connected to the tactical game in the rpg that was much more of a skirmish experience than Lightning Strike.

RD: Yes, the original tactical rules in the first edition of the rpg was written for maybe five exo-armors per side and it has the full 3D combat, it has vectored thrust and it has the X, Y and Z axis. So you had to either raise your miniature up into the air or use a lot of counters! Lightning Strike simplified this to a 2D plane and streamlined version of vectored thrust and in the future edition we would aim to streamline it further. In the old tactical rules you could run your exo of the table if you didn't apply counter-thrust properly!

FB: Hehe! That actually happened to me the other day as I was doing some solo tests of the tactical rules in preparation of running our rpg campaign - one of the exo-armors simply wooshed off the table as I realized I didn't have enough thrust to turn in time. Still, I think it brings a certain something to the game, even with the much simplified "vector tokens" that are used in Lightning Strike. Do you think we might see something like that in the updated rules?

RD: I think we’ll try and remove as many counters and tokens from the tabletop as possible in a new ruleset as they tend to slow down the game. So I don’t see full vectored thrust rules like in the rpg, as for keeping the thrust arrow from Lightning Strike, we’ll have to look at that. New rules will have to go through alpha and beta versions, where we get feedback from the players before they are locked down.

You got to be careful with the hard science, going to the extreme. In fact, back when Wunji Lau, who wrote the Europa Incident (among other stuff), started working on Lightning Strike we decided to make it more for selling miniatures than for selling an rpg. There are two different dynamics between the two types. In an rpg you want a lot of background and fluff that people can really get engrossed in - technical flaws like, the players find out that there's something wrong with a particular model; if you push it too hard it might explode or something like that!

But in a miniatures game people just want to know, "ok the miniatures look cool, there are cool rules that allow you to fight against one another in a balanced battle", so there has to be a point system for how to build your fleets and all that. Sometimes you can't take what's in the fluff of the rpg and translate it since a player might go "well, why would I ever buy this miniature if it has this major defect?!".

FB: Making a balanced miniatures game is certainly a very different experience from an rpg. Will the new version basically be a smaller update to the current Lightning Strike rules, mainly taking into account the switch of one exo per stand to three, or will it be a major overhaul, like what you have done with Heavy Gear?

RD: It's going to be a little bit different. What Wunji and I are talking about right now is how to update it and bring it to the level people expect of a miniatures game these days. Like I said, less counters to keep track of stuff and so on. One thing we realized is the way we wrote Lightning Strike and the way we abstracted things back then is not ideal in todays gaming climate. We had the exo-armors as these 35mm tall miniatures and the ships being maybe 60mm long so it was not exactly to scale. 1/500 scale for the exos and fighters and 1/5000 for the ships.

We explained that in Lightning Strike by saying that you are actually the admiral on the bridge looking at this projection of the battle, and of course the projection is not going to show a pinprick of light that was your exo-armor but a blown up image to make it easy to grasp. What we're saying now is that instead of just one exo-armor what we have is an entire squad of exo-armors. We'll go and redo the rules and get feedback from the players to streamline it down. You'll have squads of exos and you'll have ace exo flights, and when we come about doing the Dragonstriker or the Stormrider we'll have just one big model representing it.

We can't really have them to exact scale as even with 15mm exos the ships would become very big and too expensive for the regular player. Having players shill out $50 for one ship just to have it in scale isn't worth it, sometimes you have to abstract it.

Anyway, we did some massive changes to Heavy Gear with the latest rules (downloadable for free here), and we will probably do something similar to this with Lightning Strike. We want to get it to the point where it's easier to built your fleets and have faster dice rolling mechanics so we can speed up the gameplay just like we did with Heavy Gear. That's not to say that it will be exactly like those rules, we'll likely throw in some different stuff to try out and get peoples feedback on. We want to make sure that every weapon upgrade or every pack of exos are viable in the game - "what does this pack bring that the other doesn't?".

FB: So probably some major changes incoming. Will the process be similar to how you are handling the latest iteration of Heavy Gear, with beta testing etc?

RD: We'll be sure to do alpha tests and beta tests to get some good feedback. As game designers you can have this idea in your head and you think it'll work perfectly and then someone out there goes and says "but what if you do this?" and you realize it completely breaks the game.

Mechanics are far from nailed down but we're probably going to have a dice pool similar to Heavy Gear where you add or subtract the number of dice in the pool rather than applying modifiers to the actual roll. Basically we want to keep the positives and get rid of any negatives and defects. For example if you have a ship in the old rules which doesn't have the range to hit the enemy ships at the other side of the table, it's going to get somthing that can do that. Since battles are usually between ships firing at each other and some exos trying outmaneuver and outgun each other to get to the enemy ships.

FB: Well, having units that can actually do stuff is usually more fun. And as far as the scale goes, I think having exos and fighters at 15mm and ships staying at the scale they are now will be just fine. Yes, it's still out of scale but it's close enough that our brain can have you look past it and it feels like it makes sense on the tabletop.

RD: Exactly. Right now we're trying it out, first releasing the Jovian and CEGA fighters and we just released images of the new exo-armors, the Pathfinder and Hector for the Jovians and the Wyvern and Syreen for CEGA. Our sculptor, Tony Baltera, is working on some other things in the background now so we're getting some more Jovian and CEGA exos and eventually he's even going to work on some of the Venus stuff like the Ryu and the Brunhilde fighter. We basically want to get what we had in the old 1/500 scale, all the fighters and exos, into the new fleetscale. Then after that we're going to look into how we can actually pay for maybe doing new ship designs and all that. We've talked about the possibility of doing it as a kickstarter, you never know. There are a lot of ship designs out there that we never sculpted.

FB: Yes, the ships in the Fleet books are among some of the best hard scifi designs I've come across in any medium. Not only that, but they also look very sleek and cool so that people who might not be all that interested in the physics can appreciate them for their looks alone. I think they're beautifull and I'm sure they would sell like hotcakes!

RD: Right now it's all about making sure there's a market for it and building up a new fan base, as we haven't had anything new come out for the game for a while. Our main focus has been Heavy Gear as that is our main product line. There's a new computer game in the works for Heavy Gear as well...

FB: And a new rpg!

RD: Yepp, and a new rpg. There is some other stuff in the background we can't mention yet. A lot of people have been asking us "are you ever going to do anything more for Jovian Chronicles? What happened to the fleetscale fighters you showed us back in 2006?" and at one point we actually looked for them and finally dug them us as they were in a box, buried in another box in storage. So we thought "ok, let's put it out there before Christmas and see if people are interested" and we got a lot of positive responses!

Alexander class Destroyer from Fleet Book 1. Beautiful stuff!

FB: That doesn't surprise me. I have read a lot of positive reactions and comments to the new fleetscale stuff. People seem really excited for it and not only old JC fans, but also people who become interested mostly because of the Gundam connection or because of the simple fact that there are almost no fleet scale mecha fighter miniatures out there.

RD: Tony has been learning over the last year how to actually do 3D models that will cast well.

You'll notice, when you zoom in on the pictures of the new exos, that we've actually pushed the arms into the body. Because when you cast these as one piece miniatures you can't have undercuts, so it's learning how big you can make the detail to make it show up nicely. Since doing a 3D model and having one that can be rapid prototyped and look good as an actual miniature are two different things. You can put the most insane amount of detail on a 3D model, and many kickstarters do this, but it just makes me think "you can't do that. It won't show up on the model".

We're going to see how far we can push the limit with Jovian Chronicles. Some guns might give us trouble depending on how they are pointed and in that case we might have to do some exos as two piece miniatures. We use Maya to create the actual 3D model which can be exported as an object file that can then be sent to a company like Shapeways for rapid prototyping. But it's actually when you get the model back that the real skillfull jobb actually happens as you have to take that and turn it into a miniature. You can't simply cast the prototype but you have to first seal it, as it's porous, and often you need to sand it to get rid of print lines. We then do silicon moulds, running a specialized resin that can survive the vulcanization process, and we take those parts that are then cleaned up again and we make a vulcanized rubber moulds to run pewter. It's not as expensive as doing plastic but it still costs a bit to do each one. You got to pay for the mould being cut and test runs, but you still get away with $400 or $500 in cost to get stuff into production. Compared to the moulds for the plastic models in the Heavy Gear kickstarter where each one is about $15,000!

FB: That is quite big chunk of change indeed! But apart from the plastics you will be doing for Heavy Gear, the pewter and resin casting is all done in-house, right?

RD: Yeah, we do everything in-house. We're working with Fusion Models who actually handles the making of the silicon moulds and Alain Gadbois, who runs that company, was actually our original sculptor back when we started the company. Fusion Models do our large scale Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles kits, but Alain is a WW2 buff and does mostly historical stuff, although there are some sci-fi stuff there as well - he's a geek like the rest of us. He's also very experienced with this, not only doing models but everything from race car steering wheels to hearing-aids to parts for military aircraft. Still, we have both resin casting and pewter spin casting set up in the office so it can be done by us with full control. With the plastics we're having a company just north of Indianapolis who are going to run the plastics for us. That way we can control the chain of command much better.

FB: Seems like a good idea considering how often companies have trouble when doing the casting in China.

RD: Yes, just being able to call up and ask them to print 500 more of something and then having it shipped by UPS a week later is a big difference compared to the slow boat from China.

FB: Alright, getting back to Jovian Chronicles for a bit and the new exo-armors. How did the idea of having stands of three exos come about?

RD: We liked the idea of having three to a stand and one of them being the leader or ace and being marked in a cool way, like with the plasma lance or the axe.

FB: Love the axe! Very Zaku!

RD: Yeah, that's the idea. The guns change as well for the leaders with the Pathfinder getting a larger one while the Wyvern gets a smaller mass-driver. The Syreen was more difficult as there's no differences in how it is equipped. So we tried sweeping the wings back and giving it a kind of forward motion which I think works.

The stands are actually moulded from piano wire which gives them this ribbing that allows them to flex without breaking easily. There is also a ball joint at each end that match up with the ball sockets at the back of the exos. So you have a lot of freedom in how you pose them. We did have to remove the Hector's fourth thruster leg to make room for the ball socket, otherwise it would have been impossible to get out of the mould.

As I mentioned earlier we're hoping to convert most of the fighters and exos to fleet scale during the course of this year and then see if there's enough demand for more spaceships and updated rules. Possibly there would be a kickstarter or doing our own crowd funding just using the website and make sure we get a certain number of pre-orders to pay for all the models, the rapid prototyping, making the moulds and so on. We get enough orders and it happens.

FB: I know it's way too early to talk timeframes here, but I expect any kind of crowd funding would happen next year?

RD: Yes, it wouldn't be this year. Now we're focused on fulfilling our kickstarter for Heavy Gear. We're getting the moulds back from China some time in April and they'll get run late April or early May and when we get all the plastics we'll be packing up orders for the next month and a half. We want to have all the stuff out for backers by the end of June and then we'll have one month to prepare all the stuff we want to take to Gencon. The plan is to have the retail version of Heavy Gear ready until then.

FB: I think a lot  of backers will be interested to hear this, of which I am one of course. Nice to hear the retail box will be at Gencon - plastics should certainly open up for a larger audience. But... getting back into space again! While they are quite small at 15mm have you considered doing some kind of equipment or conversion pack for the exos, similar to the Weapons and Drones pack that is available in the old scale?

RD: It's possible, but we don't want to get too specifik on things. If we go and say that you have to represent your miniature 100% WYSIWYG like we do with Heavy Gear we limit ourselves, because we force people to buy an insane amount of different models. We want to do something more similar to, for example, Star Wars: X-Wing where you have one X-Wing model but then you equip it with different cards and upgrades. So something similar to this, perhaps having some kind of datacard, so that you get more use out of each model. We might do some of the variants if they're different enough and depending on how they need to be cast.

We basically want to look at the parts that we have and see if we can allow people to swap or upgrade things. If we did some variants like, for example, the Wyvern Marine or Bomber that might be just a single exo-armor that you put in place of the leader to show that this squad is a squad of Marines etc.

FB: Right. So instead of a pack of conversion pieces there might be a pack of specialists or something?

RD: Yeah, probably something similar to what we did with the Heavy Gear infantry where you have basic infantrymen and one specialist in the middle of the base to show its type. That way people don't have to shell out a lof of extra money for a number of completely different squads and if you're creative you could probably magnetize the specialists so they can be swapped out as needed.

FB: I'm one of those magnet aficionados. With the new exo-armors I want to be able to use them one and one for the tactical game in the rpg as well so I'll see if I can't magnetize each mech so I can swap them around.

As we're starting to wind down, I've just got to ask about the name. We have mostly been talking about Jovian Chronicles, although the current miniature game in that setting is called Lightning Strike. Will the new/updated game be called Jovian Chronicles rather than Lightning Strike, considering it is perhaps more widely known?

RD: The final name for a new edition has not been decided yet. We’ll have to brainstorm that once work gets started on a new rule set using the new small Fleet Scale exo-armors and fighters along with the existing Jovian Chronicles spaceship miniatures. For now players will continue using the Lightning Strike rules with the small Fleet Scale exo and fighter squads representing the older individual exos and fighters. The future game may end up being call Lightning Strike 3rd Edition, Jovian Chronicles Fleet Scale, or something else entirely that we dream up.

FB: Ok. I think we've covered the new releases and the future of Jovian Chronicles pretty well by now. As a parting gift, can you tell us what is on the horizon? The Retaliator perhaps?

RD: The Retaliator and all of the other exos are queued up for Tony to work on. We do have the Fury and the Cerberus pretty much done so those might be next. And I can show you a screen capture of the Fury Fleet Scale exo armor for the CEGA faction that our 3d modeller, Tony Baltera, has been working on for a future Fleet Scale miniature release. Of course, the actual model will be tiny at 15mm so keep that in mind with regards to details.

FB: Cool, I have always liked the look of the Fury and the Syreen! Well, it has been lots of fun talking to you Robert. I hope we can do it again when we get the new rules or if there's a kickstarter in the future.

RD: Sounds like a plan. Pleasure talking to you, Martin.


And there you have it, dear readers! The lastest info on everything Jovian Chronicles/Lightning Strike. We have six new packs up for order or pre-order right now and more will be added to this line-up during the year. Rules later on and maybe a kickstarter next year. Exciting stuff indeed! Right now I'm just looking forward to using the new exos with the current Lightning Strike rules as I think they're brilliant in many ways. It will be interesting to see what the future holds in regard to the rules.

The models will also find use in the rpg campaign as I think we'll try to incorporate the tactical rules at certain times at least. Here's what I'm looking at right now, standing in front of the monitor. You might notice there are some exo-armors missing. Well... not for long now...

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A First Look at Dropfleet Commander!

Hello there, dear readers! I've been a bit absent around here as my analogue life has been a little hectic. There are some The One Ring reviews waiting to be published, some Infinity mini impressions as well as a bunch of other stuff. As things wind down here and we're back in Sweden I'll hopefully soon be back up to speed.

However, right now I want to talk to you about something really exciting and that is the upcoming spaceship battle game from Hawk Wargames called Dropfleet Commander. Or at least that seems to have become the official title after only being an internet moniker. Hawk Wargames is of course the producer of the 10mm sci fi wargame Dropzone Commander and that they have a spaceship game in the works has been known for a long time. It's also been known that Andy Chambers is the main designer behind it and as I think that he's one of the few innovative designers coming out of GW (and actually making good games while actually working for them!) it certainly made me pay attention. The last game designed by Chambers that I have played is Dust Warfare which I enjoy quite a bit.

Until now the details have been fairly sparse - having battles taking place around gravity wells rather than in deep space and most of them being centered around actually landing all those troops you play with in the ground game. Still, not much talk of mechanics and even less about what the actual ships will look like. Well... with one exception of course. For a couple of years now a huge spaceship model in 10mm scale has accompanied Hawk Wargames to various conventions. I'm sure you've seen it. If not, below are some pics courtesy of the great guys over at Orbital Bombardment (check out their podcast if you're interested in DzC!). The Avenger is a New Orleans class strike carrier in Dropfleet Commander and we have been told it's one of the smaller ships in the game. Each of the blue hangars contain an UCM Condor ready to drop.

So yeah, it's big. And now we finally know what a couple of other ships will look like, as well as the Avenger in fleet scale. At Salute Hawk Wargames brought some UCM models for the upcoming game and talked a lot more about the scope of the game and some of its mechanics. First, let's have a better look at the modes. There's a nice picture at the top of the page and here you have individual shots of the ships:

This is a Beijing class battleship and according to Dave this is about as large, or at least long, any of the ships will be. Some (dreadought!) will be more massive, but they won't get into "silly territory". I'm reeeeally glad to hear Hawk are actively taking a stand against the oversized monstrosoties from Spartan Games. Of course, speaking of oversized... those guns... they grate on my optic nerve!

Berlin class cruiser (in the middle). You can see that it, and the bb, have some big fixed forward gun.

Moscow class heavy cruiser.

And here's the New Orleans strike carrier in a slightly smaller format. I like how different it looks from the larger ships as it is meant to actually enter atmosphere and offload ground forces. More streamlined to not immediately burn up.

Paris class cruiser.

Apart from those cartoon looking guns on the larger ships I think they look really good and have style all of their own. While not super hard sci fi, they have more of a realistic feel to them than most other spaceship  models out there (not counting the guns of course). So we have the small New Orleans Strike Carrier that  drop troops from orbit, two different cruisers and a battleship.

Now the real juicy bit as far as I'm concerned is not the models but that talk about the actual gameplay, which sounds very intriguing! Here's an interview with Dave and Andy Chambers where we finally get to hear what the game will actually play like.

If you don't have the time to watch, here's the tl;dw:

• It's a completely new rules system and NOT a re-skin of Dropzone Commander (hear that Spartan Games?!).
• It's an Orbital Combat Game - not a deep space combat game. It will take place above a planet and a ground combat zone the size of France or Spain.
• You interact with the ground and actually drop troops into cities while ground and space defences try and stop you.
• There are three levels of play; high orbit, low orbit and atmosphere. 
• Things move slowly in atmosphere - "like moving through soup".
• You don't win by destroying the opposing fleet but by dropping enough ground forces.
• Avenger is frigate size and although one of the smaller ships in the game it's about the largest that can enter atmosphere. Larger ships burn up if their orbit decay.
• Points wise, similar to Battlefleet Gothic but the smaller ships have a lot more damage points (instead of just one).
• Weapons don't have a range value (or rather, they're all infinite) but ships have a Scan value (the example given by Dave is 9") and a signature value and it seems like you add these together to see if you can hit. Larger ships have larger signatures of course, and it also goes up when using lots of energy (firing weapons, changing vector). You can also ping enemy ships or try to run silent to not get detected.
• Missiles can only be taken out by counter measures when entering within actual Scan range. This seem to imply that missiles will be actual counters a la Battleflett Gothic. Missiles can and will be taken out by countermeasures automatically when fired at long ranges, so they only work up close (inside your own scan range).
• Andy pointed out that he didn't want to make yet another Age of Sails in space, like BFG, but something more modern with the emphasis on ECM vs ECCM rather than broadsides (I heard Andy took inspiration from the old naval wargame Harpoon when designing this).
• As for visual design Dave wants to really tie it all together and there are many small details in regards to this. Take the point defence lasers at the rear of the Avenger. They're just little nobs on the DfC model but if you look at the large 10mm model you see that they're actually the same cannons as the Orbital Defence Laser you can buy as a scenario model for Dropzone Commander. Very cool!
• There was some mention of campaign play, but no solid info.
• Release aimed for late 2015/early 2016, but Dave said he don't want to rush it.

And some additional info from Andy Chambers' Facebook page (thanks jgcpalmer from the Hawk forums):

• It will have slightly more ships per side than Battle Fleet Gothic.
• If everything goes to plan, there will be demos going on at GenCon.
• Internal testing is going on right now, but there will be some external testing too, and Andy Chambers will "send up a flare" when the time comes.
• Someone asked, "will the game have carriers and actual fighter/bomber miniatures?" and Andy Chambers replied "Of course!"

And finally from Hawk Wargames newsletter #40, mostly confirming the above, but with a couple of bits of new info:

• Dropfleet will be an Orbital Combat game in which the vast majority of your games will take place in orbit above a planet's surface. The game has been designed for this from the ground up by Andy Chambers and is an entirely new and unique ruleset.
• A typical gaming table is 4'x4' and will show the surface of a planet rather than the more typical 'starfield' style space combat table. The area covered will be around the size of a large European country/US State.
• Delivering your troops to targets on the surface will be crucial for victory and most missions will be tactical and objective focused. Space stations, static defences, ground troops, cities and other scenery play an integral part in the game.
• Three altitude layers (High Orbit, Low Orbit and Atmosphere) are present in games and have various effects. Only certain ships (such as Strike Carriers) can go atmospheric and each layer has advantages and disadvantages in different tactical situations.
• Weapons range is neither absolute nor fixed. It can change based on the power of your ship's scanners, the enemy ship's signature and the enemy's actions (firing several weapons greatly increases a ships signature for example). Stealth is frequently crucial!
• A framework for linking games of Dropfleet and Dropzone will be present in the rulebook, opening up many exciting possibilities for campaigns and narrative settings. 
• We still have a lot of work to do on fleet balancing and sculpting before release although the core ruleset itself is 90% complete. At this point we anticipate a release date around the end of this year/early next year as none of us want to rush this exciting and ground-breaking project! Stay tuned for more information and previews throughout this year.
• The image at the top of this article gives you an idea of the size comparisons between the various ship classes. A typical tournament-sized fleet will be around twice this size. 

That's about all the info I've been able to find and to me pretty much all of it sounds spot on what I want from a spaceship combat game. Sure, the planetary invasion bit wasn't on my wishlist per se, but I was desperately craving something other than lining up two fleets in deep space with some asteroids and a nebula for cover and this is certainly different! It also gives the game 3D space in a fairly elegant way without it getting too complex for large fleets of ships. 

I think it sounds really cool and I know for sure now that I won't be investing in Star Wars Armada until I know more about Dropfleet Commander. The scan and signature bit alone made me squeal in delight as it is one of my favourite parts in Lightning Strike. To also have this game be constructed from the beginning to integrate with ground game has me thinking that I'll finally be able to play out those large campaigns that I used to dream about doing with BFG and Epic back in the day.

Overall, this has gone from "need to know more, because it might be cool" to "this sounds almost to good to be true, and the models are fantastic as well!" which means I need to get my friends into Dropzone to kind of make them ready for Dropfleet. Hehe!

When I know more about it I'll let you know.

Oh, and don't forget that Fire Broadside is on Facebook now too. That's where I post most of the small newsy stuff as soon as I see it.

UPDATE 1: Check out Brückenkopf Online for some really great pics of the ships (like the one below)!

UPDATE 2: 

At GenCon we got our first look at the Scourge ships and they are real beauties as well! We also learned that Dropfleet Commander will be launched through Kickstarter to fund the making of plastic moulds enough for two player starter. J. D. Welch on the forums has this to report: 

"Finally, don't know if this has been reported yet, but there will be a Kickstarter for Dropfleet, coming this fall (October, probably), with an April target for delivery. Dave mentioned a couple of things with regard to this, namely that the Kickstarter will only be for the 2-Player starters (or "core kits", not sure of the exact wording here) so that retailers don't get screwed out of sales of all the other ships that will appear in DfC; and that he "wouldn't be able to sleep if we were even a week late with the promised delivery date" for the Kickstarter, whenever that ends up being."

So make sure to save some money for October! Now here are those ships courtesy of Gemana and BlackLegion...

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Star Wars Armada Impressions

Alright, so let's talk Star Wars Armada. A lot of people have been expecting FFG to release a capital ship focused starship combat game for some time and now it's finally here. Or announced at least. Seeing as X-Wing is fairly low complexity and is very much aimed at the casual gamer (as well as the hardcore!) I was a little weary that Armada might scale back on complexity as well, possibly loosing parts of what would make it interesting to me. However, after having read about it and watched Team Covenants demo game I have gone from cautiosly optimistic to fully rabid gundark! Ok, maybe not that far, but it has certainly availed most of my fears. Check out the video:

After the initial announcement I was surprised to see quite a bit of confusion and some angry rants over at BGG by X-Wing players who didn't understand the difference between the games and/or who thought FFG was just after a quick money grab. I guess having people not understanding the difference might be down to the fact that there are a lot more X-Wing players out there than people who play large scale starship combat games like Full Thrust or Firestorm: Armada. Still, I almost found it a little annoying that people expected a Star Trek Attack Wing when this was clearly something more ambitious. As you might have gathered the adherance to scale that FFG made such a bid deal about in X-Wing has gone out the window with all the ships being "relative scale". However, they still look right-ish so I don't really have much problem with it.

Box contents.

As some of you already know I'm a great fan of spaceship combat and even though I haven't played a fraction of all the games I want to play I'm always on the lookout for new stuff. You might remember my Wanted: More Spaceship Gaming article from a couple of years ago. That article is still relevant today as I have yet to find the "perfect" game. Of course, that will be very difficult as it depends on what I'm after at the moment; something rock hard like Attack Vector Tactical, or something much softer (and wetter!), like Firestorm: Armada. I'm mostly on the hard side of the fence these days but I know I will have trouble finding people to play those kinds of games with.

Now, while Armada is certainly not of the hard variety it still has enough interesting features to make me want to play it. Let's make a nice bullet point list to break it down:

• Momentum. While not as detailed as in some other games we do have momentum to the ships and you will only be able to accelerate or decelerate by using a special order for it. Your momentum also decides how much turning you'll be able to do using the funky bendable stick. Simplified, sure but also very simple and quick!
• Order planning. The larger the ship the longer you'll have to plan ahead. For the Victory SD in the core box you will make a stack of three orders of which you will use and then add one each turn, basically forcing you to plan three turns in advance all the time. The Nebulon B has to plan two turns in advance while the corvette can pick its order every turn. This is very cool! This basically combines written orders with ponderous command structure and/or ship design. Something I don't think I've seen before (although I'm sure it's out there).
• Maneuvering. Fire arcs and range plays a big role and there doesn't seem to be a cookie cutter "always best" solution to every situation (like range band 2 in 1st edition of Firestorm: Armada). It all comes down to the ship firing and what it's firing at.
• Fighters being interesting. I love how fighters and EXO armours are proper pieces in Lightning Strike and can be both upgraded and personalized as well as be a threat to almost anything on the table in the right circumstances. Armada seem to be doing something similar where fighters are more than simply tokens and you can have aces and properly screen your ships etc.
• Customization. If X-Wing is anything to go by Armada will have a similar card system for putting your fleet together. I like how this system is very easy for the new player yet still rewarding for the veteran, trying to squeeze every bit of firepower out of his force!
• Ease of use. While I'm not adverse to writing orders or having a datacard or tokens to keep track of FFG have become better and better at integrating this kind of stuff into their game hardware. In armada almost all the info tracking needed is done with various dials and tabs on the bases of the ships. Lovely!

All these things combined make for a game that I find highly interesting. Of course there are still a lot of things

that we don't know and I'm sure my thoughts on the game will change over time, but at the moment I'm pretty stoked! The Star Wars setting is probably the thing I care the least about, weirdly enough. I certainly don't dislike it but there are certainly other settings or concepts that I would find more interesting. Star Wars is also a bit limiting in that the number of factions are low as well as the number of different ships available. Still, it's perfectly servicable and I'm not complaining. I just find myself almost a little surprised that what I'm looking forward to with Star Wars Armada is the mechanics and not really the Star Wars bits. Hehe!

Image courtesy of Dice Tower News.

 The first wave will consist of the core box, which contains one Victory SD, one Nebulon B and one corvette plus a number of fighter stands, and separate releases of the same ships plus two more ships, similar to how X-Wing was released. The two additional ships will be the assault frigate mkII for the rebs and the Gladiator class SD for the imps. Both designs from the expanded universe, but I have no problem with this. While Star Wars fighters from the EU often look a little wonky and don't fit in all that well, the capital ship designs are usually a lot better and I quite like both of these. It seems like the frigate will be a larger ship for the rebs while the Gladiator will be about half the size of the Victory class. There will also be a pack of fighters for each faction and I'm happy to see that these will be a mix of different fighters including Y, A and B wings. Cool! You can see the frigate and some fighters below:

 Love the B-wings! Oh, and I REALLY hope the fighters are easily
detachable for painting. Image courtesy of Team Covenant.

Interceptors and TIE bombers for the imps, and the Gladiator SD looks pretty spiffy! Image courtesy of @twarnken.

So there you have it! I think Armada has a lot of potential and I'm eager to read more previews and hear more impressions from Gencon. While I really enjoy X-Wing I've always been more of a cap ship kind of person, and just imagine the kind of campaigns you could do by combining Armada, X-Wing and Imperial Assault! It would be teh awesome!! Haha! Well, that's all for now.

I'll be back later with Infinity news...

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More Star Wars Goodness from FFG!

Alright, so the FFG Inflight Report had some interesting reveals! FFG seem to be the Star Wars company now. Of course, as they've handled the it very well so far I'm not complaining.

You've probably heard of Star Wars Armada by now, so I'll talk about that later and focus on the news from the seminar. What as me the most excited is the upcoming Star Wars Imperial Assault which is basically Descent in a Star Wars dressing. I felt sceptical at first but reading the anouncement and description page it certainly seem to bring some new stuff to the game; the main thing being the possibility of playing it as a two player skirmish game. What might be most interesting about this release is that it is in fact a proper board game (although with a skirmish component) which FFG didn't have the license for a couple of years ago. Apparently Christian Petersen was a bit cagey when this was brought up but I fully expect to see a slew of Star Wars board game in the future. Anyway, apart from it being a board game, the combination of Descent and Star Wars shouldn't come as a surprise as Descent 2 is their best selling board game and X-wing is their best selling game.

So why am I excited about a Descent re-theme? Well... because of the theme! Although I've actally come to enjoy the Terrinoth setting it can't really compare to Star Wars, especially when you focus on the original trilogy and do it as well as FFG does! There also seem to more focus on the roleplaying aspects of the game, which I like, but this could simply be the marketing speak making it look more interesting than it really is as Descent is very roleplay light. The two player skirmish mode is an interesting way of playing the game and if executed well I think it's a great way to get some use out of your game even when you can't pull together the full number of players (four rebs and one imperial player). So... now I'm considering if maybe I should try and offload my copy of Descent and get this instead. I guess future previews will help me decide. :)

Image courtesy of BGG.

Next up we have the next expansion for Eldritch Horror and it takes on my favourite Lovecraft novel: At the Mountains of Madness! This is both awesome and a bit frustrating at the same time. Awesome because I've always wanted to explore this setting in a bord game (not to mention roleplaying game!), but frustrating as I didn't really enjoy (my so far only game of) Eldritch Horror. Then again, perhaps a more focused expansion like this might be the thing to really make it click for me. It really comes down to how it's executed though. For me AtMoM is such a rich setting that it could easily be an entire board game in its own right! I'm guessing we'll get a smaller board to add to the main board, but if it turns out to be similar to the expansions for Arkham Horror, which suffered from lack of focus (Innsmouth notwithstanding), I think I'll be disappointed. Still, very excited to see FFG tackle this. Finally!

EDIT: Oops! Had missed the official announcement here. Here's the additional board:

Alright, back to Star Wars!

Image courtesy of Dice Tower News.

Ever since the launch of X-Wing I've had a kind of half expectation of seeing a

third pirate/scum/hutt faction and now here they are, the Scum and Villainy faction for X-Wing! Although I've already collected a sizable rebel force for the game, my Star Wars heart has always belonged to the smugglers and bounty hunters of the galaxy so I'm happy to see them getting their proper outing in the game. It seems like the first scum base box comes with one Y-wing and two Z-95s plus conversion cards for Slave I and HWK-290, which means I would have a pretty decent squadron with only that box. Later on we will see the Star Viper, the IG-2000 (seen at right) and the M3-A interceptor (called it!). I'd expect more of the SWG ships to turn up as they're all over the card and roleplaying game. Finally I might be able to get my own little Dunelizard! I loved that ship. So yeah, bounty hunters and pirates and hutts! Awesome!

EDIT: Here are some better pics, courtesy of El Taller. The Scyk look waaay too big and the Star Viper look waaay too small. Still, nice models. :)

Christian also talked a lot about digital integration and explained how it will work in forthcoming games. We've seen it in Xcom and to me it looks pretty neat. As far as I can tell you have an app that takes care of a lot of the "work" of playing a board game which should help both with keeping play time down and help make much smarter AI. Plus I guess the rulebooks will be a lot shorter when digital integration is used. I'm really excited to see this in future games and share few of the worries some doom mongers cry about over at BGG.

Finally there were the usual nice, but expected, announcements like more Netrunner (bringing a new faction?), two more factions for Battlelore and that the next force focused Star Wars rpg will drop in early 2015. They also showed some of the wave 1 ships for Star Wars Armada that look pretty neat, although I was a bit surprised not to see another rebel ship. Like I mentioned above, more on Armada in its own post later.

A pretty interesting inflight report. I must admit I'm a little sad that there are no news for FFGs own IPs. I would LOVE to see a new Twilight Imperium or something using that setting. Then again, when they actually have one of Twilight Imperium's main inspirations I guess that's where they'll put their money. Still, I like the look of both Armada and Imperial Assault so I won't complain.

More news as I read them.

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