Dear Backers,
We thought we would give you a little more information with this update for you.
Firstly, it gives us great pleasure to announce that pledges have been arriving with backers from today onwards! It's been a long journey for us to get to this point as we've expanded and met the challenges that the sheer success of the Kickstarter presented. Our warehouse is straining at the seams with over 150 pallets of product and we can't wait to get it out to you all!
As the shipping process continues we'll be able to provide a clearer picture of our schedules once we establish a reliable daily boxing/dispatch rate. We are working closely with our dispatch partners to ensure our packages reach you as quickly as possible. With around 4000 individual orders to pack, label, log and dispatch this will be by far the largest shipping operation the company has ever undertaken, so please bear with us over the coming number of days as we ship your orders. We're working as fast as we can to get them to you. You'll be provided with individual notifications once your order is ready for dispatch where possible, so please keep an eye out for that.
Some more details for you all:
As it is now shipping, we want to talk a bit more about the rulebook and the game, specifically, what we've added or improved since the Kickstarter was originally launched.
The rulebook has been a truly gargantuan effort for all of us! At a whopping 224 pages it is quite a bit larger than originally planned, offering the game the depth and immersive experience that it deserves. In addition to over 60,000 words of background, an extra level of polish has been lovingly applied to the look and feel of the book, right down to showing the real world dimensions of almost every ship in the game!
Although all this added to our workload and pushed our schedule back a little, we think it has been worth it for the increase in quality and content of the product and the whole game. We can comfortably say without reservation that it's the best publication that Hawk Wargames has produced to date and is a book we can all be justly proud of. We hope you enjoy consuming it!
The beta test with our Admiral backers proved extremely useful and we have incorporated a wide range of improvements and adjustments to the rules based on this feedback. In addition to streamlining and many balancing adjustments (points costs, unit prowess etc) we've also made several global adjustments to the relative effectiveness of weapons and tactics. One example of this is that most carriers can't launch quite as many Bombers as before, bringing their destructiveness into line with regular weapons.
We've also added some whole new elements that were either missing from the beta or have since been incorporated into the ruleset. Here are some of the highlights:
1) 'Ramming' is now in the rules!
This has been discussed at considerable length, and has now been added due to popular demand and (admittedly) for sheer fun factor. However, since ramming in the Greek Trireme sense is extremely hard to pull off in high velocity space combat, the actual thing your desperate captain is doing when you ram is closing to suicidal point blank weapons range and/or detonating the drives for massive devastation. Since this always results in the destruction of your ship, you can only do this when the ship is almost destroyed as a last and desperate attempt to drag the enemy down with you! If you can pull off a successful ram though, the results can be devastating... Rolling a number of Lock 3+ dice equal to your starting hull points can be RUINOUS, especially if it's a 22 HP battleship doing the ramming...
2) A range of rules for orbital scenery
These add greatly to reasons for manoeuvring and provide a plethora of tactical options for players. Most of the game's scenarios incorporate some orbital scenery and we find it improves the gaming experience greatly. Most common is Debris Fields, a constant threat in wartorn orbits of the Cradle Worlds. These come in Fine and Dense varieties, each bringing their own opportunities and challenges. For example, Fine types are particularly dangerous to strike craft, whereas Dense ones do more damage to ships that fly through them. There are also Planetary Rings (essentially, a fine strip of debris bisecting the table) and Large Solid Objects (LSOs), being small moons, orbiting asteroids and massive orbital plates. Since scenery is now integral to the game, the 2 Player Starter Set now also includes punch out card Fine and Dense debris fields!
3) Detailed rules for Space Stations
These are common sights in the orbits of the highly developed Cradle Worlds and are now included in many of the game's scenarios. Often, these are worth Victory Points and present a different challenge than Clusters when it comes to taking them, as Strike Carriers cannot hide in Atmosphere while dropping troops on them, making Troopships far more durable for the task. The core rules even include a set of standard armaments for them, often adding an extra reward for holding them as the scenario dictates.
4) Three new special Sector types
These add flavour and variation to some of the new scenarios in the book and can be used to make some awesome setups of your own. Orbital Defence Sectors feature colossal anti-orbital guns that can engage enemy ships if you hold them, Power Plant's give a highly valuable (but volatile) objective that does massive damage to all other Sectors in the Cluster if destroyed, and Comms Stations give your ships added Scan Range if you hold them. Tokens for these new Sector types are now included in the 2 Player Starter Set in addition to the original 3 types.
5) Approach type
This is a new part of every scenario. It dictates how a fleet approaches the battlespace, be it in an ordered battleline or in a chaotic and rapid response to an emerging threat. There are six types in total and these greatly change the dynamic, often feeding the fleets into the maelstrom over several turns, making Energy Spikes a lot more instrumental late game. You can also change the suggested Approach Type in any scenario, altering the shape of the game and adding to replay value.
6) Command Cards
These add an extra tactical and immersive layer to the game. Much like in Dropzone Commander, these are not essential and can be added once you've got used to the core rules. These will be released in early 2017 for all four factions and the rules for them are now also included in the core book.
7) Integration with Dropzone Commander
Five pages of the book are dedicated to integrating the two games together in various ways. How you do this is going to be massively dependant on the size of your gaming group and the amount of time available. As such, the rules give multiple options, catering for in depth campaigns with multiple players, 2 player time-lapses, campaigns days and much more! The close ties between Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander will be integral to some exciting global campaigns we have planned in the near future!
We hope you enjoy the Rulebook for Dropfleet Commander and are as excited as we are to finally see it released into the wild! In the following updates, we shall include a range of other updated information like this, including more images of the final reward items going out. We shall have further shipping information for you soon.
Kind regards
The Hawk Wargames Team
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