While it may not be the most popular game on the market, Dropfleet Commander is not just a solid naval game with some great models, but also a favorite of several of us here at Goonhammer. It keeps the hallmarks of naval strategy games—things like deliberate movement, firing arcs, and orders that affect your ships’ capabilities—and combines it with unique elements like energy signatures and heat spikes, then sets the entire thing over a series of dropsites that serve as objectives for your game.
With as much fun as we’ve had with the game, we were excited when TTCombat announced that they’d be releasing an updated edition of the game this fall. The new team promised a streamlined play experience that would address the balance issues that had been cropped up during 1.0, all while remaining recognizable as the fleet-action game we all know and love.
Now, Dropfleet Commander 2.0 is finally out, and it’s time to see if the good folks at TTCombat have been able to deliver on their promises. Read on as we look at how the new edition stacks up against what’s come before.
Thanks to TTCombat for providing us with a review copy of the 2-Player Starter Set for this review.
So, what are the biggest changes for 2.0?
- Expect stuff to live a lot longer than before, as we have a triple whammy of damage reduction in play between access to save reduction still being limited, criticals no longer bypassing saves, and saves being on a per-hit rather then per-damage point basis. Even concentrated firepower will fail to drop ships with good saves, especially with some having backup saves that mitigate even more damage
- Orders are more flexible with even basic ones offering potentially more firepower, support options, or maneuverability depending on the order in question
- A more streamlined experience, you’ll expect less convolution to any particular section of gameplay. As seen in things like the changes to ground combat, close action/point defense merging into regular attacks and saves.
- The new mission/secondary/scoring rules offer a bunch of interesting challenges to help with list diversity and creating multiple viable strategies, but could be overwhelming to new players so be careful about introducing them
- Assets like fighters, bombers, and torpedoes are persistent so expect another layer of playing around anticipating where wings can end up and beware of torpedos being more flexible.
Rockfish:
I’ve only gotten a chance to play a single game and paint a trio of models as the preview kit arrived close to release in a time when I was already up to my eyeballs in life stuff, but I had a ton of fun in that game!
While neither player had touched the new edition it mostly went smoothly though there were opportunities for getting tripped up by previous edition expectations, the biggest probably being that stuff really doesn’t die like it used to. For our game we only had access to the fast play sheets, but neither of us was prepared for the Bruges to tank both the Comet and the Catastrophe along with a random scattering of frigates for several turns after a first glance at the number of weapons going into it. In general, the changes to how crits and weapon effects have changed makes for quite substantially different feeling weapon balance, it felt fine but if you’ve played the previous edition of the game you’ll need to keep it in mind.
I found the new flight assets pretty interesting, having them be more then essentially delayed action guns is pretty cool, and it feels neat to be able to have carriers out of the scuffle but still boosting the ships in the fight or dealing damage. I will admit though that it does contribute to an element both of us noticed, which is while every action is streamlined overall the game doesn’t really feel any faster despite that being a hope in the prerelease material. Between units living longer and more things hanging around between turns it means that you just have more stuff to do for longer, this isn’t really a disadvantage given that you do get to play with your toys more but still makes for a decent length game. It was admittedly a first game and there were opportunities for things to move faster, but our game still ended up lasting around two and a half hours with the fast-play fleets which are around 600 points a side. I’d expect to shave half an hour off on another game but the new style of alternating on a per-group basis also makes it tricky to plan more than a handful of moves ahead, which does create a lot of risk for dead time as the game gets more complex over the course of a match as chasing a win condition gets more difficult.
We didn’t get a chance to try the new scenario builder, but at first glance, it felt like there were some interesting scoring and map types and it seems like it could be something to help keep list building and games fresh for a while. It does seem like there are a lot of moving parts to track however, and a few of the scoring types encourage odd play styles that might make certain matchups very difficult. This isn’t strictly an issue but be careful about ramp-on for new players for the game, and we’ll have to see if a few of the scoring types that don’t include standard scoring become skewing of balance excessively.
A big plus I’ll call out is that picking up the game feels much faster then the previous edition as there are a far fewer unexpected inconsistencies and most mechanics feel a bit tighter, so if you want to drag friends in then this is probably the best time to do so. It’s worth highlighting that particularly if you are coming from 40k it will feel far more familiar a process than before, while it’s clearly a different beast you’ll feel a lot of overlap in the damage loop and interacting with objectives.
In closing thoughts, I am very excited to play more games in the new edition both with previous opponents and hopefully by dragging a few other friends in. The drop of the digital rules and the full ship stats has meant I’ve spent a while nerding out over all the toys the resistance and UCM have to play with, and I’m hoping to give them a try soon!
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