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Friday 9 January 2015

Dropzone Commander

I got an intro to Dropzone commander; which seems to be seeing a sudden surge of interest over here. Overall conclusion? It's a pretty decent game which seems to borrow quite a bit from warhammer. 

So the demo was Resistance vs Resistance, which is the new faction in DZC and we're both playing the basic starter set. Which means this is pretty much a mirror match. Which makes it a lot easier for me because I'm a total n00b and my opponent's pretty experienced so I just have to mirror him in the beginning. 

At the start of every round in DZC, you roll for initiative. Whoever wins initiative gets to activate one his troops/units first. Then players will take turns activating. If you have less troops, then you opponent just gets to chain activations after you're done. The mechanics itself are simple enough. You can move and shoot or shoot and move. Models in a unit do not have to move at the same time but they do have to shoot at the same time and all targets are declared before the shooting begins. So if you overkill something, you don't get to switch targets. Same if you fail to kill something. 

When rolling for shooting, you basically roll to hit, which is a number on your units stat card and as long as you that number or higher, you hit. Then you roll to wound; which is exactly what it sounds like. There's a chart for you to see what you need to roll to wound, which is your weapon strength vs their armor. This is basically standard warhammer stuff. You can also shoot and kill almost anything in the game, including buildings. Although buildings are fairly hard to kill with the average building having 20hp compared to a normal units 4hp. 

However, the main purpose of the game isn't to kill each other. Instead, it's to score objectives and for that you need infantry, which will go into buildings to locate the objectives and then you have to secure them or transport them back to your deployment zone. Unfortunately, infantry die really fast in this game of mechanised tanks/planes/robots so you need some dedicated transport to make sure they reach the buildings where the objectives are hidden. 

And I think I'll probably point out that one of the things I don't like about the game is the way the objective system is structured. Because finding objectives is random. At the start of your troops turn, you roll a d6 and if you roll above a certain number, you find the objective. Each consecutive turn you stay in the building, the number goes lower. But again, this seems a bit too RNG for me because people can easily get screwed by just not being able to roll that required number even after 3+ turns. Granted, it's low on possibility but it's not impossible. I just think it should be a fixed term which would reward strategy and not RNGy. 

Overall I enjoyed the game, even managing to win the demo through sheer luck since I shot down my opponents troop-carrying transport the first turn, which really screwed him over. We both tied on CP, having managed to transport one objective back to our base each but I managed to kill more things than him so I was up on Kill Points, which was the 2nd tie breaker. 

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