It’s been a couple of months since I last played some disappointing games of Dropzone Commander and I don’t think stewing in frustration will do any one any good so I’ve decided to take another path. No game, no matter how well designed, is flawless. In Simulation games especially, this can lead to some pretty funny interactions.
I’ve decided to illustrate some of these situations in Dropzone Commander through some new photographs. It was a lot of fun creating these scenes and, if nothing else, I hope you enjoy them. Big thanks to Colton for loaning me some of his fantastic UCM, Scourge, and Shaltari models.
FOCUS X
After rolling to hit, you can choose to discard any number of hits from a Focus Weapon and add the X number to the Energy Value of one or more of the remaining shots.
BFE pg. 299
I started with this image a few months ago and it spawned a lot of similar ideas. The main commentary comes from the Errata emphasizing that there is no maximum to the Energy value of an attack and it may a key way to attack the yet-to-be-released Behemoth models.
Shaltari Braves: Armor 9, Warsuit: … In addition, re-roll successful Collatoral Damage hits against this unit.
DESTRUCTIBLE
Each unit inside a Garrison that is destroyed instead takes 2d3 hits.
Unit builder and BFE pg. 269
Some of these rule interactions take a bit of of set up to pull off. This setting came about from those games back in October where a group of Shaltari Braves were nigh invincible in a building. Not even dropping a building on them can guarantee wiping them out.
REDUCED X
A weapon with this special rule may instead combine its fire. It instead makes 1 shot, with every foregone remaining shot … adding 1 to the Energy value of the weapon.
BFE pg. 300
But not all Shaltari are invincible…
DISEMBARKING
A squad embarked in a Transport may choose to
disembark as part of their Move action. Place them on the bard within 2″ of the Transport in coherency, and the make their moving action like normal.
BFE pg. 263
REDUCED X
If not a Close Quarters Weapon, this combined fire can be used to target Aircraft, although if doing so it reduces its R(F) and R(C) ranges to 6″.
BFE pg. 300
While infantry in the new ruleset are punching way outside their weight class, ground transports got a big range boost, delivering Infantryzone to the opponent’s face in record time. It is also funny to see that Infantry gain an Anti-Air attack without the restrictions normally seen with Anti-Air.
As I find more scenarios with these interesting results, I’ll post more as they were a lot of fun to create.
Russ Spears
Not sure if you ever had a chance to read them, but Murphy’s Rules from Space Gamer collected gems like this (overpriced collection available on Amazon), and your presentation would fit in perfectly!
Wait. What? (I kept laughing there)
Christian
Wow, I’ve never seen those. I found the PDF for a reasonable price and will need to pick that up as the examples I’m seeing are really great.
Russ Spears
I’ll have to dig out my copy to find the exact example (maybe I need a handy pdf too…) but there’s some scifi game that takes an hour or 2 of prep. At the beginning of the game each player rolls a die and there’s a 1/6 chance they’re destroyed (I think it’s a home planet explosion) before the action even starts.
#2 – A fantasy game (I really need to go look up these details) where Orcs have a negative point value when building your forces, so you can have an infinite number of them.