Rise of the Iornman PHR!

It begins!  I have started painting my PHR rom the starter set in an Ironman style.

This is ust the start of it all. So far all I have done is done a white primer with a Mephiston Red (a citadel base paint) coat. From here I plan on adding in gold in most of the areas that you see white. Some areas (vents, bottoms of feet, etc) will have silver.

The scheme is based off the Ironman MK43 armor.

This uses a pretty good selevtion of red mixed in with gold and silver so I have a ton of options to work with.








Here is some close ups of what I am working with!


Thoughts?

What is Dropzone Commander?

So question that most of you have likely been asking yourself if you don't already know.

What is Dropzone commander?

Top is the PHR army and bottom is the Shaltari

This is a great question! Now back in 2012 I believe during Salute which is the UK's version of GenCon (but bigger if I my information is right), Dave from this unknown company called Hawk Wargames shows up and steals the show! I mean no one knew this thing even existed!

Scourge army models

This game literally came out of no where. It did not just come out of Dave's imagination on "This is what the game will be" NO! He brought a fully created game that took him 3 years to create and released it with 4 factions, in high quality resin that can be thrown against a wall and not break or chip (everything breaks eventually but this stuff is amazing!)

Now you may be asking yourself, what makes this game so good compared to other tabletop wargames? Well this is a 10mm game that revolves around These dropships bringing in troops, tanks, and the like to the battlefield!

Now 10mm is SMALL, here let me show you how small this is.

The above picture is of the Scourge starter set in plastic that I assembled. Those are quarters and a dime in that picture to show you how big models are.

This game does a few things that many others do not. One of those things that it really nails home very well is the need for your Dropships! Now you play the game on a 4 foot by 4 foot area usually in an urban environment with buildings you can destroy that may also have objectives in them. So the play space is 48 inches by 48 inches and a basic tank moves maybe 4 inches while a skimmer may move as much as 9 inches! Now your dropships move much caster than this, we are talking anywhere from 12 to 30 inches so you can see how important it is to be a mobile force.

To add to this, the game pretty much limits the capacity to just "spam" units (which means to use the same units en-mass). This is great because you have to split your army builds not only between needing Infantry to get objectives, but tanks to destroy buildings, other tanks, and your opponents anti-air units, as well as the aforementioned anti-air units to combat gunships, dropships, fast movers, and other aerial threats. This means balance is key in this game.

Something else that makes this game great is the way forces need to be built. Now in other games, you have limits on how many of something you can take. For instance in 40k, you can have X amount of troop choices, X amount of Heavy choices, etc (at least back in 5th edition when I played). In Dropzone Commander this is taken to a whole new level!

In the picture on the right you can see that there are different choices to choose from when you build your army. Some of these choices you are required to take while others you may or may not be able to take.

Ferrum Drone Carrier for the UCM

There are 3 basic levels of play. You have your Skirmish which is anything 999 points and below, you have your Clash which is up to 1,999 points, and lastly you have your Battle which is 2,000 points and above. In each of these you have limitations on what sorts of units you take. Each unit is part of a battle-group which can consist of several units. This can be something like a set of tanks with a dropship, as one unit and a support unit (like the Ferrum). This form can be limiting to a degree but it is actually a great way to balance the game. Having each army be a bit unique beyond just their aesthetics and weapons is a great way to go in my opinion.

Well that is all for an intro into the wonderful world of Dropzone Commander. Next I think I will do some break downs on the current armies and maybe a bit of the fluff!

Thus the Misadventure begins!

Welcome all! This is a brand new blog for me (duh) into the world of Hawk Wargames! Now I say Hawk Wargames because this will encompass both Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander (Yes I am a happy backer of Dropfleet). Now the crux of this blog! To provides updates not only on my modeling and painting but also the work I am doing to increase the amount of players in my area (this is the hard part).

Where I live Dropzone Commander has yet to actually take off. Sure we have a few players here and there but we don't have anywhere near the level of play that I would like or enjoy so I will be working on that (advice ALWAYS welcome!)

Well I guess I could start by showing off what I have been doing eh?

So I started this game a few weeks back by getting the 2 Player Starter set from my my FLGS! Now I am pretty loyal to my FLGS's in my region and buy solely from them before going to any other retailers. Having said that I could not wait to get this open and built!



Now the Starter set comes with two armies at almost 600 points each. Now where near a full game and even missing some things like Commanders and artillery which is perfectly fine! It does come with some great pre-cut card stock terrain and some great posters that fold out into your play area.




I did do a play test of the game against myself to get the rules down as well as some of the feel of the game. WOW it was a fast and brutal game, things died so much quicker than other games like Warhammer 40k (created by the company that shall not be named), and the game lived up to its need of being tactical and big picture thinking which was AMAZING!



After playing this game I brought it to my FLGS and played a game with a random person who had never played a Ground based wargame before. He played X-Wing but that is wargame light to me (I play Star Wars Armada, the TRUE Star Wars Wargame!). He did some interesting things that was fun and he picked right up on the game but one could tell that he was unused to the game style.

From there I got my Prime opponent to play the game and hooked him in, hook, line, and sinker (pun intended). Now we are working on figuring out what he wants to start off on which from what I can tell is UCM.

During my research of this game I found this blog called Orbital Bombardment which also does a podcast. Well in one of their blogs and podcasts they did an upgrade list to the starter armies last christmas which you can find here. So to help out my Prime opponent we used this as a basis for figuring out what he wanted to play with.

Now! My latest works. I literally picked these up yesterday (christmas eve) and built them after work staying up till about 0300 or so (got off of work at 2330), it was a good way to bring in the holiday on my own I guess.

I bring to you my PHR and Shaltari starter sets! Now I cant wait to paint these in which I will cheat. . . a lot. I plan on applying white primer to all of the armies and then washing the models in colors that I think will look great.







Well, that is all for now, my next post will be on Dropzone Commander and what you can expect from the game. All from the aspect of a newbie like me!~