Dropfleet Commander News Part 2 The Shaltari and PHR

Well here we are again ladies and gentlemen. This time we are going to go over how Shaltari Gates work and what information HawkDave gave us in the interview with Beasts of War.

Troop Landing/Gating: How it has been explained:

So lets go over how troop landing is going to work for all the factions. Shaltari obviously do this a bit differently.

First off there are two types of ships that land forces for all the factions except Shaltari. The first is the Strike Carrier. They deploy Dropships onto the objective sector and can deploy 2 types of tokens. They can deploy troop tokens and armored tokens. As HawkDave stated in the video, you would use these against targets that have defense batteries. They are good at this because they are more nimble. 

Each Strike Carrier can drop 1 token a turn but only while on the Atmosphere level.

The second type of ship is the Troopship, also known as the Mothership. These carry bulk landers which drop 4 tokens a turn. They are not as nimble as the Dropships that the Strike Carriers deploy but they deploy more in a single spot a turn. They deploy either troops/armored (unknown if you can mix and match) or Defense Batteries. These ships have to be in Low Orbit and can not go into Atmosphere or they burn up and go boom.

Shaltari Gating: works a bit differently. First off the Shaltari have a Mothership but it stays towards the back and does not have to enter low orbit. The Shaltari use their Voidgates (the lil flying saucers) which come attached to every cruiser sprue. The Mother ships can deploy 3 troop/armored tokens a turn through different Voidgates. Each Voidgate can materialize only 1 token per turn but can move tokens from one spot to another easily (no other faction can do the second part). Each Voidgate has to be within 18" of a mothership to be used.

The Shaltari dont have the ablity to drop Defense Batteries on the ground BUT the Voidgates have an ability like the Eden and Gaia do in Dropzone Commander. The ability is a charged atmosphere like ability and so drops conducted around the Voidgate functions like a weaker Defense Battery. 

Something, that HawkDave did state is that the Gates can extend the range of the mothership but it is unsure on how far and what limitations are included. 

HawkDave stated in the video that he thinks 3 Voidgates per Mothership is ideal but I expect to see an extra layer (4-5 per Mothership). He did state that each Voidgate will cost around 10 points which makes me thing that the games will be at tournament level about 500 or so points (just my opinion don't go quoting me on that one)

Shaltari Adamant Battle cruiser:

The weapons are 2x Particle Lances (the top weapons) which are reported to to be reliable damage that ignore armor so I am expecting Lock 2+ which means on a roll of a 4+ you ignore armor.


The bottom weapons are 2x Disintegrators which we did not get much information on but I believe they were shown in the Shaltari video. 

PHR Frigates 

The PHR have some exotic frigates. From what we know of the other races frigates, each one will have unique things about them. For instance one of the UCM Frigates is a Missile boat which means it has to get into extreme close range but it launches so many missiles with its sisters (every ship is female) and overloads the enemies Point Defenses. The Scourge have a Frigate that have guns facing upwards which makes me believe that they will be hunting cruisers and frigates from the Atmosphere level. It is all very exciting!

The Calypso has no weapons but it is able to shield a friendly ship increasing the Lock value of an (maybe all) attacks against the protected ship. Knowing Hawk this is unlike to stack.

Here we have the Medea Strike Carrier. As all Strike Carrier it launches troop or armored tokens onto sectors. Unlike other strike carriers, this ship is reportedly able to conducted Orbital Bombardment (shout out to my favorite DZC blog and podcast!) attacks without any penalties. I have heard from a possible Admiral backer who has his mitts on the beta rules that it does not have any special rules showing this but I cant confirm anything.

This lil beauty (feel read to read that in an Aussie accent) is the Pandora and she is pure win! Per HawkDave in the video, she is currently the only Frigate with a Burn Through Laser! This means you can use her to give spikes to enemy ships, you can push damage through. It can be quite the tool in our box.

HawkDave did not give this one a name and it was not on the campaign but it is the only Escort Carrier in currently in the game. This means that it launches 1 base of fighters or bombers. Since you can have a group of 4 that means 4 bases a turn. We dont know much about the rules on squadrons yet so we will see if this is useful or not.

Oh! One Frigate I am not covering is the Europa. It is the PHR's standard Broadsiding Frigate with their basic guns.

The Leonidas Battlecrusier

As we can tell. . . this thing is a thing of beauty. HawkDave did confirm that this ship does not have any frontal weapons so don't expect a full on charge to be the best thing ever. HawkDave did state that it is not much slower than a PHR Cruiser while the PHR Battleship will be the slowest of all ships. We dont know much about its weapons other than the top row is the standard PHR guns.

The Leonidas is immense . . . it makes me want to set a second one and paint it like an orca. . . GAH!!! Why must you tempt me!!!





















What is your favorite ship so far?