A Sciolist

I was in the mood to put together another video of a game, and originally it was going to be Dropfleet. However, shortly after deciding that, version 2.0 was announced to be coming out soon. So I decided to wait until then to give the new rules a go, and in the meantime, make a Dropzone video instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxUzfyQ-6Vc

Never played this demolition based scenario before, and it was a fun twist in both play and list building. Would want to do some tweaking to shake things up more in terms of terrain rules and things like that if we play it again, not because the scenario is bad or anything, but just to keep things fresh, as I could see this becoming a bit stale if played straight more than a few times.

You can see a few rocky terrain pieces in the video, as I finally finished some more terrain. It’s scraps of MDF, random bits of foam trash, some bark chips, and spackle. They look decent for the effort and provide some LOS blocking and table flavor.

I mentioned in a previous post that I finished up my Resistance Dropzone force. Well that was a fuckin’ lie! I completely forgot there was one more thing I needed to do. Last year I put together one of the armor boxes, and lost a piece of an Atilla. Well, at long last, I did a mediocre job of casting the missing piece on the third walker and putting it together.

Went with the ‘blue stuff’/oyumaru method to make a copy of the singular piece I needed two of:

It took a few attempts to get a mold that worked decently enough.

It is, of course, a two-part mold system, but you’ll have to forgive me as the kid took the other half after I finished everything and it vanished to parts unknown. Regardless, it took more than a few attempts to get something that was cast decently enough from said mold!

I settled on one attempt that worked out well enough, although far from perfect.

One problem I couldn’t overcome was getting the socket molded properly. I ended up giving up and just drilling it in myself, as you can see from that rough and off-center hole. I’m alright with the piece being just good enough, and not actually good, as it’s not a prominently visible component of the final assembly:

After that, I ‘finished’ my Resistance Dropfleet collection with the addition of a Myrmidon. I was originally going to build it as an Argonaut as I thought that was the best looking of the three variants when seen in the official photos, but didn’t end up going with it after getting the bits in hand. I think it’s that I really dislike the front-heavy/hammerhead look on the battleships like the Myrmidon and Elysium are built as.

Why not an Amazon? Some reasons: first, I am a contrarian fuck and have never seen it built as anything other than an Amazon. Secondly, the model has an issue that I see on all of said builds shared online and in the official photo:

The gun is angled! I test fit with mine, and it looks like it could be mostly remedied with some heat bending, but it annoys the hell out of me every time I see it in photos, as it’s supposed to be a spinal mounted gun that runs the entire length of the ship; so it needs to be perfectly aligned with the plane of the ship! Despite possibly being solvable (mostly anyway, it seems the heat bending might result in a subtle curve on the upper part of the hull over the gun barrel in order to align things), I also don’t like the narrow and long look.

Rules, while least important to me, are still a bit of a factor, and the Amazon is just A Big Gun which isn’t that interesting. The Myrmidon has some unique scanning rules which are more intriguing. The mass torpedoes of the Argonaut are fun sounding too, but I think it looks better wearing that scanning helmet. I do question the in-universe choice of having violently energetic vent cannons next to likely quite sensitive scanning and optical equipment, though.

The fleet, of course, isn’t actually finished, but much like the Dropzone collection, there’s some models I’m just not interested in:

• Phalanx: I might one day, it’s kind of visually boring since I already have a Centurion that it’s a bigger version of.
• Baleares: Hammerhead design. No.
• Dreadnought: Don’t like it. Yes, it’s customizable to a huge degree, but every build I’ve seen looks the same in the end, and mostly just look like kitbashes. Here’s my Hot Take™ about Dropfleet: it’s largely rubbish for kitbashing.
• Literally Every Possible Cruiser and Frigate Loadout: If I end up in a Time Enough at Last scenario, sure.

—

Lastly, I want to get a few disorganized comments out concerning Grand Fleet Admiral. I alluded to it in an earlier post, with full intentions to give it a proper go and review at the time. But after digging into it a bit more, I lost all motivation to do so. This is a hobby and ain’t my job, so fuck it, I’m not going to force myself to do something I don’t want to!

Why, though? Frankly: the AI art was so off-putting it killed the entire thing for me. I’ll get into that in a minute.

I did a quick read of the rules, and there isn’t anything unreasonable in there near as I can tell. Well, there is one thing that keeps coming to mind that is personally annoying to me. Terrain in a space game can be difficult, as there’s a limit in what you can actually have floating out there without getting too silly or setting-specific. GFA has the usual expected things: planets and moons, asteroid fields, and nebulae. I think the reality of the density of asteroid fields vs how they’re depicted in media has been beaten to a pulp and I’m fine ignoring that (as an aside back to Dropfleet, I like how it uses debris fields as the primary terrain feature because it makes more sense in the scale and setting and provides the same style of play that asteroid fields typically do). Nebulae, however… nebulae are described as smaller in size (6″) than planets/moons (10″). A nebula is an interstellar gas/dust cloud! They’re orders of magnitude larger in scale than planets! Anyway…

There’s a few systems that look like they could be fun to play with, such as the vanguard vs main fleet rules. It claims to be a mass scale fleet system, and it accomplishes this by disguising that it’s actually run with a smaller and more reasonable number of ‘units’; the commanders that you build groups around, and that most everything measures to/from. Mulling it over a bit, it sounds like adding ships to groups could be re-contextualized as adding modules to a single ship that provide abilities and stats.

I’m not actually opposed to this! It does provide an important purpose, stated as such by the goal of the author: scale. The spectacle of having tangible and detailed physical models to move around on the table is one of the primary strengths of tabletop gaming, and designing a system around enabling a large number of them can be a good thing, provided said system also avoids things like the tedium of placing a horde of models down that get immediately picked back up after a single round of play or anything like that.

The first thing that started putting me off was the actual design of the ship models. Each fleet does of course have their own design language, but none were very strong, or executed in a way that spoke to me. They lack the kind of detail I’d want for a modeling project; but to be fair, I never intended to use their models for this, as I don’t have a 3D printer and was just looking for a system to use my Dropfleet collection with.

It’s once I started going through the faction rulebook where things really broke down for me.

The main rulebook is 30 pages (v2.25 update 76, which is what I’ve got on hand right now). The faction rulebook (v2.25 update 76 as well) is 230 pages. There’s a lot of factions, and that comes to how the game monetizes itself. Rules are free, and they don’t sell models. They sell .stls, and so every new faction is a new set of stls. They’ve chosen to go wide rather than deep. I suppose this is to ensure they have a sufficient variety of faction flavors that any given player will find one that appeals to them. Still, there’s a few ‘main’ factions, such as the ‘Anglo European Alliance’, the ‘SINO Russian Pact’, etc., with the rest being minor players in the background.

Each faction is provided some background fiction, unique rules, and a set of commanders with AI art that began to overwhelm me with disgust as I scrolled ever longer through the PDF. Not just that, but the factions are largely paper-thin in inspiration and design, drawn from the usual menagerie of fantasy. It’s Space Vampires. It’s Space Insects. It’s Space Elves. It’s Space Japan. Each one has the kind of rules you’d expect.

By the way, I do have to share Space Cats. I’m open to some fun silliness, perhaps contrary to some criticisms I’ve leveled here or elsewhere, but I honestly don’t know how to feel about this:

Mittens, please, don’t fire the particle cannon at that civilian freighter!

I understand why AI art is used. This is a small, independent project, and the go-wide design of the monetization necessitates a good deal of art in order to sell the flavor and identity of each new faction. That would get expensive quickly if paying a real artist. The ethics of AI art have been and continue to be argued to death around the internet, and as someone not involved in the industry, I’m not going to have much unique or productive to say about it. A little bit is tolerable and honestly inevitable, I just don’t want to see or support it when it’s this blatant, fighting against the tide it may be. I’ve been talking mostly about the faction rulebook as that’s where it starts hitting you hard with it, while the main rulebook is a mixture of AI art and actual photographs of real models, so it’s not as bad there.

I also felt a little odd about something setting-wise. The background describes humans as going out to colonize the galaxy while having achieved a mastery over genetic manipulation, allowing them to modify themselves for any given environment. “Neat,” I thought, “this is how the setting justifies a variety of ‘alien’ races while retaining a connective link between them.” But reading some faction backgrounds, it sounds like there’s also straight up alien species as well? Not really a big deal to have both, it just feels a bit muddled thematically.

Anyway, I’m not going to pretend I gave it a fair shake. The rules could be good, playing it could be fun! I just can’t motivate myself to engage with it if I have to see another fucking AI portrait to do so. The rules are free on their Discord (fuck), so I’m going to leave it at the system isn’t for me, but it could be for you, so give it a read yourself and ignore my old man ramblings.