Met with my buddy Andrew tonight to play a game of Dropzone Commander that we’ve been planning for a couple of weeks.
We agreed to 1,200pts, special characters were allowed.
Andrew took Cato, the special character for the Ferrum drone carrier model and I took Jacosta Caine, the PHR general in an Apollo-like Type 3 walker known as a Hera. Unfortunately I forgot to bring Andrew’s UCM command cards so we didn’t do a full battle report because with special characters and no cards we felt that the game would have been pretty significantly gimped without those cards.
Nevertheless, we got stuck in and I quickly discovered that those Starsprite drones the Ferrum spits out are hellish in the extreme! Focus 4 effectively turns their normally Energy 6 shots into energy 10 with just 2 hits and a whopping energy 13 (the maximum) with 3! Considering that the game will start with 8 drones to begin with I was incredibly impressed with both the speed and the capabilities and flexibility of tactics in these drones!
We played the Intel mission so my Mercury Drones weren’t utilized to their greatest effect, though I have a feeling that my opponent Andrew may have wished that his Starsprites had the same ability as the Mercury drones did when rolling 1s on Intel because the poor guy got 3 of the damned bombs rather than any actual victory point scoring searches!
Still, with his drones and Gladius he did manage to dish out a truly punishing hail of fire on me! My freshly painted Athena was wrecked in a blaze of glory on the first turn it came out (Turn 3) but did manage to take out 2 points on Cato before it crashed into a building after being downed by a hail of anti-aircraft fire.
For me, I think the most spectacular moment was in the last turn I realized that Caine had an effective range of 36″ because she could jet up 12″ on her move and still manage to fire her 2 shots of strength 10 railguns. While those railguns were bouncing off the hulls of Andrew’s Sabres and Rapiers they did manage to do the final 3 points on to Cato and take her out!
BUT! Turns out that Cato wasn’t actually IN her Ferrum! No, she had been called away on medical leave during this battle so while her command vehicle was destroyed, the reason why the commander never played a single tactical card was because she was never on the field of battle anyhow!
With this intel retrieved from the smoking wreck of the Ferrum’s black box telemetry data, Caine has decided to double down her efforts and call in reinforcements to hunt down Cato for next week.
So, with that knowledge in mind, there is but one last question the PHR have to ask:
Will the real Cato pleas stand up?
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