Specialist Groups in Practice. How are they Working Out?

[captainrockman]

Hello,

It has been a month since the Specialist Groups came out for the major nations. I have seen them in use a couple of times, and wonder how people are liking them?

I tried out an RC group with 2 Suvorov Cruisers and an attached Tambov Gunship. I deployed them in the advance in a wedge formation (Tambov in the middle). The Tambov lacks broadsides, so this didn't hinder it at all. The cruisers helped to shield the gunship and were able to shoot their own broadsides. This is a pretty beefy group, and came to about 230 points. I think it worked out pretty well, and may prefer this to using 2 Tambovs (180 points). The group as a whole was more survivable (5 extra hull points, an extra rocket and torpedo target jammer, more AA, an extra target for the enemy etc.) and still had 4 main turrets to fire.

Has anyone else tried any fun groups?

[Landlubber]

I haven't had time to try the new groups for the French and FSA. Although the FSA do now have a specialist battlegroup that is all John Henry and Freedom robots...gotta find an excuse to get that on the table.

So, this is just my $0.02, but...while I like the idea of specialist groups in DW, this is something that we first saw in Halo: Fleet Battles. Quickdraw and I have discussed this a bit--I certainly hope that we are not seeing a move towards "homogenization" of rule sets across Spartan's various game systems. The damage track mechanic that Halo uses is similar, if not identical, to the damage track mechanic used in Planetfall. Dystopian Wars and Firestorm Armada are already both very similar.

Not saying Spartan is going that direction--they might just be cherry-picking things to use in other games. But I hope they keep them as separate as possible.