Deadzone: Third Edition – Creating your Strike Team is easier than ever!

Hopefully you’ve recovered from the sheer excitement of the Deadzone: Third Edition announcement. I mean, there’s so much to get stoked about – new rulebooks, new two-player starter set, new minis…

If you saw our blog yesterday, you’ll know that over the next few weeks, we’re going to be taking a deep dive into Deadzone: Third Edition to explain why it’s going to be the best damn sci-fi skirmish game ever.

First up, let’s take a look at what we’ve got planned, so you can mark your diaries, cancel all other appointments and prepare to digest all the Deadzone news…

• YESTERDAY – we kicked things off by talking about what the aim was with Third Edition
• TODAY – What’s new? Building your Strike Team
• SEPTEMBER 15th – What’s new? Changes to line of sight
• SETEMBER 16th – What’s new? Cleaning up keywords and abilities
• SEPTEMBER 17th – What’s new? Units and minis!
• SEPTEMBER 18th – What’s new? Moving the narrative along

That’s right, today we’re going through building your Strike Team. Just in case you missed it, we’ve split the rules across two books – the core rules and the force lists book. The latter is where you’ll find all the stats for all 10 Deadzone factions.

In terms of how to build your Strike Team, nothing has really changed. You still take one Leader, as many Troops as you want, one Specialist for every Troop and a Support model for every three Troops. Simples. We’ve also added the idea of ‘Living Legends’ to each faction. Some of these were miniatures that were previously only available as mercs, e.g. Kira Nikolovski, and you had to unlock them as a Specialist. Now you can actually add one Living Legend to your list, without the need for unlocks. Great for squeezing in some of those unloved mercs.

The big change when it comes to the Force Lists are the way that unit stats are displayed. One of the slight niggles with Second Edition was that some stats were shown as diagrams, while others where numbers and (perhaps the biggest problem) was that weapon options were shown on a totally different page. As a result, if you wanted to give your character a different load out, you had to flip between pages to check the stats for movement and the shoot stats for your weapon.

In Third Edition we’ve brought everything together into one place. Now all the common traits, e.g. Speed, Range, Armour, etc. are across the top of a unit entry, while the weapon options are below. Taking a look at the Enforcer Operative, for example, you can see that when armed with a Laser Rifle, it’s classed as a Troop, is worth 2VPs when killed and costs 16pts to add to your Strike Team. Whereas, if you arm an Enforcer with a Burst Laser, it becomes a Specialist that’s worth 3VPs and now costs 22pts. There’s no need to flick between pages because the data is all there.

We think this will also make it much easier to add different weapon options to your Strike Team. For example, in Second Edition if you wanted an Enforcer with a Missile Launcher, you had to select an Enforcer Specialist for 16pts, ignore the Laser Rifle stats on the profile and then add the Missile Launcher for 8pts and, finally, add everything up to work out the cost and VPs. Now, all that’s done for you and you can see an Enforcer with a Missile Launcher has actually gone down in cost to 22pts. That’s because you’re now longer paying a ‘tax’ for the original weapon when choosing a Specialist. As a result, expect to see Specialist costs dropping almost across the board.

Something else you may have noticed is that we’ve separated ‘health’ from ‘size’. In the previous edition if you were a size one model, it meant you could suffer two wounds before you were dead. So, to increase the number of wounds on a model, we had to make them a bigger size or give them abilities, like Tough, while to decrease the wounds, we had to have Fragile. Now, size has no bearing on health points because they’re separate. What’s more, talking of size, we now also specify the base size a miniature should be on, e.g. 25mm, 40mm, etc. This is important to make sure people have the correct size base but also for Line of Sight, which we’ll come to in a later blog.

The other big announcement for list building is that we will be launching Third Edition with an EasyArmy list builder. That’s right folks, you can throw your spreadsheets in the bin because now it will all be done for you. Hooray!

Phew, lots of good changes to Force Lists then, which are all going to make it easier than ever to create your Strike Teams.

DEADZONE: THIRD EDITION IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW FROM THE MANTIC WEBSITE OR YOUR FRIENDLY LOCAL GAME STORE. IT'S DUE FOR RELEASE FROM OCTOBER 25th.