Cutters are speeding their way into Fridays release so let’s take a look at what they do!
Getting the obvious out of the way first, Cutters are fast! I mean FAST. These not so small ships are among the fastest ships in the game. With a Thrust between 14″ and 20″ there’s very few places to effectively hide from them.
UCM
First up, UCM get the Reykjavik and the Nuuk. The Reykjavik is a nimble, lightly armoured, heavily armed mass driver platform. With 14″ Thrust, Outlier, and Vectored, this ship can get exactly where its Twin Mass Drivers can deal most damage. Speaking of which, these are the same Mass Drivers as on the Kiev, albeit nowhere near as good at shooting into atmosphere. Still, if you can get a weapons free on a full group of 3, they can put out a lot of damage.
The Nuuk, on the other hand is both lightly armoured and lightly armed. It’s Haywire Blaster wins no awards for damage (not even a wooden spoon) but if it hits, it can shut down a whole round of planning. Forcing a larger ship onto standard orders can be crippling for its damage output, or forcing a station keeping ship off of an objective could win you that game.
Scourge
The Scourge get the Wraith and the Parasite. At 16″ Thrust and Vectored, the Wraith is quick and nimble. They aren’t particularly armoured, but are the only Cutter with two weapon systems. They’ll need that manoeuvrability to get to close range, where most of their damage will be coming from. Close Action (Beam) Plasma Brands, perfect for getting damage through pesky point defence.
The Parasite is a ship that bucks the trend of Scourge ships wanting to stay hidden. The Parasite loves Spikes, and gains a damage boost if any of the ships in its group use their Energy Siphon to drain them from other ships. This is a bit of a double edged sword though, as the Parasite that siphoned off that spike also gains it. Minor Spikes give less damage than Major Spikes, so you’ll need to decide how much you want the siphoning ship to be seen and how much damage you want to do with the group.
PHR
The Pegasus and the Ourania are the very swift looking cutters for the PHR. First of the two, the Pegasus is part engines, part nano-hive. Chock full to the brim with Nano Drones, this ship is capable of keeping itself repaired on dangerous missions far from the front lines. This results in a sizeable Regenerate of 6, that even works while Crippled! The Nano Drones are no slouch when it comes to dealing damage either, with plenty of attacks (maybe) and Close Action (Swarmer) gives its targets a difficult time defending.
The Ourania, however is a completely different ship to anything we’ve seen in Dropfleet so far. This ship acts a bit like a Scout unit does for Indirect weapons on ground, but for weapons in space. There are a few limitations on this ability, first the ship firing its weapons must be in line of sight to the target, no shooting around moons. Second is that the Ourania must be in Scan + Signature of both the firing ship and the target. A powerful ability, though thankfully (or unfortunately for PHR players) the unit is Rare and less armoured with less point defence than normal for PHR.
Shaltari
Shaltari Admirals get access to the Caesium and the Gallium Cutters. Both of these ships have a ridiculously fast Thrust of 20″ with a reasonable shield and high point defence. The Caesium is a dedicated light ship hunter though will need to be positioned well to make use of a F(N) Focused Disruptor. Fortunately the disruptor has a decent amount of attack and Calibre(L), giving it a very good chance of landing a crit on those pesky L tonnage ships.
While the Caesium is a scalpel for excising your opponents fleet of its L tonnage ships, the Gallium is more a serrated knife. Slower than the Caesium, the Gallium makes up for it with by not caring what it attacks, though will probably want to tackle larger ships. The Bio Atomiser Array may not deal damage up front, but it can stack up Corruptor tokens quick. Point defence won’t save you from this close action weapon, with 6 attacks, some of those Corruptor tokens will stick. A Gallium won’t hold up much under sustained fire, though with low sig and high thrust it should be able to put plenty of Corruptor tokens on the things that matter before they have a chance to react.
Resistance
The Resistance kit isn’t quite the same as the other Cutters. This kit can be put together in a couple of different ways , just in case you wanted all your cutters to look slightly different. The only part that matters to determine which variant is which is the prow, though. The first of these prows is the Sagittarii. Fairly tough for a Cutter, the Sagittarii has a set of N-12 Artillery Cannons. These are the same type of gun you can find on the broadsides of a Grand Battleship (though in greatly reduced number). Thanks to being mostly engine, both of these ships have 16″ worth of thrust, and a reasonable amount of hull and armour to keep them alive.
The Baleares has absolutely no weapons to speak of, unless you count Bombers as weapons. What it does have, is almost the same statline as the Sagittarii. Thanks to keeping some fighters in reserve, the Baleares has a slightly higher point defence than the Sagitarii, but you’re not taking it for that. This little Pocket Carrier is fast, and the ability to get fighters and bombers where you need them shouldn’t be overlooked.
There you go Admirals, be sure to check the TTCombat Store tomorrow (at around 3pm GMT) when pre-orders go live!
As a bonus, we’re also doing a minor balance pass at the same time as the Cutters release! This will include changes to over performing ships like the Agrippa, as well as underperforming ships, like the Triumvir. We’ve also got a couple of new Experimental Rules that should help Resistance Gunboat Cruiser builds and Dreadnoughts.