Halo November Update


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Halo: Fleet Battles Update

Hello fans of all things Halo at Spartan Games. We’ve owed you this update for a while now, and we appreciate your understanding as we locked a few things down and looked to create this blog for you.

I am going to cover both of our Halo games in this blog, but let’s first start with an important Halo: Fleet Battles update for you.

It has been a fabulous first year for our Halo spaceship game and I’d like to discuss some changes to the game. During the first year, we have taken close note of feedback and created the following PDF downloads for you all:

It’s important to us to understand how folk are playing the game, and the changes you’ll find in the Clarification & Errata Update reflect this. Key rule amendments here affect MACs and Vulnerable Tokens. You will find the changes clearly marked in the document and we have added a couple of new clarifications to the document.

An important piece of feedback we got from our growing community concerned our Fleet Commanders. When we created Halo: Fleet Battles, we took a direct narrative route, embracing the fantastic Halo canon and literally running with it. What took us by surprise was the reaction from players looking to game more competitively. For these players, the Narrative Fleet Commanders and Heroes, such as Lord Hood and Cortana are not that well suited for competitive play. They wanted simpler, more evenly balanced Fleet Commanders.

Step forward our Generic Fleet Commanders to lead your Halo: Fleet Battles forces. We would certainly recommend that anyone looking to play a more competitive tournament game use these lower pointed, less powerful Fleets Commanders in their games.

You’ll notice that we have two statistic downloads for you – UNSC and Covenant. Don’t worry, we’ve not gone through them and changed everything. We have simply compiled all our statistic sheets into two easy to download and print documents. There are, however, some amends to our statistics which have come about after having had a year to look at your feedback and then compile it into our own game experiences.

Things to look out for include:

  • Marathon-class  Heavy Cruiser – changes tend to affect Point Defence, Titanium Armour, MACs and Missile Batteries.
  • Valiant-class Super-Heavy Cruiser – The Valiant now has a Special Rule to watch out for: High Value Target.
  • CPV Heavy Destroyer – Also has the High Value Target Special Rule.
  • Covenant Assault Carrier (CAS) – Its points cost has been reduced to 750.

We recommend that you download the compiled statistics and have a look around them. These now represent our master statistics and as new models come out we will append these PDFs for download. Note that these updates supersede any printed statistic sheets.

We’re confident these changes will improve the overall gameplay of Halo: Fleet Battles and we look forward to hearing more about your exciting spaceship battles in the Halo Universe!

Ground Pounding

Halo: Ground Command first arrived in August at GenCon 2016 and has, it must be said, kept us very busy since then. As you read this blog we are beginning to ship our new 1/100th scale Armoured Units (Scorpion and Wraith) which come with two types of turret each, providing the capability to engage ground and air targets. You can download the statistic cards for the four tank variants HERE.

Our first Armoured Units bring two of the most well-known tanks from the Halo Universe to your tabletop, and we’re most excited by their arrival. The Scorpion is an exciting model for us as we assisted in the creation of the Sun Devil AA Turret, which was talked about by 343 Industries, but never fully realised until now. The Scorpion comes with two variants in the box, the Sun Devil M808B2 Air Defense System and the M808 Main Battle Tank which is armed with a High-Velocity Cannon.

The Wraith comes in the shape of the Type 26 Assault Gun Carriage, armed with a Plasma Mortar, and the Type 52 Anti-Aircraft Artillery variant which is armed with a Fuel Rod Battery. Just as with the Scorpion, a player can build either variant from the parts included in a box.

Following our Armoured Units, we are working on some cool expansion packs for players to grow their infantry forces:

  • UNSC Command & Spartans Pack
  • UNSC Army Infantry Unit (including all upgrades)
  • UNSC Army Weapon Unit (including all upgrades)
  • UNSC Recon Team
  • Covenant Command Pack
  • Covenant Grunt Levies Unit (including all upgrades)
  • Covenant Jackal Marksmen Unit
  • Covenant Jackal Assault Unit

The Infantry Units will give both players plenty of flexibility in their purchasing, and we have included all upgrades for a unit should it have access to them. Productising Units in this way gives players maximum flexibility over their purchases and makes it much easier for us to deliver new Units moving forwards.

The arrival of the brand-new Jackals and UNSC Recon Teams adds some exciting new tactical builds for players. If you think about these two Units, having snipers on the tabletop will certainly have the officers of both sides diving for cover. Their ability to pick a target makes the inclusion of these Units a must-have for UNSC and Covenant players. Plus, they look cool!

Manufacturing and Shipping

We wanted to update you on our manufacturing and shipping of Halo models. Firstly, the vast majority of Halo: Ground Command models are now fully under manufacturing control and we will, within 7 working days of this blog, have fully dealt with the mail order backlog we experienced due to the high demand for Halo: Ground Command core models. If you still find you are waiting for an order of any of our products, please send an email to [email protected] so we can look into it for you.

We are, however, still working hard to resolve shipping delays with our Pelican and Phantom large scale models. We’d like to extend our apologies to those people who were impacted with delays getting hold of their models, and to those who are still affected by the delays. The complexity of these models means that we need to be super vigilant in spotting mistakes, the quality of the final product we send you needs to be high. This is translating into delays in the manufacturing process as we strive for the highest possible production level for you.

As you know we have been shipping the Pelican for some weeks now, but the backlog generated by the initial delay, coupled with a high demand, is taking longer to than we had hoped to erode. The Phantom has also been impacted by this, and whilst it is now signed off for production, we have yet to start shipping it. We would like to assure you that we are allocating as much resource as possible to resolving this delay. As you can see from the attached below, the Phantom is a beast of a complex model and we believe that when folk get their models they will be super excited with them and the quality.

Although we released the Pelican and Phantom models as mail order only products, where possible we worked with some stores to enable them to take pre-orders directly from customers. If your store is affected by the delays we would encourage you to check that they have placed their orders with us, and that they keep in contact with us to track the status. This will assist in avoiding confusion for those customers who believe an order has been placed, when it has not entered our systems as part of an actual order.

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