The Hunt for the Prometheus starter set contains everything you need to play Dystopian Wars, containing;
30 Highly Detailed Plastic & Resin Miniatures
1x 14 Ship Covenant of the Enlightened Fleet
1x Descartes Class Control Ship
1x Hypatia Class Generator Ship
3x Copernicus Class Heavy Cruisers
Each Cruiser can alternatively be built as either Antarctica, Chatelet, Lovelace, Stiletto or Ulysses Class
9x Merian Class Drone Frigates
Each Frigate can alternatively be built as Germain Class
1x 16 Ship Commonwealth Fleet
1x Borodino Class Battleship
5x Kutsov Class Cruisers
Each Cruiser can alternatively be built as either Norilsk, Oleg or Sineus Class
10x Rurik Class Frigates
1x Rule Book
1x Campaign Book
2x Victory & Valour card Decks
60 Cards in each deck
1x Template Set
40x Action Dice
12x Critical Dice
2x Condition token sets
1x Iceberg & Physeter Construction Token Set
3x Medium Bases
Pacific wrote: Interesting stuff, the HIPS is a good start. I loved some of the previous miniatures, but they seemed to be a difficult resin to work with.
Rules wise - I had assumed they would just be using the previous rule versions (or similar). Was that an incorrect assumption to make?
I need to flog the local for not giving more details, but according to him it’s a complete restructuring of the rules.
Honestly, I'd prefer the resin, it was usually just hull+large slab of superstructure+metal turrets, super easy to put together (when not miscast) vs cutting, trimming and gluing multiple pieces per even a small frigate. But I realize people prefer plastic as a whole so that makes sense.
Cool models that, as others have mentioned, make Armada look a bit like an exercise in playdough. The first two iterations of the rules used rolling buckets of exploding dice that left very little room for any attempt at strategy, so a solid playthrough/review will be the base minimum for me.
Also not a fan of the fluff crossover with the ameritrash WWX, but I'm old enough to know that ignoring the official fluff is not an actual crime and I like the general model design (some other factions had been previewed a few years ago at some convention and looked sick).
Are there any US distributors for this? I loved the game originally despite its failings, and would love to see it return, but this preorder is coming at a spendy time, as is fairly costly.
I'm sure Wayland/Warcradle will have enough influence to get the word and product out to the USA; though the current UK trade situation* might mean that they are focusing a bit closer to home and might branch out overseas in the new year more heavily.
This news is also very fresh so it might just be some of the overseas stores haven't caught up yet.
*not just Brexit, but also the global mess that is international trade at present.
Its a new 3rd Edition of the rules, the exploding dice concept is very much still part of it (and isn't going away). Last iteration of the playtest rules I saw had attack dice explode, but defense dice didn't - also used custom d6s with symbols BUT there was a conversion table provided if you wanted to use your own d6s.
The rules are new and improved (debatable on the improved bit, I always thought the rules were trash and I think they continue to be trash, but thats IMO), but not a huge departure from previous editions of the game. Heavily stripped down, streamlined, and simplified, but the core gameplay concepts remain largely unchanged from the Spartan era.
Not all of those plastic ships have variant builds from what I understand - 3 of the Antarctican and 5 of the Russian cruisers have variants, and the Antarctican frigate has one variant, but thats it.
Legacy Dystopian Wars models may not be useable - IIRC Warcradle is going to release some sort of "Legends" statblock for them or whatever so they can be used in casual play with the new rules (don't quote me on that, Im not 100% positive they said they would), otherwise everything for the game going forward is going to be 100% new sculpts and designs. None of the ships in this starter box could be found in the previous iteration of the game, for example - they are all new designs with new names, even if they may have some design overlap with previous designs from the Spartan era.
My impression is that WC will basically say "use old ships as proxies for new ones." Even if they make a chart to say what old ships might count as in the new forms.
It's basically a full remake of the game with a full restart.
Yeah, maybe thats what they were planning to do. I dunno. Either way, yes it is a full reboot of the game in every which way, including the setting and the factions (most are staying relatively unchanged, a few are being combined/reworked/eliminated/created new, etc.).
The previous editions, and Firestorm Armada are like weird junk-food to me. I know they're objectively terrible, but I also love them, and they scratch an itch nothing else quite does.
As long as you know that its objectively terrible, thats all that matters. If it scratches an itch then its okay to like it lol.
I can understand the appeal though, the Spartan games were for the most part super casual, fairly rules lite, and boiled down to fun dice-chucking.
I would never want to play it with anyone who had an expectation of a balanced or competitive outcome or who treated it as anything other than a simple dice-chucking game with some cool minis though. I think people who took those games too seriously are ultimately what ruined it for me.
Spartan Games also filled a niche that has not been filled in decades - high quality seafaring games - with a big touch of fantasy/sci-fi.
I still hope that WC might relent and make the ground assets in ship scale as having vast thundering airfields is just pure steam punk/sci-fi dream stuff.
Even with Dropfleet Commander now on the market there still hasn't really been an explosion of space games either. Again Spartan found and filled those niches really well and its fantastic to see that WC are following in their design footsteps (the FA stuff on facebook has been outstanding to look at and its just concept designs/sketches).
For me it was a line of games I desperately wanted to love, because they were unique and had cool models (the final generation of Uncharted Seas ships, 8 years ago, is light years ahead of the fantasy ships Mantic just put out by any metric except personal aethetics) but my god the rules could literally be boiled down to "throw dice at each other, whoever has more 6s wins" with some clunky ordnance thrown in so you would think there's an actual game going on.
1st gen Uncharted Seas really showed that they were learning both casting and design ideas; but yeah by the end they had really solid work in both areas. It's a huge shame they could never take it just that bit further.
I'd honestly be fine with a fun beer&pretzels junkfood affair that lets you duke out an epic cinematic naval dusting in an evening on a ridiculous table like this one;
https://youtu.be/ohzTOoN8SNo
Precisely like @lord_blackfang I desperately wanted to love this game, made a point to paint my Antarctica fleet before the first game and then watched in utter horror as half of it sank and burned before getting into effective range, when his Russians rolled a couple of exploding 6s.
We're getting into Man O'War (the old GW's salty grandpa), and it seems like the right mix of cartoony violence and meaningful choices ...
Overread wrote: Spartan Games also filled a niche that has not been filled in decades - high quality seafaring games - with a big touch of fantasy/sci-fi.
I still hope that WC might relent and make the ground assets in ship scale as having vast thundering airfields is just pure steam punk/sci-fi dream stuff.
Even with Dropfleet Commander now on the market there still hasn't really been an explosion of space games either. Again Spartan found and filled those niches really well and its fantastic to see that WC are following in their design footsteps (the FA stuff on facebook has been outstanding to look at and its just concept designs/sketches).
Theres always plenty of space and naval games coming and going - they don't really seem to sell very well/ever really catch on despite the apparent demand for them (sometimes makes me wonder if its possible for any naval game without "Battlefleet Gothic" in the title to succeed, given that even Star Wars Armada has been struggling).
As for your steampunk scifi dream, if Warcradle doesn't scratch the itch, someone else will.
Precisely like @lord_blackfang I desperately wanted to love this game, made a point to paint my Antarctica fleet before the first game and then watched in utter horror as half of it sank and burned before getting into effective range, when his Russians rolled a couple of exploding 6s.
My first game of Uncharted Seas was also my last. I was playing iron dwarves against an opponents bone griffons (or whatever the undead were called), both of us playing for the first time. Opening salvo from my battleship against my opponents had hot dice, caused the most supercritical critical damage result possible, sunk their battleship in a single blast, the aoe on it sunk all of his frigates and two of his three cruisers (the third one was heavily damaged/crippled). My opponent conceded on the spot, vowed never to play the game again (and sold his fleet some weeks later). The small gaggle of observers from our gaming group watching this likewise said they were uninterested in ever trying the game, those who already bought stuff for the game likewise sold their stuff or simply just avoided ever playing the game again.
NewTruthNeomaxim wrote: Are there any US distributors for this? I loved the game originally despite its failings, and would love to see it return, but this preorder is coming at a spendy time, as is fairly costly.
My FLGS has it on pre-order for $89.95 so it must be available from some US distributor.
Overread wrote: Spartan Games also filled a niche that has not been filled in decades - high quality seafaring games - with a big touch of fantasy/sci-fi.
I still hope that WC might relent and make the ground assets in ship scale as having vast thundering airfields is just pure steam punk/sci-fi dream stuff.
Even with Dropfleet Commander now on the market there still hasn't really been an explosion of space games either. Again Spartan found and filled those niches really well and its fantastic to see that WC are following in their design footsteps (the FA stuff on facebook has been outstanding to look at and its just concept designs/sketches).
Theres always plenty of space and naval games coming and going - they don't really seem to sell very well/ever really catch on despite the apparent demand for them (sometimes makes me wonder if its possible for any naval game without "Battlefleet Gothic" in the title to succeed, given that even Star Wars Armada has been struggling).
As for your steampunk scifi dream, if Warcradle doesn't scratch the itch, someone else will.
Precisely like @lord_blackfang I desperately wanted to love this game, made a point to paint my Antarctica fleet before the first game and then watched in utter horror as half of it sank and burned before getting into effective range, when his Russians rolled a couple of exploding 6s.
My first game of Uncharted Seas was also my last. I was playing iron dwarves against an opponents bone griffons (or whatever the undead were called), both of us playing for the first time. Opening salvo from my battleship against my opponents had hot dice, caused the most supercritical critical damage result possible, sunk their battleship in a single blast, the aoe on it sunk all of his frigates and two of his three cruisers (the third one was heavily damaged/crippled). My opponent conceded on the spot, vowed never to play the game again (and sold his fleet some weeks later). The small gaggle of observers from our gaming group watching this likewise said they were uninterested in ever trying the game, those who already bought stuff for the game likewise sold their stuff or simply just avoided ever playing the game again.
That happened to me once. Exploded my battleship on top of one. Explosion took out several nearby cruisers. One of those exploded and did more damage. We’re like yeah, that was dumb. Wanna just reset and start over? Sure. I’ve also lost a game of Pandemic before I even got to take my turn.
I played 1, maybe 2 games of DW but surely half a dozen of Firestorm Armada and a brainless instant-win lucky shot happened in every single one. Worst one was like 30 successes on 10 dice, and I'm not interested in being lectured that that's national lottery level odds and doesn't make the game bad.
Personally I much preferred Uncharted Seas anyways. Far more fixed direction weapons and wind to factor in. Made maneuvering much more important than everyone has tons of turrets and engines Dystopian Wars.
I've still got a Japanese Fleet from the original ruleset.. not going to be able to play around with the new rules, so maybe I should try to get rid of them now.. hmmm
I mostly want a Dystopian wars Ottoman Flying crusier. Those sprues could be really useful in Battle Fleet Gothic conversions, though 3D printing is kind of making that moot.
I've watched a couple of (by now a year + old) batreps by Guerillaminiatures and OnTableTop and it seems like they've mitigated the worst of the disaster that used to be the shooting phase. Can't recall if any of this was in the previous edition, but there are now three "types" of hits and the light ones (1 of 3 on d6) are negated by cover, some types of defense etc. The number of hits from the bucket o'dice must now meet the armour value for every point of damage and target player rolls to defend (2 shield sides on d6). Smallest ship classes can still get blown out of the water in a single barrage, if it crits, but the bigger stuff seems to have more staying power.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: I hope there’ll be an economical way to obtain some of those sprues.
Not if there will be a hard brexit!, and that is prolly their biggest threath, should it happend, they will have a hard time selling the game outside their little playground.
Allso if they do not allow the old resin ships for non turny matches, they are going to shoot themselfs in the foot for the first 12 months. (im biased here as i have atleast a resin russian starter fleet box plus some single models at home)
Sprues seems a bit too heavy on the parts, as someone else said here, the resins was perfect; hull, bridge cannons, finished.
Less then 15 min including flash trimming to whip them up, the smaller boats was even 100% single piece. But i guess thats how plastic creations is nowadays, no solid block of material, just hollow, weightless substance.
Plastic is going to increases parts because of the nature of casting plastic; but honestly time to build shouldn't be an issue because this isn't a game where you need 30 cruisers to make one unit and where you might field 10 units.
As for old ships my impression is they won't ban them; they'll just take GW's angle of "do what you want, proxy all you want; but our marketing is 100% on the stuff we are selling not the stuff we no longer sell (esp since WC didn't profit from the bulk of the SG original cast sales and from what I can gather they've not really profitied from the casting they've done of them since purchasing SG's material)
Overread wrote: Plastic is going to increases parts because of the nature of casting plastic; but honestly time to build shouldn't be an issue because this isn't a game where you need 30 cruisers to make one unit and where you might field 10 units.
As for old ships my impression is they won't ban them; they'll just take GW's angle of "do what you want, proxy all you want; but our marketing is 100% on the stuff we are selling not the stuff we no longer sell (esp since WC didn't profit from the bulk of the SG original cast sales and from what I can gather they've not really profitied from the casting they've done of them since purchasing SG's material)
Im not expecting them to market or support SG products when they have released their own, i just wish for a place for the SG models in this new version since thouse models will dominate the table content for a long time.
When WC manages to produce all the old factions, then they can do a "GW legacy" move on the SG models.
It should be fairly obvious why the SG minis aren't bekng supported - Warcradle cant easily make money off of them because the existing community already owns them and its not yet clear what support exists from newcomers. If the SG legacy sculpts see validity I expect it will come later, after Warcradle has seen returns by selling new content first, and brings in sufficient new blood that they can sell old stuff again.
I get that, sure, but Kings of War has also shown there is merit in playing the long game and picking up an orphaned playerbase to quickly grow your own. Every veteran begrudging being told he has to rebuy his army could have been an instant, free opponent attracting fresh customers.
There was a rulebook trade in program tho, so Warcradle seems to value old players. I'm not fully ready to believe all old models will be invalidated.
From what I have read in the past, the answers to a number of raised questions are:
Free Rules: WarCradle has stated they will provide free rules online for all their games, just like they do for Wild West Exodus. They even just closed (on 12/17) a free printed rulebooks (Dystopian Wars and Armored Clash) offer for anyone who had a Spartan Games DW rulebook.
Using Old Models: They stated they would provide an old models proxy list to allow you to use your older models in place of the newer models. Their hope is that the new models will be so attractive that you will buy them because you want them, not because you have to. However, the scales may not be exactly the same.
New Production of Old Models: They have already done limited runs of the old Spartan sculpts based on their ability to use the materials they got. No plans to keep them running indefinitely. Instead, many new sculpts are updated versions of the old sculpts.
with regards to new production of old models, I believe they discontinued that practice. Was dogging through older posts on their blog, seems the "classic" range was limited as they claim they didnt have full access to the original models, molds, sculpts, and files.
Using Old Models: They stated they would provide an old models proxy list to allow you to use your older models in place of the newer models. Their hope is that the new models will be so attractive that you will buy them because you want them, not because you have to. However, the scales may not be exactly the same.
Well, cant buy what is not beeing made, or not avalible due to political changes.
With 7 major factions and a dusin minor factions, it is unrealistic for WC to expect that the first two years will mainly see their plastics on the tabletop, and we have no idea of the speed faction releases will be at.
I am 100% in support of DW and future Armada, but WC should face some of the realitys of the current world.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: I hope there’ll be an economical way to obtain some of those sprues.
Not if there will be a hard brexit!, and that is prolly their biggest threath, should it happend, they will have a hard time selling the game outside their little playground.
Allso if they do not allow the old resin ships for non turny matches, they are going to shoot themselfs in the foot for the first 12 months. (im biased here as i have atleast a resin russian starter fleet box plus some single models at home)
Sprues seems a bit too heavy on the parts, as someone else said here, the resins was perfect; hull, bridge cannons, finished.
Less then 15 min including flash trimming to whip them up, the smaller boats was even 100% single piece. But i guess thats how plastic creations is nowadays, no solid block of material, just hollow, weightless substance.
We trade all the time with nations with no free trade deal, a very small amount of duty wont have much of an impact. Shipping times might be slightly slower but we can act on and anticipate those.
Using Old Models: They stated they would provide an old models proxy list to allow you to use your older models in place of the newer models. Their hope is that the new models will be so attractive that you will buy them because you want them, not because you have to. However, the scales may not be exactly the same.
Well, cant buy what is not beeing made, or not avalible due to political changes.
With 7 major factions and a dusin minor factions, it is unrealistic for WC to expect that the first two years will mainly see their plastics on the tabletop, and we have no idea of the speed faction releases will be at.
I am 100% in support of DW and future Armada, but WC should face some of the realitys of the current world.
The production of the classics miniatures is not really viable for most of them. We have produced what we can from the molds we had and as they begin to break down the yields drop. It is not worth us mastering new molds for a handful of sales. Much better for us to focus our resources on products that will sell in higher volumes.
We trade all the time with nations with no free trade deal, /.../
All of which have functioning border facilities and logistics infrastructure in place, so saying "shipping times might be slightly slower" is at this point so much wishful thinking, at least as far as EU is concerned. As for the "very small amount of duty", it's not the whole picture. I don't expect Wayland to guarantee the current shipping costs to EU after 1. 1., with the quite possible additional costs of bureaucratic processing.
chaos0xomega wrote: with regards to new production of old models, I believe they discontinued that practice. Was dogging through older posts on their blog, seems the "classic" range was limited as they claim they didnt have full access to the original models, molds, sculpts, and files.
And according to their own words, they were a waste of time. Unsurprisingly, the vocal minority that clamored for the chance to buy old models turned out to be vocal, and nothing more, unsurprisingly.
although as I don't think all the old stuff was available (?) it could be some of the demand was for stuff that spartan hadn't been supplying recently as the moulds has failed and they didn't have time/money to make new ones,
and those would be the things that weren't available here either as there were no decent moulds (or perhaps even masters)
From what I gather WC got a mess of a pallet from the administration sell off of SG. Along with that were the elements that were the result of SG very slowly going under - so missing/damaged masters; moulds that were worn and broken; no up to date id code list (apparently there was one but its licence had lapsed for the software running it) so you couldn't tell which two moulds worked on the same model.
From what I gather they paid a lot and likely didn't get their money's worth in terms of the mess they picked up. It's why they likely decided to pause and reboot the entire game and take several years over it rather than just picking up right where SG left off - which is a risk since over those years the market has shrunk not grown as gamers have moved on as the supply ran out.
I don't think they've even profited much if any off the classics sales they have done.
It's sadly a symptom of SG going down the drain very suddenly and after a prolonged period of internal trouble.
AduroT wrote: Did anyone get Uncharted Seas and Firestorm Armada?
WC bought everything. They are already working on FA with a beta set of rules doing the rounds in facebook and being worked on. There's also a huge amount of lore and concept designs there too.
Uncharted they teased some ideas about really early, but I think its been put to one side for now since its taken so long to get the core games out.
They've mentioned that the air and sea for Dystopian is the same scale; that they want to change the land units though to a different scale so they can set it in the middle of Africa and include the Wild West Exodus line (WC merged the two games - which lore wise isnt' that hard since one only focused on one country and Dystopian, whilst it had lore, was not deeply fleshed out formally). There is some fan pushback on them getting rid of rolling airfields and such, but we might have to wait and see what fully happens on that front.
I don't think they've thought about Planetfall (the ground FA game) or other titles. SG's biggest weakness what that they spread themselves so thin over so many games so fast so if WC do bring them all back we are looking at a years nad years before we get there.
But right now Dystopian Wars and FA are both in the bag.
As in rights to the games? Warcradle got all three of their universes and games, etc.
Was digging through some DW stuff last night, the last betaset was actually a pretty big improvement over the SG era rules. Still not entirely to my liking, but I might give em a chance. The Chinese fleet looks pretty neat based on the test minis they previewed last year, maybe Ill give it a go.
Have to be honest though, never really liked the DW sculpts to begin with because they were mostly chunky tonka truck looking designs with exaggerated features and proportions, etc.although towards the end some of the newer sculpts and factions really took some major strides forward in the aesthetics band design department. Feels like Warcradle doubled down on the aspects of the designs I hated most, im guessing it was a necessity for plastics to work but I widh they had gone less gonzo cartoony with it.
Thing is with the scale they work in "gonzo cartoony" sort of works better than realistic. If you go too realistic at that scale with the size of the ships you can end up with warships that either have very little to no detail or chock full of super tiny super fragile near impossible to paint detail. Especially when you remember that the models prime purpose is to be viewed 1ft away on a table during a game.
You see the same thing with 20mm through to 6mm games - weapons are often very enlarged and such because faithful recreation would be too thin and fragile for most to work with; and when viewed at a distance they'd not stand out easily enough.
Easy E wrote: I am interested, even though I am not impressed with how the game plays.
It has the classic Naval game weakness of "Escorts are a useless waste of time and resources".
Yea i kinda never got the point of smaller ships in any naval game, go big or go home is kinda how they all play.
Then again, DW/FA is basicly just about chugging buckets of dices in a casual setting, exactly the kind of games i like.
Yeah the ground game is "armoured clash" iirc, think they were eying 10mm for that but not positive. Uncharted Seas has been mostly quiet, firestorm is being worked on (and like dystopian wars looks nothing like the previous iteration of the game, dindrezi for example look nothing like dindrezi).
As for the need to be cartoony, I disagree. Plebty of 1/1200 ship minis out there that "play it straight" and work fine in scale. I can understand the need to oversize some guns a little bit in order to make them work, that's a far cry from The direction they've taken some of these minis. It wasn't until yesterday that I started comparing the old minis to the new minis did I realize just how over-exaggerated the new ones are, even in relation to the old ones which I thought were all ready too much.
I'm in! Probably. Depends on the rules I suppose. I have a bunch of ships from the Spartan days but I never got around to playing the game. I did play 'Firestorm Armada' and I enjoyed that a lot. I particularly liked the exploding 6's mechanic and the squadron by squadon activation (I activate a squadron or capitol ship and then my opponent activates a squadron or capitol ship). It lead to some tense and very close battles and avoided the bad feeling you get sometimes in games like 40k when you lose 2/3 of your army before you get a chance to do anything
as for smaller ships and naval games, it's a problem of faulty perception amongst game designers and poorly implemented mechanics. Without writing a lengthy post that is more suited to the game design forum or a historical board than this thread, the general assumptions made by many designers seem to be that a smaller vessel is inherently less survivable than a larger one, and that a big gun shooting a small ship should result in devastating damage to said small ship. Neither of these assumptions is really supported historically, for a number of reasons that basically boil down to science and math (less armor = lighter weight = greater buoyancy and less structural stress, smaller faster target = greater difficulty for bigger and slower turrets to track and aim against them = significantly harder to hit, less armor = less resistance to penetration = bigger heavier shells are less likely to detonate and more likely to pass through tbe ship without exploding, etc).
There's a number of different ways to resolve this in wargame design, designers simply seem to choose not to, and I suspect it's a psychological / ingrained cultural thing at this point. I've been toying with some naval war game designs for a few years now, I've lightly playtested a couple iterations of rules designed to account for this phenomenon, and while the rules do what I want them to the feedback from players has been lukewarm at best. players seem to *want* big heavy guns to delete these smaller ships right off the map in a single salvo, they don't like the idea of them being able to tank the damage and shrug it off. to them, it's simply "unrealistic" despite the wealth of historical examples to the contrary.
In the most traditional sense, escorts are bullet-catchers. Shots going into them aren't going into more valuable ships, and if the scenario works in tandem, one shouldn't be able to ignore the small stuff.
In the older rules (at least for Firestorm-I assume it was the same in Dystopian Wars) you needed to roll a 5+ to hit the smaller faster ships. You could say that needing a 5+ rather than a 4+ takes into account the fact that as well as being smaller, faster targets, some of the shells are hitting these ships but are not detonating
I dont really think thats accurate though. Lots of games dont intend small vessels to be escorts/bullet catchers, many of them try to code small vessels as "specialists" which provide buffs, support abilities, utility support, specialized weapons/systems, etc to the fleet, whereas bigger vessels are coded as brawlers, etc. Sometimes these games include "escorts" as a specific type of small vessel intended specifically to catch rounds for bigger ships, etc.
The other problem is also the fact that tabletop gaming has very little in way of fog of war. There's no real way to simulate the confusion that allowed Taffy 3 to survive, and for some reason, many games shy away from giving the tinboats the equivalent of IRL torpedoes that made them so dangerous to capital ships.
Even when they have rules for combining fire like in Firestorm or Dystopian wars, they very often ended up being dead weight or just thin mist before they got anything done.
Of course part of the problem is the fact that these games insist on bringing those escorts to the "grand finale" slugfest between the battlelines which would normally see the light ships play screen/withdraw precisely because everyone knew they wouldn't contribute much, cause otherwise you have very little variety in the forces you can bring- BBs, BCs, maybe some heavy cruisers.
most games don't do "grand finale" slugfests though - usually you have a battleship on each side as a flagship and cruisers make up the bulk of their fleets. Sadly I can't say that ive encountered a game that has "proper" fleet actions where battleship squadrons are the core of the fleet and everything else exists to support them.
There's always the Federation destroyer in Star Fleet Battles, which is basically the Heavy Cruiser's saucer (including the bulk of its weapons) with a single warp engine. It's an anomoly, though. SFB also had the Fast Patrol Ships (or PFs), and a PFs versus regular ships scenario called Piranha.
But yeah, it's a problem. The trick is to give the smaller ships a role without having them eclipse the big ships. Historically, torpedoes balance out because they were tricky to use (I'm not aware of any destroyer-launched torpedoes hitting a battleship in WW2, though Yamato did have to turn away from some when fighting Taffy 3; contrast with USS Laffey performing a *crazy* close approach of Hiei at the Solomon Islands, and completely gutting her bridge with gunfire).
I'm excited to see this game come back. I've long since sold off all my fleets, but played this a fair bit back in the day. First edition had excellent models, and pretty poor rules (you just rolled a bunch, and hoped to get more dice and better rolls than your opponent - really not much strategy at all) and second edition had absolutely appalling rules (everyone remember how every fourth word was boldfaced and/or underlined? WTH was that all about?) that I couldn't even read, let alone try to make sense of.
I loved the models and the fluff, it's cool to see the new models in plastic, but the game was pretty terrible - if the 3rd edition is similar, I am cautiously pessimistic... lol. I will also wait on 3rd edition for some rules playthroughs and such and probably won't be getting into this.
In the interim, I've got Mantic's Armada with its fantastic models (though the rate of miscasts is pretty alarming - if they don't get that under control immediately, the game is sunk before it even leaves the harbor...) and interesting rules. I haven't yet played, and am withholding judgement until I try it, but the models are marvelous so far (the ones that aren't broken, melty, missing bits... sigh!)
If they release Uncharted Seas, I would definitely pay them a visit - but now that Armada is out, there might not be room for another fantasy naval game...?
There's also GW's 1993 Man o War still kicking around. Getting the mandatory cardboard components is a PITA but most ships have been resculpted for 3d printing, for free, so models are more accessible than they have been in 25 years. I've read the rulebook for the first time a couple of months ago and was surprised by how streamlined and intuitive it is.
On the one hand theres probably more "big name" naval games on the market now or soon to enter the market in the next year or so than there have ever been... on the other hand I'm still not seeing any community movement towards an increase in naval wargaming that would really justify it being called a "Renaissance".
I think whats really happening is that a lot of different designers and manufacturers all recognized the same perceived holes in the market and are all trying to fill it within the same timeframe. Its a supply side drive that I'm not seeing as being fully supported on the demand side of the market - but I would love to be wrong on that front, as I've always enjoyed naval gaming and have been dismayed by their lack of popularity among the gaming community as a whole.
lord_blackfang wrote: There's also GW's 1993 Man o War still kicking around. Getting the mandatory cardboard components is a PITA but most ships have been resculpted for 3d printing, for free, so models are more accessible than they have been in 25 years. I've read the rulebook for the first time a couple of months ago and was surprised by how streamlined and intuitive it is.
Man o war is fun, but a table hog. Even a small-medium sized game will have so much real estate taken up by the ship templates, it can be a bit rough! I appreciate how Armada is playable with just a few ships (as opposed to squadrons of ships) - but again, I don't know how the game itself plays. I've now almost gotten enough orcs n humies to play a skirmish, so maybe if I get off my lazy arse, I'll post a batrep???
Easy E wrote: I am excited to see Dystopian Wars back, as it fills a market niche that has been missing since its loss; Fantastic Naval battle.
Heck, if the rules are good enough, I may get into it, but only if we get the full Dystopian War scope back.
The main draw for the game (for me at least) was how you could play sea, land, and air battles all at the same time. Fleets or ground combat groups (sometimes both if you had the right table setup) battling it out while airships and super-sized planes clashed in the skies. And of course, the units that could go from one area of combat to another, like flying robots or floating tanks.
That was the theory, in practice land and sea (and air, which was balanced with sea in mind) were so completely apart in power that it made land units just waste of time from pure one-off gameplay perspective, and I think it was clear with number of painted fleets/forces back at the old spartan forum that most people were in it for the naval side.
I honestly think separating land warfare into it's own thing like they did now was a better idea.
pancakeonions wrote: Man o war is fun, but a table hog. Even a small-medium sized game will have so much real estate taken up by the ship templates, it can be a bit rough!
Very fair point. There are standard playing card sized dry-erase stat cards available online tho!
The games sea-centric focus is no surprise, the original game - as well as the new one - was launched as a naval game with naval battle fleets, and the first few waves of releases were likewise naval in nature. At that point, you've effectively established a sort of "identity" for the game, and with it a prevailing culture. when your established fan base is showing up to battle with naval fleets supported by air assets, it's really hard to crack into the ground combat side of things later, as that requires different table setups and force compositions than what the established community is using. The early adopters and those who've invested the most into the game up till that point are basically being told to shelve some aspect of their collection in order to accommodate new content that doesn't even fully integrate with the old stuff - realistically speaking, that's not something that would be very likely to happen unless the game somehow managed to make a compelling case for why the ground elements should be utilized, and managed to draw in significant numbers of new players that were gung-ho about that aspect of gameplay.
That's not to say you can't get a game that integrates the three domains together, just that If you want to successfully pull that off you have to go about it a certain way.
- The Hunt for the Prometheus in French, German, Polish and Spanish
- Rules and Gubbins Set in all the above languages (to really be able to split the starter with a friend)
- freely available rulebook in the above languages (Mein Gott, c'est muy miły!)
- Commonwealth Frontline Squadron - the Russian plastic part of the HP box
- Enlightened Frontline Squadron - same, but for the other side
The freely available rulebook seems to show the company's faith in the system revamp, so that at least gives me hope.
Don't forget they are also giving out free rulebooks to a load of fans who showed photos of themselves with the original rulebook. So the rules are going to be very well spread by that as well.
The modularity and number of options on these is out of this world, but the aesthetics are pure scifi and do nothing for me in terms of steampunk/alt. history ...
Yeah the Imperials (linked in my previous post) use steam engines to drive weapon segments onto and off their ships from dock - some variants even have the steam engines waiting at the rear of the vessel.
Dystopian Wars always took a more high-tech approach to steam punk, perhaps slightly on the techo-punk end at times.
It's certainly at the "higher end" tech end of Steam Punk than the low end.
Definitely, and I think there is appeal in doing a more high-tech steampunk. In-universe it is the good ole alien technology explanation so things work from that end too.
I think there's appeal in both areas. High tech steam punk can do a lot of funky things and they can splice in some lightning and other quirky techno stuff quite easily without it standing out. Heck original Dystopain Wars even had run faction running around with genetically mutated animals and such (concept only that never made it to models or even concept art).
The other extreme is very cog and boiler heavy designs with basically lots of exposed inner parts; connecting rods, pistons and such.
And in fairness if you go the high tech end you can include the latter as one of the factions easily. In fact I'd love to see that, one force that's all boilers and pistons and such.
That said I wonder if scale also comes into play; at the scale the game is at you actually have to build pretty massive things to see cogs and gears and pistons and such. Festooning a model with them could bury it in detail and lose form.
I do recall that the 30mm version of the game had designs that were a touch less techno and a touch more core steam punk. I think in many ways because at that scale you can start to include a lot more smaller details and such - which at the scale Dystopian Wars is at, would basically be impractical to model.
Iirc the Britannia forces likely were the most Steam, with visible boilers and such going on. I think it’s harder the capture they look at this scale though.
Silly question: has anyone heard if the old ships will be compatible with the new version of the game? Reason I ask is because my FLGS has some of the old stuff on clearance and I might love an excuse to buy it. Sorry if this has already been answered, I'm tired and didn't want to read through the whole thread even if it is only a few pages.
Any pictures of what the air plane/ fighters will look like?
minor quibble, but the old DW "tokens" for the little one-person fighters were never that cool looking. Hoping maybe these guys go for something more like the flight of planes in axis and allies - like these guys:
ZergSmasher wrote:Silly question: has anyone heard if the old ships will be compatible with the new version of the game? Reason I ask is because my FLGS has some of the old stuff on clearance and I might love an excuse to buy it. Sorry if this has already been answered, I'm tired and didn't want to read through the whole thread even if it is only a few pages.
It has indeed been answered in the thread! Sorry though, don’t want to go back thru the whole thread to copy/paste it for you even if it is only a few pages.
pancakeonions wrote:Any pictures of what the air plane/ fighters will look like?
minor quibble, but the old DW "tokens" for the little one-person fighters were never that cool looking. Hoping maybe these guys go for something more like the flight of planes in axis and allies - like these guys:
Very true. The fighter tokens were one of the weakest model aspects of the originals. This is what I did with mine;
I will be checking out the rules when they are available but pretty sure this is a hard pass. A shame because DW was our go to game for several years.
Nothing Warcradle has done with the game excites me. I get that you have to put your own mark on something to make money but tying it in with Exodus? Why? The last version of the beta rules was one of the most dumbed-down rules sets I have seen in a long time. As for being in plastic - cool but not really needed so neutral on that.
Odds are the couple players we have here will dust off the old fleets every couple of month and add a revision to our own version of 2.1.
A small dark part of me does wonder how many factions Spartan would have put out by now. At the rate they were going I am betting at least 40.
Well before Spartan killed themselves Neil wrote a post on what he wanted the future of DW to be. It was awesome. The one thing in that list they managed to make happen was the super dread bots. And I consider those models to be the second worst thing that happened to the game.
Spartan Games could well have released a lot in the years if they'd not been shut down. The problem with SG wasn't releasing new things, they were great at that. The problem with them was keeping up with what they'd released.
You'd get months of them fawning over Dystopian Wars and giving out news of new things coming and then everything would suddenly go silent, deadlines on previews would be missed and they'd shift their entire focus to Firestorm Armada for several months etc... And that was their issue, they kept focusing on new games and big army additions because those likely brought in a lot of sales very quickly; but they were a small operation and didn't' have resources to keep focused on multiple fronts at once. So for all they'd gain for a big focus on one game; they'd lose it on another.
I wasn't their only issue, I believe Niel had some major health problems that took him out of action for a considerable length of time - and in a small operation losing staff like that can be crippling.
Niel had some awesome ideas and SG had some great designers. They had fantastic vision, but lacked resources to make it real. I'm always very sad that they were never able to merge with WC or another major firm - ergo to team up with an investor in the industry.
ZergSmasher wrote: Silly question: has anyone heard if the old ships will be compatible with the new version of the game? Reason I ask is because my FLGS has some of the old stuff on clearance and I might love an excuse to buy it. Sorry if this has already been answered, I'm tired and didn't want to read through the whole thread even if it is only a few pages.
Only as proxies for the new stuff basially (although i'm sure somebody will re-stat them for the new game)
The Imperium Carrier looks great. The Cruiser and BB look like ass. I really feel like they chose to fixate on the wrong parts of the Prussians. Glad I have a few of the older models.
NGL, having read the new background (the full one, not the horrible early blurbs year back) and seeing the new models, I'm excited now. If only the LGS didn't have "due to brexit, this pre-order may be delayed 2 more weeks" on the starter.
Man, I've never heard of this game but that unboxing and those sprues (and the resin quality lookin good) has me really interested. I loved the short lived Dreadfleet box set...
I think its because smaller ships can be sold en-mass whilst big ships cannot.
At the same time they weren't going to do plastic originally for the launch ships, they were going to be resin as well. That only changed because Corona basically delayed the release date by a year so they worked on the plastic components and pushed them through into production. As I recall originally it was a delay of packing components and such with the first outbreak of Corona coupled to the lack of events and such which made them choose to delay launch. Granted whilst this year we've not got events back, it is clear that the big conventions likely won't return until 2022 or very late 2021 at best in some countries. So it makes sense to get it out the door.
There are some buried in the discussions on their FB page, there's also some details in the faction descriptions on the website and in the resources download there's the "cover art" for each of the first battlefleet boxes
Man does that mean this will be the only plastic? Cause I'm 1000% scarred by resin. Though the nature of these flat bottom ships would lend itself bigly to clean resin casts. I have nightmares about mold slips in my soul.
axotl wrote: Man does that mean this will be the only plastic? Cause I'm 1000% scarred by resin. Though the nature of these flat bottom ships would lend itself bigly to clean resin casts. I have nightmares about mold slips in my soul.
The resin ships are awesome.
Because of their nature the mould lines is basically the waterline at the bottom of the model so they are super easy to clean up and prepare. Was like that in the Spartan Games day too - the sea ships are great for resin casting.
Plastic is very good quality too - its honestly akin to GW's plastic in terms of its nature and feel.
Also the size is fantastic, the ships are wider than they were in the past, the deck guns on a battleship have a lot of room around them; they look VERY warship like. We've also had it confirmed that the whale tokens will eventually get models and that leviathans - bigger than battleships - are coming at some stage (likely a year off and more since this first year is all about getting core battlefleets out for each faction).
Not a huge fan of ships larger than BBs (they always just end up BB guns stuck on way too much HP in my experience, regardless if in space or water), but hey, we'll see.
I thought it was Dreadnoughts in Dystopian and Leviathans in Firestorm?
Either way, have to agree with Cronch - "bigger than battleships" is a somewhat overused design trope that seems to stem from a lack of understanding that Dreadnoughts and Battleships were essentially the same damned thing.
chaos0xomega wrote: I thought it was Dreadnoughts in Dystopian and Leviathans in Firestorm?
Either way, have to agree with Cronch - "bigger than battleships" is a somewhat overused design trope that seems to stem from a lack of understanding that Dreadnoughts and Battleships were essentially the same damned thing.
Sorry yes Dreadnoughts in Dystopian and in Firestorm
Leviathans were even bigger in Firestorm but were only ever teased and never released - Stewart has confirmed that they are on the cards with WC though! Granted FA is a year away from initial release at best so likely years before we see them.
Yea models larger than a subway sammich are dumb. I may be biased because it was my first naval game but BFG hit the right spot for me, plenty big to show off detail but not too much bumping into eachother and overlapping (admittedly overlapping is a bigger issue in space games where shps are considered points, not so much in naval where hulls are in scale with the table). Firestorm just went stupid big.
I think in DW its a problem of scale. At 1/1200 f you want to include a ship the size of the Yamato, you're looking at 8-9" in length right off the bat. If you want to imply the existence of something monstrously large, then... well, you're going to need a bigger boat and a subway sandwich sized ship becomes unavoidable.
Well unless subway has downsized the largest ship right now is around 5.5 inches, so not even half a sub. Dreadnoughts I suspect might be a few inches longer so we are still well short of 12 inch subs.
Heck a Slaanesh hellflayer chariot is longer on just the blades.
I'd still say a 6" sub is bigger, but that's because of the bulk. I've got some of the old Empire of the Blazing Sun ships. While the battleship checks in at 6 inches (I've got mine sitting in front of me as I write this, and just used the tape measure on it), it doesn't have the bulk of a sandwich. It's definitely not as wide as a sub sandwich. And the only way that it's as tall is if you crush the food.
Incidentally, 6 inches makes it just a bit longer than a 1/1800 USS Missouri - not including any bases that the latter might be attached to.
On another note, it looks like they got rid of EotBS in the new setting, and created a new Pan-Asian federation. Boo!
One problem SG had was keeping up with their own games; whilst they released a LOT of stuff, they really stressed and suffered in keeping up with existing armies; yet they were addicted to the big sales spike that a new faction or game would bring.
It basically wound up being something that I think contributed to their eventual downfall because they could only spend so long focusing on one game or army before they had to move on; so for a few months Dystopian would get all the attention then Firestorm etc... They rotated almost at random which annoyed fans etc...
One big thing Warcradle has done is cut things down a lot. They've merged quite a few forces and the new plastic ship kits let them get a good number of varied ship classes and builds into a single kit as opposed to perhaps 8 or more individual kits.
Stewart on the facebook pages has said he thinks 8 is the magic number of factions for the game right now. That said who knows if Dwars does really well all over again (which I hope it does) and they add more and more models they might well reach a point where they can safely add a new faction and where its a better option than either bloating their own range for existing factions or updating sculpts from existing ones.
He's also clearly a fan of the game because quite a few of the iconic units have been mentioned making a return in some form at some stage.
That and I think WC are still scaling up their own back end production; hence the slower roll out of stuff. Start small; find how the market responds and rise accordingly.
There are 8 major factions, but each one has a number of sub-factions. The Empire of the Blazing Sun still exists as a sub-faction within the Pan-Asia faction. You will still be able to collect and play an exclusively Japanese-only faction if you don't want to play Pan-Asians or whatever, but it might take a while for them to get enough releases to enable that to occur in a realistic and balanced manner.
Heck a Slaanesh hellflayer chariot is longer on just the blades.
GW's table-hogging designs should be a cautionary tale, not something to aim for
Well they do have a semi-major hold on the market. So if people are making boards and fighting games with them and doing well then Dystopian Wars has more than enough chance going for boards of the same size and such.
chaos0xomega wrote: There are 8 major factions, but each one has a number of sub-factions. The Empire of the Blazing Sun still exists as a sub-faction within the Pan-Asia faction. You will still be able to collect and play an exclusively Japanese-only faction if you don't want to play Pan-Asians or whatever, but it might take a while for them to get enough releases to enable that to occur in a realistic and balanced manner.
Not really. I looked over the PDF for the Pan-Asian faction, and each of the member-states has its own area of responsibility within the larger governmental structure. The Japanese area of responsibility is the navy, while another nation has control of the air force (including aircraft carriers, and their support ships). Giving each of the member-states their own thematic naval squadrons would be counter to the way that the developers have organized the faction.
I realise this is difficult in the current climate but are there any reviews or battle reports to give a flavour of the game?
The official release date was two days ago, so it's likely still a bit early.
chaos0xomega wrote: There are 8 major factions, but each one has a number of sub-factions. The Empire of the Blazing Sun still exists as a sub-faction within the Pan-Asia faction. You will still be able to collect and play an exclusively Japanese-only faction if you don't want to play Pan-Asians or whatever, but it might take a while for them to get enough releases to enable that to occur in a realistic and balanced manner.
Not really. I looked over the PDF for the Pan-Asian faction, and each of the member-states has its own area of responsibility within the larger governmental structure. The Japanese area of responsibility is the navy, while another nation has control of the air force (including aircraft carriers, and their support ships). Giving each of the member-states their own thematic naval squadrons would be counter to the way that the developers have organized the faction.
The game designers have literally said what I posted, so regardless of what that fluff document may indicate it seems pretty likely that you will be able to field a pure subfaction - besides the fact that the Pan-Asians already have separate Japanese and Chinese Battelgroups announced as releasing later this year.
A direct quote from Stuart (Warcradle Designer) on facebook:
Let's look at the Empire, for example. The Empire Battlefleet let's you freely mix anything from the Empire faction together. But there are no benefits to do so other than the complete flexibility it offers. A Ning Jing Battlefleet, on the other hand, requires the Flagship to be Ning Jing class and the other units to all be non-Aerial and have the Chinese and Empire traits. In this way there is also a bonus to your Battlefleet you can unlock for having your choices more themed.
I bought the starter on a bit of a whim (I’m hoping my brother will play it with me), and it just arrived this morning. It’s really rather good quality, even down to the box.
Polish retailers probably can't stock it because EU customs officials haven't found the button in their new software that clears goods for transit yet.
The more I look at the Warcradle minis the more I find myself appreciating the late Spartan-era sculpts (which at the time I found to be kinda meh, but they've taken on a new charm for me). So far the only new minis I've seen that I think I actually like are the Chinese resin prototypes, so I guess I'll wait until they release and see what they look like in plastic or whatever before I decide to jump in. Otherwise most of the rest of the minis feel like they've lost some of the charm of their previous iterations.
Mechanically, on the other hand, it looks like Warcradle made some big improvements on the game - still not my cup of tea but I could see myself playing it if I was in the mood for dice-chucker that I don't have to think too hard about.
I think some of the charm is that late age Spartan models were going for totally nuts science - huge centipede sea and land walkers and the like. Erog they were being really creative. I think WC are reigned in a little because they are having to go right back to the start with the core fleets. Though even then they've got a huge whale mind-control ship as one of the starter ships which looks awesome.
Plus I like that WC has beefed up the sizes. Everything has more room to it. You really see this comparing old to new ships - the old KoB Battleship has several turrets that almost have no deck before the edge of the ship. This makes the guns look big, but the hull look small; new battleships and even cruisers and the like have a lot more hull shape and space to them. The weapons are not much bigger, but are now settled onto the hull rather than dominating it.
The nice thing is this means not only will dreadnoughts be huge hunks of resin, but also that the smaller ships get to have more detail and more life to them.
They did also change the scale, the ships and planes are now more...real-life sized as opposed to 5x that of IRL ships.
And curiously I found the "pre-fall" Spartan sculpts completely devoid of charm, as they jumped the shark so completely they turned to designs silver era comics would find too goofy.
Overread wrote: I think some of the charm is that late age Spartan models were going for totally nuts science - huge centipede sea and land walkers and the like. Erog they were being really creative. I think WC are reigned in a little because they are having to go right back to the start with the core fleets. Though even then they've got a huge whale mind-control ship as one of the starter ships which looks awesome.
Those aren't even the minis I'm referring to. I simply think that these sculpts:
Have finer detail, nicer lines, better proportions, and are generally just more aesthetically pleasing than any of the designs that Warcradle has thus far previewed. Likewise they are way better than any of the sculpts that Spartan had in the original few waves of releases for the game when it released. If the first factions out of the gate had looked anything like this I might have actually given the game a chance. The initial few waves of releases IMO were chunky, misshapen, and bizarrely proportioned and ruined any potential buzz I might have otherwise had for the game, the same was true for Firestorm Armada and Uncharted Seas (though in Uncharteds case I eventually gave the game a chance with the launch of the Ralgard). I basically tuned out the game after that and never paid any amount of attention to it. It wasn't until after Spartan went belly-up and I was tasked with clearing out my LFGS inventory on ebay that I realized how awesome the minis for Dystopian (and Firestorm) were as Spartan's sculptors improved in skill and the concepts improved in quality.
Warcradles sculpts, even where they deviate from Spartans designs stylistically, thus far seem to be truer in proportion and aesthetic direction to the initial waves of Dystopian Wars rather than the later waves of Dystopian Wars IMO. Early Dystopian was, to me, chunky and squat, whereas later on the sculpts and designs became more streamlined and better balanced. Thus far everything shown by Warcradle is back to the chunky and squat look...
Warcradles Firestorm Armada concepts, on the other hand, look to be a *huge* improvement over Spartans and have more in common with late Firestorm than early Firestorm from the looks of things.
All those pics to me are middle-Spartan. After they hit their stride, before they started churning out flying chinese dragons and floating statues of liberty.
Also, those ottoman minarets? Whoever settled on them as a design feature should be forced to sit on the whole fleet repeatedly to realize how much of a PAIN in the posterior they were to glue and keep attached.
But that's just a personal peeve.
Maybe middle spartan is more appropriate then, I dunno. As someone who stopped basically paying attention to the company entirely around 2011/2012, other than to dip my toe briefly into Halo Fleet Battles, anything past that timeframe is "late" to me as I don't really know when things came out in relation to eachother anymore.
Cronch wrote: All those pics to me are middle-Spartan. After they hit their stride, before they started churning out flying chinese dragons and floating statues of liberty.
Also, those ottoman minarets? Whoever settled on them as a design feature should be forced to sit on the whole fleet repeatedly to realize how much of a PAIN in the posterior they were to glue and keep attached.
But that's just a personal peeve.
I will not hear another ill word about the Ottoman fleet! It is AWESOME in every way!
Except for those damn minarets of course
I live a few miles down the road from the citadel in Cairo and the first time I saw it from the highway my thought was, "cool it's an DW Ottoman ship!"
I feel really sorry for the designer(s) working for Spartan come the end - there was such fantastic talent there in their designs. Say what you will, Spartan put out a massive amount of creative product.
I was never really tempted by the faction in the past, but the idea of flamethrowers on most ships is very tempting. I also love that ships alternate mode with several massive long range artillery cannon
I realise this is difficult in the current climate but are there any reviews or battle reports to give a flavour of the game?
The official release date was two days ago, so it's likely still a bit early.
There was one bat rep I found yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to watch it yet:
People were sent the box a month ago (my buddies at The Battle Hammer for one), so I am genuinely surprised at the lack of any content apart from unboxings/sprue reviews.
edit - Ah man it looks to be sold out, but I want it NOW!
