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I spent a couple of hours last night cleaning our ships up and washed them this morning. If the weather gets a bit better I will spray primer them later and we might have a go at a first game tomorrow!

Howard A Treesong wrote:I spent a couple of hours last night cleaning our ships up and washed them this morning. If the weather gets a bit better I will spray primer them later and we might have a go at a first game tomorrow!

Cool, let us know how it goes! I hope you show those Prussians what for, old bean.

I'll stick it to the boche if I can. Wife has a Dreadnought, I don't. I can't see it going my way.

Hmm, that's not ideal, certainly. What've you got in your list?

Stuff in the Brittania starter set and the aircraft carrier.

We're just getting to grips with it at the moment, I'm not fussed on lists. I've going to buy us both a few more things to have more rounded forces soon anyway.

Then we might get some stuff for land battles!

Ah, yes, then you are probably stuffed. In order to take down as many of the perfidious bosche as you can with you, I offer the following piece of advice. Take dive bombers for your tiny flyers. Brittanian dive bombers rock more socks than an automated sock-rocking machine. Have fun!

When you want to prime it rains, when you go out it's sunny and you cant prime pain in the _ _ _ _.

Ooof, a Dreadnought on one side. Well, the points difference mean you could take more bombers and smaller ships. You should post up the lists for both sides so we can have a look. And/Or take a record and post a new thread with a battle report. As a Prussian Dreadnought fielder I can vouch for the scariness of your KoB torpedo bombers (Doncasters?), can engage out of AA range and with multiple torpedo strikes. Then as htj says the Dive Bombers are pretty tasty too!

I have recently acquired my first fleet, a shiny covenant naval fleet, and with a Rulebook on order I should have things ready soon!
Looking forward to playing a few games it seems when I mentioned I was buying a fleet a few in my local gaming group mentioned they had fleets already!

ive just picked up a rulebook and really wanna give this game a try.

what im having difficulty doing is picking a faction.

Would some good Sir please give me an overview of each army , strengths , weaknesses etc with unit guides?

i would very much appreciate it

It depends on the game you want to play. I liked the Prussian Airship Aircraft Carrier so that was what swayed it for me. I'm very much a 'pick army by the design' type of person! But in a better answer to your question these are my feelings for each:
Prussians: Not great at long range but large amounts of firepower close up, good at boarding enemy ships
Kingdom of Brittania: Torpedoes so are dangerous at range, the Battleship's not great but the Dreadnought is pretty nice (I've played against one and it did plenty of damage!) KoB Dive bombers are vicious!!
Rising Sun & FSA: I have no first-hand experience so this is what I get from looking at the rulebook. These guys tote missiles about so can wreack havoc from range again. The Japanese have that awesome robot squid things that can drop mines.
Covenant of Antarctica: They have more expensive units so you'll field fewer of them against the other factions but they've got some particularly nasty energy weapons that hit at the same strength no matter the range! Some of the ships can semi-submerge making them harder to hit.

Individual unit guides I can't do as I only really know my faction and it would take too long! I would suggest maybe proxying some models, use your rule book and fight against yourself or someone else and get a feel for how they perform then make your decision on that. I know lots of people do that, I prefer finding out how well each one does when it's finally deployed!

You can also look at the tactics section of the SG forums, there is a lot of good discussion there as well:

http://forum.spartangames.co.uk/smf/index.php?board=162.0

I'm looking at starting Covenant too since htj and Sattamassagana initally failed to lure me with the older steampunky nations the shiny war scientists came along and finally hooked me.

Gonna theorycraft my fleet and pick it up in blister form unless I end up with most of a battlefleet box anyway.

Covenant seem to have a 40k Eldar kind of feel, not punch trading sluggers but fast elite precision strikers which suits me just fine. Then I can show those English and Prussians what for!

Some friends are playing this, now. They love the game, but say that boarding and stealing someone else's ships is often easier than trying to sink it.

kronk wrote:boarding and stealing someone else's ships is often easier than trying to sink it.

This and some really terrible balance issues are why I dropped the game. Imagine the Battle of Jutland, except the Brits and Germans steam straight at each other trying to board each other's battleships pirate-style.

I had been assuming that they were just playing some rule wrongly.

I've never played, but I've heard them talking/complaining about the boarding. Otherwise, they seem to really enjoy it.

No it really is 'that' bad.

The problem is that ships generally need to take damage 4-6 times for the big ones before they're destroyed. And since ship performance degrades with damage, you could have two battleships slug it out for five turns before one wins, and they both likely take some pretty horrible damage before the conclusion is evident.

By contrast, the battleship with more Marines can steam towards the battleship with fewer Marines while shooting at some other target. Then it boards the enemy, probably wipes out its marine complement in a single turn (since boarding actions are just 'see who rolls more dice' kind of activities) and, if it's able to do so, destroys the enemy ship.

If you're looking for a game where distant battlegroups engage each other with massive ordnance from over the horizon (like I was)... Dystopian Wars will probably disappoint you.

Still only going through the rules myself as waiting on the release of Antarctican blisters but by the numbers a band 1 full broadside volley from a battleship is potentially crippling for even an intact battleship, if it recieved damage closing to range as well then it may well end it right there. Doubly so if you laser painted or losing marines to tesla weapons.

I'm open to the idea that boarding could be a problem due to my lack of practical experience but it's not the impression I get from the numbers in terms of ranges and band dice. If your gonna close to boarding range you'd best hope they don't get a volley off before you do.

Is your experience that your lacking the short range punch to drop Battleships before they board?

I can't say as boarding has been particularly successful in my experience. Prussians looking to board my ships were fairly well ripped apart by AA, and only one boarding has actually succeeded. I'd be interested to hear some anecdotes of boarding being more successful if you've got some.

Had your escorts not been kicking around I'd have had you though. I think it's not so much boarding is overpowered but people aren't taking the possibility into account when building their fleets. Reading other battle reports out there seems to tally with this. Those that use escorts/CAP cause difficulties for boarders, those that just pootle their ships about lose them to boarders.

Sattamassagana wrote:Had your escorts not been kicking around I'd have had you though. I think it's not so much boarding is overpowered but people aren't taking the possibility into account when building their fleets. Reading other battle reports out there seems to tally with this. Those that use escorts/CAP cause difficulties for boarders, those that just pootle their ships about lose them to boarders.

Your boarding actions against my Frigate and Destroyer are the only ones I remember, and the Escorts didn't get involved with that. But they certainly add a substantial kick to repelling boarders, true.

Yes, but it was the presence of the escorts that put me off attacking your Dreadnought. It only had one AA dice but they added another 6!

Heh, yeah. Britannian Escorts are awesome.

sourclams wrote:No it really is 'that' bad.

The problem is that ships generally need to take damage 4-6 times for the big ones before they're destroyed. And since ship performance degrades with damage, you could have two battleships slug it out for five turns before one wins, and they both likely take some pretty horrible damage before the conclusion is evident.

By contrast, the battleship with more Marines can steam towards the battleship with fewer Marines while shooting at some other target. Then it boards the enemy, probably wipes out its marine complement in a single turn (since boarding actions are just 'see who rolls more dice' kind of activities) and, if it's able to do so, destroys the enemy ship.

If you're looking for a game where distant battlegroups engage each other with massive ordnance from over the horizon (like I was)... Dystopian Wars will probably disappoint you.

Eh, as others have pointed out, escorts and CAP can really help larger models with this problem. For smaller models, I've found that I can usually hold range long enough to whittle down the enemies smaller ships before they hit 4". The thing is, even cruisers die relatively easily in this game; getting 6 hits for a crit is not all that hard to do. The bigger problem, as I see it, are the airships. The can come in obscured and then board the pants off you! The best way to mitigate that factor that I've found is to limit the number of airships in the game.

Irregardless, there is no getting around the fact that boarding is a major part of DW. This makes the game closer in feel to an age of sail game than a WWI/WWII naval game, so if that kind of game is what you were hoping for, I can understand your disappointment. Still, I have found DW to be a fun game in it's own right, so YMMV.

So I'll start by saying I really enjoy the game. I love how it looks mid game on the table and I love how it plays out.
But it seems that every time I play a game I find new things that make no sense so I'm here to ask a couple questions and hopefully some of you kind folks can help clarify.
First, the american blimps...how do armored topsides protect them from shots coming from below? Makes no sense to me.
Second, how exactly do the line of site over smaller models rules work? In one place it says that large ships can only see over small and tiny but then later on the same page it also says that models can see over other models one size smaller than themselves. So can my taka-ashi walker see over my chi-ri mid tanks or not?
edit* Third, elusive target: is that really only for when small ships fire at other small ships?

Other bits of the rules just seem horribly worded or not well thought out. I'm glad the group I play with plays more for fun instead of competition.

wana10 wrote:So I'll start by saying I really enjoy the game. I love how it looks mid game on the table and I love how it plays out.
But it seems that every time I play a game I find new things that make no sense so I'm here to ask a couple questions and hopefully some of you kind folks can help clarify.
First, the american blimps...how do armored topsides protect them from shots coming from below? Makes no sense to me.
Second, how exactly do the line of site over smaller models rules work? In one place it says that large ships can only see over small and tiny but then later on the same page it also says that models can see over other models one size smaller than themselves. So can my taka-ashi walker see over my chi-ri mid tanks or not?
edit* Third, elusive target: is that really only for when small ships fire at other small ships?

Other bits of the rules just seem horribly worded or not well thought out. I'm glad the group I play with plays more for fun instead of competition.

1. Yeah, the armored topside MAR on the Lees does seem a bit counter-intuitive, but I like to imagine them being attacked by plunging fire .

2. AFAIK, the rule is that models can shoot over other models if they are two or more sizes smaller, as per the example on page 47. Do you have a page number for the one size smaller bit? In your example, the walker would not be able to see over the medium tanks.

3. Yes, for all intents and purposes Elusive Target works the same as Small target in that it causes small ships to hit a model with that rule only on a 5 or 6.

Don't have the book on me at the moment but I'm pretty sure the size bit is both in the terrain section and the first page of the line of sight section. It talks about terrain sizes and seeing over terrain and then mentions model sizes and l.o.s.

I just checked; even in the discussion on terrain, it has to be two sizes or levels smaller than the firing model for it to see/shoot over.

Didn't get around to our game in the end, I'm still getting to grips with the rules, there are a lot of little things to remember, so I'm trying understand everything properly first. Instead we ended up drinking a bottle of wine that sunday and I didn't feel up to much after that.

Nissed as a Pute.