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Agreed on that front. The DW website does a decent job explaining the who and why of the factions, but not what they look like, besides the box cover art.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Agreed on that front. The DW website does a decent job explaining the who and why of the factions, but not what they look like, besides the box cover art.

Looks like they took the feedback to heart and included pictures of those ships that are already released. Some are shots of the plastic models if the Studio hasn't painted up a particular variant yet.

....and in the same step, some orbats got changed again.
Commonwealth aka got a visual overhaul of its orbat and new special rules and battlefleet rules + some new models (like the Alexeyev Class flagship)

so might be time to check if your factions orbat has changed, (yet again.......)

Everything but Union, Enlightened, and Alliance have been updated. Union should be next (hopefully next week), then enlightened still this year. Alliance will be waiting for a new release next year before their orbat gets an update.

Union is up today with some tasty new units, but no new art.

art... forget the art, 50-70% of the models in the smaller factions dont even have a model yet, cant even make some of the battlefleets as the flagship models dont exist yet... they are falling way, way behind on model releases and that is prolly the biggest weakpoint of this game at the current state.

Apart from that, this orbat round is apperently in order to make one universal structure in the game.
Easier way to identify units and add unit limitations, but allso make one universal template for all battlefleets to follow regardless of faction to make the game easier to balance for the devs.

That's sort of how they've always done things. The next 6months-ish worth of releases are in the ORBAT as a "beta rules set" so people can try them out and send feedback, sometimes use older Spartan models (like the old chinese flying fortress) AND get an insight about what's to come for the faction in the near future.

Even though it does test your patience somewhat, I kind of like it... You do get a look into the near future and if there will be units that interest you (or if the faction goes down a path you don't really care about).

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
art... forget the art, 50-70% of the models in the smaller factions dont even have a model yet, cant even make some of the battlefleets as the flagship models dont exist yet... they are falling way, way behind on model releases and that is prolly the biggest weakpoint of this game at the current state.

That viewpoint is outright delusional. The game is getting an average of 2 new hardplastic sprues each month. I challenge you to find any game outside GW that can match that.

We're seeing unit entries added to orbats before the model is out. That's not falling behind on model releases. That's getting rules early.

Dystopian Wars only feels super slow because of how big Spartan was before they collapsed. So yeah many of the factions still have a long way to go to grow to their old sizes. That said whilst I feel like the art direction has gone a touch more deiseal than steam punk; Warcradle have solid designs and you can already see how they are improving working with the plastics with the new small turret designs and such.

I think 2023 will also be a big year because many of the core fleets now have a good portion of their core ships. This means that we should see far more airships and wild fancy and crazy science stuff coming through in the new year. Perhaps also with more things like civilian and shore batteries and the like.

But let's also not forget Spartan's models were not modular. Your faction started as 1 battleship, 1 cruiser, 1 frigate, then a carrier group of about the same variety, then maybe a third variant of each size class, then loop back to resculpt the first starter with new names.

The Spartan counts-as lists that used to be at the back of the Orbats were like two dozen entries per faction, but in practice half of that had never been available to buy at retail in any real capacity.

The same variety is more or less matched by any two Warcradle sprues with accompanying flagships.

And even if the doubled release pace only lasts until midyear we're talking about about 18 new sprues by next Xmas, that's doubling what's available now. Plenty to cover all the current entries with room to spare, probably even a plastic flagship here or there.

Yep Spartan had a lot of variety with individual resin ships. Which is why WC has been able to go pretty fast with the core ships in plastic and getting a lot of the range out really fast.

I think what's missing now is simply the cool fancy wild stuff. Ergo the fun wacky saturday morning kids cartoon superscience machines and such. And honestly we are starting to see that arriving here and there and its only going to get better from there on

That's coming for sure. The japanese plastic submarine, which we can infer from the orbat, has 6 builds including a magma beam cannon, a gundam carrier and a tentacled submarine (it has the same melee action as the squid colossus). And their new dreadnought has an anime beam cannon.

I've made a Faction guide for this game on YouTube for those people who want to get into the game, but are not quite sure what each faction is all about...

It's not black and white though and only a brief overview of each of the 8 major factions:

Ekranoplans!

First up - Mod/op request that we change the thread title since this is appearing to be the generic thread for Dystopian Wars that isn't news in the Warcradle news thread.



Took the dive with some Sultanate recently, massive chunk of resin in the form of a huge carrier and some plastic support ships. End of the week/start of next I hope to have the new Battlefleet set (which is basically the original battlefleet plus a support sprue) and a portal ship.

Might not be a bad idea, there was never made any general thread for DW 3.0 but over the past 12 months, intrest in the game on this forum has increased.

Lets see if OP can change the title to a more general discussion term,(or if he asks a mod to lock this thread and make a brand new general discussion one) and if we get too many hobby pictures in here, one can allways make a seperate dedicated hobby thread.

To be fair right now I'd say it wants to be a general hobby and chat thread to keep the interest going.

I've adjusted the title to be more descriptive of what the game is all about (especially now with the latest kits, it seems fair to mention the sky warfare aspect).

And a general thread about it is indeed missing, so any discussion is good... Be it hobby projects, rules evolution or questions for people curious about the game.

The hardest part is waiting for new releases. January's wave officially releases this Friday, won't be in stores for another 1-2 weeks, and we've already seen gorgeous kits coming a month after that.

Am i the only one who is annoyed that they dont sell DW dices seperatly?

Yea i can buy countless of 11mm dices, i prolly have 100+ of them allready both regular and custom 6 design as i used to be a dice collector, but this game has designed their own dice symbols as defualt standard, and while there is a conversion chart for regular dices, not using value 6 for both exploding hit and 2 shields means house rules, to the point where it is just better to use the official dices.

To be fair with the new Battlefleet starter sets you can likely get a good many dice as most of those sets are going to be worth getting 2 of for most players since you get a nice big chunky resin battleship and most fleets have at least a few variations for them to field.


Granted not as good for established players and I agree it would be good of them to sell dice on their own not just in the gubbins set

Yea I'm pushing 100 DW dice and I've never bought a Rules&Gubbins box

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Yea I'm pushing 100 DW dice and I've never bought a Rules&Gubbins box

I only have the 16 or so that came with the rules and gubbins, i dont have any need for the 2p boxes as i have zero need for them (thats how it is when you are primarely a union collector), and the new 1p starters arrived 7 months too late for me.
Cant find any feedback section to WC either so i can suggest this to them. (all they have is feedback regarding mis-packed or damaged products and beta rules)

You can message them on facebook or their discord and they are pretty active

https://discord.gg/3VVjGaG2Mn

Looks like every ORBAT got a 3.03 simultaneously with some tweaks to "deepstriking" units being the major change it seems.

They've also added a visual ID chart at the end of each Orbat so you can work out exactly which ship is which.



Also fun news from the Discord - they've got plans for some beachhead missions and battles aiming for the end of the year. Already previewed a generic ground unit token.
We know that they are going to do the land game fully as a separate scale (set in internal Africa which is one of the big hotbeds for ground battles between all the playing nations and links up with WWE setting); but it seems like coastal and beachhead battles are going to be a thing. But as said this is end-of-the-year stuff so its a long way off.

The new John Henry bot for the Union:

Nice bot!

This game has been on my radar for a while, aesthetically it's right up my alley. I need to look into the factions a little more and consider giving this game a go. Might grab one of the fleet starters, i've narrowed it down to Union/Commonwealth/Imperium.

On the official website I did have a slightly hard time figuring out the visual style of each faction at a glance. Putting a painted set of each faction starter above the faction description might help with that. The gallery is kind of a wall of images, a lot of which are blank.

Yeah they've not updated the gallery in a while; but there are also some ships on there which aren't yet released as teasers. Same for the Orbats (which mostly now do have ship ID's in them in a chart with visuals). There's always a few ships that aren't yet in models so that you can see the stats of what is coming up.

There's a stick right up his bot!