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Ruckdog wrote: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.

Airships are unbalanced. It's obvious that they released the game way to soon. I would expect mk2 to be released in the near future.

The tiny fliers are such a clunky mechanic in the game it takes a lot away from 'smooth' game play.

I absolutely dislike a game mechanic/design flaw that forces you to have to take certain units, like escorts.

I could go on and on about how bad this game is, from basic game systems to unbalances, but...

imweasel wrote:Airships are unbalanced. It's obvious that they released the game way to soon. I would expect mk2 to be released in the near future.

In what way would you say they're imbalanced? Personally, I don't find them to be too powerful for their cost, but I'd be interested in hearing your thinking on this.

The tiny fliers are such a clunky mechanic in the game it takes a lot away from 'smooth' game play.

Agreed, I don't particularly like the fuel points system, would like to see it removed.

I absolutely dislike a game mechanic/design flaw that forces you to have to take certain units, like escorts.

You're not really forced to. If you want more air defence, you can go down the CAP route. I don't see a problem with having to build lists built on certain premises, myself, as it makes for less spamming.

htj wrote:In what way would you say they're imbalanced? Personally, I don't find them to be too powerful for their cost, but I'd be interested in hearing your thinking on this.

Flying obscured. I can basically ignore your fire, fly up in the clouds, swoop down and board you. Prussians are really, really, really, really good at this.

htj wrote:You're not really forced to. If you want more air defence, you can go down the CAP route. I don't see a problem with having to build lists built on certain premises, myself, as it makes for less spamming.

Yes you are. Try to defend your 250pt dreadnought vs the same number of points of airships WITHOUT escorts. CAP just doesn't cut it.

Obscured is OP, I'll admit. Bumping it down to 5+ or adding more long range AA attacks would take care of this. That being said, lower AA on airships would see them very vulnerable to TF fighters, and would serve the same.

Whilst I could just say 'don't take a Dreadnought' that would be facetious of me. But personally, I don't see needing some kind of anti-air defence as a bad thing. For example, you wouldn't field a 40K army without any AT. It'd be suicide. Same basic principle, as I see it. CAP fighters should be just as effective as escorts, looking at the numbers. What am I missing here?

htj wrote:Obscured is OP, I'll admit. Bumping it down to 5+ or adding more long range AA attacks would take care of this. That being said, lower AA on airships would see them very vulnerable to TF fighters, and would serve the same.

Whilst I could just say 'don't take a Dreadnought' that would be facetious of me. But personally, I don't see needing some kind of anti-air defence as a bad thing. For example, you wouldn't field a 40K army without any AT. It'd be suicide. Same basic principle, as I see it. CAP fighters should be just as effective as escorts, looking at the numbers. What am I missing here?

Airships have plenty of AA. If they are capital class, they get to take cap as well.

At least in 40k, my AT can be used against, well everything. Escorts are only good for defensive fire. Might as well make the DN/BB more costly and throw the escort capabilities in with them.

It's bad game design/decision that forces you to purchase models/play units to 'fix' the issue. Dystopian wars also has rules issues. It was poorly play tested by people that 'knew' how to play the game (and probably by 'fans').

Airships have plenty of AA. If they are capital class, they get to take cap as well.

Yeah, they do. I was suggesting a reduction would be a good thing, rather than claiming that they're OK as they are.

I see what you mean about the game design. For me, it feels like a 1st edition: there's a whole bunch of kinks and flaws in there that need to be worked out. I still find it thoroughly enjoyable, though. The balance issues aren't so bad as to make the game unplayable, but then, I've always been a narrative gamer rather than a competitive gamer. Perhaps that makes me more willing to turn a blind eye to this kind of thing.

My main gripe is with the rulebook. It's bloody awful.

I understand exactly where you are coming from.

We first started playing with starter boxes sans tiny fliers.

It was a blast. At first.

Then we started to play with more of the rules. Turns out the rules are not intuitive and I actually got some errata pushed through.

From a competitive stand point, it's a bad game.

Beer and pretzels? Not so bad and it's not too costly to get into.

I'm a competitive gamer, so I can't recommend it.

Makes sense to me, imweasel.

imweasel wrote:I understand exactly where you are coming from.

We first started playing with starter boxes sans tiny fliers.

It was a blast. At first.

Then we started to play with more of the rules. Turns out the rules are not intuitive and I actually got some errata pushed through.

From a competitive stand point, it's a bad game.

Beer and pretzels? Not so bad and it's not too costly to get into.

I'm a competitive gamer, so I can't recommend it.

Well said! This is pretty much the conclusion I've come too as well, especially after my "keeping people interested" thread last month. As for me, I'll keep on drinking my beer and eating my pretzels .

You can also still impose more limits. My LGS group was quite happy to accept my 50% hard cap on aerial models. We also don't solely use aerial units as obscured board/boarding rushers, we often leave 'em down and let them duke it out with all their weapon systems.

But if you made it so that the dreadnought didn't need any escroting/air support then instead we'd have thread about how it's overpowered and there's nothing you can do to take them down.
Even an airship flying up obscured will then trigger a responsive AA attack when it declares its attack on anything, no?

imweasel wrote:I absolutely dislike a game mechanic/design flaw that forces you to have to take certain units, like escorts.

The rules absolutely need tidying up, they're repetitive and confused. Something we'd noticed that could solve the escorts but needing AA thing was why would any other ship (as long as it was in range) not help out with its AA? Escorts have to remain with their parent vessel but you could have had a small unit of destroyers or frigates that could motor over to help out the dreadnought as and when it was needed. It joins its AA with the dreadnought and once the threat was gone is free to motor away.

I think the draw of the game for me is the setting and the models, these are the most important aspects for myself. Not beiung a competitive gamer I think for what is otherwise a very attractive game to play we'd make a rulebook that had our own corrections in it.

After all, how many people play Monopoly correctly?

Even an airship flying up obscured will then trigger a responsive AA attack when it declares its attack on anything, no?

It'd have to come out of obscured to attack a surface target. It is, however, your one shot against it when it comes in. Knocks out tiny flyers fairly well, but when you've got what is effectively a flying ship it's going to take a lot of AA to bring it down in one round.

Good point about the Monopoly thing. I don't see why wargames should be approached any differently. Personally, when I land on Free Parking, I want the damn money.

CPTPromotable wrote:You can also still impose more limits. My LGS group was quite happy to accept my 50% hard cap on aerial models. We also don't solely use aerial units as obscured board/boarding rushers, we often leave 'em down and let them duke it out with all their weapon systems.

So basically, you are agreeing with me on the fail of DW in the competitive gaming environment.

I suggest the company actually fixing the rules. Personally, they are worse than 40k.

Sattamassagana wrote:The rules absolutely need tidying up, they're repetitive and confused. Something we'd noticed that could solve the escorts but needing AA thing was why would any other ship (as long as it was in range) not help out with its AA? Escorts have to remain with their parent vessel but you could have had a small unit of destroyers or frigates that could motor over to help out the dreadnought as and when it was needed. It joins its AA with the dreadnought and once the threat was gone is free to motor away.

The AA "bubble" you are describing is actually how Point Defense works in Firestorm Armada. Point defense is a bit like a combination of CC and AA, as it works against torpedoes as well. Thus, you could extend the same principle to CC, although will make less of a difference to the overall game that the AA would. Be warned though, this would probably lead to the same tight clustering of ships for mutual defense that is commonly seen in Firestorm.

imweasel wrote:

CPTPromotable wrote:You can also still impose more limits. My LGS group was quite happy to accept my 50% hard cap on aerial models. We also don't solely use aerial units as obscured board/boarding rushers, we often leave 'em down and let them duke it out with all their weapon systems.

So basically, you are agreeing with me on the fail of DW in the competitive gaming environment.

I suggest the company actually fixing the rules. Personally, they are worse than 40k.

I dunno...I'm still of the mindset that they are not worse, just different. Spartan never intended DW, FA, or US to be anything other than beer & pretzels games, based on statements made by the company's founder during his interviews with the D6G. Unfortunately, the models they are making are getting so good that they have attracted the attention of players like yourself who just aren't a fan of that style of game. That seems to be leading to a phenomena where gamers are buying into DW expecting a tight, balanced game like Warmahordes or 40k, and being disappointed over time for the reasons already mentioned. None of that should be taken as saying the DW rules are good as-is, or that the company doesn't listen to its players doesn't appreciate feedback, and has no plans to improve its games (infact, Spartan's past actions have demonstrated the opposite). Rather, I am trying to express what I see as a difference in priority; right now, I think Spartan is more interested in trying to get more models out and keeping up with demand than completely overhauling the rules to be suitable for a highly competitive environment. Remember, this game has only been out for a whopping 9 months, and has resulted in explosive growth for the company.

What Ruckdog said. The 3 battlespace nature of DW makes any tournament attempt force restrictionsthat don't exist in the book. If we hosted a tournament at any conventionright now, and said 'bring 1000 points of Dystopian Wars following the requirements in the book' you will have people bring naval and air, land and air, and mixes of the three. If you intended it to be an all naval/air tourney you've just messed up, and that's not on the company.

Noone is saying they shouldn't fix stuff, I have a problem currently with certain stacking modifiers that can, given a perfect situaton, make indirect fire bombards hit better than direct fire. Spartan has been, and will continue to, fix things with the game, but the intent from the outset was never a megamazingly tight tournament capable ruleset out of the starting gate.

As to being a fail in the competitive gaming environment, as far as I'm concerned you only fail there if you are trying to make a tourney game and fail at it, they are making a game where I can have great battles where big ships, bigtanks, and big balloons all blast the tar out of each other on one table. Spartan didn't set out to make a tourney game, they set out to make pretty much what we've got now. It needs polish, and we'll see that with the mentioned expansion and the second 4 factions releases.

If I want to play hypercompetitively, I'll pull out the old WM/H stuff(which is actually what I've been ding on top of DW/US, since those two brought me back into tabletop games.) Although even those rules have issues.

Total cop-out in my opinion.

"We never intended our game to be anything but a bro-fisting tickle fight between dudes that want to push toys around".

The issue for me is not necessarily that it's not an ultra tight competitive rules set, although I dearly wish that it had been so. To be fair, the rules imbalances were terrible. KoB battleship was quantitatively terrible yet cost a points premium to other, better battleships, and then the hidden double-whammy of how stat degradation hammers multiple turret models moreso than single or double turret models made it impossible to be worse unless it was actually some sort of floating, battleship-shaped piece of hardened dung.

The big, game-breaking, made-me-sell-my-stuff-and-ragequit factor was twofold:

Disgusting intrafaction imbalance compounded by poor rules interactions.

Age-of-Sail playstyle. When conflict largely devolved into watching capital ships, both naval and air, attempting to get as close as possible to launch boarding parties onto each other, the game died for me. The aesthetic and marketing both suggest something more akin to Battle of Jutland than Battle of Trafalgar.

sourclams wrote:When conflict largely devolved into watching capital ships, both naval and air, attempting to get as close as possible to launch boarding parties onto each other, the game died for me. The aesthetic and marketing both suggest something more akin to Battle of Jutland than Battle of Trafalgar.

I'm using your quote as an example here, but several have mentioned about how it seems to be a rush for boarding. I would attribute this more to playstyle and tactics than the actual rules. In my limited experience I've only ever seen a single boarding action, If the opponent is trying to board, and your playstyle is hang back and fire at them, then you would need to adjust your tactics to keep away from the enemy and blast them out of the water.

Of course if all your opponents are prussians, then of course it's going to be a game of boarding, try playing against the more long ranged factions and see if you feel different. I play EotBS, (only own the starter box at the moment), although when I get serious money and regular opponents I will be running a 1500pt Ika spam list, so my focus will be on keeping opponents distracted while my 4 giant squids sneak up and beat face.

As an unrelated note, this is the list I came up with, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to swap the destroyers for escorts to keep my BBs alive for longer.
Sokotsu Battleship 1
Sokotsu Battleship 1

Tanuki Gunship 3
Tanuki Gunship 3

Ika Mechanical Squid 2
Ika Mechanical Squid 2

Uwatsu Frigate 4
Uwatsu Frigate 4

Yurgi Destroyer 2

Don't have enough experience to say whether the list is any good, nor do I have the models to make the list, but I think it might work.

@Zero. Rather than dropping the Destroyers for Escorts, I would suggest dropping some Frigates for Escorts.

As to the flaws of the ruleset, I'm still too green to go to work on them, but I can forsee working with my regular playing group to hammer out a modified rule system to balance it at some point in the future. I'd never rage-quit, as I'm in it for the models, and I want to use them!

Leigen_Zero wrote: I play EotBS, (only own the starter box at the moment), although when I get serious money and regular opponents I will be running a 1500pt Ika spam list, so my focus will be on keeping opponents distracted while my 4 giant squids sneak up and beat face.

So your tactic is primarily going to be...

Getting your forces in close and launching squids+boba fetts at the enemy?

This is the exact same approach as the Prussian blimp spam, except utilizing the even more powerful submerged rules.

Ruckdog wrote:

Sattamassagana wrote:The rules absolutely need tidying up, they're repetitive and confused. Something we'd noticed that could solve the escorts but needing AA thing was why would any other ship (as long as it was in range) not help out with its AA? Escorts have to remain with their parent vessel but you could have had a small unit of destroyers or frigates that could motor over to help out the dreadnought as and when it was needed. It joins its AA with the dreadnought and once the threat was gone is free to motor away.

The AA "bubble" you are describing is actually how Point Defense works in Firestorm Armada. Point defense is a bit like a combination of CC and AA, as it works against torpedoes as well. Thus, you could extend the same principle to CC, although will make less of a difference to the overall game that the AA would. Be warned though, this would probably lead to the same tight clustering of ships for mutual defense that is commonly seen in Firestorm.

But that would in itself give the advantage for fixed channel weapons. Swings and roundabouts.

Most comments on here seem to devolve into "damned Prussians, always boarding grumble grumble..." but with my Prussian fleet I only had one successful board, a load of marines killed and some ships left (almost) undefended. Seems far more sensible to me to just shoot the hell out of things.

sourclams wrote:

Leigen_Zero wrote: I play EotBS, (only own the starter box at the moment), although when I get serious money and regular opponents I will be running a 1500pt Ika spam list, so my focus will be on keeping opponents distracted while my 4 giant squids sneak up and beat face.

So your tactic is primarily going to be...

Getting your forces in close and launching squids+boba fetts at the enemy?

This is the exact same approach as the Prussian blimp spam, except utilizing the even more powerful submerged rules.

No only the squids will get up in your grill, the boats are going to hang back and provide longer ranged support without trying to get into boarding range. I know I'm disadvantaging myself by not boarding with my boats, but I'm using a tactic that makes me reminisce of the heady days of red alert 2 (pre Yuri's revenge) when you had a soviet naval force that consisted entirely of dreadnaughts lobbing missiles while giant squids pulled the opponents naval defence to the seabed!

Sattamassagana wrote:
But that would in itself give the advantage for fixed channel weapons. Swings and roundabouts.

Most comments on here seem to devolve into "damned Prussians, always boarding grumble grumble..." but with my Prussian fleet I only had one successful board, a load of marines killed and some ships left (almost) undefended. Seems far more sensible to me to just shoot the hell out of things.

Speaking of fixed channels, another dynamic that will change is that clustering ships together will cause LOS issues in DW that it wouldn't in FA, where ships don't block LOS. So you're right, there will be some interesting trade-offs involved with taking advantage of an AA/CC bubble. As for Prussians boarding, I think you have a point; if your opponent has good luck with AA and melee rolling, the Prussian player is in trouble. I had much the same experience playing my Prussians for the first time in my last game. That being said, on average the Prussians are a boarding threat to be reckoned with, and if the dice swing the other way they can wipe out an enemy with very little damage in return. That is exactly what happens when I play against Prussians with my FSA; I manage to kill 1 or 2 boarders with AA, and then kill only a few with my own marines before getting wiped out .

Leigen_Zero wrote:
No only the squids will get up in your grill, the boats are going to hang back and provide longer ranged support without trying to get into boarding range. I know I'm disadvantaging myself by not boarding with my boats, but I'm using a tactic that makes me reminisce of the heady days of red alert 2 (pre Yuri's revenge) when you had a soviet naval force that consisted entirely of dreadnaughts lobbing missiles while giant squids pulled the opponents naval defence to the seabed!

Great visual! Man, it has been a long time since I've played that game!

Anyway, this will probably be a pretty powerful force, but you will need to watch out for CC-sniping airships, as well as your opponent's larger ships focusing enough firepower on the squids as they close such that even only hitting on 's won't be enough to save them. An enemy dreadnought or battleship catching a squid at RB2 will be throwing a LOT of dice at it. A mark in your favor is that you will have 4 squids, while your opponent will not have 4 dreadnoughts .

Ruckdog wrote:
Anyway, this will probably be a pretty powerful force, but you will need to watch out for CC-sniping airships, as well as your opponent's larger ships focusing enough firepower on the squids as they close such that even only hitting on 's won't be enough to save them. An enemy dreadnought or battleship catching a squid at RB2 will be throwing a LOT of dice at it. A mark in your favor is that you will have 4 squids, while your opponent will not have 4 dreadnoughts .

This is kind of what I was going for, I can't remember if CC is reduced by damage (probably isn't, like ACK-ACK) but the purpose of the other boats is to soften up the boats and present a target saturation so that the opponent either concentrates on the boats and gets nommed by the squids, or concentrates on the squids and gets blasted by the boats.

For that to work, though, you will be better off having your BB's close with the squids; to be honest, I don't think a DN with two shield generators is going to be very scared of a BB's range band 3 or 4 shooting.

Ruckdog wrote:For that to work, though, you will be better off having your BB's close with the squids; to be honest, I don't think a DN with two shield generators is going to be very scared of a BB's range band 3 or 4 shooting.

I kind of like that idea, it sounds like a good tactic, and give me the image of some mad Japanese scientist in a lab-coat with some yuri-style mind-control helmet standing on the bridge of each battleship directing his 'pets' with wild arm-flailing gestures.

Hello all

Thought you may like this ...

Dystopian Wars France Magenta Battleship - Review



Full review here ...
http://colshofer.blogspot.com/2011/09/colonel-shoots-colonel-scores-part-3.html

CS

Nice! I'm looking forward to painting this one.

*sigh* I had somebody that was going to pick me up one of those beauties at gencon, but it fell through due to family emergency taking me away from anywhere internet-able(sic) before i could confirm with him/get him the money for it. Color me sufficiently jealous that you have one already!

They are available on eBay if your so inclined. You may want to be sitting down when you look at the pricing.

Hi folks,

@Ruckdog Long time before I paint it

@Sarge Yup. noticed that.

@CPT ... One day, my son, all that will be yours

CS