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I have checked it out and am sold on this game, to the point that I am now saving up to buy and costing out what I will collect. This will be my next gaming money sink, not that I need another one.

Ruckdog wrote:Ok! Ok! I should be getting my first ship painted up tomorrow, and I'll put up some pics in my P&M blog if I can.

EDIT: Got my first cruiser all painted up as a test. I am going with a "Great White Fleet" theme:

Do the FSA cruisers have a variable centre mount as the battleship does?

Yanks have the best fleet from what I have heard, though Prussians and Brits have the best looking.

I have been looking on the tactical forums, people are saying the Britannian fleet is weaker an d is only effective in a narrow range of circumstances

Ruckdog wrote:

Considering the South won the American Civil War in the DW universe, I'm sure the FSA would bristle at being characterized as Yankees .

Not got the book, they are Rebs? How did it end.

Yesterday I ordered a 'test' miniature, something to add to my shelf if I do nothing else with it. Though I am almost certain to buy into this game now, the more I read about it and look on the forums the more I like it. I have found my cash sink for that first half of 2011, putting off my Vampire Counts army yet again. After being delayed for over three years by Descent, Titans, Warmachine, AT-32, Confrontation and more Warmachine in that order. The miniature I bought was this:



and frankly miniature is not an appropriate word for it. While I bought the Zeppelin from Weyland Games, I find the Spartan games store Mega Bundle especially tempting as it includes the rulebook and cards and a healthy discount. Notice the discount is worldwide so interesting Aussies and others gouged on shipping should check it out and consider buying 1x each carrier with it. The deal is a smart move, as I will not end up collecting four fleets when two or three would do.

Dystopian Wars Mega Bundle


Yes do remember this deal 'only' includes line warships and not carriers, its one of the reasons I chose the zeppelin to buy, it wont interfere with this deal. Also note that the price has held at £125 from December, in fact all prices have held, so Spartan Games has absorbed the VAT rise. I like the naval Battle Groups because they arent really starters as per Games workshop boxset starters, with the carriers in addendum you don't really need much else. I may just add the new studff as it comes out at one box each and the ships are huge. Its a damn good deal frankly, and has gone a long way on selling me this game.

IHeart, the Mega-bundle is worthwhile even if you are not yet sure. You get all you need to play, a very good discount and free shipping worldwide. You can sell off two or more of the included Starter Fleets to recover much of your money to local players who collect those fleets.

Or you might have all four fleets grow on you, combined with the low general price and end up collecting all four.

Oh and by the way, thats how you get your rulebook and card deck, its included!

sourclams wrote:Product quality can swing from box to box. They use silicone molds (we know this because my buddy got a ship with huge chunks of silicone mold adhered to the resin.

If you're got an early run model, it's very probably near perfect. If you end up with a later run model, it probably has more defects just as the mold has broken down.

What's nice is that many of the models come in clear plastic blisters so you can eyeball the quality. For starter boxes, that's not as doable.

This is what I feared would happen.

I bought three Dystopian Wars carriers from Firestorm Games.

Two out of three were faulty in some way, one was miscast, another had pieces missing. I contacted Neil, on the spartan forums and he promised to replace them. In fact the third was also slightly miscast with the top deck of my FSA carrier uneven, but I didn't consider it bad enough to complain.

I will say this for them, they don't play all evasive on customer service. Saying that I have had good results from GW too on this regard.

Practically everything in the Prussian list is a boarding platform.
Don't just keep an eye on the big stuff, rocket marines can appear in large numbers from bombers and frigates too.

Daba wrote:Is there a rundown on how the factions play?

Each fleet has oddball units that are contrary to their own design doctrine or do unique things.

Federated States of America

Ship design: Paddle steamers with low to the waterline hulls. - FSA ships are harder to hit because they are low to the waterline, the paddle wheels also make th ships able to out-turn anyone else but are on only moderate speed. The FSA special design is a flying mecha, which is cheap and potent, we can expect to see a lot of them soon.

Weapon doctrine: Guns and lots of them. The FSA can out-shoot anyone, particularly at range, and almost all their guns are turreted for wide arcs of fire. FSA carriers have few supplementary defences so they are vulnerable but considerably cheaper.

Tactics: Cheap carriers means the FSA can try for air superiority if they want, however most players do not and try instead for massive long range bombardment superiority instead, notably by deploying multiples of the excellent FSA battleship. FSA designs have no weaknesses and simple to apply strengths , rely on range or wide fire arcs to apply firepower. This makes them easy to play and win with.

Prussian Empire

Ship design: Sleek modern hulls with relatively few weapon systems. Prussians enjoy a higher technology base and a better understanding of the science of electricity, expect to se a lot of cabling even to the main gun turrets. These ships are fast. The Prussians like airships too, including carrier airships, with lots of electricity of course. The unique Prussian design is a germanic warlord titan.

Weapon doctrine: Prussians like to have good ship defences and electrically powered large turrets, but what they really like to do is carry large marine compliments for boarding actions and outfit anything with 'Tesla Coils' which fire lightning at the enemy and is a technology unique to them.

Tactics: Lightning is short ranged, boarding soldiers need to get in range also t use their rocket packs, the main gun turrets are not short ranged but don't hurt for getting in closer. Prussians are fast especially thier lighter units. This makes Prussian tactics rather straightforward, to excuse the pun. The titan is less impressive than it looks, solid stats and a terror on land though less so in water despite a few gadgets it has which make is a good submarine killer.

Empire of the Blazing Sun (Japan)

Ship design: Enclosed hulls oddly resembling steam trains, though what you see is not all steam boiler but gun decks. Blazing Suns have solid ships, as easy to hit as anyone elses (except FSA) but harder to land a critical hit on. Defences are not as good as the first two fleets but acceptable. The unique Blazing Suns design is a robotic squid.

Weapon doctrine: As Blazing Suns ships are compartmentalized they carry a lot of disparate weapon systems including guns torpedoes and rockets, this can lead to problems in coordinating fire due to restricted fire arcs, however if you do get the guns in they hit as hard as FSA but have the versatility of toys the Britannians have.

Tactics: Considered weaker by some, they are not they are just harder to use than FSA and Prussiains both of which follow simple to follow albeit diametrically opposite tactical doctrines. Blazing Suns if handled well have everything going for them, range speed firepower and an answer to any attack type. But you need to play them well to get the most out of them. dont know much about the squid as yet, though ir purports to be effective.


Kingdom of Britannia

Ship design: The closest to a Victorian battlefleet, plenty of gun turrets big solid hulls boilers girders and rivets everywhere. Standard steampunk stuff really. The Britannian special units are submarines.

Weapon doctrine: The Britannians love their torpedoes, pretty much everything has them, in large numbers. Torpedoes being a system buried deep in the hull carry on firing right until; the ship sinks whereas other gun systems degrade with fire. This technically can keep the Britannians in the fight longer than anyone else. On top of this the Britannians have more large gun turrets than anyone, using one more per design class than the maximum of any other fleet. However British guns while having an impressive number of barrels have an unimpressive rate of fire meaning individually each turret is worth considerably less than those of other races, also Britannic torpedoes have long arming times making them useless at short ranges and being torpedoes have no effect on land or air forces.
This plus a general lack of anti air defences and poor marine compliments means that British ships are at best paper tigers and at worst deathtraps. All is not lost however , some of their unreleased vessels cover all the above weaknesses and are arguably the best units in the game.

Tactics. Technically all rounders Brtiannians suffer from 'bad codex syndrome' some of the units in the fleet lists are appalling however others are excellent. Britannians can win even with the weak stuff but have problems with air heavy lists, later Britannians will be a very tough to beat but will undoubtably suffer from 'cookie cutter' lists as everyone takes plenty of the odd few subchoices that are good designs.

Most notably of these are the Britannian escort, destroyer and drsadnought. every faction gets one desifgn of each. The destoyer is an upgunned escort sized vessel, most are powerful but the Britannian version especially so. as with most britaniic designs its torpedo based so spartan might have thought that it would simply be one amongst many torpedo vessels, however as it outclasses practically everything else many Brtannitc players are considering replacing most of their line fleet with destroyers.
Evey faction has an 'escort' which is an escort size vessel with supllementary air and anti submarine ddfences that it can lend out to surrounding ships. All are good the Britannian one is simply better asnd far more needed. This makes the design essential.
Every faction also has a dreadnought, each dreadnought costs about 50% more than thev next most expensive thing (a battleship) and is downright nasty. The Britannian design is the nastiest of the lot, at no extra price and as the Brtiannic battleship and cruiser are both laughably poor designs we can expect the dreadnought to be a staple of Britannian fleets in the near future, backed up with a horded of destroyers. In fact while their is nothing wrong with Britannian frigates except that they are overshadowed by destroyers the only component in the original release to have a guaranteed place in the eventual Britannic fleet is the bomber, which is admittedly a very good piece.
This is the only fleet with which I am disappointed with Spartan Games games design, for a new sysem three out of four lists right isn't bad.

sourclams wrote:Not to kinda pee on the parade, but there's some real competitive issues with the game 'when you come down to it', with its current model line (which I figure is worth bringing up as we're now into 'how do factions play').

Boarding actions are much more effective at crippling ships of all classes than gunnery, in general.

Flyers can become, effectively, immune to most gunnery, only hittable on 6's by ascending into the clouds--something that they can do at will.

The 'big flyers' (Japanese sky carrier, Prussian Zeppelin) carry a huge allotment of boarding marines at a pretty low points cost.

Put that together and there's a horrible metashift to Death From Above armies that are both horribly resilient and have hugely effective offense. Oh, and they're carrier ships, so they also come with 6 Fighter, Divebomber, or Torpedo bomber airplanes.

The only reason I bring this up is because I bought into a WWI-esque naval game to find out that the massive ranged gunfights I was expecting had a far greater tendency to be decided at close range in boarding actions. The ships look like pre-dreadnoughts but the play was more like Age of Sail.

I still had fun with the system, but there's some real imbalances and the net-listing potential is rife. Just a heads up for those considering the game before spending.

I have to agree with this, on the Spartan Forums some of us are trying to get the developers to errata the game before the imbalances get out of hand.

sourclams wrote:
But never before on the forums have I seen the 'just use tactics/skill>list' apologist mentality that I experienced reading through the SG forums.

You should have tried the Rackham forums, they had zampolits to decry critics of game balance. I cant tell which killed the company more, Rackhams unrelaibility to stockists, Chinese manufacturers shenanigans, or the blatant failure to accept that some portions of the ruleset were unplayable (and had a number of people walking away from the first game).

sourclams wrote:
Since retooling the game for boarding actions to be less decisive and gunnery moreso, and to bring the airships>sea ships dynamic back in line would require literally retooling the whole game, I really don't have my hopes up for the future of SG in my area. Great game potential, good models, but definitely borked for quasi-competitive playstyle.

How true. Been trying that wake up call on the SG forums.

Privateer Press didnt break into the market long term because of awesome miniatures, though that helped, but because they got a reputation for playability and game balance from the outset.

Dive/torpedo bombers are very effective in fives, you can be rolling up to 15 attacks per wave, and its hard to abort that many.

They are very good (fresh) cruiser killers and can kill a half hull battleship.

Ruckdog wrote:

Orlanth wrote:Dive/torpedo bombers are very effective in fives, you can be rolling up to 15 attacks per wave, and its hard to abort that many.

They are very good (fresh) cruiser killers and can kill a half hull battleship.

I have not been able to pull this off, unfortunately. I usually see at least 2 if not 3 tokens aborted/shot down, giving me only 6-9 attacks. Even if I get enough hits to score a point of damage, this is then negated with concussion charges :(. This, of course, assumes that I can get all 5 bombers into attack position; it seems like most of the time they end up getting pounced on by the enemy's fighters or shot up by a passing bomber. As for a attacking a BB...around my FLGS, battleships just about always have a 3-4 strong CAP to prevent them from getting boarded and captured. These fighters make it that much harder for my torpedo planes to get through.

You need to be running the correct bomber type for your faction, and have no enemy CAP around. CAP cant be everywhere and of course ties up a flyer contingent preventing them from offensive use. If the best ships have CAP then swiftly bomb/torpedo some frigates and recall to carrier to reload and sortie again. Send them against capital targets in the late game when hull points are reduced or after a shredded defences critical (which is like rolling the ship in honey and setting it outside for the wasps). Dive bombers can hang back move very quick to exploit such a weakness.

Also Prussian dive bombers are particularly nasty because you have to reroll successful hits on them with ack ack, so they tend to get a good volume of bombs in.

Miss Dee wrote:You got the card deck?

I have, I recommend you get a deck. The cards add a lot to the game without complicating it.

FSA have it easy.
Their ships are harder to hit and have maneuver bonuses as standard and hit hard at long range. The longer the range the more advantage they have over anyone else. Furthermore FSA turrets have good arcs of fire, you rarely have to concern yourself over the exact position and facing of the ships. This makes FSA tactics a no brainer: hang back and shoot.

EotBS can also hit hard at range and have a defensive advantage too, harder to critical hit and now also have a maneuver bonus in the ammended rules, but their guns are ecclectic and often fire in narrow non-overlapping zones of fire. This means they are much harder to use despite comperable capabilities on paper. The KoB are a problem child, and benefitted most from the ammedned rules but still are rather lacklustre in general with a few stellar units as exceptions. Prussians have weaker firepower prefer short range engagements but have the best boarding troops.

All in all Prussians and FSA have their strategy mapped out and are easier to win with. However Prussians are generally weak while FSA are generally strong, consequently you can win easily and often with FSA and the faction is error resistant for the most part. Its a good faction therefore but also a crutch for tactical play. If you want a 'win button' play FSA if you want a tactical challenge pick a different fleet. The others can and do win, but need to think about it to do so.

I would try with a grey or white undercoat and diluted brown for the decking so it shades itself.
Exposed gears in dark metal colour with heavy inkwash, metal panels any colour you wish.

Rust and staining is good, and you can also blacken from the soot if you like.