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SO pretty much what the title asks. What is your opinion of Dystopian Wars. I am just curious, as I tried the game and found the setting engrossing, the models fantastic, and the gameplay fun.

Please voice your opinion on ANY facet of this game!!! Thanks

I love it myself.. plus Uncharted Seas and Firestorm Armada use the same exploding dice mechanic as well..

leads to a love it or hate it polarization..

Models are freakin' gorgeous 95% of the time.. the remainder is a serious WTF moment..

Love the miniatures. The game play is solid as well. Check out Beasts of War youtube channel for a "how to play" video.

The only issue seems to be that Spartan Games seems to always have balance issues. Then they fix it with errata/updates. It's like they don't do enough internal testing and things don't get finished until after the stats are published and the public puts it through proper testing.

Great game. It helps that the local store supports it as a game system for league play. I like the game. Has great models. However, the rule book is seriously one of the worst written books. I just recieved the warmachine mark II book and understand it a whole lot better.

Great game.

I don't even mean to be a hater when I say this, but I really dislike everything Spartan Games makes.

The exploding dice lead to ridiculous bouts of luck. It's not even a matter of a desperate do-or-die. If you choose to fire upon a giant battleship for the sake of simply doing some damage, you may end up obliterating the entire thing with a little luck. The game stops being fun when it becomes this swingy.

The 'balance' in the game is forced. Every faction has specific 'classes' of units from destroyers to cruisers to fighters, etc. Pretty much every unit has an analogue in other factions and barely more. There is the occasional chainsaw sub or flying dragon, but it kills the uniqueness of a faction when the bulk of your fleet is nothing more than cookie-cutter templates of ship classes.

Spartan Games started just recently and they pumped out three games (with a fourth on the way) with several factions each. They're overextending and the games and factions suffer due to this. They spent quite some time ignoring the entire Uncharted Seas line and then they decided they ran out of ideas and reboot all the models. Spartan Games needs to stop haphazardly making new factions and new games and focus on what already exists.

Love the models (particularly the Prussian Airships), and the rulebook is "pretty", but I was left feeling "meh" after reading it and have decided to pass...

I'm a fan -- especially of the models, which are weird and wonderful.

To be fair, I've only played a few games so far (just naval forces), so I can't really comment on the game play. It seems serviceable.

I personally like the exploding 6's mechanic. But then, I'm not really a wargamer or a competitive/tournament player. For me the primary goal in gaming is to create successful suspension of disbelief and immersion in an alternate world. On these grounds, Dystopian Wars works nicely, IMO. A unique aesthetic with an evocative feeling of "authentic" but weird atmosphere.

All entirely subjective, of course.

I think the models and setting are fantastic...the gameplay didn't really engage me though. I'm defiantly not a super competitive gamer and I'm all about beer and pretzels gaming but the game really did feel a bit too luck driven.

I'll definitely give it another try whenever the next edition of the game comes out but for right now I couldn't really recommend it.

The rules/balance thing holds up as long as everyone involved is just there to push some miniatures around and half a laugh fighting a steam powered naval battle with weird science.

However, if you are picking what you think looks cool or sounds conceptually cool and your opponent looks at the army list and tries to build the best list for the points value, good luck winning. Figuring out the maximum firepower per point and spamming that is pretty much a sure thing compared to prioritizing variety or concepts in army selection.

Some of the models look interesting , but many others are not to my liking especially the St Pauls Cathedral British model .

Absolutely love the models and the concept. I don't have the rulebook and have only played two or three games, but it seems pretty fun. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody at the stores I go to here plays it.

Its a fun and interesting beer and pretzels game. The moment people start to make competitive lists, it all falls apart rather fast...

With that being said, it has some truly beautiful models (like the Prussian air ships) and I'm extremelly glad I waited for the French Republic before I bought a fleet of my own!

Dynamix wrote:Some of the models look interesting , but many others are not to my liking especially the St Pauls Cathedral British model .

How odd, that's my favourite.

I really want to say nice things about Spartan, but they are like an abusive boyfriend in that I constantly feel violated everytime they change thier rules. In the past 3 years they have changed the rules for Uncharted seas 3 times and the rules for DW are not even a year old and they are getting revised again.

It seems like they push out a piss poor product and expect their fans to fix them for them so they can get more money out of them by releasing another book. If you want to waste money on really pretty models then that is up to you.

I went back and took a hard look at the game, and it wasn't for me.

I played Man O War back in the day, and Battlefleet gothic for a time.

Those ship games are behind me.

Still kinda have a soft spot for Federation/ Starfleet battles/ etc. ehatever they are calling it now.

Pirates was a fun game as well, but always wished they would have taken it to the next level and made those sized ships in resin/ plastic, with the same mechanics... Those games were ok, but damn was that cardstock ship stuff expensive.

I'll be curious to check out the new rules edition I've heard they're putting out. See if that fixes some of my perceived balance problems. In the mean time, I think Uncharted Seas back when I played that was better, as it was more simplistic, but everyone at the FLGS right now just wants to play Dystopian due to a preference for the style of figs.

I've only played one or two games, but I thought it was quite fun to play, unfortunately the only person I know (personally) who plays is 5hrs drive away, so a bit too far for a quick game I think.

However, I do really like the models and such (especially the squid, I'm currently planning a 1500 squid spam list with 4 of the blighters), although at the minute I'm in a real hobby funk and every time I put brush to resin I end up feeling crappy because I haven't made a single brush-stroke I though was acceptable, let alone awesome for about 2-3 months now.

The rules had some holes in them (especially the morale things IMHO) but the re-balancing they posted on the website recently seems to address some of the issues.

What Spartan seems to be doing is crowd-sourcing their play-test, they listen quite well to the forums but really if you are going to do all the playtesting via player feedback you should offer a very cheap rulebook, otherwise you end up with a rulebook that I don't want to replace each time they fix the rules and a gakload of printed out pdfs

A couple of friends and I started Dystopian wars a few weeks ago. I think its a really good game. Great models, dynamic rules and evocative backstory.

Spartan seems to be a decent company in terms of re-acting to customers comments and criticisms, publishing rules updates when they are required.

It is good to see a bunch of people interested in this game on here.

Anyone who is up for a game we play at Darksphere in London, England. http://www.darksphere.co.uk/
We've just started a Blog of our experiences with this system. http://www.darksphere.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&p=2696&sid=3d8d58757926b0d46156109641abc072#p2696

frozenwastes wrote: Figuring out the maximum firepower per point and spamming that is pretty much a sure thing compared to prioritizing variety or concepts in army selection.

No, you jest. That sort of thing never happens in the larger miniatures gaming world. No larger gaming company would ever encourage spam lists through sloppy playtesting

Spartan has a serious case of British School of Game Design sickness, and they listen to the players in what appears to be a rather unorganized fashion, but they have been steadily imprvoving since they started up. It is still beer & pretzels, but I think they eventually may get the holes out of their current 3 systems (US has come pretty far already, actually).