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In the older rules (at least for Firestorm-I assume it was the same in Dystopian Wars) you needed to roll a 5+ to hit the smaller faster ships. You could say that needing a 5+ rather than a 4+ takes into account the fact that as well as being smaller, faster targets, some of the shells are hitting these ships but are not detonating

chaos0xomega wrote:
yet clearly people find the "bullet catcher" dynamic to be unrewarding and unsatisfying.

Oh, I get that, I am just voicing the very surface level design idea at work.

I dont really think thats accurate though. Lots of games dont intend small vessels to be escorts/bullet catchers, many of them try to code small vessels as "specialists" which provide buffs, support abilities, utility support, specialized weapons/systems, etc to the fleet, whereas bigger vessels are coded as brawlers, etc. Sometimes these games include "escorts" as a specific type of small vessel intended specifically to catch rounds for bigger ships, etc.

The other problem is also the fact that tabletop gaming has very little in way of fog of war. There's no real way to simulate the confusion that allowed Taffy 3 to survive, and for some reason, many games shy away from giving the tinboats the equivalent of IRL torpedoes that made them so dangerous to capital ships.
Even when they have rules for combining fire like in Firestorm or Dystopian wars, they very often ended up being dead weight or just thin mist before they got anything done.

Of course part of the problem is the fact that these games insist on bringing those escorts to the "grand finale" slugfest between the battlelines which would normally see the light ships play screen/withdraw precisely because everyone knew they wouldn't contribute much, cause otherwise you have very little variety in the forces you can bring- BBs, BCs, maybe some heavy cruisers.

most games don't do "grand finale" slugfests though - usually you have a battleship on each side as a flagship and cruisers make up the bulk of their fleets. Sadly I can't say that ive encountered a game that has "proper" fleet actions where battleship squadrons are the core of the fleet and everything else exists to support them.

There's always the Federation destroyer in Star Fleet Battles, which is basically the Heavy Cruiser's saucer (including the bulk of its weapons) with a single warp engine. It's an anomoly, though. SFB also had the Fast Patrol Ships (or PFs), and a PFs versus regular ships scenario called Piranha.

But yeah, it's a problem. The trick is to give the smaller ships a role without having them eclipse the big ships. Historically, torpedoes balance out because they were tricky to use (I'm not aware of any destroyer-launched torpedoes hitting a battleship in WW2, though Yamato did have to turn away from some when fighting Taffy 3; contrast with USS Laffey performing a *crazy* close approach of Hiei at the Solomon Islands, and completely gutting her bridge with gunfire).

For those who wish to talk about Escorts and Game design, I started a thread in the Game design forum as I find this topic interesting:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/794828.page


Edit: I am excited to see Dystopian Wars back, as it fills a market niche that has been missing since its loss; Fantastic Naval battle.

I'm excited to see this game come back. I've long since sold off all my fleets, but played this a fair bit back in the day. First edition had excellent models, and pretty poor rules (you just rolled a bunch, and hoped to get more dice and better rolls than your opponent - really not much strategy at all) and second edition had absolutely appalling rules (everyone remember how every fourth word was boldfaced and/or underlined? WTH was that all about?) that I couldn't even read, let alone try to make sense of.

I loved the models and the fluff, it's cool to see the new models in plastic, but the game was pretty terrible - if the 3rd edition is similar, I am cautiously pessimistic... lol. I will also wait on 3rd edition for some rules playthroughs and such and probably won't be getting into this.

In the interim, I've got Mantic's Armada with its fantastic models (though the rate of miscasts is pretty alarming - if they don't get that under control immediately, the game is sunk before it even leaves the harbor...) and interesting rules. I haven't yet played, and am withholding judgement until I try it, but the models are marvelous so far (the ones that aren't broken, melty, missing bits... sigh!)

If they release Uncharted Seas, I would definitely pay them a visit - but now that Armada is out, there might not be room for another fantasy naval game...?

There's also GW's 1993 Man o War still kicking around. Getting the mandatory cardboard components is a PITA but most ships have been resculpted for 3d printing, for free, so models are more accessible than they have been in 25 years. I've read the rulebook for the first time a couple of months ago and was surprised by how streamlined and intuitive it is.

Naval is having a bit or a renaissance right now....

On the one hand theres probably more "big name" naval games on the market now or soon to enter the market in the next year or so than there have ever been... on the other hand I'm still not seeing any community movement towards an increase in naval wargaming that would really justify it being called a "Renaissance".

I think whats really happening is that a lot of different designers and manufacturers all recognized the same perceived holes in the market and are all trying to fill it within the same timeframe. Its a supply side drive that I'm not seeing as being fully supported on the demand side of the market - but I would love to be wrong on that front, as I've always enjoyed naval gaming and have been dismayed by their lack of popularity among the gaming community as a whole.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
There's also GW's 1993 Man o War still kicking around. Getting the mandatory cardboard components is a PITA but most ships have been resculpted for 3d printing, for free, so models are more accessible than they have been in 25 years. I've read the rulebook for the first time a couple of months ago and was surprised by how streamlined and intuitive it is.

Man o war is fun, but a table hog. Even a small-medium sized game will have so much real estate taken up by the ship templates, it can be a bit rough! I appreciate how Armada is playable with just a few ships (as opposed to squadrons of ships) - but again, I don't know how the game itself plays. I've now almost gotten enough orcs n humies to play a skirmish, so maybe if I get off my lazy arse, I'll post a batrep???

 Easy E wrote:
I am excited to see Dystopian Wars back, as it fills a market niche that has been missing since its loss; Fantastic Naval battle.

Heck, if the rules are good enough, I may get into it, but only if we get the full Dystopian War scope back.

The main draw for the game (for me at least) was how you could play sea, land, and air battles all at the same time. Fleets or ground combat groups (sometimes both if you had the right table setup) battling it out while airships and super-sized planes clashed in the skies. And of course, the units that could go from one area of combat to another, like flying robots or floating tanks.

That was the theory, in practice land and sea (and air, which was balanced with sea in mind) were so completely apart in power that it made land units just waste of time from pure one-off gameplay perspective, and I think it was clear with number of painted fleets/forces back at the old spartan forum that most people were in it for the naval side.

I honestly think separating land warfare into it's own thing like they did now was a better idea.

 pancakeonions wrote:
Man o war is fun, but a table hog. Even a small-medium sized game will have so much real estate taken up by the ship templates, it can be a bit rough!

Very fair point. There are standard playing card sized dry-erase stat cards available online tho!

The games sea-centric focus is no surprise, the original game - as well as the new one - was launched as a naval game with naval battle fleets, and the first few waves of releases were likewise naval in nature. At that point, you've effectively established a sort of "identity" for the game, and with it a prevailing culture. when your established fan base is showing up to battle with naval fleets supported by air assets, it's really hard to crack into the ground combat side of things later, as that requires different table setups and force compositions than what the established community is using. The early adopters and those who've invested the most into the game up till that point are basically being told to shelve some aspect of their collection in order to accommodate new content that doesn't even fully integrate with the old stuff - realistically speaking, that's not something that would be very likely to happen unless the game somehow managed to make a compelling case for why the ground elements should be utilized, and managed to draw in significant numbers of new players that were gung-ho about that aspect of gameplay.

That's not to say you can't get a game that integrates the three domains together, just that If you want to successfully pull that off you have to go about it a certain way.

February scheduled releases include

- The Hunt for the Prometheus in French, German, Polish and Spanish
- Rules and Gubbins Set in all the above languages (to really be able to split the starter with a friend)
- freely available rulebook in the above languages (Mein Gott, c'est muy miły!)
- Commonwealth Frontline Squadron - the Russian plastic part of the HP box
- Enlightened Frontline Squadron - same, but for the other side

The freely available rulebook seems to show the company's faith in the system revamp, so that at least gives me hope.

Don't forget they are also giving out free rulebooks to a load of fans who showed photos of themselves with the original rulebook. So the rules are going to be very well spread by that as well.

And comes the Imperium with their rail-road ships!

https://blog.warcradle.com/blog/2020/warcradle-studios-diary-37?fbclid=IwAR10sKkcQCbm_TSl6lWT2Oco1ihsvdcaYKEzOl82_2fRZU8ot_mr0VhVHXk

In addition to moving whole weapon systems with rail on and off their ships; they've got two named variation builds and some carrier concept art!

The modularity and number of options on these is out of this world, but the aesthetics are pure scifi and do nothing for me in terms of steampunk/alt. history ...

Doesnt look scifi to me at all, at most its "teslapunk", but its still very industrial looking

Antarctica is pretty Sci Fi I think. The rest not so much. Teslapunk vs Steampunk kind of come down to individual factions.

Yeah the Imperials (linked in my previous post) use steam engines to drive weapon segments onto and off their ships from dock - some variants even have the steam engines waiting at the rear of the vessel.

Dystopian Wars always took a more high-tech approach to steam punk, perhaps slightly on the techo-punk end at times.
It's certainly at the "higher end" tech end of Steam Punk than the low end.

Definitely, and I think there is appeal in doing a more high-tech steampunk. In-universe it is the good ole alien technology explanation so things work from that end too.

I think there's appeal in both areas. High tech steam punk can do a lot of funky things and they can splice in some lightning and other quirky techno stuff quite easily without it standing out. Heck original Dystopain Wars even had run faction running around with genetically mutated animals and such (concept only that never made it to models or even concept art).


The other extreme is very cog and boiler heavy designs with basically lots of exposed inner parts; connecting rods, pistons and such.


And in fairness if you go the high tech end you can include the latter as one of the factions easily. In fact I'd love to see that, one force that's all boilers and pistons and such.




That said I wonder if scale also comes into play; at the scale the game is at you actually have to build pretty massive things to see cogs and gears and pistons and such. Festooning a model with them could bury it in detail and lose form.
I do recall that the 30mm version of the game had designs that were a touch less techno and a touch more core steam punk. I think in many ways because at that scale you can start to include a lot more smaller details and such - which at the scale Dystopian Wars is at, would basically be impractical to model.

Iirc the Britannia forces likely were the most Steam, with visible boilers and such going on. I think it’s harder the capture they look at this scale though.

Silly question: has anyone heard if the old ships will be compatible with the new version of the game? Reason I ask is because my FLGS has some of the old stuff on clearance and I might love an excuse to buy it. Sorry if this has already been answered, I'm tired and didn't want to read through the whole thread even if it is only a few pages.

Any pictures of what the air plane/ fighters will look like?

minor quibble, but the old DW "tokens" for the little one-person fighters were never that cool looking. Hoping maybe these guys go for something more like the flight of planes in axis and allies - like these guys:

ZergSmasher wrote:Silly question: has anyone heard if the old ships will be compatible with the new version of the game? Reason I ask is because my FLGS has some of the old stuff on clearance and I might love an excuse to buy it. Sorry if this has already been answered, I'm tired and didn't want to read through the whole thread even if it is only a few pages.

It has indeed been answered in the thread! Sorry though, don’t want to go back thru the whole thread to copy/paste it for you even if it is only a few pages.

pancakeonions wrote:Any pictures of what the air plane/ fighters will look like?

minor quibble, but the old DW "tokens" for the little one-person fighters were never that cool looking. Hoping maybe these guys go for something more like the flight of planes in axis and allies - like these guys:

Very true. The fighter tokens were one of the weakest model aspects of the originals. This is what I did with mine;

I will be checking out the rules when they are available but pretty sure this is a hard pass. A shame because DW was our go to game for several years.

Nothing Warcradle has done with the game excites me. I get that you have to put your own mark on something to make money but tying it in with Exodus? Why? The last version of the beta rules was one of the most dumbed-down rules sets I have seen in a long time. As for being in plastic - cool but not really needed so neutral on that.

Odds are the couple players we have here will dust off the old fleets every couple of month and add a revision to our own version of 2.1.



A small dark part of me does wonder how many factions Spartan would have put out by now. At the rate they were going I am betting at least 40.

Well before Spartan killed themselves Neil wrote a post on what he wanted the future of DW to be. It was awesome. The one thing in that list they managed to make happen was the super dread bots. And I consider those models to be the second worst thing that happened to the game.