Daston wrote:Was released in September, it looks like my wife has been trying to find an original boxed set for my xmas presant but to no luck. Looks like its the revised set for me plus some extras

plastictrees wrote:

Daston wrote:Was released in September, it looks like my wife has been trying to find an original boxed set for my xmas presant but to no luck. Looks like its the revised set for me plus some extras

Your wife might want to try amazon.co.uk....

Daston wrote:

plastictrees wrote:

Daston wrote:Was released in September, it looks like my wife has been trying to find an original boxed set for my xmas presant but to no luck. Looks like its the revised set for me plus some extras

Your wife might want to try amazon.co.uk....

Sadly the old core sets on Amazon are £100+

So she is going to try the US as they have a few and will ship to UK

Alpharius wrote:That terrain is nice!

Price, for the work blocked, please?

Welcome to another preview of the intense tabletop miniatures action that awaits you with Dust Warfare! In his first preview, renowned designer Andy Chambers shared some of his inspirations and philosophy for the game’s gritty, alternate-reality World War II battles. Today, Andy discusses what he considered to be the biggest challenge of adapting the streamlined board game mechanics of Dust Tactics to a tabletop miniatures system, the turn sequence…

Looking at the turn sequence

Dust Tactics uses a system where players alternate their unit activations, which is nice and clean and keeps both players engaged at all times. For Dust Warfare, I wanted to create a system that allowed bigger armies to fight with a coordinated battle plan. When it comes to creating the “big tabletop game” tempo, I like to be able to engage with several units at once, using–for example–some to lay down covering fire while others advance. For me, the ability to coordinate units like this really feeds into the idea of playing the role of high commander over a platoon or company in battle and opens up a whole new set of tactics to use in the game. As I felt that scaleability was really key for Dust Warfare, I decided to experiment with the idea of allowing multiple unit activations within the Dust Tactics alternating activation system.

One of my inspirational World War II games featured a semi-simultaneous turn sequence that was new to me at the time (bear skin boxers and flint knives were also very new back then). The phasing player would lay down preparatory fire, then move. Then the non-phasing player could execute defensive fire, and finally the phasing player could take advancing fire with his moving units. It meant defenders were horribly unpleasant to winkle out of their positions unless you had enough preparatory fire to keep their heads down while your assault force closed. It felt very “real” and was something I wanted to refine for Dust Warfare.

Initially, I tried keeping the alternating activations and introducing a system where HQ units could activate several subordinate units at once to get the kind of coordinated effort I wanted. This turned out to be pretty clunky in practice as you always activated your HQ units first, creating a default IGO-UGO sequence with an untidy tail of alternating activations afterwards. It convinced me I needed to have a specific command phase to do clever, command stuff, followed by a unit phase where all your units would activate without prompting from the higher-ups.

Reactions

But all this monkeying with a new turn sequence left out altogether the nice player interaction of Dust Tactics and the idea of defensive fire altogether. Fortunately there was a solution. The basic idea was that units aren’t going to sit still while the enemy attacks them; if they have guns, they’re going to use them. Or they might choose to run away, or charge closer.

Breaking it down, there's basically two situations where this is likely to apply–when a unit gets shot at, or when the enemy gets too close. This works great in an action-based system like Dust Warfare. When each reacting unit is granted a single reactive action, it can choose to shoot at the source of its discomfort or simply move. Reactions work to keep the opposing player involved and rather elegantly handle a lot of the interplay that can be gained from system with straight-up alternating activations.

However, a reaction can’t just be a “freebie” extra action, and clearly a unit should only react once in a turn or it's going to pull off some superhero moves, counter-firing against everything that attacks it. This is solved by placing a reaction marker on the unit to show it can't take any more reactions this turn and that the unit has already “spent” one of the actions available to it later in the turn.

There's another circumstance when a unit can't react–when it's already under fire and pinned down. The military often use “suppressive fire” purely to keep the opposition's heads down, and this seemed like a good tactic to encourage by having suppression prevent reactions.

Suppression, in general, is also something I’m really excited to include, but that's a topic for my next designer diary.

The situation is grim for the Allies. The Axis powers have made a another surprise move: an invasion of Southern Britain. If the Brits fall, the allies will be dealt a mortal wound. But there is still hope; in this time of consternation new heroes have arisen to defend the homeland, and new technology has been rushed to the front lines. Now, all eyes are on English Isles, as a new campaign is launched and the war reaches a fever pitch.

Dig in and prepare for a new threat. Axis and Allied commanders alike have a wealth of new intelligence to devour, and any commander worth his salt knows that knowledge is power. The Dust Tactics: Operation “Cerberus” rules are now available for download online (pdf, 7.7 MB) on the support page.

Know yourself, know your enemy

The “Cerberus” rulebook contains exciting new rules for your Dust Tactics games. Large vehicles will soon be leaving their footprints on your matches, NCO command squads will be lending all sorts of expertise to the fray, vehicles will be transporting troops around with the new carry capacity rules, and your Dust games will be expanding vertically with rules for 3D structures. Additionally, “Cerberus” includes descriptions of new units and heroes, as well as more background information to immerse yourself in the world of Dust.

Defend the allied coasts...or invade them if you would prefer. Continue the struggle with the Operation “Cerberus” rulebook. The Operation “Cerberus” expansion hits shores later this quarter. Pre-order this product now at your local retailer.

Dust Studio is very proud to announce that all our model kits from the Deluxe Edition range and the Dust-48 range are now provided with their own gaming stat card for Dust Tactics!

All the rules to play our models kits can be found in Dust Tactics' expansions, mostly Operation Cerberus and on Dust Model website, on each model kit's page. There you will find the description of the unique skills these models can have. All other skills and game rules are within Dust Tactics' booklets.

As many of these new models introduce very new game rules, the cards don't have an Army Point Cost attached: therefore these models are not “legal” to play in Dust Tactics tournaments. But you can surely enjoy them when playing with your friends!

All these new stat cards can be ordered from our web store at www.dust-models.com. If you bought some of our earlier models kits, you'll certainly want them. To keep things simple we've made a pack with all the cards from our earlier models and priced it at 3.99 US$. Quite a bargain!

Happy gaming,

Dust Studio Team.

chaos0xomega wrote:You think theres any chance of the Core Set being rereleased? And I mean the original, not the inferior revised one. I have hopes of acquiring 3 of them...

Noir wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:You think theres any chance of the Core Set being rereleased? And I mean the original, not the inferior revised one. I have hopes of acquiring 3 of them...

Sadly, NO, not a chance. The original core set was done buy a different company. FFG got the rights, slapped a sticker on it with there info and called it a day.

Sadly, NO, not a chance. The original core set was done buy a different company. FFG got the rights, slapped a sticker on it with there info and called it a day.

endtransmission wrote:A nice announcement from Dustgame.com this week.

Dust Studio is very proud to announce that all our model kits from the Deluxe Edition range and the Dust-48 range are now provided with their own gaming stat card for Dust Tactics!

All the rules to play our models kits can be found in Dust Tactics' expansions, mostly Operation Cerberus and on Dust Model website, on each model kit's page. There you will find the description of the unique skills these models can have. All other skills and game rules are within Dust Tactics' booklets.

As many of these new models introduce very new game rules, the cards don't have an Army Point Cost attached: therefore these models are not “legal” to play in Dust Tactics tournaments. But you can surely enjoy them when playing with your friends!

All these new stat cards can be ordered from our web store at www.dust-models.com. If you bought some of our earlier models kits, you'll certainly want them. To keep things simple we've made a pack with all the cards from our earlier models and priced it at 3.99 US$. Quite a bargain!

Happy gaming,

Dust Studio Team.

Sad that they don't have even a rough indication of a point value on them, but at last you can now play with all those extra miniatures from Paolo. I must also be going blind, because I can't see the stats on each model's page yet

Duncan_Idaho wrote:

Sadly, NO, not a chance. The original core set was done buy a different company. FFG got the rights, slapped a sticker on it with there info and called it a day.

Well, what would you do with a warehouse full of those boxes?

Also, if AEG would have produced the game and not FFG we would have gotten a much slower release-tact.

The problem with the big box is: Price is a little bit to high for a starter. There are already now more revised sold than the original starter for a reason. The new box contents are also better for learning the game than the old ones (and thats from someone that can give you the page, collim and paragraph when woken up in the night and asked a rules question !).