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Eh, most of them just add a few hit points and an extra gun over a basic battleship while staying strictly in the same battlefield role, meaning they don't add much to gameplay but do threaten to make battleships obsolete. Which, I suppose, is exactly what happened IRL.

Some notable exceptions are the ones with a unique weapon system like the Commonwealth artillery dreadnought and the Japanese one with the Space battleship Yamato energy cannon.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Eh, most of them just add a few hit points and an extra gun over a basic battleship while staying strictly in the same battlefield role, meaning they don't add much to gameplay but do threaten to make battleships obsolete. Which, I suppose, is exactly what happened IRL.

Some notable exceptions are the ones with a unique weapon system like the Commonwealth artillery dreadnought and the Japanese one with the Space battleship Yamato energy cannon.

From the looks of these new ORBAT entries, most of the newer Mass 4 ships (even the word dreadnought is not used) seem to have multiple build options to have unique weapon systems. I suppose the Archimedes/Schneider/Nansen was the first of that kind).

The Crown is also getting a "+1 battleship" in the Gloriana, but also has that super generator flagship option. I can't really recall any entries where I went: "oh, this is just a better version of the main battleship" without it also looking like there was another high tech/weird option to build out of it. And that seems good to me... That's a way to please both crowds I suppose.

I think you may be right, most Mass4 kits seem to have a +1 version of their faction's vanilla battleship but also some wonky variant build

 lord_blackfang wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Dreasnoughts being battleships +1 is a tabletop fantasy naval gaming concept that needs to just... die.

So you want fantasy naval gaming to not mirror our reality in this regard and invent a new concept of what a dreadnought is, or just drop the term altogether?

Dreadnoughts IRL were just battleships. There was nothing "+1" (or "+10" if you prefer that nomenclature) about them. The only distinction they had over existing battleships of the era was the standardization of armament around the "all-big-gun" concept. This didn't necessarily make them "+1" - while it gave them a heavier main armament it came at the expense of the ability to defend themselves from smaller surface combatants and limited their effectiveness in close-range firefights, as such its better to think of dreadnoughts as battleships with a re-distribution of capability more closely aligned to practical application of force, rather than the design for theoretical application of force which was predominant in the pre-dreadnought era.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Dreasnoughts being battleships +1 is a tabletop fantasy naval gaming concept that needs to just... die.

So you want fantasy naval gaming to not mirror our reality in this regard and invent a new concept of what a dreadnought is, or just drop the term altogether?

Dreadnoughts IRL were just battleships. There was nothing "+1" (or "+10" if you prefer that nomenclature) about them. The only distinction they had over existing battleships of the era was the standardization of armament around the "all-big-gun" concept. This didn't necessarily make them "+1" - while it gave them a heavier main armament it came at the expense of the ability to defend themselves from smaller surface combatants and limited their effectiveness in close-range firefights, as such its better to think of dreadnoughts as battleships with a re-distribution of capability more closely aligned to practical application of force, rather than the design for theoretical application of force which was predominant in the pre-dreadnought era.

Uh... sure... AFAIK X+1 colloquially means "X but better" which is what they were, better battleships, to the point that the term dreadnought eventually became redundant as all battleships in active service were dreadnoughts.

Tho it is amusing that DW Dreadnoughts often add more support weapons, which is guess is the opposite of what actually happened.

I suspect its because they have to balance them into the game with a function beyond just being bigger and better. But lets also not forget that support generators and such are very powerful things that we don't have in reality.

So it makes sense that if you've got this huge flagship of your fleet and powerhouse of damage and armour; you'd 100% want to put some generators on it that support the rest of your fleet.



Real world aside, Spartan Games made the choice to make their dreadnoughts big - many were twice the size of a regular battleship in the setting. Both in Dystopian Wars and Firestorm Armada.

Spartan tried to compete with Bad Dragon I think

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Spartan tried to compete with Bad Dragon I think

.................... And now I can't look at my Sorylian Fleet the same way ever again......

 Overread wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Spartan tried to compete with Bad Dragon I think

.................... And now I can't look at my Sorylian Fleet the same way ever again......

Pure souls saw a fleet of lightsabre handles but I always knew the truth.

The models for Dystopian Wars look really great, especially the airships. The naval units don't interest me anywhere near as much the zeppelins and other aircraft. A full-on air armada game without the surface (and submerged) ships would be great. I haven't seen a game like that where it looks like the airships were designed to fly from the outset, like Dystopian Wars has done. Other games, like Castles in the Sky, usually look like they just took WWI ships and made them fly without any thought as to how that might change the design.

Keep your fingers crossed - before Spartan died the air side was fully fledged. Battleships, dreadnoughts, unique things, gunships, fighters, interceptors, carriers - you could run a fully air to air combat game without any sea surface forces if you wanted.

Sure full diversity included the sea and land back then, but I'm sure Warcradle will grow the air section. Heck considering that the current Dystopian Wars isn't listed to include the land elements and they've used plastics to get a lot of multi-part kits out; we might well see even more air diversity!

Some air diversity, but definitely not as much as naval. Like subs, airships are still a support element and not all nations will lean into them equally. I think most factions are not going to go much farther than what we're seeing already - a sky fortress, a sprue that builds 1-3 air cruiser classes and 1-3 air frigate classes, and that's about it.

Just having plastic airships is already a great start, gives a good base to kitbash or convert from.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Dreasnoughts being battleships +1 is a tabletop fantasy naval gaming concept that needs to just... die.

So you want fantasy naval gaming to not mirror our reality in this regard and invent a new concept of what a dreadnought is, or just drop the term altogether?

Dreadnoughts IRL were just battleships. There was nothing "+1" (or "+10" if you prefer that nomenclature) about them. The only distinction they had over existing battleships of the era was the standardization of armament around the "all-big-gun" concept. This didn't necessarily make them "+1" - while it gave them a heavier main armament it came at the expense of the ability to defend themselves from smaller surface combatants and limited their effectiveness in close-range firefights, as such its better to think of dreadnoughts as battleships with a re-distribution of capability more closely aligned to practical application of force, rather than the design for theoretical application of force which was predominant in the pre-dreadnought era.

Uh... sure... AFAIK X+1 colloquially means "X but better" which is what they were, better battleships, to the point that the term dreadnought eventually became redundant as all battleships in active service were dreadnoughts.

Tho it is amusing that DW Dreadnoughts often add more support weapons, which is guess is the opposite of what actually happened.

Thats debatable - the "fast battleships" of the World War 2 era were battleships evolved into battlecruisers rather than a true continuation of the philosophy and doctrine underlying the concept of the dreadnought. In a few cases, fast battleships were quite literally battlecruisers (i.e. the ships were reclassified as battleships/fast battleships after having previously been classified as battlecruisers, or in some cases were classified one way by one nation and another way by another nation).

Similarly, the "design revolution" of HMS Dreadnought is grossly overstated - and the ship was itself basically obsolete as soon as it launched. The "all-big-gun" armament scheme of Dreadnought was inefficient and unwiedly owing to the placement of 2/3rds of its guns into wing turrets, and the "secondary" armament (really a tertiary armament by comparison to the ships that came before and after it) was underpowered and incapable of properly defending the ship against the growing threat of torpedo boats and destroyers in the absence of the medium/intermediate caliber weapons carried by her predecessors. While it may have been "+1" vs other battleships, it was really more like "-5" versus MTBs.

The South Carolina-class is a slightly better example of later battleship construction (center-line primary armament in a superfiring configuration, still suffered from the inadequate 3" tertiary-turned-secondary battery). The British began to fix the Dreadnoughts deficiencies with the Bellerophon just two years later with a slightly larger though still inadequate 4" battery (and eliminating most of the wing turrets), which was then superceded by the Orion-class in 1910 with its all center-line primary armament supplemented by the still-inadequate 4" guns - and finally fully realized modern warship design with the Iron Duke-class in 1912 which fully eliminated center-line turrets and provided for a proper secondary armament of 5" guns, moving 3" guns (amongst others, including 4" guns following the 1928 refit) into a small tertiary anti-aircraft battery. By that point though, the US had already beat them to the punch with the Delaware and Florida-class ships (launched 1909 and 1910, respectively) which were the first "Dreadnoughts" to bear an all-centerline primary armament and carry an adequate 5" secondary battery, and featured a small tertiary battery (later supplemented with additional anti-aircraft weaponry in 1917 - this was a design feature that the US somewhat abandoned in future classes of vessel until it became clear that the AA tertiary was a necessity rather than a luxury). But even before that, the Germans launched the Nassau-class (1908), Helgoland (1909), and Kaiser-classes (1911) which, while still utilizing wing turrets for their primary armament, had a 5.9" secondary battery and a full-size tertiary battery of 3.5" guns. Likewise the Japanese Kawachi-class of 1910 - while winged in the primary armament, featured a 6" secondary and a large albeit mixed tertiary of 3" and 4.7" guns.

But its actually the Italian Conte di Cavour (1911) which can be said to be the first truly "modern" battleship, featuring a centerline primary armament with superfiring guns, a full size secondary armament of 4.7" guns (just barely on the right side of adequate), and a large tertiary of 3" guns (which would later be refit into an AA armament), followed by the Austro-Hungarian Teggetthoff-class the same year which featured a similar distribution of weapons, though opting for a 5.9" secondary and a 2.6" tertiary. If you placed either of these two warships next to HMS Dreadnought, you would see little similarity between them, whereas placed next to Iowa or Yamato you could see the clear evolutionary trend that lead from one vessel to the other. Likewise, placing the South Carolina or the Nassau next to the Dreadnought similarly reveals stark contrasts between the vessels and the design philosophies associated. The fact that neither the South Carolina-class nor the Nassau-class was actually designed in response to HMS Dreadnought (having been designed and started before the existence of Dreadnought was known) and instead were designed in response directly to pre-dreadnought warships (the Lord Nelson-class in the case of Nassau and South Carolina due to shortcomings in the design of the Connecticut-class) kind of speaks volumes, and theres some clear design through-lines from those late pre/semi-dreadnought warships into both vessels that bypass HMS dreadnought entirely, which comes full circle into the design of Conte di Cavour and Teggetthoff, as they were both influenced by American and German shipbuilding theory and design, rather than English (or for that matter French).

Anyway, point is, "Dreadnoughts" as a concept don't truly exist. Dreadnought was not actually a prototype for another 40 years of warship-building as many claim it to be, and later battleship designs don't owe very much to Dreadnought itself. Likewise, Dreadnought was not truly "+1", it was conceptually +1 within the context of a theoretical warfighting doctrine, but that doctrine proved impractical as major navies would learn just 10 years later and the design of Dreadnought (and indeed many of the "Dreadnoughts" afloat at the time who were influenced by it) was largely inadequate in practical application as a result, which necessitated further adoption of a heavier and more voluminous secondary armament -similar to the pre-dreadnoughts that they supposedly replaced- in order to make up for the inadequacy of battleships against smaller combatants which resulted from the prior elimination of secondary and tertiary armaments in many designs following the launch of HMS Dreadnought. Any actual "+1" in terms of size and capability of "dreadnought" era warships was the result of an ongoing and pre-existing trend enabled by technology, rather than design philosophy. That is to say, the tonnage of warships and the caliber of weaponry was already on a 50 year upswing leading into the launch of Dreadnought and there is no reason that would not have continued if Dreadnought had not been launched. That is to say, the fantasy-naval standard of handing players a significantly larger vessel with more and even bigger guns called a "dreadnought" is an artificial construct, when in reality a dreadnought should be roughly identical in size to the vessels those games deem to be battleships, with the only real difference being that of the ratio of primary/secondary/tertiary weapons.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Some air diversity, but definitely not as much as naval. Like subs, airships are still a support element and not all nations will lean into them equally. I think most factions are not going to go much farther than what we're seeing already - a sky fortress, a sprue that builds 1-3 air cruiser classes and 1-3 air frigate classes, and that's about it.

I don't know about that, there are a few nations coming up that will be exclusively flying ships it seems.. So there will be plenty of list builds possible with purely Aerial units for those who wish to do so.

The Polish-Lithuanian fleet seemingly will be a purely airship nation, the Spanish will be air-born galleons with a zeppelin like structure on top, the Bavarians will be 100% airborne and it looks like the Koreans will also be solely based on aircraft. If I'm not mistaken, both Crimson league and eclipse company mercenaries will also mostly be sky-vessels... So I think it'll be a viable way to play for a lot of factions, should the player want to do so.

 Elmir wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Some air diversity, but definitely not as much as naval. Like subs, airships are still a support element and not all nations will lean into them equally. I think most factions are not going to go much farther than what we're seeing already - a sky fortress, a sprue that builds 1-3 air cruiser classes and 1-3 air frigate classes, and that's about it.

I don't know about that, there are a few nations coming up that will be exclusively flying ships it seems.. So there will be plenty of list builds possible with purely Aerial units for those who wish to do so.

The Polish-Lithuanian fleet seemingly will be a purely airship nation, the Spanish will be air-born galleons with a zeppelin like structure on top, the Bavarians will be 100% airborne and it looks like the Koreans will also be solely based on aircraft. If I'm not mistaken, both Crimson league and eclipse company mercenaries will also mostly be sky-vessels... So I think it'll be a viable way to play for a lot of factions, should the player want to do so.

Sure, but keep in mind national sub-factions aren't designed to run solo, you might be able to do a legal build but they're not going to have the full gamut of tactical options. Ukraine is a purely submarine nation that is fully done with no plans to expand so that's our first example of a specialist nation, and what do they have? One sprue

Yep Spartan Games had them too. They are designed as allies to major powers. Eg in the old game the Russian force didn't have many air units, their power was having super land and sea forces to compensate. However they had allies like Lithuania who brought in things like their carrier airship to bolster the Russian forces.


Perhaps in time popular allied forces might bulk out and splinter off as an ally and become a major power; but we'd have to wait and see in the future.

I'm hoping for a "Wakanda" secret faction myself!

 Overread wrote:
Yep Spartan Games had them too. They are designed as allies to major powers. Eg in the old game the Russian force didn't have many air units, their power was having super land and sea forces to compensate. However they had allies like Lithuania who brought in things like their carrier airship to bolster the Russian forces.


Perhaps in time popular allied forces might bulk out and splinter off as an ally and become a major power; but we'd have to wait and see in the future.

The difference is that in Spartans rules construct, factions like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were designed and balanced as separate standalone factions that had the capability of allying into the core factions, like Russia, in order to supplement their capabilities. In Warcradles rules construct, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (or to use a better example, Ukraine) is not a separate faction but in fact a natively integral element of the Commonwealth (i.e. Russian) faction that has the option to be played standalone, but isn't necessarily well balanced for use in such a manner vs an opponent that fielding a true "multinational" faction fleet, etc.

Basically to use 40k as analogy, Spartan designed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as Genestealer Cults to Russias Tyranids. In Warcradles case however, Russia/the Commonwealth would be more like playing the Tau Empire or Orks, whereas playing Poland-Lithuania/Ukraine would be like playing pure Kroot or pure Beastsnaggas. Can you do it, yes? Will you be successful at it? That depends.

Yep, all I'm saying is that as the game expands we might one day see one or some of the subfactions splinter from their parent major nations and become large enough ranges on their own.

Of course we are years off that ever being on the horizon and we don't even have Warcradle running all the other spartan games licences either - Firestorm, Uncharted Seas, to say nothing of the land war for dystopian wars etc...

I don't think they'll splinter it in such a manner. As they indicated early on in development, Warcradle developed the faction construct they are using for business reasons - it was the number of factions they felt they could support consistently with a regular pace of new releases, the number of factions they felt their retailers could support by allocating the appropriate amount of shelf-space to stocking, etc. They very explicitly said that they did not want to follow Spartans path of many standalone mini-factions, as that would inevitably result in SKU bloat and stores that had too-small amounts of seemingly random inventory for a broad range of factions that was insufficient to properly support a player interested in getting into the game with one of those factions (I think we all have probably encountered this issue with other third-party games, some of us may even see it at smaller shops with 40k/AoS,etc.), whereas by keeping everything defined within the limits of the 8 or so existing factions, a new player coming in is guaranteed to have access to a good selection of options for their chosen faction at all but the smallest of shops. The "subfactions" that are things like Ukraine/Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are meant for "advanced collectors" or "power users" or whatever you want to call it. The expectation is that the vast majority of players will start by playing the faction as a proper whole, and then later possibly specialize into one of the sub-factions while retaining their collection of non-subfaction units for play where it suits them to do so if the sub-faction struggles in the meta, etc.

That was certainly my experience with Spartan both in brick&mortars and with online retailers. Outside starters it was always a random handful of boxes.

Same. The few stores locally that carried any of Spartans games had the exact issue. It was always a random assortment of stuff, usually because they ordered an incomplete selection of the product range (because gauging demand for the game and/or specific products for a game with such a small audience and playerbase is not easy) or because they ordered 1-2 copies of each thing and never restocked it as it sold because it moved too slowly to justify further investment. If you wanted to play "faction xyz", then you could maybe find a starter box for them (if you were lucky) and a few random blisters or boxes, but it was rarely what you needed to make a standard points level game or to assemble an effective and balanced army list, which meant you either had to go online to fill in the holes, hop over to other local stores to fill in the gaps, or try to place a special order for the items through your store (hit or miss in the days of Spartan, at least for US retailers).

Warcradle has done a good job of making that less of an issue as the reduced faction count and the consolidation of products into battlegroup sets (rather than individual blisters or whatever for each type of ship) makes it much easier for retailers to manage and curate their inventory - even if they know nothing about the game.

chaos0xomega wrote:


Warcradle has done a good job of making that less of an issue as the reduced faction count and the consolidation of products into battlegroup sets (rather than individual blisters or whatever for each type of ship) makes it much easier for retailers to manage and curate their inventory - even if they know nothing about the game.

I think the move to multi-build plastic sprues probably helps the SKU bloat more than anything. The battlefleet set are for sure a good thing though, as you can start a fleet using any of them through the flagship system... And that has only gotten more flexible as time went on (ruleswise that is).

Another thing is it means that a lot of the sku that they will end up with is going to focus on the really fancy stuff.

Your run of the mill ships are your cruisers and support cruisers with their multi-build hulls and then boom all the rest of your range is big flagships, mechs, skyships, etc.... Not always big, but certainly the fancy, crazy science stuff that really gets people engaged and interested and just looks really interesting on the front of the box.

https://twitter.com/warcradlestudio/status/1616057912165646336

https://twitter.com/warcradlestudio/status/1616088178489954307


Warcradle dropped two teasers today!
Looks like some Russian skyships with massive drills on the front - so most likely at least the Irkutsk Skydrill


And what I'm assuming is their twin hull teleporting carrier - the Topkapi Portal Strike Carrier

That does sound like a pretty packed month... Russian flyer ships AND russian skimmer ships in one month, along with the options to build the three new flagships in that box.

The Topkapi box feels a bit odd, as it seems to only include some parts to connect the hulls in resin... But it may include the portals as well for the faction.

It's even more - Russia are also getting their massive artillery flagship!!

Avalon preview has got me all giddy! That's personally my most anticipated (air)ship.

Grabbed off the facebook.
Note I stuck to the new things so there's also those new battlefleets coming this month too. Note that the new starter for the Commonwealth (Russia) has the new skyships and hovercraft

ALSO there are 3 versions of the dreadnought included in the Commonweath set!!
https://trade.warcradle.com/rikhter-battlefleet-set-dwa270013.html