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Looks like a great value set! Sounds like it's gonna come down to what's changed in the rules so will be watching with interest

I've still got a Japanese Fleet from the original ruleset.. not going to be able to play around with the new rules, so maybe I should try to get rid of them now.. hmmm

I mostly want a Dystopian wars Ottoman Flying crusier. Those sprues could be really useful in Battle Fleet Gothic conversions, though 3D printing is kind of making that moot.

WHOA! Plastic??!?! I am so down for that!

I've watched a couple of (by now a year + old) batreps by Guerillaminiatures and OnTableTop and it seems like they've mitigated the worst of the disaster that used to be the shooting phase. Can't recall if any of this was in the previous edition, but there are now three "types" of hits and the light ones (1 of 3 on d6) are negated by cover, some types of defense etc. The number of hits from the bucket o'dice must now meet the armour value for every point of damage and target player rolls to defend (2 shield sides on d6). Smallest ship classes can still get blown out of the water in a single barrage, if it crits, but the bigger stuff seems to have more staying power.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I hope there’ll be an economical way to obtain some of those sprues.

Not if there will be a hard brexit!, and that is prolly their biggest threath, should it happend, they will have a hard time selling the game outside their little playground.
Allso if they do not allow the old resin ships for non turny matches, they are going to shoot themselfs in the foot for the first 12 months. (im biased here as i have atleast a resin russian starter fleet box plus some single models at home)


Sprues seems a bit too heavy on the parts, as someone else said here, the resins was perfect; hull, bridge cannons, finished.
Less then 15 min including flash trimming to whip them up, the smaller boats was even 100% single piece. But i guess thats how plastic creations is nowadays, no solid block of material, just hollow, weightless substance.

Plastic is going to increases parts because of the nature of casting plastic; but honestly time to build shouldn't be an issue because this isn't a game where you need 30 cruisers to make one unit and where you might field 10 units.


As for old ships my impression is they won't ban them; they'll just take GW's angle of "do what you want, proxy all you want; but our marketing is 100% on the stuff we are selling not the stuff we no longer sell (esp since WC didn't profit from the bulk of the SG original cast sales and from what I can gather they've not really profitied from the casting they've done of them since purchasing SG's material)

 Overread wrote:
Plastic is going to increases parts because of the nature of casting plastic; but honestly time to build shouldn't be an issue because this isn't a game where you need 30 cruisers to make one unit and where you might field 10 units.


As for old ships my impression is they won't ban them; they'll just take GW's angle of "do what you want, proxy all you want; but our marketing is 100% on the stuff we are selling not the stuff we no longer sell (esp since WC didn't profit from the bulk of the SG original cast sales and from what I can gather they've not really profitied from the casting they've done of them since purchasing SG's material)

Im not expecting them to market or support SG products when they have released their own, i just wish for a place for the SG models in this new version since thouse models will dominate the table content for a long time.
When WC manages to produce all the old factions, then they can do a "GW legacy" move on the SG models.

It should be fairly obvious why the SG minis aren't bekng supported - Warcradle cant easily make money off of them because the existing community already owns them and its not yet clear what support exists from newcomers. If the SG legacy sculpts see validity I expect it will come later, after Warcradle has seen returns by selling new content first, and brings in sufficient new blood that they can sell old stuff again.

I get that, sure, but Kings of War has also shown there is merit in playing the long game and picking up an orphaned playerbase to quickly grow your own. Every veteran begrudging being told he has to rebuy his army could have been an instant, free opponent attracting fresh customers.

There was a rulebook trade in program tho, so Warcradle seems to value old players. I'm not fully ready to believe all old models will be invalidated.

Ive yet to ever actually see someone play Kings of War, im not convinced anyone does or that mantic has made any money off of it.

From what I have read in the past, the answers to a number of raised questions are:

Free Rules: WarCradle has stated they will provide free rules online for all their games, just like they do for Wild West Exodus. They even just closed (on 12/17) a free printed rulebooks (Dystopian Wars and Armored Clash) offer for anyone who had a Spartan Games DW rulebook.

Using Old Models: They stated they would provide an old models proxy list to allow you to use your older models in place of the newer models. Their hope is that the new models will be so attractive that you will buy them because you want them, not because you have to. However, the scales may not be exactly the same.

New Production of Old Models: They have already done limited runs of the old Spartan sculpts based on their ability to use the materials they got. No plans to keep them running indefinitely. Instead, many new sculpts are updated versions of the old sculpts.

with regards to new production of old models, I believe they discontinued that practice. Was dogging through older posts on their blog, seems the "classic" range was limited as they claim they didnt have full access to the original models, molds, sculpts, and files.

 alextroy wrote:


Using Old Models: They stated they would provide an old models proxy list to allow you to use your older models in place of the newer models. Their hope is that the new models will be so attractive that you will buy them because you want them, not because you have to. However, the scales may not be exactly the same.

Well, cant buy what is not beeing made, or not avalible due to political changes.
With 7 major factions and a dusin minor factions, it is unrealistic for WC to expect that the first two years will mainly see their plastics on the tabletop, and we have no idea of the speed faction releases will be at.

I am 100% in support of DW and future Armada, but WC should face some of the realitys of the current world.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I hope there’ll be an economical way to obtain some of those sprues.

Not if there will be a hard brexit!, and that is prolly their biggest threath, should it happend, they will have a hard time selling the game outside their little playground.
Allso if they do not allow the old resin ships for non turny matches, they are going to shoot themselfs in the foot for the first 12 months. (im biased here as i have atleast a resin russian starter fleet box plus some single models at home)


Sprues seems a bit too heavy on the parts, as someone else said here, the resins was perfect; hull, bridge cannons, finished.
Less then 15 min including flash trimming to whip them up, the smaller boats was even 100% single piece. But i guess thats how plastic creations is nowadays, no solid block of material, just hollow, weightless substance.

We trade all the time with nations with no free trade deal, a very small amount of duty wont have much of an impact. Shipping times might be slightly slower but we can act on and anticipate those.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 alextroy wrote:


Using Old Models: They stated they would provide an old models proxy list to allow you to use your older models in place of the newer models. Their hope is that the new models will be so attractive that you will buy them because you want them, not because you have to. However, the scales may not be exactly the same.

Well, cant buy what is not beeing made, or not avalible due to political changes.
With 7 major factions and a dusin minor factions, it is unrealistic for WC to expect that the first two years will mainly see their plastics on the tabletop, and we have no idea of the speed faction releases will be at.

I am 100% in support of DW and future Armada, but WC should face some of the realitys of the current world.

The production of the classics miniatures is not really viable for most of them. We have produced what we can from the molds we had and as they begin to break down the yields drop. It is not worth us mastering new molds for a handful of sales. Much better for us to focus our resources on products that will sell in higher volumes.

rich1231 wrote:

We trade all the time with nations with no free trade deal, /.../

All of which have functioning border facilities and logistics infrastructure in place, so saying "shipping times might be slightly slower" is at this point so much wishful thinking, at least as far as EU is concerned. As for the "very small amount of duty", it's not the whole picture. I don't expect Wayland to guarantee the current shipping costs to EU after 1. 1., with the quite possible additional costs of bureaucratic processing.

chaos0xomega wrote:
with regards to new production of old models, I believe they discontinued that practice. Was dogging through older posts on their blog, seems the "classic" range was limited as they claim they didnt have full access to the original models, molds, sculpts, and files.

And according to their own words, they were a waste of time. Unsurprisingly, the vocal minority that clamored for the chance to buy old models turned out to be vocal, and nothing more, unsurprisingly.

although as I don't think all the old stuff was available (?) it could be some of the demand was for stuff that spartan hadn't been supplying recently as the moulds has failed and they didn't have time/money to make new ones,

and those would be the things that weren't available here either as there were no decent moulds (or perhaps even masters)

From what I gather WC got a mess of a pallet from the administration sell off of SG. Along with that were the elements that were the result of SG very slowly going under - so missing/damaged masters; moulds that were worn and broken; no up to date id code list (apparently there was one but its licence had lapsed for the software running it) so you couldn't tell which two moulds worked on the same model.

From what I gather they paid a lot and likely didn't get their money's worth in terms of the mess they picked up. It's why they likely decided to pause and reboot the entire game and take several years over it rather than just picking up right where SG left off - which is a risk since over those years the market has shrunk not grown as gamers have moved on as the supply ran out.

I don't think they've even profited much if any off the classics sales they have done.


It's sadly a symptom of SG going down the drain very suddenly and after a prolonged period of internal trouble.

Did anyone get Uncharted Seas and Firestorm Armada?

 AduroT wrote:
Did anyone get Uncharted Seas and Firestorm Armada?

WC bought everything. They are already working on FA with a beta set of rules doing the rounds in facebook and being worked on. There's also a huge amount of lore and concept designs there too.

Uncharted they teased some ideas about really early, but I think its been put to one side for now since its taken so long to get the core games out.



They've mentioned that the air and sea for Dystopian is the same scale; that they want to change the land units though to a different scale so they can set it in the middle of Africa and include the Wild West Exodus line (WC merged the two games - which lore wise isnt' that hard since one only focused on one country and Dystopian, whilst it had lore, was not deeply fleshed out formally). There is some fan pushback on them getting rid of rolling airfields and such, but we might have to wait and see what fully happens on that front.

I don't think they've thought about Planetfall (the ground FA game) or other titles. SG's biggest weakness what that they spread themselves so thin over so many games so fast so if WC do bring them all back we are looking at a years nad years before we get there.


But right now Dystopian Wars and FA are both in the bag.

As in rights to the games? Warcradle got all three of their universes and games, etc.

Was digging through some DW stuff last night, the last betaset was actually a pretty big improvement over the SG era rules. Still not entirely to my liking, but I might give em a chance. The Chinese fleet looks pretty neat based on the test minis they previewed last year, maybe Ill give it a go.

Have to be honest though, never really liked the DW sculpts to begin with because they were mostly chunky tonka truck looking designs with exaggerated features and proportions, etc.although towards the end some of the newer sculpts and factions really took some major strides forward in the aesthetics band design department. Feels like Warcradle doubled down on the aspects of the designs I hated most, im guessing it was a necessity for plastics to work but I widh they had gone less gonzo cartoony with it.

Thing is with the scale they work in "gonzo cartoony" sort of works better than realistic. If you go too realistic at that scale with the size of the ships you can end up with warships that either have very little to no detail or chock full of super tiny super fragile near impossible to paint detail. Especially when you remember that the models prime purpose is to be viewed 1ft away on a table during a game.


You see the same thing with 20mm through to 6mm games - weapons are often very enlarged and such because faithful recreation would be too thin and fragile for most to work with; and when viewed at a distance they'd not stand out easily enough.

I am interested, even though I am not impressed with how the game plays.

It has the classic Naval game weakness of "Escorts are a useless waste of time and resources".

 Easy E wrote:
I am interested, even though I am not impressed with how the game plays.

It has the classic Naval game weakness of "Escorts are a useless waste of time and resources".

Yea i kinda never got the point of smaller ships in any naval game, go big or go home is kinda how they all play.
Then again, DW/FA is basicly just about chugging buckets of dices in a casual setting, exactly the kind of games i like.

Yeah the ground game is "armoured clash" iirc, think they were eying 10mm for that but not positive. Uncharted Seas has been mostly quiet, firestorm is being worked on (and like dystopian wars looks nothing like the previous iteration of the game, dindrezi for example look nothing like dindrezi).

As for the need to be cartoony, I disagree. Plebty of 1/1200 ship minis out there that "play it straight" and work fine in scale. I can understand the need to oversize some guns a little bit in order to make them work, that's a far cry from The direction they've taken some of these minis. It wasn't until yesterday that I started comparing the old minis to the new minis did I realize just how over-exaggerated the new ones are, even in relation to the old ones which I thought were all ready too much.

I'm in! Probably. Depends on the rules I suppose. I have a bunch of ships from the Spartan days but I never got around to playing the game. I did play 'Firestorm Armada' and I enjoyed that a lot. I particularly liked the exploding 6's mechanic and the squadron by squadon activation (I activate a squadron or capitol ship and then my opponent activates a squadron or capitol ship). It lead to some tense and very close battles and avoided the bad feeling you get sometimes in games like 40k when you lose 2/3 of your army before you get a chance to do anything

as for smaller ships and naval games, it's a problem of faulty perception amongst game designers and poorly implemented mechanics. Without writing a lengthy post that is more suited to the game design forum or a historical board than this thread, the general assumptions made by many designers seem to be that a smaller vessel is inherently less survivable than a larger one, and that a big gun shooting a small ship should result in devastating damage to said small ship. Neither of these assumptions is really supported historically, for a number of reasons that basically boil down to science and math (less armor = lighter weight = greater buoyancy and less structural stress, smaller faster target = greater difficulty for bigger and slower turrets to track and aim against them = significantly harder to hit, less armor = less resistance to penetration = bigger heavier shells are less likely to detonate and more likely to pass through tbe ship without exploding, etc).

There's a number of different ways to resolve this in wargame design, designers simply seem to choose not to, and I suspect it's a psychological / ingrained cultural thing at this point. I've been toying with some naval war game designs for a few years now, I've lightly playtested a couple iterations of rules designed to account for this phenomenon, and while the rules do what I want them to the feedback from players has been lukewarm at best. players seem to *want* big heavy guns to delete these smaller ships right off the map in a single salvo, they don't like the idea of them being able to tank the damage and shrug it off. to them, it's simply "unrealistic" despite the wealth of historical examples to the contrary.

In the most traditional sense, escorts are bullet-catchers. Shots going into them aren't going into more valuable ships, and if the scenario works in tandem, one shouldn't be able to ignore the small stuff.

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