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Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





Trying to find much on the game is like pulling teeth. I've seen one video on Youtube from OnTableTop and the game looked extremely fun, but before I invest into a system which I know has died once before, I was hoping to get thoughts from real players.

What is it like? How is its balance? Level of rules complexity? Does it seem like WarCradle will be supporting the game for a while?

Also what are ally rules like? Can we sort of buy whatever we like or are factions really insular? With such limited releases is there enough to properly play?

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3730 Total (210pts painted) 
   
Made in pl
Longtime Dakkanaut




I've played it once in early April, and yet to play a 2nd match, which should give you a good idea of my opinion on the game.
If you played previous editions, it's even more simplistic than that.
If you haven't played Spartan version, just know it's incredibly simple game, to the point where most weapons have the same stats across the nations. A Russian heavy gun turret is the same as British heavy gun turret, and every single rocket battery has the same stats for all the nations (or did when I last checked).

The game also heavily incentivizes use of medium ships- a squadron of cruisers will "cripple" a battleship in no time, possibly even sink it if they're lucky.

I personally think there isn't enough game in the game to keep anyone's interest for too long, but that's just my opinion. I've not expanded past the 2-player starter set.
(I also come to the conclusion that I don't particularly care for the style of the new ships, they look like funko pops of ships)
   
Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





That's disappointing to hear, but I appreciate it. It looked like there were rich amounts of options in the Orbats which made me think there could be a lot of depth behind relatively simple rules. Hearing it is just plain simple, sucks.

11527pts Total (7400pts painted)

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Made in pl
Longtime Dakkanaut




oh, and so far there's not a single Flying unit in the game, so it's all naval. Even the ostensibly Flying american spotter plane is a naval unit that just counts as flying.
The deepest the game gets is generator selection, and most of the generators are worse option than keeping a gun in it's place- the damage mitigation is low enough in the game it's always better to just chuck more dice imo.
   
Made in us
Dakka Veteran





I will spare people my rant and simply say our group is still using a slightly modified version of the Spartan 2.0 rules.

Warcradles models are pretty good, and I will be picking up the british carrier and the russian ekranoplans because those are awesome. But their rules are pathetic.
   
Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





Veldrain wrote:
I will spare people my rant and simply say our group is still using a slightly modified version of the Spartan 2.0 rules.

Warcradles models are pretty good, and I will be picking up the british carrier and the russian ekranoplans because those are awesome. But their rules are pathetic.


Please don't spare the rant! That is exactly what I want to hear before dropping several hundred on two armies. I am increasingly thinking I am better served gambling on Kings of War Armada, as at least in battle-reports, it looks light, but fun.

11527pts Total (7400pts painted)

4980pts Total (4980pts painted)

3730 Total (210pts painted) 
   
Made in si
Foxy Wildborne







Sadface. I was excited about a plastic naval game... again... after going all in on Black Seas and it was an extreme snorefest. And Armada is based on the same rules but with Happy Meal sculpts...

Man o War is still cool tho?

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Made in us
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MN (Currently in WY)

Lord Blackfang- You could try using your Black Seas fleets in Osprey's Fighting Sail and see if that.... ahem..... floats your boat.

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Made in us
Dakka Veteran




Seattle, WA USA

 Easy E wrote:
Lord Blackfang- You could try using your Black Seas fleets in Osprey's Fighting Sail and see if that.... ahem..... floats your boat.
I've got a copy of Fighting Sail, and keep meaning to try it out. For now, probably using old Pirates of the Spanish Main models.

I got a demo of Dystopian Wars 3.0 a couple of Adepticons ago. It was still in beta at that point, but I don't think there were a lot of changes. It felt... ok? It's a bucket of dice system fishing for exploding dice, and didn't seem too heavy on bookkeeping. It didn't grab me, but I was cautiously optimistic since I do like Wild West Exodus, also from Warcradle. But seeing the sculpts also didn't thrill me, so thus far I've passed.

I've been tossing about whether to get DW or KOW Armada, since I do have a bit of an itch for a naval game, and generally prefer fantasy/sci-fi to historicals, but haven't pulled the trigger on either yet mostly because finding someone else to buy in with me is a thing. Not everyone is a systems-collector like me, apparently.
   
Made in gb
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On an Express Elevator to Hell!!

What a shame. I loved the 'steam punk' concept of Dystopian Wars and some of the miniatures are lovely.

I guess there is nothing to stop getting hold of the previous Spartan version of the rulebook and just playing that, if you're only going local ?

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Made in si
Foxy Wildborne







Eh, Spartan's rules were also barely distinguishable from just pelting each other with dice.

I do suggest looking up GRAVETIDES, it's a WIP serious attempt to do a modernized Man o War.

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Longtime Dakkanaut




Which isn't doing much to scratch the dreadnoughts/turn of century naval/air itch, MoW was pure fantasy at sea setting/game
   
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Dakka Veteran





Okay, so here is the rant as asked for.
To start off, I am a salty jerk about how warcradle has handled DW from the beginning. They bought a setting that perfectly open (Spartan had little world-setting fleshed out beyond factions) and they could have done almost anything with it. Instead, they rolled it into a wild west skirmish game just to get said game more publicity. Because having both settings be steam punk was enough justification. feth them from the start. So yeah, I was never going to give it an honest chance. I tried during the open beta tests, but the rules were so watered down I wrote them off on the first pass.
However, as the gamestore is open for games again I was roped into helping a new guy and his son do a game. He had got into it during lockdown and was new to gaming. I blame a certain youtuber for this.
My personal grievances are in no particular order.

01 – There is very little flavor between the factions. A heavy turret is a heavy turret. You faction might bolt on a special rule, but the number of dice remains the same. This is a beginning of how simplified they made things.

02 – The fad of bolting a card game into a miniature game. So you get these stupid cards. They have a way to gain extra victory points, or a special rule you can use once. There is also a number in the corner that is used for randomly deciding initiative. The cards are the worst kind of a unneeded randomness and when played for the special rule, there is no way to counter them, and no draw back to playing as many as you can spam.

02.1 – During the demo game little kid drew two cards that allowed him to immediately activate a second squadron after his first. In a game that relies on alternating activations items like this are extremely powerful, and in this game the opponent has zero counter-play. Two simple cards greatly contributed to his dad getting tabled on turn three. I checked the dads deck, and all three of his such cards were below halfway down. Thanks for the RNG handicap there warcradle.

03 – Special D6’s are required.

03.1 – Special D6’s are idiotic enough I needed to say this twice.

03.2 – They don’t give you enough special D6’s to do a full squadron of cruisers linking into a single attack. Fail.

03.3 – I mistook the critical damage dice for Blood Bowl.

04 – The SRS tiny flyers have been dumbed down to act as an over complicated gun. You either place the tokens near your ships as protection, or near enemy ships as a kind of delayed attack that happens at the end of the phase. So far there are no faction rules associated with these attacks.

04.1 – In a direct comparison to Spartans rules these tokens acted as separate squads. This did create a problem with activation advantage, but also allowed situations where you could concentrate dive/torpedo bombers as a deterrent on your flank. My group used this often in scenarios we created. I see this as more of warcradles drive to over-simplify the game over making a good game.

05 – Fleet building. Your force consists of a few battleforces consisting of a one capitol ship and a number of cruiser and frigate squadrons. On its own this is not a bad thing.

05.1 – I do disagree with the reserve rules on the concept of battleforces though. In order to field a squad of a quick flanking frigates I must reserve the entire battleforce. So a battleship or fleet carrier must accompany the quicker flanking force and these units may not even enter on the same board edge. Again this is something that breaks the feeling of a naval game for me.

06 – To simulate drift a model moves straight forward their mass in inches, and then move up to the listed speed. For a frigate, this drift is one inch. Two inches for cruisers. But it means battleships and fleet carriers are moving three inches straight ahead in addition to their stated movement. This adds a strange skew that means most capitol ships are only slightly slower, or equal, to cruisers.

07 – Critical hits. If you roll enough hits to match the ships citadel rating you get a critical result in addition to the damage. The results though are lacking. A magazine explosion does one damage to all ships in 3”, but (unless I am missing a hidden rule) has no other effect on the ships own weapons. Most other results are minor annoyances.

07.1 – Another direct comparison to Spartans rules. Their critical table was based on 2D6 instead. This did take some looking up until you learned it but allowed for varying levels of severity. Rolls of 5-8 were common but mostly minor results. Rolls of 2 or 12 were rare but could be game changing.

07.2 – And most of the time you’re not going to rolling on this table anyway. If you manage enough hits to double a unit’s citadel rating, they simply suffer a catastrophic explosion and take two additional damage instead of rolling crits. This is by far the superior way of crippling a ship. So remember, link up a single big attack instead several little ones, every time.

08 – The morale/disorder rules look fairly in-depth but obsolete. By the time a ship has built up enough disorder status to matter it is already out of the fight. Two pages of rules for something that might come up once every few games. It disappoints me that this section is where they seem to have tried realism over simplification.

09 – Considering that I have one teaching game to go off of I am going to add a single faction specific grudge. Russian iceberg generators. Each generator can roll to produce an iceberg once a turn. However, the rest of the rule in so long, convoluted, and wordy that it just needs trimmed and redone. Worse, the final sentence is omitted from the unit card. This final sentence, in the orbat at least, states the icebergs may not be placed within 5” of any model. So what could be a neat rule turns into a mess, is inconsistent even in the rules documents, and is not even that much use since you can’t place them near your own ships as a screen.


If you really want to play, grab the Spartan rules and read warcradles old ship -> new ship chart in reverse.
Compared to Spartans DW, this ruleset does have a few advantages and a few things are basically the same. I however am to bias to go into depth on that.


As a final acidic statement
Spoiler:

Some quality on that cutting job. Nice and perfectly centered.


   
Made in pl
Longtime Dakkanaut




I can't disagree with most of the points. As for the token sheet, it infuriates me that the tokens are for minor random effects if I recall instead of the critical hits.
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut





Thanks for that Veldrain. I always appreciate people's uncensored opinions, as a passionate for or against often means more than a stream of "eh... its ok".


11527pts Total (7400pts painted)

4980pts Total (4980pts painted)

3730 Total (210pts painted) 
   
Made in us
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Seattle, WA USA

Semi-tangent.

I do actually like the Wild West Exodus rules and setting. I understand some don't like that it was folded in with the Dystopian Wars setting, and I'm not gonna disagree with anyone on whether or not that should've been done, etc. In WWX, the whole card thing for initiative and the double use of the action deck as either extra scoring opportunities or special bonuses is kinda cool, and works well for the "weird west" skirmish game. I was a little concerned that they put that into the fleet game Dystopian Wars when I had my demo, as it just didn't feel like it fit there as well.

Which I think goes to show that just because you have a "successful" mechanic in one game, doesn't mean you should shove it into every other game. It needs to fit the feel of the experience you're going for.

Other than that, I didn't see too much divergence from Spartan's general rule set (I never played old DW, but did play Firestorm Armada/Planetfall, and it's mostly the same dice mechanics). I 100% agree on the dislike of custom dice (though I think there was a chart or something that allowed you to use normal d6, which probably after a bit you'd get that mapping memorized, but still). There's very few spots where a truly custom die type works and makes sense (Blood Bowl is a good example), but it feels like a lot of companies go that route just to force players to buy more crap from them. Which, for models and whatever, sure, but dice just feels kinda petty.
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut




Tbh, spartan also had mandatory/optional special-action cards, and they had exactly the same issue as the warcradle ones- about 70% of them were situational or useless, and 30% was game/changing and there was no way to know which you'll get this game. Will it be "Heal your ship" or "your fighters get +1" movement".
So nothing changed there, i've yet to see a game where the Special Deck is worth the hassle of shuffling the damn thing.

As for special dice and difference to spartan rules, the basics (chuck a pile of dice at enemy) is there, but there's changes that change a clumsy but working system to just...bland and even less interactive. Including stuff like shields just taking out one dice from attack pool, meaning they're essentially useless because the difference between chucking 30 and 29 dice is none.There is almost no damage mitigation to speak of.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/07/03 12:28:11


 
   
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Two big differences though is that Spartan's cards had a built in method for your opponent to cancel them and using them deducted their value from your victory points. Spamming the cards could very well lose you the game.

Warcradle has added neither of these features.
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut




Sure, but they were still pure trash. The game was better without the cards.I don't know what it is with niche brit games that they love their cards so much. The same was/is with Dropzone/Dropfleet...
   
Made in be
Monstrous Master Moulder






I've just gotten the game without any previous comparison points, so no "old guard grognard" score from me.

I liked this very streamlined rules set.

I play a ton of games by now and have absolutely ZERO want for yet another game where I have to read through 100+ pages before you even get to playing or (as so often happens at my stage in life) an extend break in gaming due to IRL, leads to not being able to remember a ton of minutia to be able to play a next round of games.

So the fact that the game was fairly straight forward, wasn't an issue to me. I don't have a ton of experience in naval wargames, but this seemed to play like a game of slowly turning battleships versus nimble frigates regardless, despite movement values not being completely different due to drift. A battleship doesn't at all behave like a cruiser or a frigate in terms of movement.

I also play WWX and the fact that there were only 2 pages of "universal special rules" in this game, compared to 5 in WWX doesn't make me panic, as those 5 USR pages are the things we most often have to look up during a game... And there's nothing I hate more than having to look things up, especially when they are mostly the same, but slightly different. So I definitely disagree with the 2 other main contributors that "heavy gun batteries across factions are the same" = bad.

Can't say much about balance though. We only have 2 factions available in our group as people only bought startersets so far. Also, it seems the ORBATS in this game are being tweaked heavily and often at this stage... Something that feels a bit annoying now, but will probably be beneficial in the long run.

The boy, I say, the boy is as sharp as a sack of wet mice... 
   
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Death-Dealing Devastator





How's the game now, three years into its lifespan? I know it was met with pretty cold reviews initially from people I know, but has the situation changed since then? It's pretty hard to find any info on the game that is not relegated to just painting the models.
   
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Rebel_Princess




Austin, TX

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
How's the game now, three years into its lifespan? I know it was met with pretty cold reviews initially from people I know, but has the situation changed since then? It's pretty hard to find any info on the game that is not relegated to just painting the models.

I've played a few games recently. It's a dice chucking and sorting affair. It's got some extreme special ability bloat going. Both of those severely slow the game down, but appear to be design goals. They want every unit to feel special and apparently think giant handfuls of dice is inherently fun (note, it's not to produce more average results, as the exploding mechanic makes rolls very swingy).

It also doesn't play very well at low points or smaller unit sizes. It's designed for big engagements and if you don't then there's some horrific imbalance in certain matchups (at low points, Commonwealth railguns are super dominant). The optimal strategy is overwhelmingly to concentrate fire to the point that units with disparate weapons (which can't combine fire) are ineffective vs models that are just more of the same gun (which leads to running large homogeneous squads).

It's also got a weird relation going with terrain. The rulebook is kinda contradictory about what a table should use, the publisher have never shown any of their own tables nor released a single battle report, and large portions of the playerbase constantly say you're not using enough terrain but then post their own boards which don't seem to have that much terrain either, and then it's a damned heavy blue water naval game, why should it require every encounter be in an archipelago?

There's some dumb stuff in the rules, "torpedoes can shoot through islands" being the worst of them, but lots of little fiddly things from the exorbitant special rules. And the FAQ is missing a lot of rulings that are just a Discord or Facebook comment months later. And the reference material, the unit cards and QRF sheets, kinda suck. They just hope that you have either 5 pages of special rules memorized, or you keep a printout handy and just look it up each time, both of which slow the game down even more for new players. And those special rules are probably unique to your faction; a list of ALL the special rules would be 20 pages, easily.

Example of the rules bloat. This is a standard carrier. The first pic is the official unit card. The second pic is the expanded army book entry. The third pic is my attempt to put all the unit specific rules for it on one page, though I ran out of room for the mostly universal special traits on the weapons.





tl;dr
I don't like it as much as the older Spartan rules.
   
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The Great State of New Jersey

Veldrain wrote:

06 – To simulate drift a model moves straight forward their mass in inches, and then move up to the listed speed. For a frigate, this drift is one inch. Two inches for cruisers. But it means battleships and fleet carriers are moving three inches straight ahead in addition to their stated movement. This adds a strange skew that means most capitol ships are only slightly slower, or equal, to cruisers.


This isn't entirely strange at all, it's actually a long known quirk of naval architecture. Longer vessels experience less drag/waveform resistance in the water, as such they are capable of higher maximum speeds than shorter vessels. In the real world during the big ship era, smaller vessels usually outpaced larger ones due to limitation in constructing propulsion systems at scale, but by the end of WW2, the Iowas were pulling 32 knots at standard load and up to 36 knots at light losd, while most American Destroyers were maxed out between 32 and 38 knots and cruisers between 30-35 knots. In the modern day, aircraft carriers are pretty much the fastest ships in the entire fleet. The whole "biy ships go slow, small ships go fast" thing is purely gamer fiction.


CoALabaer wrote:
Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
 
   
Made in ru
Death-Dealing Devastator





 slyphic wrote:
tl;dr
I don't like it as much as the older Spartan rules.


I will be blunt, that sounds catastrophically bad in combination.
   
Made in us
Rebel_Princess




Austin, TX

Regarding movement, I did a comparison of the movement ranges and rate of turn of the Union fleet.

The lightest ships can move as little as 1", as far as 11", and turn up to 157°.

The heaviest ships can move as little as 4", as far as 8", and can turn up to 45°.

So while there's not a whole lot of difference in speeds, a 3" difference at both ends, there's a significant difference in turning rates.

So really, it's not realistic no matter how you look at it. Which is to say nothing of the submarine with outboard paddlewheels in the one orientation that is demonstrably physically impossible to work. I got into an argument over that one, and somewhere around here I still have the fluid dynamic publications I read and cited.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/27 00:20:55


 
   
Made in ru
Death-Dealing Devastator





I grabbed Prussian and Russian land battleforces (don't know their actual name) and some air assets during the Spartan era more than ten years ago, played one game and don't remember either liking or disliking the rules, but they were probably not bad enough for me to remember the complaints. The models are probably still sitting somewhere. Since new Dystopian lineup seems to be going strong with constant releases, I became curious once again, but some of the unit designs are way too Red Alert to me, and rules reviews generally don't give me any enthusiasm.
   
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Rebel_Princess




Austin, TX

It's quippy, but not untrue: Warcradle flanderized both the rules and models of Dystopian Wars; dimensions, traits and special rules, dice pool sizes, unit count (which is really saying something, they're seriously closing in on just as many individual units as Spartan had by the end).

I disliked the renders and most pics I saw of the models online, but I actually liked them way better when I saw them in person. They have an excellent scale for the table. So much so that I bought a Union force because of it.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/27 18:34:20


 
   
Made in be
Monstrous Master Moulder






 SgtBANZAI wrote:
How's the game now, three years into its lifespan? I know it was met with pretty cold reviews initially from people I know, but has the situation changed since then? It's pretty hard to find any info on the game that is not relegated to just painting the models.


Way more detailed and fleshed out. Many more models and playstyles are available.

It's massively taken over our local scene since I've introduced many new players too it. That same gaming group decided to dust off their GW models last week and were surprised to find how lob-sided the game ended up, after being used to Dystopian Wars game for so long... Quite a few games actually end up being close fought.


There's quite a few rules that got added to the game because one of the initial complaints was that the units appeared to be too similar. The downside of that is that there are way more keywords now. Because of the interactions of keywords, it's not the easiest game to get into, but the core mechanics are easy enough to get a grasp with. Many of the keywords are just faction traits though that every single model in your army has. The game just choses to list them on each single unit entry... I suppose that seems rules bloat to some, but if you make a 40k unit card with EVERY single detachment rule typed out on it, you'd get an overly wordy unit card entry too.

I'm not entirely sure you would need that typed out on each unit card if you actually play the game enough though... Especially when a lot of those rules keywords are shared across all factions (I'm looking at that carrier card for instance and seeing 3 of those rules being generic actions you can make with any carrier of any factions and then 4 army wide rules that every union ship has. The recent ORBATS (codexes if you are more familiar with 40k) even just list the keywords in alphabethical order just in case you do have to look one up (and you can just chose to keep that digital or print them out).


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 SgtBANZAI wrote:


I will be blunt, that sounds catastrophically bad in combination.


I'll give you a counter point: I like it loads better than the old Spartan models and rules. I bought quite a few of the older rulebooks after getting knee deep into the third edition... Tried the old rules a few times and very quickly just placed them in the display case and left them there as collectibles.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2024/01/27 20:54:24


The boy, I say, the boy is as sharp as a sack of wet mice... 
   
Made in si
Foxy Wildborne







I'm a volunteer recruiter for the game and I quite like it but I don't think slyphic's criticisms are in any way unfair. I would certainly prefer to spend a lot less time sorting my dice pool into 6 piles.

But I do much, much prefer the new rules, most importantly unlike Spartan they have actually done the math on dice this time, including exploding dice, and fully integrated the mechanic rather than tacking it on at the end as some random thing that happens (for example, cover = attack dice don't explode).

It's also a fresh, vibrant game that is actively developed in front of a live studio audience, constantly updated and extraordinary care is taken to keep every model useful.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2024/01/27 20:58:38


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Rebel_Princess




Austin, TX

I can see learning all my own forces keywords. But There's 8 factions. That sheet is as much for my sake as my opponents reference. And yeah, I'm a new player, most of us are, enough that we're routinely still looking up common things like CAP (which has an official unpublished FAQ we learned about only recently), SRS mine clearance (which has come up I think exactly twice so far), and Tactical Cavitation which again is wordy enough we have to keep checking it and also has an FAQ about how it interacts with abilties that cancel the shrouded state (which came up in our second ever game).

"if you make a 40k unit card with EVERY single detachment rule typed out on it, you'd get an overly wordy unit card entry too. " Yes. That is also horrifically bloated.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/27 21:20:34


 
   
 
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