Warhounds 2 Warmasters

A series following a collection of would-be Admirals taking on the challenge of building a fleet in an entirely new game system; Dystopian Wars by Warcradle

I often wonder to myself, how do I find myself in these situations?

Oh yes, Jay.

I met Jay a few years ago, when I responded to his post on our local club’s page asking if anyone wanted to play Adeptus Titanicus. He was kind enough to take me under his wing for a few learner games – this then became a regular weekly fixture for us, which then transitioned into going to tournaments (and now running them!). Over that time we’ve played a huge number of games of AT, might even be in the triple digits by now (Ed Note: I stopped tracking them on a spreadsheet just after we hit 70 games, but I think we’ve played between 5 and 10 games since then of AT, as we have diversified and looked at Bloodbowl, DFC and now Dystopian Wars).

The only downside of this friendship is he knows how I think, more accurately, he knows how I can be drawn into a new game with the right combo of pretty models and a well-written ruleset. Over the years, he has occasionally mentioned to me a game system that he has found and is interested in to see if it will tempt me into playing.

I would like to say this doesn’t always work. (Alex Note to Ed: Jay for my own sanity don’t correct me here) (Ed Note: I wouldn’t dream of it! You are entirely correct; Conquest, Old World, Mordheim and a few others never tempted you into picking up a box or a brush and joining the madness 🙂 ).

So when Jay asked if I had heard of Dystopian Wars, I considered the question with the usual mixture of caution and curiosity. An alternate history game with ship based combat didn’t seem that interesting to me to start off, but he seemed more enthused than usual and so I went onto Warcradle’s website and had a peek at the rules. What immediately stood out to me was how well written and structured it all was – with breakouts to direct you to the correct page if you wanted to refer back to something referenced on a different page. I found myself constantly thinking “why would they write that…….. oh, thats why”. After looking at the rules I began watching a few online videos of how the game actually played out and it really solidified the feeling that this was an interesting ruleset that would hold my attention; the unique dice, the way you have a hand of cards that was stratagems and scoring at the same time and the importance of positioning and fire arcs all ticked several boxes for me.

I then looked through the factions to see which one might hold my interest – at the time, this series had not yet developed – so most factions were wide open and unexplored. I found myself going through the ID guides that are online for each faction (which appear to have been removed at time of writing unfortunately).

Alliance or Empire? They have some lovely stand out models but nothing that called to me. Enlightened, Union and Sultanate didn’t seem to be for me at all. Commonwealth and Imperium initially caught my interest with their stompy robots, but in the end the faction that caught my attention?

The Crown. They hit the sweet spot for me, with a design scheme running through many of the ships. The ones that really caught my eye being the Avalon and the Gloriana dreadnought.

The Crown is, as I understand, essentially the British Empire in the time of Queen Victoria. A huge, globe spanning navy with the largest empire – that is maybe just starting to wane in influence. As with most factions, they have three sub-factions – British, Canadian and The East India Trading Company (EITC). Canadian ships have ablative armour to their front to help resist damage, EITC ships are all shallow draft to get closer to islands and have boarding parties and ground assault troops for additional Victory Point scoring.

And the British? They have armoured prows and like to ram you!

Added to this is the overall Faction mechanic, Guardian generators. Built into many of the ships – an interconnecting framework of shield generators that generate a pool of extra dice every turn, allowing you to boost your defences. With the amount of long-range firepower they have access to, I would be encouraged to play my favourite way – sitting far back and shooting. (Ed Note: My experience of Alex’s playstyle is that he will either sit back and shoot the snot out of someone OR he will rush into the jaws of hell with a manic grin and as large a fistful of dice as he can design his list to generate. Seriously, he has bags of dice. Plural.)

So decided, this left me with the next decision: ‘Where to start?’

Initally I considered the Avalon battlefleet but decided to go for a mainly surface fleet to start with as I figured this would better help me learn the basics and, once I had the gameplay (and colour scheme) locked in, I could expand with any extra fleet boxes that I wanted.

I ended up choosing the Gloriana Battlefleet box, with some support boxes and a Crown Starter set to get me going. This would give me a solid flagship to start with, and plenty of options to fill out the multiple roles required. It would also mean I should have all the gubbins and rulebook. (Ed Note: in retrospect, this is probably the most sensible approach to beginning a collection with Dystopian Wars and should see any new players well-served)

Once I had the models in hand, I immediately set to fleet construction. I was massively impressed with the quality of the resin, and the ease with which I was able to magnetise the Gloriana itself. I think it’s probably the best resin I have ever worked with, with minimal clean-up required and no deformities or imperfections. The older plastic models had their quirks, but I was still able to work my way through them over the course of a single weekend – the most tricky being the Prydain War Rotors, which I managed to leave until last. 

This left me with the following to paint:

1 x Gloriana Dreadnought (with magnetised options to enable it to be fielded as a Camelot or Adventurer)

1 x Sabre Command Cruiser

2 x Albion Cruisers
2 x Prydain War Rotors

8 x Caliburn Frigates

3 x Excalibur Heavy Destroyers

2 x Picton Light Patrol Cruisers

3 x Secace Fast Destroyers

2 x Tintagel Battle Rotors

2 x Agincourt Bombardment Cruiser

1 x Athelstan Flak Cruiser

1 x Grail Bombardment Cruiser

1 x Igraine Support Cruiser

1 x Hotspur Support Carrier

1 x Guinevere Submarine

3 x Morgana Assault Submarine

4 x Saxon Scout Rotor

Crikey. That is quite a lot of ships when you list it all out like that. 38 in total. 

This is the point where the excitement of planning and building a new force hits the realisation that you actually have to paint them to get them to table-ready standard. This is not something I usually enjoy, I would much rather just build models and play but, playing games with a fully painted force is very satisfying.

With this in mind I started to look up easy ways to replicate the standard Crown scheme in a way that would be simple to execute but look good at table distance. Having watched a couple of videos online, I ended up cobbling together something simple – couple of drybrush steps to put down the metallic colour, followed by picking out details in brown, red and bronze. A few shades followed by some highlights and I could easily get through a model or two in an evening.

But before I could begin painting (while I cleared the last of the previous project from my desk to make space) I played a 1000 point game vs Jay, to start getting a grip on my fleet. I had previously only played a single small 500 point game using some of his ships as proxies so this would be the first time my own ships took to the field and it was a bit of a learning curve. The main takeaways for me were:

– The amount of torpedoes Crown ships can put out is impressive. Two Pictons with  light and heavy swift torpedo turrets have 28 dice of torpedoes in their front arc. With Hunter (Surface) giving rerolls of blanks if attacking surface ships, they impacted quite a bit of damage.
– Caliburns are annoying little buggers – for my opponent. Dropping out minefields to restrict your opponents movement is useful but they only have 1 action so you need to arm them correctly (the next day I proceeded to pull off all the light gun turrets I had glued to them and replaced these with light swift torpedo turrets. There was an amount of cursing)

– The Sabre didn’t impress me as a flagship option. I will most likely run it as a Lancelot going forward.

I set myself the target of having a fully painted fleet for our next game the following week, with potentially having 2000 points table ready by the time of an arranged Saturday game just over a week after that.

Well, I destroyed that deadline.

I ended up painting everything from the intial purchases in about 9 day! It turns out, with a little motivation and the ability to paint on my lunch breaks I can crank out nearly 3000 points in just over a week – I think thats my new personal record. I even painted all my gubbins! (Ed Note: The speed this fleet reached painted and the quality of the paint-job on them is extremely impressive: I am really looking forward to the first round of photo-shoots we do for the upcoming ‘Admiral’s Gallery’)

Approaching the second game, I decided to go a little harder and wheeled out a dreadnought – for one reason: I want to kill Jay’s Kaiser battleship.

In total, my force was made up of:

1 x Camelot with attached Albion (armed with Majestic Cannons on the cruiser, in an attempt to make its gun salvos a little more deadly)

1 x Lancelot

3 x Caliburn

2 x Agincourt

1 x Hostpur

Jay’s Force comprised:

1 x Kaiser with attached Sigimer destroyers

2 x Konrad Support Carriers

4 x Toten Heavy Destroyers

2 x Nuremberg Zeppelin

The game did not go to plan – mostly due to user-error more than anything else. To be honest if Jay hadn’t decided to start the Toten and the Nurembergs off the table in Reserve then turn 1 would have been a little different and the game likely much shorter… The Kaiser took a significant chunk out of the Camelot before it had a chance to move, even with the Guardian generators. Eventually I learned I had gotten the Camelot too close and a combo of broadsides and lots of guns from the Kaiser ended up sinking my flagship.

Sub optimal. (Ed Note: Nautical pun. Nice-berg)

Importantly, I did learn a few things though. The Agincourt and their naval mortars had a respectable impact; managing to destroy some Hull Points on the Kaiser through using Blast on it’s attached Destroyers, as well as eliminating the angry balloons when they arrived amongst my backline in Round 2. I’d previously run one on its own, I will not be doing that again.

I also learned that I have to be better at manoeuvring before attaching gun battery cruisers to flagships. The Albion spent most of the game in the wrong place and was unable to contribute a lot of the time. (Ed Note: Significantly, we really started to get a feel for how fraught the mid-table becomes on Round 3 and how we only then start to suffer the results of some movement choices – a very important lesson I’ve taken to heart)

But, torpedo-spam seems to work – three Caliburns with torpedo turrets were a constant nuisance to Jay’s carrier group. I might need to work on magnetising and painting some more torpedo turrets.

So where do I take my fleet from here? Well I need a few more games to really solidify the rules in my head and then to start learning which units I like and which I don’t (I have avoided using the term “best” here. I’m a fan of running things at times that may not be the most effective, but are the most fun). At the time of writing, I have at least one more game booked in, but think it will take a couple more to get my head around the game fully. (Ed Note: a brutal brawl of a 1500pt game as we upped the ante and the first time the Ice Maiden would see deployment properly)

As for models, I will be splitting the upcoming Dominion of the Dragon 2-player Starter Set – so another Hotspur and potentially a Lancelot from that, along with all the new models. I’ll also be looking at a Ganges and Britannia box – two more flagships for options, some more cruisers and Ceylon Platforms so I can run the Dominion Aegis Battlefleet for Guardian generator boosts.

Then who knows, maybe it will be time for me to circle back to the Avalon Battlefleet……