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.

In this text based essay I will be discussing the numerically optimal fleet for Enlightened… 

Is what I would say if I was really boring and cared about optimal play. Instead, what I will say is BOATS! BOATS! BOATS! (Ed Note: Ah, the rally call of the indoctrinated)

Who Am I? Why Am I Here?

Hi, I’m Dan and you might remember me from such movies as, “Bullying Alex”, “We’re Back!” and “Heckling from behind the camera!”. Another Adeptus Titanicus aficionado turned to the dark side. (I’m not sure if that’s port side? Not quite got the hang of the nautical terminology yet.)

I was tempted into Boats^TM via the media of being in a discord with the usual W2W lot, and more than a single person at a time saying “We’re getting into this game, and it looks quite good”. (Ed Note: Wait… are we a gang of hobby-malcontents? I’m getting real ‘Mitchell & Webb’: Are We the Baddies? Vibes…) Which then led to me casually looking through the models. I’ve never really been one for looking at faction rules before picking. I either tend to pick factions in games based of looks, or failing that then looking at rough faction overviews of their play styles and seeing what seems most interesting. If a faction has a weird gimmick that is supposed to be a cool thing that you can heavily lean into, that’s me. (Either that or I like playing on hard mode if possible). (Ed Note: Probably both)

Picking a Faction

So looking through the factions a handful appealed to me:

First up was the Imperium. I am a simple man, I see giant wading robot, I hit the like button. The colossuses look absolutely incredible, the ships look awesome themselves, very sleek and cool looking things like the Skjalden. But a lot of the other ships just don’t do it for me, especially the airships.

Next is the Commonwealth. Who doesn’t love Cherno Alpha, I mean the Colossuses… You might be detecting a theme here, I quite like big robots, which potentially doesn’t come as a surprise from an Adeptus Titanicus, 30k Mech robots, (Ex-)40k Imperial Knights player and engineer by trade. But other than the Colossi, nothing hugely grabbed my attention

Sultanate were quite a high contender, I love the look of the hovercraft and the Catamaran looks. Reading into their rules that get some real tricksy plays using the portals (and once again the archangels are pretty cool looking robots…).

The other factions have a few models each that I liked but nothing that stood out too crazily to me.

So Why Enlightened?

I’d be lying if I didn’t say part of the reason I picked Enlightened was because I was umm-ing and ahh-ing between several of the factions, mentioned them in the chat once, and within 20 mins received 4+ messages saying that people thought I’d like Enlightened the most and an offer for a cheap Enlightened half of The Hunt for Promethius.

I really like the design of pretty much all of the units in the Enlightened roster. The Colossi, both the centipedes and the mecha octopus are awesome. How did they come to be? Who knows but what I do know, is that a wise man once said “when a robot and a crustacean love each other very much he uses his hard drive to impregnate the crustaceans eggs. However, the process of robo-insemination is far too complex for the human mind”. The general ships look very cool and sleek. The weapons have fantastic names like “Caloric Oscillator”, which I can only assume makes food vibrate and therefore gives all the enemy crew bad stomachs. (Ed Note: This is now head-canon for me.)

The Enlightened also have a cool special rule in the Turbo Encabulation Drives, allowing every Enlightened vessel to teleport up to 15″. Ignoring the fact this gets riskier as the game goes on, this is very cool and allows for some silly shenanigans from a fleet.

So that’s where I am at the moment for my collection, I’ve built the models from Hunt for Promethius (mostly, still need to magnetise the generators and turrets). I’ve also purchased a handfull of 2nd hand models from ebay, namely 9 more Merian subs, which are being used currently as test monkeys for paint schemes, as I still haven’t quite locked it down.

Having played a couple of games now on TTS and on actual tabletop, I can see why the game gets the high praise it does. The system plays smoothly, the rulebook is possibly the best laid out rulebook I’ve ever seen, the gameplay is fun and interactive. One of my favourite features of the system is the 97% of the time your rules only affect your dice and not your opponents, defensive traits add to your defensive pool, give you rerolls or change dice, but rarely reduce or affect your opponents attack dice. Which means you rarely need to actually know all the rules of your opponents fleet.

Where Are We Going?

After having played a few games with the Enlightened I now know what half the rules and stats mean. Unfortunately that means that I want pretty much every ship, and there isn’t enough money or points for that. I have however come up with a few silly lists, the first of which is known as “1921 Jump Seas”

Flagship [10 VP, 290 Points]

Loew Fast Explorer [290 Points, 10 VP]:

• 1x Loew [230 Points, 8 VP]: Sturginium Agitator
• 1x Merian Automata Frigate [60 Points, 2 VP]:
  • 2x Merian [30 Points, 1 VP]: Sturginium Agitator

Line [15 VP, 685 Points]

Lovelace Cruiser [240 Points, 6 VP]: Scythe Launcher [20 Points]

• 2x Lovelace [110 Points, 3 VP]: Pulse Emitter, Molecular Disharmoniser

Tacitus Assault Cruiser [445 Points, 9 VP]:

• 1x Tacitus [145 Points, 3 VP]: Molecular Disharmoniser, Pulse Emitter, Heavy Shield Generator [15 Points]
• 1x Tacitus [150 Points, 3 VP]: Molecular Disharmoniser, Pulse Emitter, Fury Generator [20 Points]
• 1x Tacitus [150 Points, 3 VP]: Molecular Disharmoniser, Pulse Emitter, Null-Clone Generator [20 Points]

Patrol [10 VP, 390 Points]

Adamski Saucer [270 Points, 6 VP]:

• 2x Adamski [135 Points, 3 VP]

Merian Automata Frigate [120 Points, 4 VP]:

• 4x Merian [30 Points, 1 VP]: Caloric Oscillator

Support [3 VP, 125 Points]

Newton Cruiser [125 Points, 3 VP]:

• 1x Newton [125 Points, 3 VP]

The goal of this list is to make the most of the Turbo Jumping special ability of the Enlightened. The Newton and the Loew give rerolls and remove dice from the jump pool of dice, while the Adamski can jump again at the end of their turn. This leads the whole fleet to being incredibly mobile, so I’ve used a lot of close range weapons, and the Tacticus boarding cruisers, hoping to get in and cause a good amount of disorder early on. How this works in practice is yet to be seen, but it’ll be fun finding out.