Dystopian Wars – Combat (part 1)
Kraggi here from the Varcan Cluster.
My second Article about the rules of the Dystopian Wars, last time Activations, this time Shooting. The movement phase itself is pretty straight forward so I decided to avoid a very small post about it.
In Dystopian Wars your measurements (which can be made at anytime) are done from the Weapon you are shooting with.
Want to shoot with a turret? Measure from the turret. Want to shoot with a Broadside? Measure from the closest point of the side of the ships hull to your enemy!
Dystopian Wars uses Range Bands for determining how effective your Weapons are. Each Range Band is 8″ long and there are four of them. This gives you a maximum range of 32″ (plus your Ship/Flyer/Tank’s movement).
Generally the lower the range band the higher the value for your models weapons systems. Each model has a Stat card. with grid on it showing the type of weapons it has, and how many Attack Dice (AD) it gets at each range band.
So when using the Magenta Class Battleship to attack an enemy Ship, you would first declare what weapon you are using, followed by finding out which Range band you are in.
Now for example, lets say that the Magenta Class is attacking an enemy Cruiser in Range Band 2 with one of its Main Turrets. Consulting the Grid above you can see that it would be Granted 7 AD.
Great, so now you have 7AD… what do you do with them? Well you simply roll them, and here is where the rules that Spartan Games chose really come into their own.
The aim of these AD is to get Hits, A hit is scored by rolling a 4, 5 or 6 on any of the AD you roll. A 4 or 5 grants you 1 hit. On a 6 you get 2 hits, and you get to roll another AD. Every time you roll a 6 you get another AD. It is therefore possible with only 1 or 2 AD to take out an entire Battleship!
This is where the system gets the Exploding D6 name from, because 6’s explode into more D6 to roll.
So you roll your 7AD and check the results. Let say you got the following: 1,2,3,4,4,5,6. The 6 gives you a re-roll that gets you another 5.
That gives us 6 hits. At this point you consult the targets Damage Rating (DR) to see if your hits, exceed it. If so, then you check the targets Critical Rating (CR), if you exceed this then you cause a Critical hit, if not the Target loses 1 Hull Point (HP).
If you cause a Critical Hit, then you roll on another table to find out what the actual critical effect is, this could result in your taking out an enemies Weapons, Steering, Troops or something equally nasty.
That is then that… no charts to consult to see what your hit roll is, followed by a wound roll, followed by an armour save. Roll some dice, add up the hits consult the targets values and do the damage. Nice and easy.
The bigger the ship the more Weapon Systems it will have. The example used above of the Magenta Class Battleship only shows three weapon Systems, however the model itself has two Broadsides, its Fore Torpedoes, and two Main Turrets.
All of these Weapon Systems can shoot, some of them can link their Firepower to get more AD in one shot, granting a better chance of a Critical Hit, or a Double Critical hit (Yes if your hits are double the CR then you get two rolls on the Critical Table, triple and three rolls etc etc).
There are also several types of different weapons systems. For example, The Prussian Empire has Tesla Weaponry. It works in the same manner with its AD, but tends to be a shorter range, and any weapon with the ‘Tesla’ special rule causes an additional effect if you do 1 or more hull points of damage. It kills 1 of the targets Assault Points. This makes it more vulnerable to being Assaulted by your marines. There are several different rules that each of the Nations get giving them a subtle but slightly different playstyle.
So there you have it, a quick overview of the half the Combat segment of the Dystopian Wars game. Next time I will cover some other ways to damage / destroy enemy ships, including Boarding & Ramming!
I hope this has answered a couple of questions about the Combat Segement of the Game, I chose the French Battleship as it is a cool model to base the article on and I hope this helps your understanding of the game! Please feel free to leave me any feedback below!
