Dystopian Wars – Kingdom of Britannia Fleet Lowdown!

5 Minute Read

Mar 30 2012

Hi again, Kraggi here, this time I am going to talk a little bit about the Kingdom of Britannia and its forces, for those of you enjoying the Rules breakdown articles, don’t worry they will be continuing from next week!

Like the Prussians, this is going to be one of my three main fleets, but at the moment I own the Starter Battle Box & the Fleet Carrier, so those are the units I will talk about.

One thing I should clarifiy before going any further is the Sheild Generator. It will get mentioned a lot in this post, and it is basically the chance to roll some D6s to reduce the number of hits an opponent scores against you. As mentioned in my Basics article, it follows the same rules for hits as AD do, so it could be awesome… or no help at all!

So to begin with lets look at the Avenger Class Fleet Carrier.

As with all other Aircraft Carriers this ship comes with 6 Tiny tokens that can be arranged in any valid combination of squadrons.

It comes with 4 Primary turrest located under the flight deck with 90 Degree fire arcs for each of them. This does mean you can never bring more than 2 Turrets to bear on any target, but you can do this for all 4 facings of your ship.

The forward Weapons are fixed width Torpedoes, these babies have one of the higher Torpedo Attack Dice (AD) values in the British fleet.

Its Broadsides are not useless either with some decent numbers to deal with those pesky enemy ships up close and personnal.

Following this there is the Ruler Class Battleship. With up to 4 Turrets the basic version of this Battleship is truly terrfying if it manages to deliver a Broadside.

However given how damage can dramatically reduce your AD, it is worth considering swapping one of the turrets for a Shield Generator. You could swap two turrets to seriously boost your survivability, however this was changed with the release of the 1.1 rules. Now you can only swap 1 of your Turrets.

The Battleship also comes equipped as standard with a Guardian Generator. This is a special bonus generator integrated into the actual ship.

It functions exactly the same as 1 Shield Generator, but also benefits models within 8″ of it with a shield.

I tend to run my Ruler with three turrets and one shield generator for this reason. This effectively gives me 4D6 in shields!

The Rulers Broadsides (Port & Starboard) and Torpedoes (Fore, Port & Starboard) are not to be sniffed at either with both able to whittle down an enemies hull points.

The Torpedoes cannot be used in Range band (RB) 1, however unless the enemy has all of the models in one area you should normally, with decent movement and positioning still get them fired off at something.

Following on from the Battleship we have Tribal class Cruisers. Like the Battleship these guys have the option to upgrade (well in my mind side grade) to a Shield Generator at the loss of a Turret.

They have two turrets as Standard, one fore and one aft, making for another evil Broadside if they get into decent positions.

The Crusiers themselves do not actually have a Broadside to use against the enemy, but the same as the Battleship they have Torpedoes in three facings. While Torpedoes can be stopped by enemy Concussion Charges, by picking your targets wisely you will be able to chip away at the enemy fleet.

The Attacker class Frigate is actually one of my favourite ships for the Kingdom of Britannia. With a turret Fore and aft, and port and starboard torpedoes it can put out some serious firepower when needed.

I once had three of these sneak up on an enemy Battleship undamaged and at Range Band 1 they managed to throw down an awful lot of AD… criting it even after Shield Generators.

The Frigate’s turret is one of the weakest turrets on a Frigate, however where I find these excel is in removing other Frigates from the sea. With each Frigate able to potentially take out a frigate on their own by either linking fire, or splitting it you have some nice options available to you.

The Starter fleet flyers are Doncaster class Bombers I quite like these models, although when it comes to using them in game I have to admit they can be a bit limited.

Their Primary weapon are Torpedoes, so up close they don’t get to use them, however up close they get their Bombs so with some nifty manouvering you should be able to get a Bomb attack on one target, and Torpedoes on another.

Overall I think that the Kingdom of Britannia has some of the nicer models (my opinion I know!) and they certainly have a fleet that can cause people problems, at the moment Torpedoes are generally seen as weak due to Concussion Charges being able to stop them, and lots of people using Escorts to defend their big ships, but several Torpedo barrages into Frigates or Cruisers can still give you a real advantage in the late game.

So what do you think of the these Models & Squadrons? I am looking at expanding my forces and when I do I will be posting new reviews for the models I have tried. I look forward to your comments!

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Author: Kraggi

Kraggi is a tabletop wargamer with over a decade of experience. His specialty is Warcradle Studio's Dystopian Wars. He began writing for BoLS in 2012.

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