Dystopian Wars: The Year Ahead
Spartan Games has a lot to say about what thie upcoming year holds for all you Dystopian Wars players. Take a look:
via Spartan Games:
The idea behind this blog is to provide an update on Dystopian Wars and detail our exciting plans for the game for 2016. I’ll go through the game piece by piece, filling in where our focus is, and by the end of it I’ll hopefully have delivered a clearer picture of the game moving forwards.
Orders of Battle (ORBATS)
During the latter part of 2015 we did not have enough resources allocated to the updating of our Dystopian Wars nation statistics, especially the Alliance Nations, so that they were fully compliant with the updated 2.0 Core Rules. We apologise for this, and I’ll now detail how we are addressing this shortfall:
All nations and product sets are being re-evaluated and new statistics are being generated that will remove any inconsistencies or balance issues that have crept in. On the whole we feel Dystopian Wars is a most balanced game, given its size and spread of nations and models, but it has become clear that our statistic documents need some revisions.
We are doing this in groups of nations, the first nations that have been updated are available from our Downloads page. These are the East India Merchant Company, Honourable Eclipse Company and Royal and Free Australians.
The next batch we will be updating are the Black Wolf, Chinese Federation and Ottoman Empire. The edits to these nations are very close to completion and will be made available very shortly. Following these will be the Kingdom of Denmark, League of Italian States and Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. We will detail the order of the other nations soon and our plan is to expedite these amends as rapidly as possible.
Getting these documents updated for you has now become the highest priority for Dystopian Wars inside Spartan Games, and the appointment of two new ‘Game Champions’ to manage the ORBATS moving forward will, we feel, dramatically improve our communication process with you.
We have also completed compiling a new FAQ document for Dystopian Wars which we are running into a template and which will be added that for download shortly. Our keeping on top of this document will be a priority for us moving forward.
Tournament Kits
We have finished our official Dystopian Wars Objective Tournament Guide which we hope you will all download and enjoy using. In support of this document will be a Tournament Kit that can be bought to support events and which includes such thing as winners’ plaques, dice bags, posters, artwork and other prizes, some for winning and some just for participating. More about this kit will come from Spartan Beth who looks after our Vanguard program.
Campaigns
Around November/December we kicked off some new ideas for Campaigns that we will be offering as free downloads. These will assist in boosting the already rich game setting and we hope to hear from you when you play the scenarios that are integral parts of the campaigns.
We are currently working on three campaigns:
Campaign 1 – Operation Ice Maiden
The fabled city of Königsberg has lain under Russian siege for over two years since the outbreak of the World War. Standing alone against the Russian Coalition, the city is now on the verge of collapse. Help, however, is now at hand. Striking from the cold north aboard the Super-Carrier Ice Maiden, the Teutonic Order has dispatched a relief force with the intention of reinforcing the city and, potentially, dramatically changing the war in the East.
Will the Prussian assault reach Königsberg in time? Will the Russian Coalition be able to hold the new arrivals at bay? The fate of these two Imperial powers now rests in the hands of their field commanders… namely you.
Campaign 2 – Battle of the Coral Sea
The territories of Indonesia have long belonged to the Kingdom of Britannia. To the west, the island of Papua, and the Solomans has been held under the sway of the Empire of the Blazing Sun. Traditional enemies, the controlling powers of these territories have maintained an uneasy peace. But the threat of conflict has long hung, like a pall, over the region. Empire of the Blazing Sun fleets have begun to edge further west, with Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji pressured to allow Empire fleets to resupply in their ports. The territories of New Zealand and Australia have raised concerns over this encroachment, but something more important than regional stability is driving the Empire of the Blazing Sun to expand into these new territories. Rumour, coming on the heels of the wet season, reports new flotillas of the Empire’s ships probing west… Grand Coalition and Imperial Bond forces have all started mobilising assets in the region in unprecedented numbers. The Soloman and Coral Seas have never seen so many warships…
Campaign 3 – Destination Baffin Bay
Something has got the military heads of the Dominion of Canada worried, and a joint taskforce of DoC, KoB and FSA forces has set sail to discover what is afoot. The icy wastes of Greenland appear to have become the latest land mass to have a Covenant Military base established, but is there more to this base than simple Covenant aggression? To make matters worse, setting sail from the East is a huge Prussian Empire force.
This once tranquil area of the globe is set to become a hot-bed of military action!
We’ve just uploaded the first of our downloadable campaign maps. This one is focused on the North Atlantic, and just happens to also include Greenland. Go grab it now and have fun planning your games. We’d love to hear about any of your own campaigns and see your scenarios and after action reports.
Our Massive Robots
We are going to take another look at the statistics for the six large robots we created at the end of 2015. This was a personal project of mine that ticked a number of my boxes. They are not, however, everybody’s cup of tea but they do look cool in a game setting where technology and weaponry has gone crazy! For those who like the robots, I hope you enjoy playing with them. For those of you disenfranchised by their arrival I hope you’ll enjoy other new models we will release during the coming year for Dystopian Wars.
New Models and New Rules
Once we have settled the ORBATS down we will continue our development of new models. Some are being made to support the aforementioned campaigns, and we are looking at all of our nations, core and alliance alike, to see what gaps need to be filled. This could see replacement models for older sculpts and will also include speciality models for nations, such as a Prussian Tesla Lightning generator ship used to upset enemy flyers!
What we won’t be doing is making any of you scrap your investment in our models. They will always be supported in our ORBATS. But an exciting idea we have for Dystopian Wars is adding modularity to hulls, allowing you to assemble in the way you want it to look. More updates on this will be coming over the next few months.
We are also looking at a fast play game engine for Dystopian Wars. We have some exciting ideas here for what we can add to the game, and look forward to getting you involved in this work during the coming year.
Packaging
We are taking a long hard look at how we package models, and therefore how we make Dystopian Wars models available to you, either directly or via your favoured stores. A few years ago, due to the sheer size of products on offer for the game, we moved to consolidated boxed sets. This served us well for a period of time, but we now feel that increasing flexibility in your fleet building is key. We are currently looking at how we do this and will roll out a format for our sales partners. Bear with us on this as it is not as easy an undertaking as it sounds. We must actively ensure that our sales partners are not penalised by such a process. The end result will, however, be positive for gamers.
Alliance Restructuring
We have identified that some of our alliance nations need retrofitting to make them a more balanced offering, especially when they are gamed against our core nations. We will be looking at these nation by nation, but what I can tell you is that the Ottoman Empire will be the first to see amends with modifications planned to how we package models. It will see some new models designed and we are confident that our adjustments will make this already appealing fleet even more fun to game with.
That’s it from me for now. Thank you for reading and as ever if anyone wants to chat about the contents of this email just drop me a line at [email protected].
All the best,
Spartan Neil
