Hello to Dystopian Wars fans and players,

With a lot of planning work going on in the background for Dystopian Wars, we felt that now was a perfect time to create a short blog article to talk about and take stock of some of the new developments.

Dystopian Wars has been one of the largest and most successful games developed by Spartan Games, with 600+ models now available for the system, each one individually tempered to provide different in-game effects. Over the years it has been great fun developing the various factions and nations that make up the Dystopian World and we see no reason to stop. As many of you will know, we have a number of nations and factions still to go!

1873 – The year of change

With so many elements in the field for Dystopian Wars, keeping on top of the statistics has been a massive challenge, but with the aid of our active and capable playtest team, we have created a new, modified set of statistics for the core seven nations. On the other side of the game, a revised background is being finalised that brings the Dystopian setting forward to the date of 1983, summarising the tumultuous three years of global warfare experienced by the various nations and two main alliances. We will have this blog live shortly.

So what’s changed in this set of Force Lists for Dystopian Wars?

This first instalment focuses on the core seven nations. After this we will have a month gap before the alliance nations get their own release.

In this update we have added the rules for the first of the core seven nation’s Dreadnought Battle Robot releases – the Hochmeister, the Ayakashi and the Coeus. These massive beasts of war can crush all before them with powerful weapons and devastating close combat attacks. Each robot has a variety of combat styles that it can utilise, along with some bespoke rules that help to identify their role on the battlefields of the Dystopian World. These guys are nasty, and their Points Cost reflects that, but bear in mind that nothing in Dystopian Wars is truly invincible – players will have to work hard to get the best out of their Robots!

The next change comes to the Armoured elements in the game. Whilst the game is generally solid, providing a degree of tactical complexity and strong synergy interaction, players who seek to add more and more Squadrons to their Armoured Forces can find it to be a bit of a slog when executing the Movement Segment of an Armoured Squadron’s activation with the perception that it takes up a disproportionate amount of time compared to the more important things such as Shooting and Boarding!

So we have changed the Turning Templates for ALL Armoured models. Massive Models now use the Large Turning Template and we have done away with Minimum Moves for these models. Note, however, that Turn Limits are still in play, and in some cases we have increased them…. this has an overall effect of speeding up the physical time for Movement of these models without worrying about ‘Snaking’ issues!

In addition, some Large, Medium and Small Armoured Models no longer need a Turning Template – they are assumed to be manoeuvrable enough to put themselves in position without requiring to worry about their bulk. An exception to this is the Surface Skimmer Armoured models, which remain the same since they are more ship than tank in most cases!

The next change is applied to the Covenant of Antarctica Drones. When we wrote the 2.0 rules we looked to visually represent the Covenant bombarding the enemy with their disposable Drones, heedless of the loss of materiel. This fitted nicely with the ethos of the Covenant and their pressures of availability of pilots.

As with many of these things, when you write a set of rules that are a departure from the established gaming-norm there is sometimes a chance you will go too far, and after evaluation we felt it time to reign the Drones in. So we looked again at the capability of the Covenant to ‘spam’ these elements, being mindful to the background and established lore.

So to counter the effectiveness of Drones the Design Team, with the valued assistance of our Beta Testers, have developed the Drone Feedback rule. This will help to reduce the number of surviving Drones on the battlefield without reducing the number of Drones that are initially available to the Covenant player. The ‘law of diminishing returns’ from Drones with this rule means that a Covenant player who wishes to ‘spam’ drones can still technically do so… but if they don’t succeed in breaking the back of the enemy the ability of the Drones to deliver persistent effect is greatly reduced.

Finally, we have opened up the testing of the upcoming Specialist Group Squadrons and Battle Groups to all players. These are explained in the relevant Force Lists (and in the rulebook), so we won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say that they allow players to field their models in new ways and gain bonuses when they do. We will be exploring this concept in the Beta Test over the next few months, but we thought it would be a good idea to give our player base their own say on the subject.

With these changes we have spent a good number of months testing and re-testing their effectiveness and we would like to personally thank all our Beta Testers for their excellent diligence and professionalism during the process. The Beta Team are responsible for the Force Lists you see, it is their hard work in playing games and reporting on their results that drives much of what we do at Spartan Games.

Happy Gaming,
Spartan Derek