Batten Down the Hatches, Ready the Guns and Prepare for Fleet Action!

With the release of Dystopian Wars: Fleet Action we think it’s a good idea to give our fans an opportunity to look inside the rules and learn about a new way to play one of our most popular game settings!

Overview
Fleet Action is a fast paced and more streamlined version of our Dystopian Wars game, which is intended to give players the opportunity to roll lots of dice and sink ships at will. Fleet Action is not intended to replace our beloved Dystopian Wars game, rather our hope is to provide gamers with more options in how they play. If you want the granular, in-depth feel of our Dystopian World – then Dystopian Wars is still the game for you, but if you want fast paced action and carnage – then look no further than Fleet Action!

Fleet Building
So, how does a commander build a Fleet?

All Fleets are created using Battle Groups. In Competitive Play, players may use Core Battle Groups which allow players to field all the models they are used to, with the focus on building forces that might actually exist in the real-world – with a good mix of Small, Medium and Large models.

Or players can choose to game in a more Narrative vein where specific Battle Groups can be fielded. These Battle Groups gain their own special rules that are tailored to the actual vessels located within them.

The Wolf Pack Flotilla for the Kingdom of Britannia for example gains the special rule: “The Silent Hunters”, which gives all models within the Group a bonus to their Torpedoes. This is pretty handy since the Group Box contains a Vengeance Submarine, three Dominion Support Cruisers and five Valiant Assault Submarines… all of which have plenty of Torpedoes to share!

Availability of Statistics
Our plan here is to split the statistics into three roll outs, with our initial focus on the Naval models statistics being available for the following Core Seven nations: Kingdom of Britannia, Prussian Empire, Federated States of America, Empire of the Blazing Sun, Covenant of Antarctica, Republic of France and Russian Coalition.

Following this release, we will move to the Armoured forces for these nations, then after that, the Aerial forces will be released.

We intend to operate what we refer to as a Living Rulebook policy on these statistics, so we will release them to you all in a format that allows you to get your models out and actually play with them, see how they handle and once you’ve had a chance to actually play some games with them, feedback to us and help us fully lock the stats down.

With your helpful input, which will build upon our work thus far, we feel this will not take us very long to finalise the Core Seven stats in their entirety. We will then finalise the statistic artwork and roll them out to you all as a free download. We will use our Forum to collate the feedback under the watchful eye of Spartan Derek and Spartan Giles.

Once the Core Seven are completed, we will move on to the Alliances, using the opportunity to add some models that are missing to these nations, and follow the same lock down process as we have done for the Core statistics.

We have taken this route of interacting with you on the statistics quite simply because of the complexity of re-stating over 500 models for a new game engine. Without making our final decision a fait accompli we feel your input is key to the process. That said, we would kindly request that your feedback on the statistics is based on actual game play and not just an armchair general reaction to reading a bunch of numbers. Like all things wargaming, you cannot beat actually putting models on a gaming table!

Rules
We will roll out some much more in-depth blogs on the rules, and videos with Spartan Derek as he discusses the game engine, but to summarise:

The game still uses alternating activations (as you would expect!)

Tokens are considerably reduced in Fleet Action, with the game being boiled down to just 4 Tokens: Damage, Disorder, Obscured and Activated. This means that the battlefield is much tidier, making the game feel and look more cinematic!

We still make use of a Turning Template for movement (although we only make use of the Medium Turning Template for this). This creates a simple, yet tactical Movement system.

Range Bands are changed from Range Bands 1, 2, 3 and 4 to just Point Blank (0-8”), Effective Range (9-24”) and Long Range (25-32”)

We still use Exploding D6 but Linked Fire is replaced with Combined Fire, allowing for faster dice calculations of Salvos.

Boarding, Bombing Runs and Fighter Attack Runs are now treated as Attacks in the same way as any other ordnance attack, allowing models to resolve their attacks in an order that suits them best.

The game brings its fair amount of chaos in the form of Disorder which can be applied during Boarding, from various weapons types and by the use of generators. Disorder changes to Damage in the End Phase unless repaired, leading to models living on borrowed time and adding real drama.

May 2016 is a very exciting month for the Dystopian World and we’re looking forward to telling you more about our plans as the weeks and months unfold.