Say hello to the Ark Royal

Here's the latest addition to the British fleet.

This thing is a honking great monster of a model, well it would be as its based on two battleship hulls, assembly and painting was a bit of a nightmare as it really demanded to be painted without the flight deck in place. Getting the deck supports glued in so that the deck could be added later was a fiddly operation but it finally all came good, and I think it looks the canines cojones anyway.

and OOOPS!!!!!!!!!!

Well last night Mexican Dave and me had our first game of Dystopian Wars and it proved to be a blast literally (sorry no pictures).

The game started with us rolling for our Fleet orders, Dave got "Capture the Enemy Flagship", I got the more usual kill 70% of the enemy fleet.

I took Brits as theyre the newest painted and Dave took the French as seems pretty normal with these rules there wasnt much in the way of firing in the first turn with both of us being newbs we just sorta ambled forward sorting out which ships could fire in which directions. We pretty much worked out that Brits are better broadside on and the French can shoot out the front of their ships better.

Turn 2 saw a lot of firing with pretty much everything that Dave shot at me being nullified by a combination of Shield and Guardian generators, and my shooting sinking a few of his Frigates and putting some hurt on one Heavy Interceptor and a Cruiser.

Turn 3 very early on saw what prompted the title of this post, I realsied that I'd royally screwed up my fleet, I had a basically nose to tail line of cruisers blocking my battleship from the front with a line of Frigates about to collide with its stern. I'd have to be careful about the order of activating these guys (or so I thought). Dave being Dave decided "what the hell, I'm gonna see what this Heat Lance thingy does" activated his battleship, got a line of sight onto mine and fired it, Dave cant roll dice for toffee normally, but he picked up his 12 dice and because of the exploding 6s managed to roll no less than 20 hits. We (later confirmed by some of the veteran players) decided that as the heat lance is and energy weapon that the Shield Generators on the battleship would have no effect on these so it was a double crit on the poor old Thunderchild. That 4 HP right away I thought, 1st Crit was systems offline (there go my shields) and it just had to be, the way he was rolling double 1s, magazine explosion. Boom!!!!!!!!!! Dave was a victim of his own success, remember he was supposed to Capture it, I was later heard to remark in my best Michael Caine impersonation "You were only supposed to blow the bleeding doors off!"

We called it then as time was wearing on, had a quick squint at the other games going on and headed home, Dave was muttering about losing because of getting for once in his life decent dice rolls, but really I'd call that one a draw. Ok he couldnt bring off a win but I'd really struggle to get 70% of his boats killed as most of my firepower and defences had just blown up, both fleets should have disengaged at that point and headed back to port.

Good game, yes, my traffic jam brought out the need for a bit more forward planning, also when fighting Brits do NOT target stuff with shield generators on them, go for the stuff that you can get an easy kill on. Yes this one will get several more outings, especially when Dave gets round to painting up his Prussians.

The British are coming!!!

Here we see HMS Thunderchild leading her battle group past the French costal islands to sneer in the general direction of the garlic eating surrender monkeys.

But seriously, these do look a lot more "steampunkish" than the French fleet in my last posts, the paintjob is what I imagine  RN ironclads would be painted in Victorian times, probably way off base, but what the hell its steampunk scifi, how can I actually be wrong?

I had thought that the Froggies were gonna be my main fleet for this game but I've fallen in love with these so any future expansion will probably be done to this lot. Who can resist a carrier thats actually two battleship hulls welded together and a deck mounted over that, ok its only got 4 turrets instead of 8 but it fires a hellascious amount of torpedoes and you can refuel and rearm your tiny fliers, whats not to love?

Another view of the Fleet

First up I'm going to hold my hand up and say that these as yet have seen no action but I did want to see what they looked like when they were set out ready for combat. Surprisingly for a "starter" set they actually do cover the table densely enough, normally I'd expect any starter forces to look pretty sparse when set out, in Dystopian Wars anything up to a full scale battle is on a 4ft x 4ft table. Starter boxes are around the 650 point mark and a full scale battle is 1250 points, which is where it jumps to a 6ft x 4ft table.

That's them set out on a 4ft frontage, ok there's room to squeeze another squadron or 2 into that line, but it does look like the starter sets will be sufficient for the first few games, so being pretty weak willed I've just ordered the Kingdom of Britainia starter set from evil-bay. Looks like a lot of naval gaming upcoming.