Britannian Starter Fleet

After a couple of weeks of painting trauma I have painted my Britannian starter fleet for Dystopian Wars:

Dystopian Wars is an epic scale Steampunk wargame from Spartan Games. Standard late Victorian setting with standard factions for the period and a combined ruleset for Land, Air and Naval forces (Naval games seem to be the standard though). Sounds simple enough? Well it aint!

The rules are actually rather simple at the base level, but the rulebook is so badly written that the only way to learn is to play someone who already knows them, or find an unofficial play guide PDF to explain the rulebook!

That aside it is a fun game with some very pretty models.

The Ruler class battleship is the centre piece of the starter set. It is a rather nice model, but the original steam reactor section was pretty ugly, leaving large gaps in the super structure, so I replaced it with one from the Dreadnought model that I bought as extra to the started set.

The Tribal class cruisers are a trifle too short and squat for my tastes, but they have impressed me on the battle field; a single torpedo salvo from these guys wiped out my opponents battleship, and the next turn they mortally wounded a couple of cruisers.

The little frigate are proving difficult to master. Unlike the larger ships all their torpedoes are mounted on the broadsides. This means you have to tack and jibe constantly to get them on target, whereas the larger ship simply steam straight towards the enemy, following their torps and finishing them off with the main guns. The Box is supposed to come with nine frigates, but mine contained ten for no apparent reason.

These Doncaster Bombers were the only survivors from a bad can of spray paint, the rest have been stripped. I know Vallejo do excellent paints, but their Primer is thin, watery and all round rubbish. It did not help that I tried to paint the belly with a gloss white spray that came out far too gloopy and finished the models off with a five year old brown Ink wash that had separated into orange and black.

This Fleet came around due to the club I attend having several players of the game, and one of the committee members happens to be a Spartan Distributor.

There soon will be a rival club that I am helping to found, and there seems to be a fair deal of interest in Flames of War, so hopefully that project will get back on track. Although there is also some interest in Bolt Action, so I may get drawn back into that game as well.

~ Bob