Saturday, August 20, 2011

Dystopian Wars - How Many Points?

My wife and I will be heading out shortly to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I therefore have even less time than usual for blogging this evening. I hope you will understand then my haste and will forgive my brevity. To that end, instead of a project update tonight I have a question to pose.

Right then, let's talk for a moment about Dystopian Wars. While working on the starter box for my Covenant of Antarctica fleet I can't help but wonder how I will expand my collection once this first batch is painted. These thoughts have been further spurred on by the pending release of the second wave of CoA miniatures, which will make available a variety of new ships and the Covenant's "special unit" as well. I am curious however with regards to how many points I should look at adding to my fleet.

For those of you who are playing Dystopian Wars, what range of points do you enjoy for your games? I've searched around on the Spartan Games forum but have not able to find much indication at all of games being played beyond the 1000 point mark. This seems surprisingly low to me. I wonder if this is due to the relative newness of the game and the influx of players just starting out, and thus being disproportionately represented among the forum's participants. (I tend to steer clear of forums and have no idea if this is a fair assumption.) Nonetheless I have also seen pictures of obviously much larger games underway, though I have no idea if this is any more typical than playing in the 1000 point range would be.

Hence I am putting my question to those of you who happen to play Dystopian Wars and might be willing to help me out. What is a typical sized game for you? Have you encountered any popular standards for play aside from your personal preference? I greatly appreciate any thoughts you wish to share on this matter, thank you.

Okay, that's it for now. Happy painting and gaming, friends!

4 comments:

  1. I don't play Dystopian Wars but I did want to say Happy Anniversary. I hope you both had a wonderful time.

    Happy Painting. Happy Anniversary.

    Cheers.

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  2. Ha ha, no worries about the game stuff. It was a fantastic day and we had a really great time celebrating. Thank you very much, Happy Whisk!

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  3. good question. For a long time you were restricted to the contents of the starter box and a carrier and so every game was around 800pts and used the same army composition. But recently that has all changed with the sudden release of many of the nations special units and dreadnoughts.

    So the question is a good one. what is the best points limit to allow for a good selection of new and interesting units?

    Well in my experience, I think 1000pts is a good game size. The game will last about 3-4 hours and it allows you to take some but not all of the cool hard stuff. For instance, a friend of mine runs 2 KoB dreads in his 1000pt list, but has almost nothing else (bar 1 unit each of the other size classes). I, on the other hand, prefer a more mixed selection of small and medium class ships as well as the carrier in my 1000pt list.

    So my suggestion is to try and expand up to 1000pts and have a go with that. Obviously you can never have to many ships?! but 1000pts I think allows a balanced unit selection and a good game length.

    Hope that helps, and happy anniversary!

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  4. Awesome, that helps me out tremendously. I had no idea you would get such a full experience of the game out of 1000 point fleets. That's really cool then that even just a starter box and a couple extra purchases will let you play a full, standard sized game. I appreciate the insight, that's excellent news.

    I will therefore plan on expanding to 1000 points as my first step past the starter box. I already have the CoA Fleet Carrier which puts my total between 845 and 870 points depending on what options I choose. It should be pretty easy then to get those last 130 or so points added. Woo-hoo!

    Thank you very much, Musings of a Smurf!

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