Dystopian Wars - British Fleet

As mentioned previously, I have been working on Dystopian Wars fleets.  Basically, on a whim, since I liked the models, and then more so because after playing a few games, love the rules.

I started with the French back in March, but also had a British fleet to get painted.  If for no other reason than what better factions to face of against each other than ones with such a long standing antagonistic history.

Better yet, the colour contrast would work well between the French and British as I could play around with the British "Dazzle" camo scheme from WW1. This is the typical Dystopian Wars British paint scheme and one that can look amazing when done well (see Curt's British Fleet for a great example).

Again, the quality of the castings and resin that Spartan Games puts out is amazing.  Almost no cleaning was required, almost no mold lines on any of the ships, and clear details on all. Just like the French fleet, every ship was almost perfect, with no bubbles or defects.

 

The Dystopian Wars universe is very similar to our own in many ways, and the British have a great real world feel to them with several rules that remind me of the British and several appearance elements that work as well.

 

One of the great items I love about the British fleet is their aircraft carrier.  It is very British to be lacking something so just bodging it together from what is at hand.  This is shown by how the carrier is constructed. They didn't have a hull big enough at the time to support a aircraft runway, so they took two battleship hulls, and essentially bolted them together and put a runway across both of them! 

Another great British element is the number of torpedoes that they can put in the water.  Many of the ships have banks of torpedoes to the fore, port, and starboard!  Some ships even have torpedo turrets that can launch them out in the direction required rather than in a fixed channel.

To back up the British fleet there is the huge dreadnought that has 6 turrets, broadsides, torpedoes, shield generators, and more.

They also have battleships and heavy support destroyers that put out massive firepower, especially compared to the French.

The ships painted up extremely quickly, and look really good at the tabletop level.  Up close some details fall apart, but I find it's always a trade off at these small scales.  Do to little and they don't show anything, do too much and they look messier rather than better.  I still need to decide on and paint emblems or flags or something, but not sure what to do so that is still waiting.  They are perfectly playable as is.

Now that these are done, it's time to book a game here in the next little while.  It's also time to go back and finish some more French, as my secondary fleet is now bigger than my primary fleet... 

The British are coming...

As Greg just posted in the comments on the French Fleet, many great projects start on a whim... So, why not continue on with that whim.

Well, I had started writing the French post up weeks ago, and got sidetracked by the 40Kegger tournament that happened last weekend and never got around to posting it.

This weekend I took a few hours and banged out two sample British ships to face off against the French.

I wanted to stick with a British paint scheme, and like the Dazzle camo that the Spartan Games uses for their fleet and the take on it that Curt used for his.

So here is my take on it, done on a battleship and a frigate as a sample.  I still plan on putting some markings on the ships to mark them as British, just not sure what yet.

Thoughts on them?  I both like and dislike the arc'ed scheme on the battleship, I think it looks cool'er in a way, but is way easier to screw up with the brushstrokes and come out slightly off...  I see 2 instances that bug me, but at tabletop level, not sure it matters... and these really are just tabletop quality, they would never stand up to any level of painting scrutiny.

Will be working on more of them over the next few weeks, so a game early June is looking very possible.

Dystopian Wars - French Fleet

After some prodding from Greg about posting, I thought I would post up some of the items I have been working on lately.

Here is my first Dystopian Wars fleet that I painted up in March on a whim.  I had this and another fleet sitting around for a while since I liked the look of the ships, but had never actually seen a game played.  I decided that it was time to unbox them, paint them, and get a game in, so here goes.

First off, the quality of the castings and resin that Spartan Games puts out is first class.  I was amazed at how little cleaning was required, with almost no mold lines on any of the ships, and better yet the crisp clean detail on the models is extremely impressive for the price of the starter fleets.  I wish I could get Forge World models even half this good, and Forge World is about 3x the price!

For those unfamiliar with Dystopian Wars is it a naval combat game set in an alternate Victorian Steam Punk universe based on ours in the year 1870.  Several of the dominant powers of that era are represented in the game.

The one I chose was the Republique of France (RoF), which is based on a France brought to great power under Napoleon. However that power was then lost after his death in 1804 and the country fell into chaos.  It has now been rebuilt by Louis-Napolen and is allied with the mighty Prussian Empire and controls most of Europe. 

While the RoF is a small force, they are a highly trained elite fighting force with many innovative technologies that other countries do not yet posses.  These technologies include:

The Gravity Nullifaction Engine which allows several of their ships to lift out of the water and pass over other ships and terrain. Even the ships that do not have these engines are generally faster than other nations ships as the RoF focuses on speed and precision strikes.

I know the French are a fragile lot, but this seems a little
extreme just to avoid sea sickness.

Many ships also have built in cloud generators which make them harder to be hit by enemy attacks. Better yet they are often combined with retardant armour which allows them to ignore the first 6 rolled against them in each round of fire.

And lastly mighty Heat Lance which inflicts damage based on the size of the target, making it an extremely deadly weapon against large battleships and dreadnoughts.

A French carrier equipped with the fearsome Heat Lance.

In addition to all of the advanced technology that the RoF possesses, they also focus heavily on air superiority.  They have greater access to air craft and anti-air (ack ack) firepower than any other fleet in the game.

While the RoF has many upsides, it also has significant faults. The first being the lack of serious firepower when compared to almost any other fleet in the game.  A case in point is their battleship which only has 2 turrets, compare that to the British with 4 at roughly the same point cost.

A French battleship and three frigates escorting her

The second fault in the fleet is the fragility of the fleet. The cloud generators and retardant armour help, but if caught in the cross hairs the ships fold up pretty fast.

The ships painted up amazingly fast.  They were simple models that I primed, airbrushed, applied basecoat, inked, and then picked out a few simple details.  I looked at picking out more detail on them, but thought that as soon as you do on such small models they start to look busier (and therefore potentially messier) than better.  Others may disagree, but that was my thought process on not adding more to them.

The one thing I did add detail and flare wise was the French flag on every ship.  While I would love to claim this idea as my own, it was “borrowed” from a painter on the Dystopian Wars forums.  In my opinion it really makes the ships pop, even the small ones with only a deck board of each of the three colours, but amazingly so on the carrier with the room to do a full flag.

Each ship has the French colours shown
on the deck in some way.

I have more to expand as this is only the starter fleet with the addition of the carrier, but next to be painted is the British fleet (on my painting deck for May) so that I can host a Dystopian Wars battle one Thursday evening in June.

Dystopian Wars - Prussian Fleet

First, my apologies for cross-posting, but as I promised to keep you all updated on my 'Dystopian Wars' project (whether you like it or not) I trust I can be forgiven.

I decided to paint up my Prussians in the spirit of early war Luftwaffe colours. I've always liked the high contrast of the grey/green against the yellow and thought the scheme would transfer well to the quasi sci-fi theme of the Dystopian Wars' models.

On many of the castings you'll see these coil-type structures amidships and/or at the stern. These are tesla weapons that are used both against ship systems and can also cause hits on ship's crews. In the game the Prussian ships are very fast and carry extra boarding parties - these bonuses, combined with the tesla weapons, tend to make them very dangerous customers when they get close-in.

Three of the ten Frigates from the boxed set.

The silhouette of the Prussian ships are very long, angular and swept back.  In terms of aesthetic design I think they are probably the most 'modern' of the Dystopian fleets.

The Cruisers

You can see the Tesla coils at the aft of the Cruisers

A Prussian Battleship.

Again, Tesla coils along the Battleship's amidships.

A pair of Heavy Bombers. I like how ungainly they look.

 Two groups of Fighters with slightly different markings to help differentiate squadrons.

Next will be the American Fleet. I'm thinking that in Curt's dystopian version of the 1870's the Confederates triumphed in the Civil War (which just seems natural) so I'll paint their fleet accordingly...

Here you can see the  Battleship sporting a couple 'plug-in' generators.

British 'Dystopian Wars' Fleet

As I mentioned in a previous post I decided to paint my British 'Dystopian Wars' stuff with a variant of the 'Dazzle' paint scheme first used by the British in the later part of WWI.

'Dazzle' paint was first developed in 1917 by British maritime artist Norman Wilkinson (who, not surprisingly, was an admirer of the cubist school of art).  Technically speaking 'Dazzle' is not a camouflage, that is it is not a pattern designed to hide, but instead was created to disrupt an observer's perception of the silhouette, size and heading of the 'dazzled' subject. From what I understand it was primarily developed to fool torpedo range-finding optics and surface rangefinders. It was really never proven how effective dazzle painting was but it often boosted ships' morale, as the crews believed it gave them an edge in combat. There are several military's organizations throughout the world today which still use the paint scheme for their vehicles/ships. In civilian terms dazzle paint has been quite popular for several applications (fashion, radar speed trap boxes, etc.) - I know when I worked at Ford in Detroit the vehicle designers would often paint their super-secret concept cars in a dazzle paint scheme in an attempt to foil any outside onlookers/photographers.

A squadron of Frigates (3 of 10).

A trio of Cruisers.

A Battleship.

An Aircraft Carrier.

The Dreadnought.

Check out that nasty ram!

Two Heavy Bombers.

The Fleet steaming out to kick the arse of those Foreign Johnnies. Woof! Woof!

The larger capital-class ships can swap out their turrets to slot-in shield generators which is kinda cool. The big-ass Dreadnought sports a ram on it's bow for those players who like to go in full steam and mix it up (cough, Dave, cough...).
 
Currently I'm working on the Prussian fleet which I hope to have done in a week or so.

'Dystopian Wars' Japanese Bombers and Fighters

Another quick update on the progress of my 'Dystopian Wars' project. Here are a few shots of a couple 'Empire of the Blazing Sun' bombers and some fighters. The game stats for the bombers are pretty mental as on top of the loads of bombs, missiles and gun turrets, each of these bad boys also carry a contingent of jet-pack samurai for boarding actions. We just had a game where this pair rolled-in over a Brit carrier, bombed the hell out of it and then launched several 'sticks' of Kurosawa/Rocket-Robin-Hood-inspired boarders that had to survive the carrier's ack ack in order to land on the ship and conduct their raid. It was pretty insane but loads of laughs.

Like my 'Wings of War' stuff, I decided to build magnetic gimbal ball mounts for the bombers to allow more dynamic posing of the models while they are on their flight stands.

Below is an example of the fighter stands - not surprisingly called 'Tiny Fliers' in the game. These come as one-piece resin 'tokens' which are really easy to paint-up.

As promised before I do have a bunch of stuff from the British fleet done-up so I'll try to post another update on those in the next little while.

New Project: 'Dystopian Wars' Empire of the Blazing Sun

I've decided to take a wee break from the Napoleonic insanity and do something completely different.

Sylvain and I tried out Spartan Games' Firestorm Armada several weeks ago which was good fun so I thought I'd check out both Uncharted Seas and Dystopian Wars as they use many of the same rules mechanics. Once I got a good look at some of the steampunk models for Dystopian Wars I knew that is what I wanted to try, so I went for it whole hog and purchased the starter fleets for Prussia, Britain, USA and Japan. 

I decided to try the ships for The Empire of the Blazing Sun first as I had a few ideas of how I wanted to do them from seeing period Japanese woodblock prints.  

These castings are quite stylized, kinda remiding me of the art-deco locomotives of the 1920's. First up are a few of the smallest ships, the frigates.

Two of the Frigates.

Then the Meat and Potatoes of the Fleet, the hardworking cruisers.

Three cruisers. The structures on the top and rear of the hull are rocket pods.

Here's  an example of one of the Capital Class ships:

A Battleship.

The brass disc pod on the stern is a shield generator...

...and a photo of the whole Fleet as it stands now.

The colour scheme is pretty straightforward: I first primed the ships black as I was just too lazy to go out and buy grey primer. I 'lifted' the black basecoat by heavily drybrushing them with Codex Grey, then went over them again with a drybrush of Foundry Austrian White (C shade). I then washed the ships down with a coat of Delvan Mud and highlighted again with Austrian White. The red was GW Red Gore highlighted with Blood Red. The planking is Americana Sable Brown then inked with Flesh Wash and highlighted with Sable Brown again.

I have just finished a bunch of aircraft as well which are kinda crazy looking. I'll put them up on an upcoming post. On the workbench now is the British fleet which I'm going to paint-up in a striped  'Dazzle' pattern similar to what was used in the later part of WWI and in some theatres of WWII. Silly but good fun.