Ahoy Admirals!
I’m Matt Carter, a game designer on the Warcradle Studios Development Team, and it has been my pleasure to have worked on the new rules for the upcoming edition of Dystopian Wars.
In a previous article, I outlined how a Round of gameplay is structured. Today, I’m going to expand on Parker’s recent exploration of Damage, Disorder and Critical Damage by explaining a little more about how Attack actions work, complete with a breakdown of how they are resolved.
How to Attack
While most of these processes will be familiar to Dystopian Wars veterans, there have been some significant changes that aim to streamline your battles.
All units will have an Action Limit. This is the maximum number of actions a unit can resolve each time they are Activated. This includes Attack actions, meaning you cannot simply fire all of a unit’s weapons at any targets you fancy.
One of the most significant changes to attacks in this new edition is that you no longer need to declare all of your attacks at the start of the unit’s activation. Instead, you can declare one Attack action, see how this plays out, then formulate a new plan based on what is now strategically beneficial, be it having another go with a different group of weapons (each weapon on a unit profile can only contribute once per Action), switching to a new target, or saving your actions to conduct valuable Maintenance or Rallies (more on these soon).
So, how do these Attack actions work?
First, the controlling Admiral must declare an Initial Target. This is an enemy model that is both in Range and within the correct Firing Arc of at least one weapon belonging to a model in the active unit. Each weapon in Dystopian Wars has three Firepower values, depending on which Range band the target category falls within.
In this new edition, these Range bands are:
Short (up to 10”)
Standard (10” - 30”)
Extreme (30” and beyond)
While your weapons may theoretically have the ability to hit targets from the opposite end of the Play Area, this is not always the best way to get the most out of your weaponry.
An Admiral may then add any other viable weapons from any models in the unit to the attack action. In this edition of Dystopian Wars, Lead and Support weapons are a thing of the past - when you include an extra weapon in an attack, you just add its Firepower value (for the appropriate Range band) to the Attack Pool.
Many of the Qualities that weapons possess also have cumulative effects (for example High Velocity (W), which converts a Heavy Counter in your opponent’s Resistance Roll to a Standard Counter for every contributing weapon with that Quality) meaning that it pays to include as many weapons with the same Quality to a single Attack Pool to as possible. This is in addition to simply adding enough extra dice to your pool to overcome the target’s Defences and Armour. Most weapons can combine their fire in this way, provided they belong to models in the active unit and that the target model is both within range and the correct fire arcs.
However, some weapons can only be used as part of a Special Attack action. These often target models with specific positional traits, or contain weapons that work in unusual ways, such as bathing their enemies in an all-consuming torrent of alchemical fire or dropping payloads of uranium bombs from great dirigible airships.
Once you’ve built a dice pool, it is simply a case of rolling your Action Dice, counting up your Hits, and grouping them according to the target’s Armour rating in order to calculate the amount of Damage your attack inflicts. However, the Target is not simply sitting idle as you bombard it from afar.
On The Defensive
All models will have a Defence rating, representing point defences and smaller shield generators that can intercept and block incoming fire. As you are making your Attack Roll, your opponent rolls a corresponding Resistance Roll to try and counter any Hits that you score. This means that both players have a part to play in resolving every Attack action - there’s even less time to check your phone while waiting for your opponent to roll their dice!
While Attack actions are not the only way for your models to inflict damage on the enemy, with many models able to unleash a devastating broadside, this is, perhaps, a topic for another blog…
Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for future blogs that will detail other aspects of the game, such as using your model’s dreaded broadsides!
Matthew Carter