First Game with DW French

Been a few weeks since said game, but one thing and other conspired to keep me away from the blog.

French had their first outing against the British faction a few weeks back. 1000pts, which for my part meant 6 cruisers, 2 pocket battleships, a dreadnought, and 3 frigates. Broadly the mission objective was to destroy 'core' units (i.e. things which come in the original starter box set for that faction). I got rather distracted by the British dreadnought and just concentrated on that instead. Consequently I lost, just.

Anyway, how do the French play? Remarkably tough actually; I had feared their technically marvellous boats would get hammered by the gun-heavy Brits. Instead they soaked up a lot of punishment, and dished out some good stuff too.

The Heat Lances are hugely powerful - assuming you can get into range soon enough to use them. The high proportion of surface skimmers really helped against the Torpedo keen British.

Itching for the next game. In preparation I bought some little Airships for use as fire observers for the submarines, hopefully giving some much needed ranged/indirect fire to the fleet.

Only other news in the wargaming world is that I'm thinking about getting Too Fat Lardies latest effort for my dark ages armies; Dux Britanniarum 

Sorry, no pics of the Dystopian Wars French - her indoors got to the camera before I'd loaded them onto the laptop.

Ecuyer Support Cruiser

Today saw a lot of listen-only conference calls at work, and seeing as my work is at home, I managed to slap some acrylic on some Dystopian Wars boats

These are Ecuyer class support cruisers - An AA Cruiser basically. Like their WW2 counterparts/inspiration, I do wonder how effective they'll be, but lovely looking models nonetheless. First outing will see them pitched in against the techno-fest Covenant of Antartica, but expecting them to do well against the Britannia fleet which is reliant on air assault.

After an abortive attempt  with Dazzle camo on the Carrier, I sat and thought about how a Victorian Ironclad would look. Decided that they wouldn't be battleship grey, or indeed camo, but should imitate the steam locos of the period. Hence, blue (it's more grey to the eye, bordering on turquoise) with lovely teak decking and brass and copper fixtures and fittings everywhere.

These are now awaiting ink and tidying up.

Dreadnought and Sky Fortress already WIP in the same scheme, just need to get some small fleur de lys transfers from somewhere.

The Nerf Within

I suspect like many gamers of my age (mid 30s), my introduction into the world of toy soldiers was through everyone's favourite object of hate; GW. A natural progression from the B/AD&D with the C-series and early slotta, onto WFB, Rogue Trader, Space Hulk, Space Marine, and all the rest.

Nerfed systems all. Every race/faction/unit/system had a Nerf unit - from the Assault Cannon terminator marine in Space Hulk, to the Reaver Titan in Space Marine; little objects of pain for your opponent. Being of that age where utterly crushing my opponent is important, I happily built armies around the most obscene units. WFB Bretonnians because they had a gazillion Knights, Imperial Guard in 40K and Epic because of the Shadowsword and Baneblade (and staggering array of artillery in Epic), and so on. 

Now I'm a bigger kid, I've always taken time to build armies either as historical representations, or as balanced 'interesting' (read; easy to lose with) units. Nerfed was for beardy tourney players, I'd never indulge in that sort of ultra-competitive nonsense.

All was right with the world until I got onto Splintered Lands. Whilst you couldn't say an Armoured Badger was truly nerf, in that system they're like little Tiger tanks. I'd forgotten just how much amusement could be had from recklessly wading into lesser opponents safe in the knowledge that it would probably be very messy for the other side.

Late this afternoon, Pete rang from the bowels of a gaming store in the City. Conversation was broadly thus;
Pete: "They've got Dystopian Wars French here, (reels off list of stuff)"
Me: "Ah, nice, just grab me one of the Battleships will you?"
Pete: "Okay"
Me: "No, wait, put it back... they've got the Sky Fortress thing? Yep, right, I'll have that. Text me when you're home and I'll pop down with the cash"

Several things then happened which I wasn't really expecting. Firstly, I became increasingly impatient as the afternoon wore into the evening; I wanted my new toy now dammit!

Then, when I finally got down to Pete's place, I tore open the blister pack like a complete kid, and then expressed delight at the a) the silly size of said toy, and b) the nerfed-to-hell stats and special rules for it through a series of cackles, and a  bit of gloating at the mighty victories this thing will give me.

The nerf within is reawakened, and in the manner of all things nerfed, I now thoroughly look forward to invoking the immortal gamer phrase;

"I'm gonna need a whole load more D6s for this one"