Author: Felix

After a few “issues” with our previous game of Dystopian Wars, I was looking forward to playing our next game and this time playing the rules as written. Well we nearly got there!

Playing a 550 point battle, Simon had a Battleship, three Cruisers and two squadrons of Frigates. Opposing him, I had the Blucher Dreadnought, a Ruler Class Battleship, a single Tribal Cruiser and a small squadron of three Arminus Class Frigates.

The field objective (for both of us) was to destroy or sink 50% of the points value of the opposing fleet and destroy all Cruisers.

Simon’s main tactic appeared to be to throw everything at the Tribal Cruiser, as a result I was able to throw a lot of ordnance from my capital ships at his battleship.

Once he had sunk my Tribal Cruiser, he went for the Arminus Frigates which didn’t last long. However his frigates managed to survive an onslaught by my dreadnought and battleship.

I then remembered that my field orders were to sink Simon’s cruisers, so I started to target his ships. Tactically I was torn between firing everything at one target, sinking that before moving onto the next, or splitting the gunnery against the three ships, taking them all down together.
Having sunk my cruiser and my frigates, Simon ignored the dreadnought and started to pour fire into the battleship, which though well armoured started to take damage.

The game reached a point where there was two ways it could go. The battleship was taking damage from Simon’s frigates, however rather than take them out, I needed to direct fire into the cruisers to sink them, I took a chance that Simon’s damaged frigates would need to be really lucky to hit the battleship. So all weapons opened fire on the cruisers. Alas my luck was out, and one of the frigates managed to get lots of sixes and by the end, managed to strike the final damage that sunk the battleship.

Tactically, Simon won out because he followed his field orders, he concentrated on taking out the cruiser and then taking out the smaller ships so that he knocked out 50% of my force. I was sidetracked by his battleship, trying to remove that meant that I was late in destroying the cruisers. I also underestimated the frigates, which though small, managed to sink my battleship! At the end of the game, Simon’s remaining ships were all badly damaged, whereas my Blucher dreadnought was virtually unscathed.