Messages

1

The Shipyard / Re: Stay-at-home Painting

« on: April 06, 2020, 05:22:49 pm »

I have been getting some serious work done on the paint bench since all this came down.  Also, teaching my son to paint and to play DW (and rewriting the core rules and making new stat cards).  Got a lot of stuff off my workbench, some of which has been sitting there since 2013-ish (hello Charlemagne).  Also made some DW scale trees for the land game which turned out pretty well.

2

Dystopian Wars / Coming Back to DW

« on: March 01, 2020, 01:43:51 pm »

I stopped playing DW a little after my son was born.  Just got burned out on the faction inflation and ran out of time.  I haven't really played it since, mostly scratched that itch with x-wing and a little bit of warmahordes.  Recently my son (now 7) asked about all the painted ships I have and why I don't do anything with them and you know, good question.  So I started poking around again.

I knew that Warcradle had picked up the license but I missed out on everything since then.  Full credit to them for making a go of it, it isn't easy, but whoever their new game is for, it isn't me.  I'm not interested in replacing my large, fully painted fleets; if I was, the direction of their new models does nothing for me; and the rules changes they're looking at seem to be mostly tinkering around the edges.   

In a perfect world, what I'd want is a much better ruleset that works with the existing models.  Since that doesn't seem to be what 3.0 will be, I've been looking elsewhere.  2.5 is better than previous versions but still very unwieldy and clunky.  I started kicking around ideas for a ground-up rewrite but that's a lot of work for something nobody would use (not that that has ever stopped me before).  I'm also thinking about starting with 2.5 and seriously cleaning up parts of it, with a rewrite and some heavy editing it might get to a decent place.  I was hoping someone might have taken a run at that already but all I can find are some balance fixes to the 2.5 stuff.

So is anybody still playing and if so, what rules are you using? 

3

Dystopian Wars / Re: DW Rules and Stats UPDATED 10/25/18

« on: February 04, 2020, 09:36:33 pm »

After rummaging around on one of my old HDDs, I managed to come up with some of the old 1.1 reformatted stat cards. They've been added to the main page! Unfortuantely, this particular download of the cards was done in May 2012, and so it doesn't include any models newer than that, including all the Russians.

I can give you copies of whatever stat cards you need up until I stopped doing them (after 2.0 but before 2.5 I think, it's been a while).  Hit me up.

4

News and Rumors / Re: SPARTAN CLOSING

« on: August 26, 2017, 07:10:39 pm »

As for community rules, I couldn't see starting from scratch as you're too likely to make the new rules so much different than current players (the only ones the IP is worth anything to) won't even see it as the same system.  I think there are probably a few "cornerstone" ideas/designs that could be changed.

For community rules, yup, absolutely.  I think it would have to be based on the current rules, just refined and fixed and maintained going forward.  That would be the best way to get the most people to buy into it, and would be the most likely to succeed in getting wide acceptance among the surviving player base, which would help keep the game in play.  With a good community effort behind it, a game can last indefinitely without a publisher.  Again, just look at Epic.

What I've been tinkering with is more of a ground-up redesign, which obviously would be a lot harder to get people to buy into, but I'd mostly be doing it for my own benefit anyway.  If anybody else could use it, that'd be gravy.

No reason both can't coexist, of course.

5

News and Rumors / Re: SPARTAN CLOSING

« on: August 26, 2017, 07:05:50 pm »

Would mantic be interested ?

They could also resurrect uncharted seas to go with their fantasy line

Mantic's thing is mostly inexpensive plastic.  Do they do a lot of resin?  They could probably make it work but they seem to have a lot of their own stuff going on right now.  Anything's possible, though.

6

News and Rumors / Re: SPARTAN CLOSING

« on: August 26, 2017, 05:08:24 pm »

I would imagine all of the Halo assets default to Microsoft instantly and it would be entirely up to them to sell them again if they see fit.  Although I think some of the Halo models were contracted out because they were plastic and Spartan doesn't have the machinery to do in-house plastics.

I haven't seen the paperwork or anything, but usually, the moulds and models would be the property of Spartan Games, but you'd need the license to sell them.  So anybody wanting to resurrect Halo would need to buy the designs/moulds/masters/stock from Spartan, and then sign a licensing deal with Microsoft, and wouldn't be able to do anything with the Spartan properties unless they had it.  MS could always buy that stuff from Spartan and do it themselves but they obviously never would.

The question of the value of the DW and FSA IP is pretty open.  It clearly has a solid, if very niche, market and it doesn't have much for direct competition.  But the thing about gaming systems is that most developers have way more ideas than they have the ability to make them (see Spartan...).  So I would wonder what gaming company would buy someone else's dead baby when they have many ideas of their own that they haven't got out yet.  A lot of the initial work is done, but it would be hard to put your own spin on the system without destroying what value the IP has, the existing players.  Change it too much and it isn't the same game any more, but leaving it the same would make it harder to embrace it as a developer.

There are a lot of companies who wouldn't mind adding those lines to their portfolio, but you'd need someone with enough heft to add a pretty extensive line, who also had lots of capacity and experience in resin casting, and has some money on hand.  I'm not sure who fits that bill.

I think that rewriting the rules to go with the existing models is certainly possible.  Warzone changed the rules and also the models, and I guess they're doing okay with it. As long as you have a well supported product, I would expect people who already have fleets on hand would probably mostly just roll with it.

I expect that an Epic style community rules revamp would be mostly the current ruleset with some tweaks and fixes, because that's the easiest thing to get everyone to agree on.  I would want to start from scratch, myself, as the DW rules have a bunch of issues which are fundamental to the rule concepts (but that's just me).

7

News and Rumors / Re: SPARTAN CLOSING

« on: August 26, 2017, 12:59:19 pm »

Given the licensing costs, I would expect this means Halo is dead.  It's not impossible someone might pick up DW and/or FSA as they are the more popular of the home-grown IP.  Both ranges are very big, though, it's a lot to manage.  The rest, I'd have a hard time seeing the math work out.

I'm actually thinking of getting going with the homebrew replacement ruleset for DW I've had kicking around in my head for a while.  The line of models for DW is huge and they're pretty widely available, I would not be surprised at all to see projects like that showing up here and there, or maybe a community driven effort to clean up and maintain the existing Spartan rules.  It's unusual, but look at Epic, it can happen.

8

Dystopian Wars / Re: DW Stats Project

« on: August 26, 2017, 12:54:52 pm »

Not sure if this would be of value to you (it's formatted fairly differently because it does have all the stats) but I have CSV files of stats for DW models as part of the package I put together for my stat cards.  You can find it here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BysinsC52_1bMEY5dG1aWFhNdE0

Take a look in Spartan Games Media.zip, in the CSV files folder.

These were crowd-sourced from the old forums and contains everything that had been released at the point that I made them.

9

The Swap Shop / Re: Looking for Miniatures

« on: September 14, 2014, 12:05:52 pm »

Meeplemart (in Toronto, Ontario, Canuckistan) still has a lot of Spartan blisters in stock.  Looks like they have the Manta, at least:

http://www.meeplemart.com/store/Search.aspx?SearchTerms=aquan