Greetings! This post is intended to be the first shot across the bow for a project I’ve had simmering for some time now in the back of my head. As you may have guessed from the title, the basic idea is to come up with a conversion or mod for Dystopian Wars (DW) to create a version of that game that uses historical miniatures.

Concept & Inspiration

The basic idea is to take the basic game engine from DW and modify it as required to more closely approximate historical naval warfare. This will require some changes and modifications to the base game, which I’ll get into here in a minute. This idea came about from my enjoyment of DW, and the realization that the game could do a credible job at representing the feel of combat up to about 1945. I also realized that such a set of rules could be a fun way to employ my large-ish collection of 1/1800 WWII-era miniatures that I have collected for Axis & Allies: War At Sea. Combine that with the fact that the unit stats for War at Sea lend themselves rather easily to conversion to the Spartan engine, and an idea is born!

Objectives

This project’s primary goal is to create a fun game with a good historical feel that is close enough to DW game that it can be learned quickly and easily by people who are already familiar with the base game.I recognize the fact that DW was not designed to be a historical game. As such, it is probably expecting too much for it to be alterable into a game that provides an accurate representation of historical naval combat. Instead, I hope to achieve a game that captures some of the feel of historical combat, while remaining accessible and fun to play. In that way, I hope to introduce those segments of the DW playerbase to historical naval gaming who might not have otherwise played a historical game. As a secondary objective, I am embarking on this project as a way to play around with some game design concepts and try my hand at game creation.

Advantages and Challenges

The advantages of this project include the fact that DW is a “proven” game that has fun mechanics and rules detailed enough to cover all major aspects of naval warfare. Also, the fact that the model stats from War at Sea are relatively straightforward to convert for use with the DW engine means that they can be used as a ready source of base data to build model profiles from.

Design Principles

As I embark on this project, I intend to keep the following list of principles in mind to guide my efforts:

1. Minimize the changes made to the DW game engine. There will need to be some changes, of course, but I believe that keeping these to a minimum is important to making sure DWH is as accessible as possible to players of the base game.
2. Maintain focus on playability over historicality. This is in keeping with my recognition that DWH will never match games like Command at Sea for their “crunch.”
3. Avoid mechanics/concepts that are directly contrary to history. While I might not be able to do things exactly as they were done “in real life,” I want to maintain the feel of plausibility within DWH. In other words, I want things to still make sense at an intuitive level for players.

Tasks Ahead

Obviously, there is a lot to accomplish for this project! One of the first orders of business is to hash out the changes that will need to be made from the base DW engine, both in terms of things to add and things to remove. As I mentioned above, I am going to strive to keep these changes to a minimum. Part of this process will be establishing scales (map scale, time scale, etc) for the game. Next, I will need to start developing some model profiles, a process which I anticipate may lead to additional changes in the engine. And of course, these changes and profiles will need to be playtested! Ideally, this playtesting will happen incrementally as the project develops, so that corrections and balancing can start as early as possible.

Conclusion

There you have it! Stay tuned for more updates on this project in the coming weeks and months. I do not have a specific timeline for this project, but I hope to get the first version put together in the next few months! Until next time…