On December 16th we posted online our first State of the Nations blog for Dystopian Wars, and one section, in particular, generated an amount of discussion on our Forum. The subject was that the minimum movement of a vessel in Dystopian Wars must be directly ahead.
We’ve referred to this as a ‘clarification’, and not a rule change, because it was the intention of the original design that this rule be in place, and so areas of balance were created with this in mind. However, the rule was not clearly signposted, and some gaming groups were split on its use.
While play-testing the current improvements being presented for Dystopian Wars, we looked to ensure that all of our playgroups were playing the minimum move rule the same way. Which meant that we also had the chance to ensure that this was indeed the right way to play the rule. It didn’t take long for the positive feedback to come back, and of particular note was the way it provided a perceived fix to some of the issues certain groups were having with particular models now that they were using the rule the way we had originally intended it.
This sort of fix we often refer to as a soft fix – a solution to a number of smaller issues via a single change, which is not directly related to one particular model; as opposed to the hard fix of changing point costs or stats on a model. The knock-on effect of a soft fix, however, often has far greater implications than the more constrained tweak of a numeric value, and these implications won’t always be immediately obvious.
While some models have received hard fixes in various places, it’s the soft fixes that will often have the longer-lasting effects.
Which is a neat way to segue into briefly discussing changes made to the Stat Cards…
Where hard fixes were still justified, after the core rules received their amendments, we’ve tweaked the Stats. Some of these tweaks are for the sake of consistency, and some are quite minor, but a few will stand out as being very important for their Nation.
We’ve also made a PDF of the updated Model Assigned Rules available (just the rules, not the character text, for easier consumption). It’s worth reading these when referencing the changes to the Stat Cards to get the full picture.
As a final point for today, something raised on our forums was that the online part of our community covers only a small cross-section of our complete player base. This is something we’re acutely aware of, and we do have plans to ensure that our players who don’t regularly frequent our website won’t be left behind. For now, though, it could be seen as somewhat of a boon; we have a large number of vastly experienced players on our forum, and we see your input as an invaluable and important tool for improving all of our games – we always welcome informed feedback.
To view the PDF Stat Cards below, please click on the link for the model you wish to see. If the PDF does not load, or you wish to save it on your machine, you can ‘Right-Click > Save Target As’ to save it.
