"Dust Tactics - love the minis, hate the rules" Topic

On my second try to this game now and still loving the minis and hating the game, anyone got a recomendataion for rules? I am tempted by Nuts war without end

Secrets of the Reich from West Wind. A little bloody and you'll have to brew your own rules for some of the odder Dust infantry, but the vehicle/mech design system is pretty versatile and should handle your walkers easily.

I'm in the process of trying out the Nuts War Without End rules at present (bought last week) so far I am favourably impressed but it is early days yet.

More impressive is that Shuggy (a veteran of WW2) is interested and may be joining in.

x42

Not sure if you have heard about this but 'Dust Warfare' will be released early this year.
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Yep, I'm waiting to see how Dust Warfare plays.

Gearkrieg

NUTS!

Brian

Second for Gearkrieg.

For Gear Krieg, what you need is A) the Superscience book, and possibly the Heavy Gear Vehicle Construction System to round it out.

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(The Superscience book is available at DriveThruRPG)

How about Tomorrows War?
We plan on using AT43 Minis with the rules.
Joep

I've got a proposed set of rules for walkers that I'm developing for AE-WWII. A draft of it is up on the Darkson Design forums.

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I have stated out several Dust models using the construction rules in it and have a walk-through on designing your own walkers.

Take a look at them and let me know what you think on the DD forums.

Nuts Ww/oE is good.
Also try Where Heroes Dare from Iron Ivan.

I was thinking of using a customized 40k or perhaps GASLIGHT. Shockforce/warengine would be intereting too.

From what I've read so far it sounds like Dust Warfare will be VERY much like the Dust Tactics games.

I find the game plays well at 160 points or more, using the scenarios from the later expansions. The basic missions are small and quite simple but with a good mix of troop types and a more interesting mission it's a good system.

That said, I think DUST Warfare will be a much more traditional tabletop game and Andy Chambers writes good rules.

From what I read from Andy Chambers notes.

1) It sounds like Dust Warfare will be IGoUGo rather than Alternating Activation as Dust Tactics is. I'm not particularly fond of IGoUGo.

2) However then Andy mentions a mechanic that sounds like the reaction system he had in Starship Troopers (also an Andy Chambers game). Despite being IGoUGo, I found the SST rules pretty good and the reaction system part was one thing I particularly liked about it. Basically when a unit completes its action within a given range of an enemy unit, that enemy unit is allowed to perform an action (from a limited range of choices). This shows promise.

3) He didn't go into specifics but the reaction fire allowed for suppressive fire which SST really didn't cover. Just speculation on my part, but I think it would involve designating a unit to perform Suppressive Fire on a selected enemy unit. Rather than causing lethal damage it makes them loose any reactions they would normally perform when an opposing unit moves within range of them. This sounds most intriguing and probably makes the IGoUGo mechanic even more fluid and involving for both players.

Looking at the demo tables at Gen Con, it appeared the game was still played with same Dust Tactics stat cards and custom dice. I can see this happening as I didn't see it hard to convert the Dust Tactics rules to a free form movement system and using large 'kill zone' templates much like SST to assign hits. Stats probably wouldn't need to change significantly and special rules may just need to be redefined for Dust Warfare, as they aren't spelled out on the stat card it could be easy to implement.

CmdrKiley – from the sounds of what you've read and posted here, I like item 3. The suppressive fire sounds like a pretty slick idea.

yes, I had the "oh no not another IGoUGo 40k clone from a fomer GW employee" reaction when I first read it.

Later as he went into it, I found the other details that really address the issues I have with IGoUGo systems.

although I'm not totally crazy about the Dust Tactics rules, I do like the ranged combat mechanics. For a mass shooting type system it seemed to address the effectiveness of certain weapons vs. certain unit types (infantry, armor, and aircraft) in a simple and effective manner.

Saving throws for cover were done pretty effectively too.

I do hope that this mechanic is carried over to Dust Warfare. However, I'd like to see range factored into it as well.

One thing that would have to be taken into account is that DUST Tactics is a board game, not a tabletop one -DUST Warfare will be the tabletop version, and looks promising. For a board game (with miniatures) DUST Tactics has nice, easy rules with good mechanics, with alternate activation and reactive fire which give the game pretty good tactical options.

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Paolo Parente's DUST vs Achtung! Cthulhu : Secrets of the Dust RPG Mashup announced in the latest update for the Achtung! Cthulhu WW2 setting Kickstarter