Operation Shadow Hunter

As everyone knows, Dystopian Wars can be played across all three theatres of war (Land, Sea and Air) but most of the time we tend to only do Land and Air or Sea and Air – what about purely Air?

For a long time I’ve been wanting to play a pure Air battle – a grand melee amongst the clouds. A place for those magnificent men in their flying machines to prove who is the best.

Setup for the game was easy – we rolled for terrain as normal and placed clouds instead of islands (we actually used the punch out islands from the Operation Shadow Hunter box upside down – showing their blank white sides only). As far as rules for the clouds, there was a suggestion we use the rules presented by the Weather Manipulation Generator for Clouds and Storms. Instead we just went with the simple – any line of sight that passes through a cloud is partially blocked, regardless of height level. Other than that, there were no other line of sight issues to worry about.

Having only three height levels to use (Flying, Obscured and Stratospheric) made a couple of models unusable. Models that laid Surface Mines became little more than AA batteries. SAS, while they could still AA targets in all three levels, were restricted to Fighters since Dive Bombers can only target Surface and Submerged levels and Torpedo Bombers were even more useless.

My opponent and I also took advantage of the Obscured and Stratospheric levels (Stratospheric for those models that could) and not one model dropped into the Flying height level all game – taking advantage of the 5+ and 6+ to hit rolls. Probably the most difficult part about that was the amount of damage inflicted was well below what you would expect to see in a normal Dystopian Wars game – unless you get lucky like I did and roll 19 successes!

It was a great chance to try something different, but in the end it did remind me that Dystopian Wars is a game enjoyed in all three theatres of war.

Reese put together the idea of the Painting Challenge, and naturally if we were asking people to throw their hat into the ring, we would need to step up and do the same. So without hesitation, here is the first part of my challenge…

These are the first part of my painting challenge. The Empire of the Blazing Sun naval models from the Shadow Hunters boxed set, and one of the older land boxes.

I made a rookie error with these, I used an untested (by me) primer. I discovered, much to my displeasure later that night, that my acrylic paints weren’t taking to the models at all. Bugger! I resprayed with an Army Painter Matte Varnish in the hope this would give something for the paint to grip. Thankfully it did the trick wonderfully, and I had no problems thenceforth.

The first leg of the painting challenge was the smalls – I was going with a relatively simple scheme.

Photo 3-07-2014 1 21 46 pm Very happy to have the smalls done, that’s one step in the right direction! The scheme is simple, but I think, after a shaky start, that they’ve come up ok.