I know there are a few AT-43 players lurking around. I was wondering if anyone has put together stats for AT-43 figs, either for D:T or D:W?

I sure would like to dust off my Red Blok Kolossi, and UNA troops for some battles.

As an owner of about 700 AT43 minis and vehicles I can appreciate your comment. However I leave them together for now and play at43 as it stands. They are tempting to use though and i would probably just mimic the Dust squads as best as possible with the minis you have.

I have a considerable amount of Red Block AT-43 troops which were proxying as Axis in our 1st game, but so far no intention to adapt their stats into Dust Warfare, honestly we even did not think about it…

We are also proxying the Allies with the UNA troops, which fit very well in the role.

Maybe the stats for the rifles and flamethrowers could give you an indication of the difference in scale for the games. I can send you all the stats of AT-43, they are in the cards and are in a fan made pdf, if you want.

I cant help but think that the Dust models should be given stats for AT-43 instead … the other way around feels like a down grade, this is not trolling just my personal opinion. Im sure some AT-43 players might agree.

Hatamoto said:

I have at least one of every AT-43 model made, including the rare Con exclusives. I strongly disagree with your opinion. While I enjoy AT-43 very much, it is nowhere near as balanced. Now, if it had a scaling initiative mechanic to keep someone from getting tabled, a case might be made. As they are written now, I prefer DW.

Shadow4ce said:

i didnt mean converting the dw models over to the at-43 universe, so any imbalances in the current armies wont matter.

not sure what you mean with initiative scaling though.. i really like the leadership point/initiative system of at-43

On the first part, I misunderstood what you meant, so no problem there.

On the initiative issue, in all the games of AT-43 I played, and the biggest reason it didn't take well here, is whoever got the Alpha Strike almost always tabled their opponent. What's really ironic to me as I type this, is the most played game in the FLGS I play at is WM/Hirdes. It is the most Alpha-Strike based game I know of. So yeah, folks here complained about AT-43 being whoever got first blood won, then promptly went back to playing a game which every rule written pushes that mechanic, lol.

In DW, if you have a really bad turn and lose half your army, you're likely to win initiative and over the next few rounds can claw your way out of the hole you dug better than any mini game I've seen over the last 34 years.

Shadow4ce said:

im sure that can be an issue, wouldnt go so far as saying it has been a problem in a majority of my played games though. perhaps rewriting some of the rules and attempt to integrate some of the stuff that makes dw unique might be the way to go what i would like to have in dw from at-43 is the scaling to hit difficulty. often you can fire a weapon really far but its harder to hit depending on range.. i like the feeling of "no shot is impossible".

Hatamoto said:

Yeah, we're probably on the same page on most of this. I think our local meta, (which is so focussed on alpha strikes from several years of WM/Hordes play), probably skewed our AT-43 games somewhat. I was the only one who enjoyed AT-43, and wasted a ton of money buying every faction to get folks interested. I'm hopeful DW sticks better because it's even more different from WM than AT-43 in how it's playing out so far. Our "Mr. Congeniality" just bought a bunch of Allies so I'm feeling very hopeful, as everyone in the store has come to the consensus he is the most fun person to play a game against, win or lose. Getting him to buy in will definitely help promote the game here, and he and I are going to be playing tonight & tomorrow, trying to get others involved. We've scheduled a campaign for next weekend and hope to have at least two others (besides the four of us playing now) playing by then. A big 3-on-3 campaign day would be cool.

An interesting trivia: When Dust Studios first started considered a dust miniatures game (2008 IIRC) they started down the road of licensing the AT-43 ruleset but bailed sometime around Rackham's first bankruptcy.

Anyhow, I'm also a former AT-43 player with a huge collection. I too have entertained the notion of crossing the two systems in some fashion, but it just seems to be more trouble than its worth. I believe it could be done, but it would take a lot of time and play testing to get things to work with anything close to balance. The way I see it, the two biggest hurdles with crossover stats are that the core mechanics are so different:

Dust stats are based on fixed Hit/Blank rolls while AT-43 based most everything on a UTR (Universal Table of Resolution)

Dust weapons ranges are fixed while most AT-43 weaons had infinite range bands rolled against the UTR

Shadow4ce said:

We alomst never had this problem. Just like any game, if the table was too small and had too little terrain, Alpha strikes certainly happened. We typically played on 4'x6' boards with lots of LOS blocking terrain so didn't run into that problem. Our biggest problem was continuing balance between factions. The first two factions (UNA & Therians) balanced well against each other but but the Karmen were too week and Cogs had too many powerful synergy builds.

If this proves too difficult to be pulled off as a fan-project then by god i hope DW matures considerably as a rule set in any coming editions.. the main points i would like to see tweaked and improved are shooting in general and reactions. Other options for moving would also be of interest (crawling perhaps? diving into cover? there are many things i can see a soldier do to improve survivability). I see people building amazing boards and terrain for this game, and i always think "goddammit, these deserve a better rule-set". But hopefully it will mature, and since i have a ton of AT-43 and DW minis i might as well play both from time to time.

In our group, our "rules-analyst" loved the card sequence in activation in AT-43 and would love to have that integrated in DW. I can see the difficulties of doing something like that but if it could be done a combination of one-player-opponent-player activation sequence card based, overwatch and reactions could be awesome. The thing with the ranges, well, it makes things maybe more "real" but also mechanics and game more complex, some people do not like to be all the time measuring things.

Re: Dust trivia. Ac-tually, the Dust miniatures game was first developed by Rackham, but early in the process they decided to switch the theme to be more sci-fi rather than alt. WW2 and AT-43 was the result. This is why the UNA and Red Blok models have such strong similarities to the Dust figures… they were based off of Dust in the first place!

As Paolo Parente pursued releasing an actual Dust-themed minis game, it was a logical extension for him to use the AT-43 system (and I'm guessing he got a pretty nominal, if any, fee). As Rackham sadly went out of business that option evaporated.

In the heighth of our AT-43 playing days (which I miss) we never felt there was an Alpha-strike problem. We felt there were some pretty hefty unit imbalances (with Therians as the worst offenders) and that the Karman generally suffered as the weakest army overall. I only got a handful of games played with my Cogs before the interest level started to taper off and never faced an ONI army. My five armies sit impatiently in the closet hoping for more tabletop action, but my opponents have sadly moved on to other games. As a pretty sweet consolation prize, Dust Warfare has arrived and is popular with the local crowd. :-) The new recruits aren't fully painted (yet) but now it's their turn to enjoy a Little War.

I would love to convert over AT-43 units to Dust Warfare and get those sci-fi troops back on the tabletop. Hmmm. That's not the only game I've discussed converting to Dust Warfare, but it's certainly worth a try!

Actually, it's my understanding "AT-43" initially stood for "Alternate Timeline - 1943." It was set in the Dust Universe, but early in its development, Rackham & Mr. Parente's had a falling out of sorts, and Rackham had to change it to "After the Trauma - 43 years later" in order to not be sued by Dust Studios. They were able to keep the molds but had to change the factions. Axis and Allies combined into UNA. SSU into Red Blok. The rains might be what the mysterious Vrill were going to look like.

At least that's the information I gathered from Rackham when I was asked to be a demo rep for AT-43.

Shadow4ce said:

thats correct as far as i know. From what i can gather the cogs have more in common with the vrill aesthetically, based on this picture; http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRTBVA6eLeSFlJLqtZsV1nA-WXVx-NQlv5X2Pz6qJqWjdwtbThILBvMouBB

I never played at-43 but I would love to try it. Unfortunatelly I just have DUST figures, so are you saying it is impossible to make stats for miniatures from dust to play at-43?

Also I think making homemade Warfare would be a fun idea, there are pleanty of games to take inspiration from. Tactics have pretty solid core rules, so I gues it still could be based on it and then add few rules to the mix.

A boardgame called Dungeon Twister have quite interesting card mechanic to give actions:

You have couple cards with number of actions printed on them, like: 4 actions, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1 etc. then you use one card and put it on discard pile and thats the number of actions you can take, when you get rid of all cards, you take them all back into your hand again. Makes you think if you want to strike hard now or wait and use weaker cards and leave the better ones for later.

I hope for Warfare to improve as well…

I would love to hear from the designers what's the reason for making some rules the way they are, like why double move ignores terrain restrictions? or why snipers ignore cover/armor?

March Move ignores terrain because you're hell-bent on getting from point A to point B and don't care if you are seen or heard or if you twist an ankle on the way. It's all out run time.

Snipers ignore cover and armor because they have highly-accursed scoped rifles and the training to take nothing but head-shots with them.

I'm not one of the designers, but I'd say those reasons are why, and at least they satisfy me.

I'd be more interested to know why the range of the Allies .50 cal is the same as their .30 cal (16") and not the same as the dual-.50 cal (24" - as it should be) when the dual-.30 is still the same as the single .30 (16").

Shadow4ce said:

i wonder why they decided to put such low range on some weapons .. im gonna try and allow all infantry weapons to fire an extra 10" over their normal max range, and any shots taken like this has to re-roll any hits once. snipers would function like they do now. another experiment would be to up reaction range to 18" because i think 12" is too easy to avoid. this will probably cause all sorts of imbalance but could be fun nevertheless

Hatamoto said:

My guess is it's to try to keep close combat a relevant part of the Dust. In AT-43 long ranges meant shooting was king and successful close combat units had to have a gimmick (like stealth camouflage or teleporting).

rwwingate said:

I still think this was the wrong decision to make … instead of using "gimmicks" speed/stealth and terrain could be factors that make it harder for shooty units to land hits. I had a problem with 40ks 24" 12" rapid fire weapons so obviously 16" will annoy me … nerfing the realism of the weapons when you can implement rules for other factors to achieve balance just annoys me a bunch, sorry.

Eh, I don't look at it as right or wrong. No game at 1/48 or 1/60 can ever really model weapons ranges accurately. If you want a game where a gorilla with a metal fist can run up and punch out a tank, you've got to dial back on the leathality of the ranged weapons somehow.

rwwingate said:

of course, not going back to that reality discussion though not my intention . what i mean is id rather see rules that allows this gorilla to use certain tactics that allows it to get close.