So, Warboy and I have been working on a campaign to play Dust Tactics with. The premise is simple: you start with a small force and gradually grow it over time until you're fighting larger, more difficult enemies. What we decided to do is start with one "core" hero and a "core" infantry unit that would be required to use in every scenario battle. The completion of each mission would result in Valor Points depending on how well you did, and those Valor Points could then be used to reinforce units after the battle, purchase new units, or upgrade your existing units to Veterans or Elites. Without going into too much detail I'll start the Battle Report.

We are currently playtesting the campaign to figure out the right point values, unit unlocks, mission difficulties, etc. We played the first 3 missions first with my SSU and then with Warboy's Allies. The enemy for this campaign is the Axis.

The Player gets 10 Valor Points to spend to start the game. He must purchase a hero and infantry unit as the "core" units of his army.

For my "core" I chose Winter Child as my hero and the Drakoni as my infantry, which effectively used up my 10 Valor Points.

Mission 1: Over the River

This first mission sets up the same as the Over the River mission in Operation Zverograd. The Player army is allowed up to 10 Valor Points worth of models to use and the goal is to reach the objective in 8 turns or less.

Enemy Force:

Stefan, Recon Grenadiers, Sniper Grenadiers

Turn one Winter Child and Drakoni advance on the objective. The Axis posts his snipers up in the building then moves up Stefan and the Recon Grenadiers.

Turn two, SSU win initiative and I move Winter Child in to attack the Recon Grenadiers + Stefan. Cause some damage but not enough to wipe them out. The Drakoni advance and he moves his snipers out of the building.

At this point it was pretty much over and after the next turn we called off the dogs. Being the first mission, we designed it to be a 1/10 difficulty, just to get the Player's feet wet and have them get used to the core of their army. We didn't take pictures of the Allies first runthrough of the missions, but they had a little tougher time with this mission, losing a squad of Grim Reapers, Ozz, and a squad of Crack Shots to the lowly Axis. The Recon Grenadiers and Axis Snipers got bunkered down in that hard cover and just held out as long as they could.

Mission 2: The Search

The second mission pits a Player force of up to 14 Valor Points against Sigrid, Laser Grenadiers, Recon Grenadiers, and Battle Grenadiers. Same setup as Op. Zverograd mission "The Search".

Before this mission I had accumulated 5 Valor Points from the resulting "Major Victory" in the previous mission. I decided to purchase Red Yana and a unit of Frontoviki, hoping their mid-range firepower would give me an edge against the armor 2 enemy infantry. In hindsight, I would have rather waited on Red Yana and purchased a couple of 1 VP units instead, like some Chinese Volunteers or Nabludyatel snipers. The low model count really hurt me in this mission, as you will see.

How the mission sets up:

Turn one:

I move up my Frontoviki w/ Yana to push towards the leftward objective, the Drakoni rush to secure the close objective, and Winter Child charges forward, hoping to wipe out some enemies and keep them from claiming the objective on their side.

Turn two:

So, he wins the initiative on turn 2 and decides to act first, moving up his Battle Grenadiers and firing everything he can at Winter Child. Amazingly he records 3 hits and Winter Child fails all of his damage resilience roles…….

I move up my Drakoni to claim an objective, he moves his Recon Grenadiers to sit on his objective, and at this point I'm thinking, "I can move Winter Child onto the corner of this building, fire off my radiation beams at the Laser Grenadiers w/ Sigrid and use my steel fists on the Recon Grenadiers, hopefully wiping them off the objective" … seemed like a solid plan in my book.

Well, what ensued was the Laser Grenadiers passing a reactive fire role and proceeding to role 5 hits! Winter Child only made one of his armor roles and was thus wiped out.

^^No more Winter Child^^

Turns 3 and 4 continued on, but eventually those pesky Laser Grenadiers and Sigrid were just too much for the remaining SSU

We replayed this mission so the SSU could get their revenge, and the SSU wound up wiping out the whole Axis force while only losing 4 Drakoni. This just goes to show you though, even the powerful Winter Child can be taken down by a couple of light infantry units when the dice gods are with them!

Mission 3: The Hidden Lab

So we proceeded on to the hidden lab mission which is where the real fun begins. At this point you can now purchase armor 4 vehicles and use armor 3 infantry, so I picked up a Natasha, Chinese Volunteers, and Nabludyatel snipers (hoping to increase my model count and get some chuff out there).

For this mission the Axis get: Lara, Heavy Laser Grenadiers, Sturmpioneres, Sniper Grenadier, Hans

Only took a couple pictures of this one as we realized we have to make some changes to how this one plays out. We also decided to add in a mission in between here, kind of an "introduction" to vehicles battle, where you fight against a Hans and Heinrich but the Player can only use his "core" units and vehicles (core units because were mandating that they be in every mission).

Some quick pictures of Mission 3

As you can see, after turn 2 I only had Winter Child, some Frontoviki, and 1 Drakoni left. Hence why were making some adjustments.

Anyhow, this is my first attempt at a battle report, so I hope everyone enjoyed it. If you guys liked it I'll post the continuation of this in a couple weeks. We plan on making some adjustments and playing missions 3-6 the next time we get together. If anyone wants to know more about the campaign, the rules, missions, point system, etc let me know, I'd be happy to go over it in more detail.

OK, so apparently I'm an idiot and cant get the pictures to work, can anyone help me out?

Well the picture is very big, the links you have been inserting are to long.

This is read as a single link and that doesn't work.

Try insering just the "i.imgur.com/RGQvXLh.jpg" part in the image insertion window when prompted.

The images also need to be smaller (you can alter this in the insertion window.

I'll see what I can do, guess this is a battle report fail

Alright, got the picture situation fixed for you guys. Please let me know if you have any comments/suggestions.

Nevada pale ale, good choice. Not seen it in a can though (uk).

I like your idea a great deal! If your using 10 valor points have you come up with your own point value system for each unit? Why not just use existing point value systems? Or are you using the old system from the original set? Can you put up the rules you've come up with so far? Sorry for all the questions… lol

Neffer said:

Yeah, this was the first time I've ever seen it in a can too, so I thought I'd try it out. I still prefer the bottles.

moffmalthus said:

Yeah, I developed our own point system in order to simplify things. Basically, I just took every unit and rounded their points to the nearest 10 then divided by 10. So Fakyeli cost 3 valor points, winter child is 7 valor points, etc.

We haven't determined the exact rules as we're still in the "play testing" phase, but what we've come up with so far:

completion of each mission results in an award of Valor Points, X amount of points for a "major victory", Y amount for a "minor victory".

objectives grant a bonus of 1 Valor Point

after each mission you can spend your valor points to purchase new units/heroes/walkers, or you can use them to "upgrade" a unit

each unit has 2 upgrades; Veteran and Elite. A Veteran gets +1 attack to one of their weapon profiles, an Elite gets to choose 1 special ability, either Damage Resilience, Fast, or Superior reactive Fire. Each upgrade costs 3 VP

each mission has a set amount of VP worth of models you can field per the mission ooutline.

if a unit is completely destroyed, you can "reinforce" the unit after the battle by paying half their VP cost, rounded up.

units become unlocked over the course of the campaign, so you can't purchase a Mao Zedong on mission 3 for instance.

So that's the basic outline, there are more rules but its hard typing them all up on my iPad. I'll be happy to explain more as we go.

That's a good start. I wonder if you could combine the dust stratagy game with this system to make a conquer the world type game. That would be awesome!

moffmalthus said:

Once we playtest some more, we are eventually going to run a campaign centered around the Zverograd map, where you can move armies into different areas and battle over different points of interest. Conquer the world would be fun, might have to look into that. As we are right now, we're kind of just making this a "living" campaign with no set number of missions or anything. We're just trying to play it out and try a lot of different scenarios.

The beer was great and the system was a lot of fun…. We are planning on some more games in two weeks to continue refining the system and as Beaker said we will try to keep updates if people are interested. The fun part was reinforcing/upgrading/unlocking units, it really forced us to purchase units that we normally wouldn't take in say a 'tournament" game or even in the regular missions. If anyone has any ideas that that want us to try, we can attemp to play test them with this system, I know there are plenty of people on here that have a lot more DUST experience than us so any thoughts or ideas are more than welcomed. Thanks for posting.

Glad to see you guys trying some sort of a campaign. The valor point seem like a good idea and being able to upgrade is interesting. However, what do you mean by +1 to attacks for veteran units? I am a bit confused.

Also for the units, Winter Child is 65 point so cost 7 VP, but how about a hell boy with 34 points? would that be three or four?

Looks forward to how you guys refine the system.

cloner4000 said:

By +1 attack to a weapon profile it means for every attack value it gets +1. For example, lets use the BBQ Squad as an example. Their unit card lists Shotgun, Flamethrower (1), Demo Charge, and Knife & Grenade as their weapons. If I upgraded the BBQ Squad to a Veteran, I could upgrade the Shotgun profile which would change it to 7/1 against armor 1 infantry, 4/1 against armor 2 infantry, 3/1 against armor 3 infantry, etc. The upgraded shotguns would apply to all the shotguns for the entire squad.

Hell Boys would be rounded down to a 3 Valor Point unit (34 to the nearest 10th is 30…divided by 10 = 3).

Next time we play we should have some rules adjusted and tweaked.