As mentioned last time, this week I will lay out for you the contents of a Faction Box, looking at the ship cards and models that will be available in a box. The exact contents may still change but this should provide a clear idea of what you will get from a box.
For this dive we will be looking at the German Faction Box, one of the factions not present during the initial run of Leviathans.
Miniatures
The German box will have these three ships as miniatures. There will be 1 battleship, 1 cruiser and 2 destroyers, the same as the original Faction Boxes. Each ship will come with a base and stand, as well as tokens to distinguish between the different ships when using the same miniature, like when using both the destroyers. These 4 ships will give you a complete Leviathans experience.
Ship Cards
First thing to note is that we are making some changes to the look so I’m just using the playtest files for now. They will of course look much prettier at the Kickstarter.
The German destroyers cover a wide range of strategies from firepower to coordination. However, the real standout ship of this group is the Wolve. As discussed in a previous article, this ship is built with the sole purpose of protecting larger ships at the expense of any real offensive power.
The German cruisers are great examples of their love of armor above speed. The Hannover is a very simple German workhorse, where as the Lubeck brings some coordinated fire options with its Bracketing crew, similar to the Falke.
The SML Wilhelm has exactly one purpose, and that is to take the entire firepower of an enemy fleet without dropping out of the sky. Almost unable to turn without its steering gear on either side, this ship as truly a flying brick.
There is one last Battleship but I will save that to share for later. Got to keep some things for the Kickstarter after all.
That’s it for this week. Next week will be the French fleet.
See you all then
Bryn Bills
Looks good here.
I really like seeing the working test versions of the ship cards. Looks like there might be an error on the bow gun on the SML Hessen. It says it’s a 5/10 range DY/DBlue when all the other 5/10 range guns on the Kolberg class are DBlue/DG. The bow gun on SML Wolve matches the dice of DY/DBlue, but it has different ranges of 6/12.
The Wolve looks like a pure support ship, it will be interesting to see how it plays. Likewise the Armored Hull of the SML Wilhelm looks like a bonus at first, but on 2nd glance (and without knowing if there’s more rules to it) it looks like it creates a weakspot on the ship. Sure it gives +1 overall to the SI, but once you take out that spot not only do you you count it as -1SI for a slot destroyed, my guess is you lose the +1SI bonus from the slot. Effectively losing that slot becomes a net change of 2 SI instead of just 1SI for a normal slot.
NGL those unit cards look super complicated. Having never played, it’s rather daunting.
The dice are color coded, so you really just need to know your short/Long range, arch and dice to roll.
The other numbers are for when YOU get hit. It’s been a long time, but I remember picking it up very quickly.
You know I really like type 3 ships so while I’m disappointed they aren’t in the fleet boxes like they were in the original as long as they will be available in some fashion I guess that will be ok.
It looks complex, but once you get playing it’s not as busy as it looks. The post “So What’s New?” has an image of finished or mostly finished ship card. Depending on where the enemy fire is coming front you get hit on one of your sides, which narrows it down to 25% of the card to deal with.
https://monstersinthesky.com/index.php/2022/04/17/so-whats-new/