Today I’m very happy to launch Dystopian Builder into beta. This is a list-building tool for Armoured Clash and, soon, Dystopian Wars. If you’re not familiar with these games, they’re from Warcradle Studios and are a pair of very cool diesel-punk games set in an alternate history. Armoured Clash is a 10mm mass battle game featuring giant war engines, blocks of infantry, and aircraft overhead. Dystopian Wars is a 1:2000 naval combat game featuring some very cool models.
One great thing about both games is that Warcradle provides the rules for free. In addition to the rule book, they release army lists as ORBAT PDFs. These are frequently updated and contain all the unit stats and special rules for each faction. Fans currently provide data files for use in New Recruit, which is great, but list building in New Recruit tends toward the painful. It’s a UI designed to work for any game, meaning it’s ideal for no games. With the advent of agentic coding, it’s fairly easy to spin up a cleaner standalone site.
Thanks
First I want to say that the New Recruit does great work, and I’m very happy the site exists. For many games it’s your only choice for list building so hats off to the developers and all of the people who manage the data files. On that note, I’m using the data files created by Sneki-snek. Big thanks to them for creating these and giving me permission to use them, it was a big time saver when setting up the app, and will solve a big maintenance headache (ORBAT updates). Lastly, thanks to Warcradle for making the game and the lovely models. I hope you’ll enjoy using Dystopian Builder!
Beta Features
I wanted to get something out there pretty quickly, so I’m launching the app feature-incomplete. The first big thing to mention: no Dystopian Wars yet. I fully intend to support it, but I need some time to get everything lined up and dialed in.
The core features are:
- Armoured Clash list building with battlegroup slots, points, etc.
- List saving
- List validation, including unit sizes, bolster, etc.
- Supporting battlegroups and boons, with rules text
- Basic list export options: text, printing
- Unit stats and rules
Upcoming features (subject to change)
- Improved print/PDF export with unit cards and stats
- Improved in-app rules reference
- New Recruit export/import
- Improved phone UI
- Dystopian Wars support
- In-game battle support/tracking
Next Steps
I encourage everyone to go and give it a shot. Please let me know any feedback you have; there is a link at the bottom of the app. I’m going to leave it in beta at least until Dystopian Wars is added, but I look forward to seeing what people want or need out of the app.
I’m going to publish a longer post looking at how I made it (tl;dr: AI), how it works, and some of my plans for maintaining and expanding it, but that’s mostly inside-baseball stuff. I wouldn’t worry about it if you just want to build a list.