You still HAVE to take a commander. It's not optional. What i'm asking is why do they all cost base 20 points. Commander "upgrades" are not in the same class as all the other upgrades in the game. You absolutely MUST take them. There's "no why would i take Expanded Launchers if Screed only costs 8 points."

It's just that now you get 20 more points to spend on more upgrades, after you decided between Motti, Screed, and Tarkin, and paid 4,8 or 18 points.

Rebels would switch to 0 (yay free), 8, and 10.

There's no "difference" in power level. The ONLY reason i can see is what was mentioned earlier, that the 20 points is used as a incentive to make you want to kill the flagship. That seems kinda weak, since i probably want to try to kill the ship that say, Motti is on anyway to make his ships have less health. "Hey don't you wanna kill that ship you already REALLY wanted to kill? here's some points to sway you." Thats not a very good incentive imo.

its a good question. hmm.

Don't think of them as a tax. Think of them as an armywide buff to best complement the fleet you have in mind.

Even if you're not playing the "obvious" Commander, they all bost your overall fleet effectiveness. Mothma works very well on AFMK2s with ECM, Garm works well with anything with a command value above 1, Dodonna works very well with everything. Taking works with every ship, regardless of whether you have 2 or 3, Motti is probably the best commander for a Squadron oriented Imperial fleet (due to just making your ISDs that extra survivable), Screed works well regardless of whether you take Glads, because they sure as hell won't go near something that has black dice on it.

I still don't understand how their points cost is not balanced relative to the abilities they give you. Just because you "have" to take one does not mean it automatically is not balanced against other upgrades for points as well. That would be like saying because I HAVE to take at least 1 ship, and every ship is balanced against each other, every ship should have a 39 point cost decrease as the cheapest ship is 39 points and I have to have one. The points are there to control how many and of what type options you have on the table and they "are" balanced against the other options you have. At least I should say in my opinion as everyone is entitled to their own but I for one am quite pleased with the current commander pricing.

Edit: In hindsight infinite Vette swarms would suck lol.

If commanders go lower than 20 in the future, fine, everything's Just As Planned. But if they don't, its worth keeping in mind that you're always fleet building at the pt level -20.

A lot of wargames have some sort of "commander tax." Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy had HQ units (Well, these days 40k has Warlords. No idea what Age of Sigmar has now). Warmahordes has Warcasters. Limitations are in and of themselves part of list-building

40K does and Fantasy did require you to pay points for commanders. There are no points in AoS and it is take whatever you want.

But in Warmachine your leaders are completely free. They are likewise free in Malifaux. In both these games they balance commanders through a secondary resource. In Warmachine, commanders that are less powerful tend to get more free points to go towards jacks. In Malifaux, less poweful master start the game with a bonus number of soul stones called a cache.

Tarkin, Motti, Garm, Skreed, Mothma's abilities are worth their points.

They effect all your ships which is huge.

Think of Raymus Antilles on all your ships but you are not limited to what order you reveal. 2 to 5 Raymus Antilles's is 14 to 35 points but not as effective as Tarkin is. This is just a single example.

I still don't understand how their points cost is not balanced relative to the abilities they give you. Just because you "have" to take one does not mean it automatically is not balanced against other upgrades for points as well. That would be like saying because I HAVE to take at least 1 ship, and every ship is balanced against each other, every ship should have a 39 point cost decrease as the cheapest ship is 39 points and I have to have one. The points are there to control how many and of what type options you have on the table and they "are" balanced against the other options you have. At least I should say in my opinion as everyone is entitled to their own but I for one am quite pleased with the current commander pricing.

Well, that's a flawed comparison because you can take more than one ship, but you can only have one commander. If you were limited to one ship, reducing the costs on all of them by 39 would also be balanced (although the game wouldn't be, because...only one ship)

I think the main confusion here is coming from Potter making two separate, but related, points. One is that every commander so far could cost 20 points less, and the game wouldn't be affected. This is true, if the point totals were also reduced by 20. After all, we are effectively playing 280 point games right now: at least 20 points must be committed to a commander. Reducing Dodonna to 0 points and Tarkin to 18, and officially making the games 280 points, wouldn't change a thing. I hope we can all agree on that.

The second point is that once that was done, the point totals could be brought back up to 300, effectively adding an extra 20 points to every list. This is also something we must agree could be possible, but it's less clear if it would be a good thing or not. Yes, the commanders could have 20 points taken off that could be spent on other things, but they could also stay the same and have the lists go up to 320 points (or even 400!), or any other number.

So one reason commanders may be at the point cost they are at is because really, FFG thinks the sweet spot for list building is 280 (or 380), but understands that round numbers are much better, and brought us up to 400 by adding 20 points to every commander. In reality, I think it's a combination of all of the above factors. Commanders could cost literally anything if they were balanced against each other and the point limits were adjusted. We could be playing 1000 point games if Dodonna cost 720 points. I think FFG wanted to cost them to look approximately what they would look like if they were a general upgrade, to make things more intuitively easy on players, found that they put the total points you can run at a good spot, and rewarded you appropriately for killing a flagship.

After all, don't forget the original commanders were spoiled with Dodonna at 25 and Tarkin at 34; those numbers didn't change arbitrarily, FFG put a lot of testing into getting the numbers right.

I'm definately in the court of "it gives them room to have people who do less, later..."

Especially when you start getting into obscure commanders, or rather, Ship-Commanders now commanding a Fleet... (Looking at you, "Captain"...)

If they knew 100% that one was going to be the cheapest for-eva , then that's where they'd label it... Mainly because its *very* ugly to have something with *negative* points costs somewhere, ebcause you made a boo-boo.

Well the entire game revolves around scoring points, so if you remove the base cost of the commanders you'd have to insert a rule saying they grant 20 points + value when killed. Easier to just have them cost the 20+ points. (which incidentally means that killing of the commander, while all else is equal, is enough to push you from a 5/5 to a 6/4... unless it's Dodonna then you'll need to find the extra point somewhere else)

Commanders affect your entire fleet and are actually quite cost effective. Imagine dividing the points cost of a commander among all your ships. You'll find that he basically grants all your ships an "upgrade card" for a decent price.

Commanders are expensive to incentivize the destruction of flagships. Their high costs also limit the amount of upgrades you can have, forcing you to give more thought to which ones you should use. Together, they set the tone of your game and the personality of your fleets.

It has nothing to do with a tax. It has everything to do with making losing your commanding officer painful for the player in some way. If there was a commander with no ability it should still cost some point value as it represents the loss of control and command.

Point limit is fundamentally arbitrary. Does it really matter that the "true" point limit is 280/380 instead of 300/400?

As far as commanders not suiting all builds equally, the obvious solution is more commanders. And Wave II will give us two new ones for each faction*, so I don't see the issue there, either.

*Technically, we don't know that the Raider has one, but they've kept the numbers equal so far.

They say it does:

Among its eight upgrade cards, you'll find Ordnance Experts, a new commander, Quad Laser Turrets, two unique titles, and more.

They say it does:

Among its eight upgrade cards, you'll find Ordnance Experts, a new commander, Quad Laser Turrets, two unique titles, and more.

It does sound like Ordnance Experts will be a ship commander upgrade like Intel Officer vs an Amdmiral.

Ordinance Experts will be an Officer upgrade (which, it looks like, will let you reroll Black dice). There will also be a Commander, about whom we know nothing right now.

They start at 20+ points to give them room for more options later. If Dodonna or whoever was 0pts, that means there could NEVER be a commander at any point in the future with a weaker effect than Dodonna, unless we started getting into a weird realm of negative points (which can work, but is just not an intuitive way of doing it and can lead to balance issues).

That seems the most obvious reason to me anyway.

Personally i believe that all commanders should have been free, if your required to have one and they are balanced then their cost should not hinder your fleet, then make it so that no matter which one you take if you lose them they are worth 25 VP.

Personally i believe that all commanders should have been free, if your required to have one and they are balanced then their cost should not hinder your fleet, then make it so that no matter which one you take if you lose them they are worth 25 VP.

But they are balanced including the cost. Tarkin and Dodonna are balanced well, but Tarkin is more powerful.

The balance comes in the points.

Unless you wanted a lot less variety in abilities? No thanks.

Personally i believe that all commanders should have been free, if your required to have one and they are balanced then their cost should not hinder your fleet, then make it so that no matter which one you take if you lose them they are worth 25 VP.

But they are balanced including the cost. Tarkin and Dodonna are balanced well, but Tarkin is more powerful.

The balance comes in the points.

Unless you wanted a lot less variety in abilities? No thanks.

It could have been done by balancing them with a secondary resource which is what Warmachine and Malifaux do with thier uneven free commander.

Off the top of my head, I think free points towards sqaudrons would have been a good way to do it. Stronger commanders get less free points, weaker ones get more.

Possibly, and it does work well in WM/Hordes, agreed. But that seems really quite clunky compared to just....having them cost points.

I mean, the ONLY time them costing points matters is competitive games, where balance has to be as close to perfect as they can get. Points are good for this.

In friendly games, if it bothers people a lot, why not just play 330/430? Or 335/435? Or whatever you want? Makes absolutely no difference as long as both players are onboard.

It could have been done by balancing them with a secondary resource which is what Warmachine and Malifaux do with thier uneven free commander.

But that's inherently more complicated and doesn't actually accomplish what it seems FFG wanted to do with them.

They want you to have to pay for taking a Tarkin because of the effect he offers.

It would be nice if we could create a 'custom' commander that costs almost nothing and you can assign him traits for points. The more ships I can include due to a cheap commander the better!

It would be nice if we could create a 'custom' commander that costs almost nothing and you can assign him traits for points. The more ships I can include due to a cheap commander the better!

Would be an interesting feature to add into a campaign system, official or homebrewed. Nice idea

Warmachine Warcasters are absolutely not balanced around the bonus Warjacks points as the differences in free points do not make up for the wide disprepency in various Warcasters power level.

But whether Commanders cost points or grant free points the end result is the same. If they granted extra points then everything else would just cost extra to compensate.

Warmachine Warcasters are absolutely not balanced around the bonus Warjacks points as the differences in free points do not make up for the wide disprepency in various Warcasters power level.

But whether Commanders cost points or grant free points the end result is the same. If they granted extra points then everything else would just cost extra to compensate.

Not really a Warmachine player, that was how it was explained to me by my local Warmachine group.

It is most certainly that way for Malifaux, though the stones you get from their cache cannot be used to purchase additional forces, only for in game effects. So point is yours.

Though even if everything else went up in points (I don't think they would) to compensate for free commanders, the pro free crowd would still be satisied because they would feel they are building a full 300 point list.