14 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

To be honest, 8E rules were MUCH better than 7th. It was the army books that were crap. They pushed the elite stuff like mad. OnG (my army) was pretty balanced and the main book was, too. It was all the crap that came out in the next armies that ruined it.

I think the biggest issue 7th had was with the army-book creep. It started off alright, and then it seemed like they hit high elves and had to make them amazing. And then dark elves had to be more betterer. And so forth until they hit Demons where the shark got jumped, harpooned, exploded, and they didn’t even look back at it as they walked towards the camera.

Oh boy do I want to chip in too?

OF COURSE.

First 40k, started around 5th edition (mechanized, blood angels, grey knights, you name it). Oh boy, Orks using a 4th edition codex, sometimes playing with people using a 3rd edition codex.
Every new codex, good units were bad, new models are the best. Buy more! New subfactions got own codexes. 6th came with allies. more codex to buy. more models. 7th, YAY NOW THERES DATASHEETS TOO to buy! dont forget codex fixes sold at full price (maelstrom of blood for khorne) and now in 8th, dear god. they sold indexes, and strict better codexes after that.
but their models are really cool, so. Bought for the models anyway

now let me tell a tale. A Wizkids tale.

I started Collectible Minaiture Games with Mage knight, the first of the flix famility, the first big game from wizkids.

You think you have it bad? First, booster packs with random figurines, because of course!
Their promos (things you gain as prize or attending cons) were also randomized, and some were strictly better than any counterpart you could pull off from a booster.
They did rebelion, lancers, whirlwind, dungeon, sinister, minions, uprising, and more (in some one, from 200 figures, JUST one was competitive enough). Then, 2.0 came.
With good and expanded rules. And "was" retrocompatible, except it was not. Very few pieces from 1.0 would play in competitively in 2.0.
Random promos (called LE, as in Limited Editions) still a thing, stronger than ever.

Then, they altright banned 1.0 in tourneys when they would just support the pure, not the eternal, format.
Ohh the booster got pricier and now, you also need to collect cards to equip some miniatures (not all of them could), the cards? where 95% trash, of course, save the rarest ones.

Every new expansion (Dark Riders, introduced more cards and cavalry, sorcery introduced spell cards and spell mechanics, omens introduced leveled heroes) introduced complexity (and power) creep, in a new 2.0 enviorment. Then they launched Nexus, and went silent. Forever.
dear god, never saw a playerbase so annihilated.

Cool thing, wizkids stil do this these days, in Star Trek: Attack Wing. The bullet I dodged not playing that game... never again I will buy a randomized pack or play something with power based promo figures.

On ‎5‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 11:47 AM, allenkwest said:

Mansions of Madness was a wonderful experience between 1st and 2nd. There was a conversion kit inside the 2 ed box and every character and monster were still valid.

Descent IMHO improved with 2nd edition as far as balance and how the game flowed. The 1st ed conversion kit felt good, but when the Hero/Monster pacts came out, it was even better with the majority of the minis. Imperial Assult is practically a 3rd ed of this and they seem to learn with each edition.

We classify ImpAss as Descent 2.5

The transition from Mansions 1e to 2e was so completely fantastic. You converted all of the minis and all of the tiles. Everything else was replaced and improved.

Descent's transition into 2e took all of the minis (for 35$) and added them to a much, much better rules system. Then they added a free campaign system app.

Battlelore had no conversion. The new monsters were smaller and nothing was compatible. I believe that the rules were better, but I wasn't interested in starting over with nothing.

From what I've seen, both from FFG and other companies, I truly believe that FFG is trying to do right by the greatest number of players. I'm really excited about everything they're working on with X-Wing 2e.

got into 40k 5th ed, didn't notice much change into 6th ed or 7th ed. 8th ed I left to go grumble, almost ready to return

Was building a dwarfs army for WH fantasy whe AoS dropped-should be a new game, not a replacement for WH fantasy, not with them replacing every faction one by one

x wing, well it's as expensive to update 1 faction as updating 2 factions in 40k to 7th ed, 8th ed is simply more expensive

I've been through the pain many people have with D&D - started in 2nd ed., went to 3rd, the re-buy for 3.5, then got sold on 4th, which they abandoned hard and in retrospect was a bad attempt to be WoW with balanced everything. I tried Pathfinder at some point and bought some stuff, and now am cautiously buying some 5th ed. books because my group has gone there, but I'm no fool this time. I'm sure 6th ed. is in sight. My friends and I play a home-brew roleplaying game now with its own rules more than anything, so we never had to worry about edition change.

I was big into D&D Miniatures in 1.0 and made the transition to 2.0, but that was an example where the game really didn't need the change and I feel like it ultimately killed it. This is probably the reason I'm most hesitant about the X-wing shift. Yeah, it could be great, but I feel like the game was good and fixable in its current form, so I worry a hard 2.0 transition like this could knock it off track.

What's funny is that I just recently got into painting minis and bought into Age of Sigmar with the new Idoneth Deepkin. For ONCE, I got into a game AFTER the big reset! (I'm sure I'll get boned down the road, I have no doubt.)

21 hours ago, heychadwick said:

I had a fully ranked unit of Goblins charge the rear if an Ogre unit and *I* was the one running?!?!??!?

They're Goblins. What did you expect?!

I can't really speak for warmachine as I started because Mark 3 came out, but from what I saw of other players the only transition cost was purchasing $10 decks for each faction you owned or $90 for all the factions. All the models were still legal just changed. Rules were different (less punishing for inexperienced players allowing things like premeasuring at any time). To top it off they having a running development cycle to boost up poorly performing units and nerf too powerful ones. They even sold physical decks for anyone who wanted but all the most up to date stuff is one the app for free.

Overall I think X wing should go the same route with cards, leave it all on the app so you can do hard adjustments when needed.

53 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

They're Goblins. What did you expect?!

+5 to combat resolution for at least 3 ranks, and a rear-flank charge, would be a good start.

Sure, they’re goblins, and 3 ogres could certainly even that difference... But 8th edition was full of dumb, and gave little to no incentive to out-maneuver your opponent.

1 hour ago, FTS Gecko said:

They're Goblins. What did you expect?!

Fanatics.

I ran very few orcs and an absurd amount of night goblins and spiders. What do you mean, "Night goblins are so squishy they make gelatinous cubes seem like a sound building material, you noob,"? I'm bringing chaos in the old world now! Banzai!

Edit: The word banzai has be changed to 'For glory! For honor! For Rokugon!' to better mollify individuals who believe that if they're not your race, you can't write about them or enjoy a game in which they are populous. Guess I can't play as goblins anymore.

3 hours ago, FTS Gecko said:

They're Goblins. What did you expect?!

Fully ranked....with spears and nets....I expect them to at least Hold!!!!!!

32 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

Fully ranked....with spears and nets....I expect them to at least Hold!!!!!!

Having lots of experience facing goblins, I can honestly say that the only thing you should expect Gobbos to do is exactly what you don't expect.

That's pretty much their entire charm...

On 5/10/2018 at 3:58 AM, heychadwick said:

You mean "heroes on monsters, super elite troopers, and magic vortices" edition.

Otherwise, yeah.......that's why Age o' S holds no interest for me. The game I loved was about ranked units fighting. The new stuff is just a larger skirmish game.

6th Ed WHFB was my favorite.

It's an interesting phenomenon. I loved playing 8th ed WHFB. But when it died I quickly moved over to Kings of War and... wow. I had no idea what I'd been missing out on. KoW is a fantastic game. By comparison WHFB was a bloated, tricked out mess.

But, a lot of people really liked that mess. I hated how in each unit I had to work out which of my models could attack, which enemy models they could attack, how many attacks they would make and what modifiers applied to each attack (because it would vary on a model-by-model basis even within a single unit) before I could even roll any dice. The game was so focused on characters and super-units and six-dicing those game-ending spells that basically nothing else mattered, but when I try and convert some people to KoW they lament the fact that there are no uber characters, no uber spells, no uber magic items to trick your characters out with. They miss the very things that made WHFB rotten at the core.

Anyway, if you've still got your WHFB stuff, do yourself a favour and pick up the KoW gamers edition book. It's only like $20 and should have all the rules necessary to play your WHFB armies in KoW.

3 hours ago, It’s One Of Ours said:

+5 to combat resolution for at least 3 ranks, and a rear-flank charge, would be a good start.

Sure, they’re goblins, and 3 ogres could certainly even that difference... But 8th edition was full of dumb, and gave little to no incentive to out-maneuver your opponent.

They should have had about a +7. 3 ranks, 3 for a rear charge, and possibly a wound.

Ogres had what, four attacks each? So if there was four or five in the unit they would have probably done about 8-10 wounds in return, meaning on odds the Goblins should have lost by one or two points and given their notoriously low Leadership value, they should have fled.

I didn't mind stuff like that. Ogres are huge and goblins are puny. No problems.

What I hated was the Steadfast rule where all units were stubborn if they had more ranks than you. It resulted in people playing these ridiculous long columns of troops, with the front ranks stacked with characters, because even if they lost the combat they would have a leadership value of nine or ten, with a re-roll, and could afford to stick around in combat forever while the characters in the unit chewed up your forces. That's what took the value out of outmanoeuvring your opponent: these huge deathstar units just obliterating everything in their path.

Hey, players of Hordes/Warmachine Mk.II & Mk.III. I really enjoyed Mk.II, how hard would it be to pick up and play Mk.III if I got myself the deck of new unit cards and the pdf rulebook? All this talk about miniature gaming has me interested, but so far nothing has me interested in pulling out my tyranids or goblins.

I didn't make it to Mk3 as the mess at the beginning let me switch to other games

But now it would be easy to pick up as rules and cards are available as pdf, in fact PP does not sell printed cards any more for balance reason

1 hour ago, Chucknuckle said:

They should have had about a +7. 3 ranks, 3 for a rear charge, and possibly a wound.

Ogres had what, four attacks each? So if there was four or five in the unit they would have probably done about 8-10 wounds in return, meaning on odds the Goblins should have lost by one or two points and given their notoriously low Leadership value, they should have fled.

I didn't mind stuff like that. Ogres are huge and goblins are puny. No problems.

What I hated was the Steadfast rule where all units were stubborn if they had more ranks than you. It resulted in people playing these ridiculous long columns of troops, with the front ranks stacked with characters, because even if they lost the combat they would have a leadership value of nine or ten, with a re-roll, and could afford to stick around in combat forever while the characters in the unit chewed up your forces. That's what took the value out of outmanoeuvring your opponent: these huge deathstar units just obliterating everything in their path.

But it was infantry, so it didn’t last very long. Oh, I agree Steadfast was really dumb... It put way too much emphasis on outnumbering. But then you had every army with some infantry-blending monster, and comets or vortices nuking massive swathes of the battlefield.

Now I would like to switch gears a bit... Flames of War handled it’s move from 2nd to 3rd edition exceedingly well, for the most part. For starters, they have a reputation for handing out free pocket-sized core rulebooks for their new editions, and they did just that for 3rd. Most of the rules were honest balance/mechanic fixes, such as allowing transports to return to the battlefield to pick up mechanized infantry (e.g. halftracks). Or stalling an attempted tank assault if your defensive fire bails or destroys two vehicles. There were also changes to the scenarios, in an effort to keep them balanced between defensive/offensive armies, and drawing a definitive line between which forces defended or attacked against each other (Infantry attacked Fortified and defended against Tank and Mech; Mech attacked Infantry and Fortified and defended against Tank; Tank attacked all; Always Attack/Defend overruled unless the opponent was also an Always Attack/Defend). The only hiccups were carry-overs from 2nd edition and rules changes making things overcosted (e.g. first print of Red Bear, the Late War Soviet forces).

But at the same time I feel that Battlefront’s move from Flames of War 3rd to 4th was less graceful. Having just released Team Yankee, their modern warfare time period, they decided to make 4th based heavily upon those rules. IMO, it was a “dumbing down”, as vehicles now automatically recovered from bogging down, morale rules made spam platoons far more effective than smaller sized, and overall it fet very... 40k-ish. Currently all the Early War and Late War supplements have just been given a generic band-aid supplement to translate things over to 4th... While they start all over again on Mid War. I’m dubious as to the quality of how they do the Eastern Front, after seeing Team Yankee. Team Yankee opted to represent Warpac forces as unskilled cannon-fodder hordes that are easier to hit than NATO troops (3+ base instead of a 4+), and drive tanks with half the individual rate-of-fire of NATO tanks. This was all to push a “faceless baddie horde” design theme, not unlike how GW handles the Orks in 40k. As a result, most people play NATO, as it’s cheaper (financially), and they’re just simply better. Especially in night-fight scenarios.

If Team Yankee is any indicator, I have low expectations for how they’ll handle Mid War Eastern Front. Battlefront typically likes to make a special briefing for any interesting company or detachment they find, non-Soviet forces are concerned (e.g. Desert Rats, or the US 761st Tank Battalion). While the Soviet briefings have always been represented as just “Tank Brigade”, “Razvedki” (Recon), “Strelkovy”, etc. Even when presented with noteworthy units like the 46th Guards Tank Brigade, the Flames of War’s design staff have been loathe to represent them as anything other than a generic horde of cannon-fodder. And knowing this, as well as seeing how they handled the Team Yankee Warpac, I don’t see much reason to expect anything good for the Eastern Front in v4. Spamming the **** out of things gets old, especially when the devs are hammering your army with questionable penalties just to make them more-spammable. See ref. the SU-100 being penalized with Overloaded, Slow Tank, and with a rate-of-fire of 1.

X-Wing 2.0 - Is Everyone Overreacting?

56 minutes ago, AceWing said:

X-Wing 2.0 - Is Everyone Overreacting?

“I went out and bought a new car...” ????????

6 hours ago, Chucknuckle said:

They should have had about a +7. 3 ranks, 3 for a rear charge, and possibly a wound.

I believe I had 3-4 wounds, as it should be with champ and spears. The Ogres were netted, so only 3 Str and I had shields. Still, I was Steadfast, but yeah, I ended up running hard. Anyways, the math was in my favor, but it wasn't.

Also, end of one horrible day at a tournament and I tried that X-wing game I had been avoiding (as I knew I would like it). Well, 5 rounds and I killed Luke and I was ditching my fantasy minis and jumping on X-wing. Been on this ride ever since. I was ready to drop off, but v2 is completely wanting me to reinvest in the game. So, no Kings of War for me, even though it looks neat.

4 hours ago, It’s One Of Ours said:

But it was infantry, so it didn’t last very long. Oh, I agree Steadfast was really dumb... It put way too much emphasis on outnumbering. But then you had every army with some infantry-blending monster, and comets or vortices nuking massive swathes of the battlefield.

Actually, Steadfast was really great. The base rules for 8E was really great. Step UP was fantastic. Steadfast was good. The only thing was that with so many stupid monsters and elite armies that it made people build insanely huge units. That part was stupid. If you just made normal units then it was great. The army books was what killed it.

Just now, heychadwick said:

Actually, Steadfast was really great. The base rules for 8E was really great. Step UP was fantastic. Steadfast was good. The only thing was that with so many stupid monsters and elite armies that it made people build insanely huge units. That part was stupid. If you just made normal units then it was great. The army books was what killed it.

Steadfast was like, the core of the whole problem. If you took 60+ infantry, put in a battlestandard bearer, a level 4 mage, a lord and as many heroes as you could get for the points, then you had a massive column of troops that was impossible to budge, that was chucking 6 dice at those game-ending spells every turn, and any unit you threw at it got blended by some lord level character stacked with magic items and his hero level characters backing him up. Since there was no way to defeat the unit in combat and it could absorb casualties all day erry day, the only way to deal with it was by trying to six-dice your own game ending spell to try and delete the whole unit in one go. Steadfast singlehandedly removed the need for tactical play. With no steadfast people needed to spread their eggs around, rather than putting them all in a single basket.

7 hours ago, Duciris said:

Hey, players of Hordes/Warmachine Mk.II & Mk.III. I really enjoyed Mk.II, how hard would it be to pick up and play Mk.III if I got myself the deck of new unit cards and the pdf rulebook? All this talk about miniature gaming has me interested, but so far nothing has me interested in pulling out my tyranids or goblins.

Pretty easy, honestly. If you can drum up interest for a slow grow league or similar 'build up a faction over time' event with local players it's a great way to get back in.

10 hours ago, Kodos said:

I didn't make it to Mk3 as the mess at the beginning let me switch to other games

But now it would be easy to pick up as rules and cards are available as pdf, in fact PP does not sell printed cards any more for balance reason

I think this is pretty accurate. When first released it was pretty much a Beta in writing and they were expecting the players to pay for it.

The “Community Intergrated Development” or CID has a lot of mixed thoughts about it from what I understand. I was holding out on converting the MkIII till the tournament rules dropped (I had issues with the amount of pre-measuring and marker placement that was legal) and they dealt with most of that but that game still felt awfully hollow for me.

On ‎5‎/‎9‎/‎2018 at 7:34 PM, DicesonFire said:

Cool thing, wizkids stil do this these days, in Star Trek: Attack Wing. The bullet I dodged not playing that game... never again I will buy a randomized pack or play something with power based promo figures.

Indeed. The thing is, D&D Attack Wing started out really nice - whilst Star Trek: Attack Wing was very much "look, we've got the rights to the X-wing mechanics, what can we do with it?", the D&D game played really, really differently and was interesting with the way armour worked, large bases and attack ranges representing melee and ranged attacks, time tokens for breath weapons, and so on. Then the 'look! you can only get this expansion pack by winning OP events!' train began, and it all became irrelevant.

I've lived through edition changes of several games but probably the ones I've noticed most are:

• 40k
  • I've played 3rd edition, 4th edition, 5th edition, 6th edition, and 7th edition. I've only played a single game of 8th - not from dislike but purely a lack of opportunity (I've gotten kind of spoiled with X-wing's 1-hour-game-time and 5 models on the table)
  • Whilst you always find yourself missing some rules elements, different editions do make a nice change as they often reset the tactical balance in some way.
  • Annoyingly I loved the thematic detachments which became a thing in 7th - it makes so much more sense to be fielding 'an infantry company with an attached armour platoon' or something similar but the amount of 'free rules' meta-detachments handed over made such a difference to power level some games became a joke. I haven't the experience with 8th to comment on balance.
  • I do like that GW have done what FFG are now doing and divorced army building rules (points costs, upgrade slots, detachment limits) from the gameplay rules (unit cards or datasheets), as this means both sides can be more 'nimble' in stepping on unbalanced units.
  • Having to buy new rulebooks was a pain, but GW rulebooks and codices do come with a pleasing amount of narrative fluff and artwork, so I at least am happy to do so because I genuinely feel like I get my money's worth out of the non-rule content (especially imperial armour series books). An edition update is an expense - especially if you have to tweak an army due to new army building rules - but in practice the actual cost of an edition change was less than the £100 or so (because 2 conversion packs because swarm player) I'm especting X-wing to cost
• Epic
  • My first real gaming experience, actually!
  • I played Space Marine back in the day, with a sizeable chaos army built around Mortarion and the Death Guard (if anyone's a 40k player let me assure you his 8th edition version is a pansy compared to his tiny epic-scale version). Watching him tank the entire fire from a Shadowsword company then casually saunter up on his lonesome and hack all three tanks to bits in quick succession is a pleasant, if distant, memory.
  • I played precisely one game of Epic:40,000 and had the 'what the heck is this crud' reflex that shut me out of the game for some years before getting involved in the initial open playtest of Epic: Armageddon, which is one of the best games GW has ever produced, being pretty well balanced and actually adding in a sense of the scale 40k always tries to talk about in the background but can't really show in a 6'x4' 28mm battlefield that's maybe a few hundred metres on each side. Rules like crossfire made movement important even when the scale was too small for a single tank to have separate facings.
  • Again, it was basically a case of buying new rulebooks, and whilst a £20-30 rulebook is an expense, it's not too bad of one. GW Specialist Games was very good at downloadable rules support for its games (if not its models range, sadly) so it didn't really inconvenience me much, and epic Armageddon was a far superior game.

5 hours ago, Chucknuckle said:

Steadfast was like, the core of the whole problem. If you took 60+ infantry, put in a battlestandard bearer, a level 4 mage, a lord and as many heroes as you could get for the points, then you had a massive column of troops that was impossible to budge, that was chucking 6 dice at those game-ending spells every turn, and any unit you threw at it got blended by some lord level character stacked with magic items and his hero level characters backing him up. Since there was no way to defeat the unit in combat and it could absorb casualties all day erry day, the only way to deal with it was by trying to six-dice your own game ending spell to try and delete the whole unit in one go. Steadfast singlehandedly removed the need for tactical play. With no steadfast people needed to spread their eggs around, rather than putting them all in a single basket.

It is, however, totally easy to understand why Gobbos liked it.