12 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

This is why I play 40k using half the normal points. So instead of 1000, 1500, or 2000 points we play 500, 750 or 1000 points. The thing is it winds up being the same size armies of models as 40k used back when I started. The price increases in models wouldn't be too bad, if it weren't compounded by needing more and more and more of them every edition.

I find 40k is so straight forward that it just plays itself. The best choices are usually obvious in game.

Alternate activation removes alpha strikes and the sheer boredom of waiting 20mins + for it to switch back to your turn.

The thing that I don't like about legion is that the dice can be a little swingy. But that's inherent in any dice game.

2 hours ago, lologrelol said:

I find 40k is so straight forward that it just plays itself. The best choices are usually obvious in game.

Alternate activation removes alpha strikes and the sheer boredom of waiting 20mins + for it to switch back to your turn.

I don’t make choices in list building. For 40k or anything else. I paint the collection I want and then figure out what ones I want to play with “today”.

5 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

I don’t make choices in list building. For 40k or anything else. I paint the collection I want and then figure out what ones I want to play with “today”.

Must be good to have no ego attached to winning an imaginary battle with man dollies.

Some of us are unfortunately not so blessed... 😅

4 hours ago, lologrelol said:

Must be good to have no ego attached to winning an imaginary battle with man dollies.

Some of us are unfortunately not so blessed... 😅

To me, winning is about the choices made during the game. Not before.

12 hours ago, lologrelol said:

The thing that I don't like about legion is that the dice can be a little swingy. But that's inherent in any dice game.

They need more or less sides

8 sided dice are poor swingers

6 hours ago, lologrelol said:

Must be good to have no ego attached to winning an imaginary battle with man dollies.

Ok I admit I laughed because man dollies.

I am sort of in between @TauntaunScout and you... I have a little thinking of “how can I make these work together” when preparing for a game, but I’m nowhere near the “ah meta gotta do this then that then another thing.” I start with a center piece or two that I want to play with (like an ATST, or Vader, or something like that) and then work from there with what else I have. I buy things largely based on rule of cool and what I want to paint. I mean they spend most of their existence on display... I should have things I want to look at instead of meta spam.

For republic, that means I only have about two ways to build a list right now using the same minis 🙂 but I’m ok with that. I’ll pick up stuff eventually and then have a few cool choices - the ARCs excite me, and I’m looking forward to more heroes.

5 hours ago, ScummyRebel said:

Ok I admit I laughed because man dollies.

I guess I was just raised in a different time. There was a lot of pre-built armies in Star Wars or Battletech scenarios and you worked within that, making a killer list wasn't part of winning in those games obviously. Plus back then, even in games where you made up your own armies, a lot of model selection was decided for you. Boxed squads (or monopose metal heroes) came with the weapons they came with, not the weapons you wanted. The mid 90's was a weird time in Warhammer where (at least compared to now) almost nothing was designed for customization. It was easier to design your own lists in the 80's or 00's that it was in the 90's.

Plus, there was an understanding that obviously we COULD break the game down into a stale meta (though we used different words), but what's the fun in that? Why make the game boring on purpose by overthinking our armies?

6 hours ago, buckero0 said:

They need more or less sides

8 sided dice are poor swingers

In small piles, 8 and 6 sided dice are also very similar looking. They either shoulda been different color spectrums, or, one of them shoulda been D12's. I pick up the wrong dice ALL the time in SW:L.

12 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

To me, winning is about the choices made during the game. Not before.

Laughs in all the trip snipers + shores/palps/luke/tauns lists.

On 4/7/2020 at 9:05 AM, buckero0 said:

They need more or less sides

8 sided dice are poor swingers

Fun fact. Rolling up an old edition cleric right now, I just rolled 4D8 for hit points. I rolled 6 ones in a row, then two 3's.

4 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

Fun fact. Rolling up an old edition cleric right now, I just rolled 4D8 for hit points. I rolled 6 ones in a row, then two 3's.

Get that boy some armor

What makes Legion better?

Butter and a dash of salt.

On 4/7/2020 at 3:00 AM, lologrelol said:

Must be good to have no ego attached to winning an imaginary battle with man dollies.

Some of us are unfortunately not so blessed... 😅

It took me a long time, growing old, and growing up to divorce my ego from winning a dice game with toy soldiers. Competitive egotism is just a feature of being a young man, in my experience. Takes a while to grow out of it.

On 4/7/2020 at 6:05 AM, buckero0 said:

They need more or less sides

8 sided dice are poor swingers

Yeah sometimes I think the attack dice should have 10 sides to make crit fishing harder, but then I remember that they designed the game purposefully so that any unit doesnt want to just walk out and get shot at repeatedly.

I think without those prevalent crits the game would have a lot more attacks that do nothing, which isnt very fun or exciting (thinking about crazy token stacking in X-Wing 1.0).

It's absolutely my favourite tabletop/boardgame of any kind. I'm coming at this from a non-competitive angle and as a non-gamer. When I was a teenager I was big into LOTR, but absolutely hated the atmosphere in Games Workshop so rarely played games. I also lacked opponents save for younger siblings who I could occasionally rope into a game, but even they weren't too bothered. The painting acutally sustained my interest and I continued to buy and paint minis for years. Also tried to get back into playing when the Hobbit edition came out, but same story. At the time I was also under-employed and didnt really have money to build up armies, so that fell by the wayside. In short, I didn't play enough to have the rules sink in and the games took forever.

Then I discovered X-Wing, and despite being primarily into modelling, I found the game so easy to learn and fun to play so I stuck with it. While the ships were expensive, you didn't need that many to have a full game so we got 2 core sets (one of each) and a few expansions even on my limited spare money. I also liked that the expansions carried all the rules and tokens, no buying extra rulebooks. I managed to get my brother and another friend interested and they both enjoyed a game that took an hour or two with minimal set up. I loved the presentation of everything on cards and no book-keeping. Just felt very intuative. Hallelujah, a mini game that I played often enough not to have to stop for rules reference every 5 minutes.

So when Legion was announced (and now having disposable income) I really wanted to give it a go, having admired X-Wing, and loving the chance to paint all those nice minis too. We had legion for 6-8 months I think before we really started to get into it. Myself any my brother also managed to make up a decent 3x3 tatooine table and some nice terrain. About a year into the game we enjoyed it enough to play around every 2 weeks and now can often go whole games without looking anything up. Once we got our heads around some advanced rules and the aim of the game not being 'eliminate the enemy entirely' we got really into it. Still forget a lot of little things, but it doesn't matter. With X-Wing we played maybe once every 2 months, but still enjoyed it.

Recently we've switched over to a new board which is more forest based and its brought a breath of fresh air to the game. The different environments lend themselves to different types of terrain and obstacles, which can change the course of battle and tactics significantly. I like the way that you can plan an army, but the randomness of battle conditions and objectives means there is no auto-win list that either of us has ever come up with. As I said, I don't really play with this in mind either, it's just for fun.

I just think it's a whole lot of fun in the Star Wars universe. It feels a little like the best of X-wing and the best of LOTR combined (I've nothing else to compare to), but each game can feel very different depending on the objectives and the terrain. We also always have the Star Wars soundtrack playing which really adds to the whole thing. We don't really build lists with any meta thinking involved. We switch factions each game, and just try out different combos to see what is fun and what's not. Almost everything we bought has been used regularly with very few exceptions. At the moment we have two core sets (empire and rebels) and nearly one of each expansion. (Haven't played or bought Clone Wars era.) We usually play 600 points on a 3x3 space because we lack storage and a proper place to set up 6x3 effectively.

As for painting, I think a little effort pays off, but it is not essential at all. Now I am BIG into painting minis so it's a treat for me. You can get good results nowadays with very little skill. Black and White spray primer and a few contrast paints will have minis that look good at arms length in no time. A house rule for us is that we must have minis painted to about 70% completion and have their bases covered with some sort of texture before we use them. This is mainly to stop us buying heaps of minis and never painting them and it works really well, our painting backlog is only 2 units, and they'll be done by the weekend. The whole board set up nicely, the minis looking the part, and every game being unpredictable keeps us playing over and over and never getting sick of it.

So I think if you love X-Wing and want to play more in the Star Wars universe in a different way, go get yourself a starter set. I haven't gone near X-Wing 2.0 nor had a game in over a year. Legion has taken over

3 hours ago, Alan Noir said:

We usually play 600 points on a 3x3 space because we lack storage and a proper place to set up 6x3 effectively.

Loved reading your post. Did you know there's an official Skirmish game type for 3x3 spaces?

2 minutes ago, Contrapulator said:

Loved reading your post. Did you know there's an official Skirmish game type for 3x3 spaces?

Thank you. Yeah we play that from time to time, same as Take the Hill scenarios, but we usually go the full 6 rounds and scale down the objecives and deployment zones from the main cards. For example to use the Emperor it would swallow up a whole load of a 500 point list.

I LOVE this game. I do wish they'd focus on more iconics and variety and little less on Yet Another Trooper specialty pack. Meanwhile back at the ranch, no Anakin or Darth Maul or IG88 yet etc etc etc. Operatives add so much to the game. I just want MORE!

On 4/3/2020 at 11:08 AM, Cyptor said:

2) It looks fairly expensive.

It's like $200 to collect two factions, if you aren't chasing the latest broken netlist. Which it sounds like you aren't. Imeprial/Rebel core sets are down to like $72 online, get two and a few characters and you can play more or less forever.

On 4/3/2020 at 11:08 AM, Cyptor said:

3) I suck at painting, and I don’t want to pay double the cost of what I bought my unit for to have them all painted. That’s reasonable, right? Having none of the tools I need for painting, I don’t know... A possible solution is to coat them all in a single-colored primer so they’re somewhat thematic and not awful (i.e white for stormtroopers, brown for rebel troopers, black for Vader, etc).

You can get all your painting stuff cheaper than you think (Vallejo or Army Painter instead of Citadel Colour, for one. Generic spray paint as primer, brushes from Michael's, etc. for two) and it's not too hard to get models that look good from 3 feet away. Which is how we play games. Some things (Vader's cape for example) really, REALLY, reward you for priming before assembly though so be careful with the awful, predominant, advice of "just glue your guys together to get your first few games in". There are a few really basic tricks miniature painters use (mostly called "washes" and "drybrushing"). Most people who say they suck at painting don't bother to undercoat, don't let the figures dry fully between coats, and so on. If you follow these videos you'll have nice looking toys. Or, like you said, just spray paint them in a basic color. Though I'd add, paint all the bases in [natural color] and pick out the guns in black, and the rebels faces and hands in pink or brown. It's amazing how little time that takes, for the effect it creates in dozens of models on a full color table. Take a good, hard, look at miniatures in museum dioramas, usually the paintjobs on the people suck! But no one notices because individual paintjobs get "lost in the crowd" so to speak. But these are truly great videos for making tabletop quality squads in no time. Paint the figures in batches, going down the line with each color. For drybrushes and even some regualr painting, the first model will be dry by the time you finish the last model, so you can keep up a decent pace. Washes can take several hours to dry: try to apply them right before bed or work!

On 4/3/2020 at 9:24 PM, Cyptor said:

Thank you everyone for your help! Every one of you helped me make up my mind. Because of the power creep that was mentioned, it's probably a good idea not to try and play competitively and just play casually, keeping X-Wing as my sort of "competitive focus". From what I heard, though, it sounds like an amazing casual game. I'm excited to start playing soon!

One more question: if I buy two core sets for value and troopers, would people want to buy an extra Luke or Vader on a site like eBay (or might I ever want two?)

Thanks again to all of you!

I painted up a squad of rebel veterans and the primer was "fuzzy" and I didn't realize it before I started painting and long story short, they really oughta be stripped in Simple Green and started over. I don't have any interest in tackling that project. They are yours if you pay for shipping.