I own the original Runewars game and I was quite surprised by the changes they made in revised edition.

The new victory conditions seem to make the game needlessly longer and prevent you from winning the game with a quick and daring assault like it was possible before. Anyone who ever won a game by performing a surprise aerial strike over a mountain with pegasus riders will know what I'm talking about. Overall, these new victory conditions seem to benefit races with strong units like Waiqar that will be able to defend their territories for one full year, but I can't be sure because I only played with the revised rules once.

I don't know what to think about moving the heroes with the Mobilise and Conquest order card. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a hero can now move 7 hexes in a single year, which seems a little too much.

On the other hand, I'm totally fine with the new rule about routed hexagon-based units counting as standing units during the Tally Strength step.

So, what about you, old Runewars veterans? What do you think of the revised rules?

Maerimydra said:

The new victory rules are the same as the Road to Victory rules in the expansion. There were times where those surprise victories were nice, but unfortunately, in a normal-length game, it seemed that too often, these victories happened too quickly - just when things were starting to heat up, boom, game over. That's why we typically played with Epic rules. This didn't completely eliminate that, but made the games take a little longer so that they at least developed more.

Road to Victory can certainly make the game take longer, and does remove the potential for these surprise out-of-the-blue wins, but they also nearly completely remove the "premature" victories as well. This is also helped by the fact that players don't start with any rune tokens in their home area. Our typical 2-player game before took about 1.5 or 2 hours; now they take about 3, but I'm fine with that.

Maerimydra said:

The Waiqar's units aren't all that strong; they are better at attack than defense since they rely on swarms. They have a few stronger units (especially with the expansion), but on defense, since they have to stick with 8 units, it can be easy to overwhelm them, especially with units that are good about destroying triangles.

From my experience, the Elves tend to be better at defense since they have a lot of rout and retreat powers (especially in Revised edition, where the Sorceress ability is MUCH stronger.

The key to winning with the new rules isn't "get 6 and sit and defend", but "get 6, then get more so that you have multiple ways to retain 6 when your victory card comes up".

Maerimydra said:

I thought the heroes worked pretty well before, but I haven't found the new rules to make the hero mobilization too much. In fact, I think it can help make sure that the hero game doesn't get relegated to uselessness; it was frustrating sometimes in a bigger map when all your quests end up on the other side of the map, and it took 2 or 3 years just to get there. Plus, in some cases, it was possible to "trap" an area or two behind water (especially with Tile 10 from the expansion), which meant heroes could never easily get there. Now they can, by moving in the Winter.

In my experience with the new hero rules, it hasn't been too much; Heroes don't often move with an activation unless they have a reason for moving to the activated area.

Overall, I like the revised rules. I thought the old rules worked just fine as well, but I do think the revised rules are a slight improvement overall - they've helped the game feel even more epic and hard-fought than before.

There are revised rules?

No. No, no, no! I fear change.

Edit:

I just read the revised rules. They sound like good changes… although I agree with OP that there's something awesome about suddenly winning, that I think will be lost in these new rules.

I love the change to hero movement. They always felt soooo slooow to me before. Now, I'm much more free to maneuver them.