Hey guys,

So this occurred to me, after mulling over what wasn't gelling with me about joining in with the local group to start up playing Hordes again. And it's that I think they really just do need to re-boot. Mk3 clearly lost a ton of fans, but there's a chance to win those same fans back with a new edition, and maybe also make an easier way for folks to start.

The reason this hit me, too, was thinking about Warcaster. Obviously, starting a new game gets it out from some of the problems of the old (namely, no design space left for new releases!). But in the end, it would end up in the very same place, imo. And to be completely honest, I've got a really awesome Hordes minions army converted and painted, and would like to use at least part of it!

What do you think, is there any chance of a Mk4 on the horizon? What would it take to get folks to try out Warmachine and Hordes?

Cheers for any thoughts / ideas

Seems likely, but the how is kind of up in the air. I think they're aware of the need to shrink the game and retire old models, but haven't totally figured out how to pull that off.

They're in a really weird position. Most of the game is in PVC that nobody wants and realistically 10 man units just aren't terribly viable in today's market. I don't think its entirely unreasonable to do a Sigmar level relaunch at this point, but it feels a little ways off.

I think the more likely direction is to try to revamp the standard format. Focus on 50 pt scenarios, with a limited selection of casters and themes, not all the different from Champions, but with more of a long term outlook. Less a rotation trying to encompass the whole game over time and more of a Modern format focused more on newer releases.

they could use the oblivion campaign as a good kick off point for retiring stuff, it could be used to create a clear divide to a sort of legacy era that still allows all the old stuff, and the brave new world for modern releases

could even fit for the fluff of "why don't X army use Y unit anymore " they all died off in the infernals war, or were retired for newer, better equipment, with maybe some units, jacks, whatever that are more popular being kept in a limited fashion as merc units

I do agree that 50 points would be a good place to settle on, and it would fit well with the 35 point army boxes they already sell

My hope would be a reboot that streamlines the game into unit vs unit rules, instead of model vs model.

I personally dislike having to resolve one attack, followed by the next, and each time needing to check range and LOS. For me, it really bogs the game down.

I would also hope to lower the entry level, rules wise, so I could get my garage group into it.

I expect that Warcaster is a test-case for potential future updates to Warmachine/Hordes

Simple.
Get rid as much math as possible with this damn game. Bonuses, buffs, debuffs, adding dice rolls togtgher, factoring all this stuff together, no matter how good you are, just no...lets get rid of that.

 greatbigtree wrote:
My hope would be a reboot that streamlines the game into unit vs unit rules, instead of model vs model.

I personally dislike having to resolve one attack, followed by the next, and each time needing to check range and LOS. For me, it really bogs the game down.

I would also hope to lower the entry level, rules wise, so I could get my garage group into it.

It depends on what the end goal of the size of the game one wants to look at. The current 75 points and larger, yeah, start making it resolve more on a unit by unit basis.

However, if you want to keep it at the current 25 or 50 point level number of models, then model by model is fine.

Think of the differences between 40K and Kill Team as a rough approximation of what your target is.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Simple.
Get rid as much math as possible with this damn game. Bonuses, buffs, debuffs, adding dice rolls togtgher, factoring all this stuff together, no matter how good you are, just no...lets get rid of that.

I'm honestly not sure what's left of the game if you get rid of all that, aside from pages of rules about throws and slams.

The core of the game is adding dice rolls together while layering buffs, debuffs and additional dice. Take that out and the core gameplay is...?

Resolved with d12 + modifiers. Instead of boosting, allow a reroll of the d12.

After that effects like, roll an additional die and discard the lowest get translated into a +1 modifier. Additional die rules just add +3 instead, or whatever.

Yes, it flattens a curve, but resolves much more quickly and multiple attacks at a time.

Interestingly I discussed this with some friends last night.

Honestly I don’t think we will hear anything about a Mk4 for another year. WM/H is pretty much in live service/maintenance mode with small releases and bug fixes but nothing drastic for the next year while PP stabilises (hopefully) and sees where Warcaster etc take them. But I am pretty certain the new game Warcaster is something of a test bed for PP in terms of rules and company strategy. Will Hungerford has already dropped some hints in several podcasts recently that a MK4 will streamline a lot of elements currently in the game. I love the game but one of the issues that WM/H has is that it is so big model wise and the mechanics are quite old that its hard to implement some of the modern trends in wargaming without a complete overhaul of the system. That overhaul will be a huge risk for PP as those moves WILL alienate some players, but it could also attract many new people or bring old players back. But its not clear if those new players would equal or exceed the number of players who would leave.

Things that Mk4 must have from my PoV:
1. The core ruleset must be just a tight and balanced as it is now.
2. The tight rule set must suit both competition play and casual play equally
3. Must be balanced and fair ON RELAESE. If we have “another Mk3” in terms of release, most of our gaming group will just walk from the game for good.
4. Evolution of the SR scenario packet. Id even be looking for 2 separate pack to support both comp and casual play. So a pack of SR style scenarios and an pack of Oblivion style scenarios.

What I think Mk4 may well include:
1. Reduction in some SKU’s. Not a wholesale cutting but maybe trimming 10%
2. Porting over of the Warcaster terrain rules - Hungerford has already stated this is his wish
3. Removal of facing and front/back arcs – Hungerford has already stated this is his wish
4. Moving to an alternating activation system of play?
5. Use of the Kickstarter for pre-releases and pre-orders for any new releases.

I also hope that PP:

1. Does any and all beta testing/CID’s behind closed doors. Drop the public CID’s
2. Sorts out supply and relationships with stores outside of the US
3. Moves away from metal to full time plastic and sprues
4. Creation of better starter boxes

I think they can abandon the idea of retiring models and instead approach the idea of resculpting. That allows them to release new and shiny updated models (its been over ten years for many of the early models) and sell them much in the same way as GW has managed to keep Marines going for decades with the same core block of models.

I think that is better than telling the "old guard" that half their collection is now worthless in one big swoop. If you're going to remove do it in small stages - one or two models here and there - alongside resculpts and releasing new models. If you take someone's toys all away they lose faith; if you remove one or two and replace and update they are more likely to remain and invest further.




They'd started this with their plastic shift, but it backfired as their plastics were just not popular and not suitable. Right now I think they wish they'd got GW's machines in-house; but that's not likely to happen.

 Overread wrote:
I think they can abandon the idea of retiring models and instead approach the idea of resculpting.

I don't see why it cant be both. IMO I don't think that PP can afford the output to resculp lots and lots of models and bring them over into plastic. Also, the sheer volume of SKU's is one of the reasons why physical B&M stores here in the UL have all but stopped carrying PP products. Id be all for core models and character getting new models. If fairly certain that now iv painted Mulg that PP are BOUND to release a new sculpt for him!! If PP wants to continue to develop WM/H and adding new SKU's something is going to have to go from the range.

Any change of direction or new edition is going to annoy a tranche of players. You might as well drop some SKU's at that point as well.

Another option would be to look at Wyrd and Malifaux where in the last edition change they removed some models from the game. They have rules and cards, you just cant use them in anything other than a special tournament or by agreement in casual games. They are removed from all campaigns and tournament play. You could retire some SKU's from production but give them legacy rules?

Mk4 would effectively be post the events of oblivion. So in a fluff stand point if certain places and citnes have been destroyed, you would have some fluff reasons to stop certain units from existing.

Just some thoughts

SKUs can be changed by repackaging. Instead of selling all the solos in individual packs put them together in to a single pack - like they've been doing up till now. Then use their website to direct sell individual models.

Smaller SKU for the store - website able to cope with individual orders for people wanting specific things.



The big risk with a new edition removing models is that when companies not GW do it they end up doing the removal at the same time as releasing the full edition rules (because most companies other than GW balance the whole game at once). The result is you get a huge instant negative backlash as soon as the new edition launches. It's not delayed or spread out its one big angry block of people who just got told a big portion of their collection is invalid all in one go. Plus they might only be able to release a small number of new models at that time so there's very little to dull the blow.

I think after MKIII and without a local PG or similar program in place a bigger bloated SKU is better than a huge portion of their remaining fanbase being upset at them for removing models.



Legacy rules are fine, but at the same time for a game that is very much dominated by competitive approaches it basically is the same as no rules because the bulk of games for existing fans will be competitive which will not include legacy by default.






A bloated SKU is only a worry for stores taking on their game - so do more combined boxed sets for those stores and use the increased internet direct purchasing to keep things going. I really think PP has to keep its fans happy with MKIV. It's the edition that they should be using to try and boost moral, boost popularity and reinforce their core market and restablish themselves. Rather than one where they clean house and create a mess. Let them retire models during an edition at the same time as adding models to the range - spreading it out so that only one army at a time is losing a couple of models whilst gaining others (which isn't actually reducing model count, just maintaining). That spreads it out - now you've got 1 or 2 armies worth of people a little disgruntled, but also happy at the same time. Something was lost but also something gained in at least equal measure (though if they followed GW's lead they'd update/add more than they remove).


It's improtant to remember how invested fans are and how important existing fans are in recruitment, especially for a company which no loner operates a local rep system and which has no stores of their own. They are totally reliant on fans to promote their game in a market that is far more chock full of games than it was when they got started. They are still a good sized fish but they are not the only fish in the sea any more.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Simple.
Get rid as much math as possible with this damn game. Bonuses, buffs, debuffs, adding dice rolls togtgher, factoring all this stuff together, no matter how good you are, just no...lets get rid of that.

So change the game entirely and make it into a bland dice-chukker like 40k?

Resolved with d12 + modifiers. Instead of boosting, allow a reroll of the d12.

After that effects like, roll an additional die and discard the lowest get translated into a +1 modifier. Additional die rules just add +3 instead, or whatever.

Yes, it flattens a curve, but resolves much more quickly and multiple attacks at a time.

The probability distribution of 1d12 is completely unlike the probability distribution of 2+xd6. I know it *seems* like it would simplify the game, but you are fundamentally altering the entirety of the game by doing this, you are no longer playing warmachine, you're playing another game entirely.

4. Evolution of the SR scenario packet. Id even be looking for 2 separate pack to support both comp and casual play. So a pack of SR style scenarios and an pack of Oblivion style scenarios.

They need to kill SR entirely. Do away with it and any other comp format. The game should be competitively playable "out of the box" with scenarios that appeal to casual/narrative players and competitive players alike. At this point the SR packet is a crutch keeping them on life support, its the reason casual players don't want to play the game and its what enables the competitive base to continue alienating them.

1. Reduction in some SKU’s. Not a wholesale cutting but maybe trimming 10%

I think this will be more than achievable by bundling solos and support pieces together into packs. Combine 5-6 SKUs (or more) into 1 rather than have them all as individual kits. I mean, honestly I think they could go a step further and probably bundle a few unit boxes together into "theme packs" or something similar to the theme boxes, figure ~$100 MSRP each, so instead of buying units individually you buy 2-4 of them together at once.

2. Porting over of the Warcaster terrain rules - Hungerford has already stated this is his wish

It would be nice if Warmachine had any terrain rules at all... >.> Speaking of which, what are the Warcaster terrian rules? I haven't really dug into the rules of the new game, I'm curious as to how they "fixed" the issues there and what they have done to prevent the playerbase from forcing Warcaster back into the realm of 2d cutouts.

3. Removal of facing and front/back arcs – Hungerford has already stated this is his wish

Mixed feelings on this one - conceptually I like the idea of facings, in practical terms facings in Mk3 feel like they are barely relevant at this point and I'm not sure the game really loses very much by eliminating them.

4. Moving to an IGUG system of play?

Its already IGOUGO...?

5. Use of the Kickstarter for pre-releases and pre-orders for any new releases.

Please... no....

3. Moves away from metal to full time plastic and sprues

I dont see this happening, PP has been pretty clear as to the issues with plastic and why they aren't using it anymore through the Warcaster campaign.

Right now I think they wish they'd got GW's machines in-house; but that's not likely to happen.

They need more than machines, they need engineers, toolmakers, etc. too, and a lot of skills, training, and knowledge that you can't really find in the US currently. Almost everyone with the expertise in designing models like these for plastic injection molding is in the UK or Japan/China (and even then, only GW really knows how to design robust kits that are ideal for wargaming and don't require you to assemble a 28mm scale models face from 5 pieces), so they would actually have to go out and actively try to poach people (read: $$$) to develop the in-house knowledge to successfully be able to do the same.

Its already IGOUGO...?

I meant alternating activations! I move a model/unit, you move a model/unit. My bad. Not enough/too much coffee today! I will correct my original post.

It would be nice if Warmachine had any terrain rules at all... >.> Speaking of which, what are the Warcaster terrian rules? I haven't really dug into the rules of the new game, I'm curious as to how they "fixed" the issues there and what they have done to prevent the playerbase from forcing Warcaster back into the realm of 2d cutouts.

WM/H does have terrain rules, IMO the issue is how the community chooses to implement them. I am always frustrated when I wee "other people" playing WM/H with hardly any terrain. Just almost symmetrical terrain set up, 2 x fences and a building. We use lots and lots of buildings, forests etc etc. Our boards are full of terrain.

From what i have seen, Warcaster terrain seems to work on the basis of 1) can i see you model 2) is the base obsured 3) is you base elevated. with set bonuses etc dependant on that. Plus a set of movement rules. What that seems to alow you to do is use almost any terrain you want as long as you both agree what the bonuses etc are when you start playing. It seems ot be a halfway house between Malifaux and WM/H. But for balance i have to say i have only watched 2 of the PP demo videos. But i do know Hungerford stated on a few podcasts that he would like to implement a number of the element of Warcaster terrain etc into WM/H if there is a Mk4. Which im pretty certain is code of "its going to happen".

They need to kill SR entirely. Do away with it and any other comp format. The game should be competitively playable "out of the box" with scenarios that appeal to casual/narrative players and competitive players alike. At this point the SR packet is a crutch keeping them on life support, its the reason casual players don't want to play the game and its what enables the competitive base to continue alienating them.

Personally, Im not in violent disagreement with you. If there were two scenario packs "comp" and "narrative" you would find our basement group palying "narrative" 90% of the time. But we are not most WM/H players. If you removed the comp element of WM/H i think you would kill it. I want to develop a less comp scene of narrative and campagin play alongside the comp scene.

Sunno wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I think they can abandon the idea of retiring models and instead approach the idea of resculpting.

I don't see why it cant be both. IMO I don't think that PP can afford the output to resculp lots and lots of models and bring them over into plastic.

They shouldn't anyway. They crapped the bed with a lot of their plastic attempts, to the point that I think a lot of their audience would walk if they announced a major overhaul to plastic.

Personally, if they could do it right, it'd be preferable, but I suspect a large chunk of their audience wouldn't agree.

The probability distribution matters very little, because PP tends to link low Def to high Arm, and High Def to low Arm.

As such, between the two rolls, you still generate a spike-smoothing effect. Instead of 5+ on 2d6 (83%) to hit and 10+ to inflict damage (17%) = 14% of attacks generate damage.

Vs 5+ on a d12 (67%) to hit and 10+ to damage (25%) = 17% of attacks generate damage. There is precious little change in outcome by changing the basic resolution... even without tweaking, and that would allow 40k-style speed rolling for units or multi-attack models to roll their attacks all at once.

For me, realistically, consolidation/reduction in sku's and the sheer volume of profiles:

a) retire the 'legacy/older' versions of casters. With respect, the 'current' version of that caster should be playable, not what they were ten years ago. It's... jarring seeing thagrosh 2 fighting deneghra 1.
B) consolidation/reduction in unit profiles for factions. There's too many in my opinion. Too many releases over too long a time have encroached on the design space of too many factions. Classic complaint is khador' men o war. Once they were a unique 'heavy' infantry type, as khador didn't do light jacks. Now, everyone does light Jacks, AND has multi wound heavy infantry. In my opinion, for example, a lot of the super heavy exemplars could go. Similarly, I don't see why kossites, idrians etc need to have unique profiles. Just have a generic 'irregular infantry' merc unit, arguably with faction specific ca's.

It won't happen. Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle. Too many of these things will drive the current players away, regardless of what you do.

Unfortunately, and for a very unpopular opinion, which I fully expect to be greeted with various shades of hostility - What I Think actually needs to happen is an 'aos'ing of Warmachine/hordes. The nuclear option.

I could see them retiring characters with specific forms where the old and new form have the same base size. At that point they've no so much removed a character as just consolidated them so that you could use either model.

Legion of Everblight there's 3 or so versions of Lylith that are all hard with a bow on a base that could easily just be one version then have her on her sledge as a second; that's cut the casters in half already for her.




It's a nice way to "remove" a model without actually invalidating the old sculpt. You're just changing its relationship and use in the game itself.

LunarSol - I totally agree on 50 points being a more appropriate "size" for a game. Things really start to go off the rails after a certain size, imo, and 75 is just a bit too cumbersome. Hopefully they target a slightly smaller game size in the future (a la Warcaster).

Sunno - I agree with your list of points so, so much! Where are you hearing what Hungerford is thinking, is that through Twitter or some sort of stream? Nice to see it's at least on their radar. Makes me hopeful, and want to hang onto my stuff just in case this really could happen in a year or two.

Likely Hungerford's stuff was coming up during the Warcaster Hang out & Paint deals. They showed off some rules through that.

 RiTides wrote:


Sunno - I agree with your list of points so, so much! Where are you hearing what Hungerford is thinking, is that through Twitter or some sort of stream? Nice to see it's at least on their radar. Makes me hopeful, and want to hang onto my stuff just in case this really could happen in a year or two.

Hungerford has been on a number of podcasts over the last few months. Most notably his comments on Chain Attack and The Meta relate to this.

 Overread wrote:
I could see them retiring characters with specific forms where the old and new form have the same base size. At that point they've no so much removed a character as just consolidated them so that you could use either model.

Legion of Everblight there's 3 or so versions of Lylith that are all hard with a bow on a base that could easily just be one version then have her on her sledge as a second; that's cut the casters in half already for her.




It's a nice way to "remove" a model without actually invalidating the old sculpt. You're just changing its relationship and use in the game itself.

They've already kind of done this. Madrak1 currently has the most recent rules and the second most recent sculpt of the 3 Madrak iterations. His rules are a bit of blend of all 3 versions and does a good job representing what Madrak is as character in the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
I think they can abandon the idea of retiring models and instead approach the idea of resculpting. That allows them to release new and shiny updated models (its been over ten years for many of the early models) and sell them much in the same way as GW has managed to keep Marines going for decades with the same core block of models.

I think that is better than telling the "old guard" that half their collection is now worthless in one big swoop. If you're going to remove do it in small stages - one or two models here and there - alongside resculpts and releasing new models. If you take someone's toys all away they lose faith; if you remove one or two and replace and update they are more likely to remain and invest further.




They'd started this with their plastic shift, but it backfired as their plastics were just not popular and not suitable. Right now I think they wish they'd got GW's machines in-house; but that's not likely to happen.

I think it would be interesting to see the game reduce its unit sizes down to 4-6 instead of 6-10. They could resculpt and relaunch units this way to help modernize the game and reduce the number of rolls without losing the strategy inherent in model specific targeting.

Deadnight wrote:
Once they were a unique 'heavy' infantry type, as khador didn't do light jacks. Now, everyone does light Jacks, AND has multi wound heavy infantry

Khador still doesn't have light jacks.

chaos0xomega wrote:
I expect that Warcaster is a test-case for potential future updates to Warmachine/Hordes

Yep, you wrote almost word-for-word what I was going to post.

I think if Warcaster does quite well over the medium-to-long term they'll pluck what they can from it and go forward with that in mind. If it's an horrendous flop then- well, things ill be more up in the air. Of course it could also flop and still have a largely positive reception to the rules. Thus far I've heard only positive things about the ruleset (not so much the design of the models however) so who knows, they might take from Warcaster even if it doesn't last.

Man I'd love to see unit sizes reduced, like LuarSol mentions. Infantrymachine always drove me crazy

Maybe four things kept me from early-adopting Warcaster:

1) Incomplete model lines - I tend to hold off picking up new games that are model-based and not rules-based, as the early metas tend to be pretty boring thanks to restricted unit pools. I'll check back when the heavy jacks release.
2) Yet another sci-fi game setting - I really like the Iron Kingdoms setting, like a lot, and am not interested in investing in another damn sci-fi world.
3) No lists - I'm not wrong, right? There's no pre-game army lists, you are simply limited to 4 of each unit and I think 1 of each hero? And you spawn them in as needed? I really like list building, and I really dislike sideboard games (it's a reason I never got deep into MFX).
4) Custom dice - man, I hate proprietary dice, let me use my own set with probabilities I understand, colors that match my army, etc.

I can't see WMH mk4 really failing at 1 or 2, but I'm vaguely concerned that 3 + 4 could become a sad reality. Otherwise I too would like to play WMH again - but I'll point out that I don't know if mk3 is keeping me from that, more the raging hard on for 75 pt matches and lack of local opponents, tho I'm told there are several slumming it among the hard core 40k players

There are benefits to "no lists"approaches in so much as it allows you to adapt to your opponent and the situation. One issue with lists is that its possible to have an opponent build a counter list to your own or even to have things you can't counter.


A great example was the old way super-heavies used to work in that they required very specific counter units to hurt them at all. Dedicated flying units were the same. So as soon as you didn't have counter units (either didn't take them or they are destroyed) your opponent has "untouchable" units on the field.

Being able to react to a changing gameplay state means that there's more potential for drafting in a counter or such that you need in that moment. Plus you can bet having a pre-defined bring-in list will be a thing.

You have lists, but currently there aren't really enough unit options to compete for design space in lists. More releases and you'll see people putting more thought into what they leave on the shelf.

The system is similar to Crisis Protocol and VERY similar to Monsterpocalypse and you're seeing those games start to enter a period of "list building" despite their sideboard nature. Both have grown to the point where there are enough options to where the sideboard nature does not preclude list building as a concept.

 LunarSol wrote:
The system is similar to Crisis Protocol and VERY similar to Monsterpocalypse and you're seeing those games start to enter a period of "list building" despite their sideboard nature. Both have grown to the point where there are enough options to where the sideboard nature does not preclude list building as a concept.

That's heartening. MonPoc I am endlessly attracted to but turned off by sideboards (and that I want to field all my dudes from the same sub-faction, and that has only been possible for a small number of factions released early on -- OR to be honest, I just want to run all Savage Swarm ) I also recall this was why Age of Sigmar never stuck for me at all before there were points: I simply struggle to build and paint an army of miniatures when there aren't rules to support army construction in the abstract. Here's hoping WMH doesn't float in the same big brain, game of counters world (for long anyway).

You don't need points for list building to be a thing. Technically all games have points. MonPoc (and by extension, Warcaster) for example is a 20 point game where every model is worth 1 point. There's a lot of thought that can go into what models make the list. For example, I currently own 32 destroyer units and have to leave 12 at home for a game. Deciding those 12 depends a lot on what monsters I want to run and other factors same as a game reliant on points.

AOS taught me that I personally absolutely need a value-driven balancing system to scaffold army construction on Without one no real world work happens for me, which means no tabletop happens because I play only-painted 95% of the time *gestures to Arena Rex, a game he would love to play and has owned since it existed, but 'build 3-5 gladiators' just isn't all the engrossing of a hobby goal*

Despite serious efforts, AOS (again, sorry) failed to launch as a hobby for me. It's certainly a game, like MonPoc is a game, but it didn't have the crunch to hold my interest off the tabletop - which means no planning, no buying, no building, no painting, no playing. So like the only way I can maintain interest in MonPoc, for a PP example, is by going 'ok Salvage, collect and paint all of the things for this sub-faction you like' ... which hasn't worked game-wise because that's very few minis in most cases.

It seems super weird that WMH would go that route, after so many years of being crunchy af, but hey, maybe that's the future and I'm a dinosaur who still believes in TAC and the insane balancing act that requires. Sideboard has often read to me as 'it was hard to balance everything, y'all, so bring some counter picks maybe?' but more often as 'buy the entire faction (but especially multiples of the most efficient choices)' *looks at MFX mk2 again*

A lot of it is just a matter of trying to view these newer games the same way you view older ones. Newer rules still have significant crunch; just not necessarily points. It's all about identifying your limited resource and designing to maximize it. Until recently, points were the primary resource, particularly in IGOUGO systems.

Alternating activation games are an easy example. In those systems, point cost has a weird secondary effect due to the strength of having more activations and being able to remove retaliation to key models by activating them after your opponent has run out of what is actually the system's limited resource. Infinity is a really interesting example of a system where different resources compete to be maximized in ways that aren't initially as straightforward as they seem. I don't find any of them less crunchy and honestly part of the appeal is that they challenge my perception of what crunch really is.

Honestly, I felt the same way Savage, and found I was giving myself arbitrary force construction goals when considering Warcaster. With the huge number of units in WMH, having no points / value mechanism attached to weight / balance them somewhat seems very unlikely.

But if there wasn't any it would definitely turn me off, too...

I find game systems with no points and no unit limits are very hard to envision how to build an army. It's basically choice paralysis by too much choice. You end up in a situation where making basic choices for a generic army is very hard because you've no real basis on what to make the choices with.

Imposing some limits and values actually makes choices easier and armies are easier to envision what goes into them.


Even something as simple as AoS's limits work. You know that a 2K army only has 6 slots for leaders and 4 for behemoths and artillery; you know you must take 3 battleline and 1 leader. Now you've already got four portions of the army pre-chosen for you. You still get to choose what models they are, but the limits have already started to guide your army construction from the onset.

Plus its easier to see how to potentially build other armies, even without study of their rules.



Not limits is also, as noted, much harder to balance because the variety of potential lists is mindboggling. Either you have to make things all very similar and identical so that choice is basically just a visual thing; or you have to run the risk of high imbalance.



The only real bonus to no limits is the marketing and sales department thinking it will encourage random purchasing splurges on models because people aren't limited. Because that big super huge super expensive model isn't limited to "1 per army" which translates to "1 per customer on average, at best"
However as AoS showed at launch (Granted the rules were utterly rubbish back then too); sometimes no limits just results in stifled growth and a confused playerbase

I was around when WM/H was a new game. i din't care all that much for it at first, but....i actually really like MKIII for gameplay with 2 specifications- both mentioned by others

1. 50 points or less to make the game manageable

2. 3d terrain rules (and more of it) i hate the flat 2d terrain. i am a veteran gamer, i think we can all figure out how to correctly use 3d terrain in the game.


This is how my WM/H tables look-




If they try to re-launch it in the manner of warcaster i will never play it in such an edition. warcaster tries to combine to many different systems that clog the game and make it something that is not warmachine.

 aphyon wrote:


2. 3d terrain rules (and more of it) i hate the flat 2d terrain. i am a veteran gamer, i think we can all figure out how to correctly use 3d terrain in the game.

Im 100% with you. We also use mostly 3d or at least 2.5d (forest with removable trees for example). Im not against the use of 2d terrain as such. It has its place but id prefer it to be the exception rather than the norm. It isn't that difficult to find and use 3d terrain and with 3d printing you can order or make things to a set dimension to still allow for accuracy. Its just with the inherent overhang of many models in WM/H its hard to gain the level of accuracy you need sometimes without resorting to proxy bases or 2d outlines

Ever tried standing Mulg next to.....anything? Sadly for models like that you end up with a proxy base almost as soon as the game starts.

But as with many of the issues with WM/H, its more a community and players issue than a PP issue. However if PP produced and sold terrain via general retail, that might encourage more 3d terrain. Iv seen quite a few of the trenches they made a few years back. they get used because they are "official". Maybe if PP produced a set of official building, walls, forests etc, they may get played more?

The terrain thing infuriates me. I get how it got there, but it looks terrible. Locally, we have players that won't even play with a mat. It's just felt on a brown sheet of particleboard.

I think the biggest thing the game could do to improve terrain is to make it matter less so it can matter more. Right now, rough terrain is absolutely crippling to anything without pathfinder, to the point where everything just has pathfinder. They really need to introduce something akin to GB where your movement is reduced by 2" if you move through rough terrain during the movement. It greatly speeds things up while still significantly affecting the game and lets them cut pathfinder from a ton of models.

If I were really to go all out on a complete revamp, I think destructable terrain would be a big part of it. Might just be my love of MonPoc and Marvel at the moment, but Warmachine always felt like a game that wanted its models to Kool-Aid Man into battle anyway. I think we're past the point where designing terrain rules that work on train sets and dioramas makes sense. The idea that people these days are playing with terrain fixed into the table rather than set on a neoprene mat is woefully out of date. I want a power attack that lets me plow right through that wall in my way.

But as with many of the issues with WM/H, its more a community and players issue than a PP issue.

No it isn't. PP managed almost two full editions with 3d terrain. 2D was pushed hard by PP's steamroller rules, and encouraged further by the pressgangers who were convinced (by PP) that steamroller was THE way to play.

Somewhat before the end of mark 2 (long enough after cephalyx for someone to have a full army of them), the store I was playing in went from full 3D to full 2D despite still having the same terrain closet. Not coincidentally, this happened at the same time a PG showed up to train folks how to 'properly' play for steamroller (and for tournaments in another store, which I thought was poor taste).

Steamroller didn't demand 2D terrain at all. That was entirely a community driven thing. The major conventions started using it for convenience/cost/clean play reasons and a good chunk of the more zealous players decided that was the only way to play the game.

First, facing needs to go.

I think what we really need is a Mk.3 -- Mk.3 felt more like Mk.2.5, and we're up to about Mk.2.7 at the moment.

I'm not convinced that we need to invalidate people's models, because I don't think a huge back-catalogue is actually making that much of a difference to the learning curve -- would eliminating Kossite Woodsmen, Assault Kommandos, and Black Dragon Pikemen from the game really reduce the frustration and NPEs that a new player might experience and flatten the learning curve? Or is that new player more likely to be frustrated when they smash their face against Clockatrices and pre-nerf Lord of the Feast? I think it's the latter.

crimsyn wrote:
First, facing needs to go.

That would feel so good and speed up my own gameplay enormously.

I really like facing as a general concept in games, but I'm not sure if Warmachine really needs it anymore. The only problem I've found when games remove it is just that free strikes get weird, particularly with longer engagement ranges.

Voss wrote:

But as with many of the issues with WM/H, its more a community and players issue than a PP issue.

No it isn't. PP managed almost two full editions with 3d terrain. 2D was pushed hard by PP's steamroller rules, and encouraged further by the pressgangers who were convinced (by PP) that steamroller was THE way to play.

Somewhat before the end of mark 2 (long enough after cephalyx for someone to have a full army of them), the store I was playing in went from full 3D to full 2D despite still having the same terrain closet. Not coincidentally, this happened at the same time a PG showed up to train folks how to 'properly' play for steamroller (and for tournaments in another store, which I thought was poor taste).

Not taking shots but im not sure thats true.

Im happy to be corrected but as far as im aware at no point has the SR rules ever said anything about a requirements for 2D terrain. 2D was adopted by the community probably to deal with the issues of pin point accuracy and storage. However looking back quickly through (and i did only dip sample) PP's coverage of the big tournaments, most of them are using 3d or 2.5d terrain.

However, I do agree with a point that i think you making that the push to be "SR only" has driven lots of people toward 2d terrain because, mm of measurement means a lot in this game. But again, the lack of take up by the community for the narrative content that PP put out every year was a community decisions as the community chose to focus on "SR or nothing". Apart from our basement group who preferred narrative stuff. But we are an oddity.

I did experience a similar shift, though - all of us used to play on 3D terrain (wobbly models and all ) and then almost everyone switched to 2D. It was definitely a turnoff... not sure of the causes, but PP should be pushing for 3D terrain if they want a good tabletop experience, like most miniatures games.

I think a big reason 2D terrain started becoming the thing for Warmachine/Hordes was in fact the Steamroller variant for playing and the extremely heavy emphasis on micro-measurements the system itself was built around. 2mm mis-measurement really makes a difference in this system, so for "accuracy" a lot of the tournament players went to flat terrain markers (especially for the various zones that most SR scenarios are built around), to min-max the measuring aspect. IMO, at the cost of the aesthetics of the game (and detriment to the community overall, and part of why I retired as an Infernal, but that's a different story).

There was, as of late Mk II, massive bloat in the game and the emphasis on power-combos to one shot things led to pretty boring game play, IMO. It was also a massive barrier to getting new players in (as has been discussed in other threads). So, I think if there was to be a Mk 4, it would need to be much less reliant on mega-combo-building (which won't happen; that's part of the design ethos at PP) and streamlined enough that new players could actually learn without being immediately curb stomped (but not too streamlined since the "crunch" is one of the often cited appeals of the system).

I'm not sure what it would take, honestly, for me to consider getting back into WM/H with a Mk 4. I do still have a boat load of painted models that I'd like to do something with, but I hadn't had "fun" in a WM/H game for a long time before I dropped it.

I feel like MK3 launched with a pretty massive reduction in mega-combos and the playerbase absolutely revolted.

 LunarSol wrote:
I feel like MK3 launched with a pretty massive reduction in mega-combos and the playerbase absolutely revolted.

That's quite possible. I did drop out right before the launch of Mk 3, which was actually a surprise when it came out 3 months or so later since that was the first I'd heard of it. And from what I heard, the Skorne players had every right to revolt, and not just because some combos were removed.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the most vocal playerbase, which would have been the tournament tryhards, did indeed get up in arms about not being able to club baby seals anymore and having their crazy wombo combos removed. I think an ongoing problem that lead do a lot of the issues with that game was listening a bit too much to the tournament crowd at the expense of having a, you know, fun game, over a game that emphasized gotcha's with both measurement and unforeseen-combo "tactics."

I really enjoyed MK3 at launch. Outside of a couple exploits that mostly seemed to come from the impression that it looks like there was probably a rule against targeting friendly models with attacks for the majority of playtesting, I thought it was the game at its best. My biggest gripe was that solos and attachments were grossly overcosted, which seemed to be intentional once their design space was moved to themes.

I think the biggest sin of MK3 was rolling out more advanced rules in a similar manner to codexes to a community that was not accustomed to codexes. The Warmachine community is not really okay with "we'll fix you in 6 months" the way GW's playerbase seems to be.

What I would hope for in a new edition is model count lowered, like Kill-team the model count is low and not too many models to paint. Also, have better-looking table setups, many tables of WM/H look barren and with unpainted models, it doesn't look
that interest in a game or not much care was taken beforehand.

Early on I always liked it when war machines where decent models and I could do different actions besides move and shoot. I think that is what got me into the game originally but now you have gigantic models and gigantic forces covering the table

LunarSol wrote:I feel like MK3 launched with a pretty massive reduction in mega-combos and the playerbase absolutely revolted.

Both are actually true, well at least the tryhards kinda revolted. to me both things were better for overall gameplay experience especially for casual gamers coming from other systems.

Genoside07 wrote:What I would hope for in a new edition is model count lowered, like Kill-team the model count is low and not too many models to paint. Also, have better-looking table setups, many tables of WM/H look barren and with unpainted models, it doesn't look
that interest in a game or not much care was taken beforehand.

Early on I always liked it when war machines where decent models and I could do different actions besides move and shoot. I think that is what got me into the game originally but now you have gigantic models and gigantic forces covering the table

Sounds like you are an infniity player

Swimming, climbing, crawling, lifting objects, opening doors etc....

With a force that averages 10 minis.

With the Oblivion release last year, we kind of got Mk 3.5. The movement of the company to new digs, a huge hiring spat followed by the Coronavirus lock down, and the maybe release of Warcaster this year means we probably won't see MK IV until maybe 2022. Maybe an announcement in 2021? I was fully expecting some kind of news about the end of Oblivion and the future of Warmachine/Hordes at Lock and Load this year.

The Coronavirus is really wrecking a lot of the hobby and game industry. Yeah, lots of people are painting and planning armies, but the companies are basically shut down. That means no new products, and no production to replace stocks from prior to the virus. Everything is getting pushed further and further into 2020, if not 2021 or 2022. If Governor Inslee (Washington state governor) extends the stay at home order past May 4th to something like June 1st, I expect PP to announce that Warcaster will be delayed until late fall/winter 2020.

One of the unfortunate casualties of all this will be the FLGS. How many will reopen after having a couple months of no income?

I was certainly looking forward to seeing how they wrapped up Oblivion at LnL. They've been doing a fantastic job with the huge narrative games at the event the last couple of years and with the Hengehold Scrolls they really seemed to find a way to get players involved in the fluff again.

For those not aware, PP has been running a huge themed narrative games at LnL for the last couple of years and incorporating memorable moments from those games into the fluff. My understanding is that the final battle at Hengehold was supposed to be this year's event that would have really shaped the world going forward.

 Valander wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
I feel like MK3 launched with a pretty massive reduction in mega-combos and the playerbase absolutely revolted.

That's quite possible. I did drop out right before the launch of Mk 3, which was actually a surprise when it came out 3 months or so later since that was the first I'd heard of it. And from what I heard, the Skorne players had every right to revolt, and not just because some combos were removed.

Very interesting that as an Infernal you hadn't heard of MK3 just three months before launch (even if you were retiring at the time). I definitely recognize you from the forums, thank you very much for chiming in here!

I honestly don't know what went wrong, other than being massively rushed, but the end of Mk2 definitely saw the game struggling, but the solution was in many ways worse than the problem. I hope they take their time with Mk4 and get it right.

Public CID development is the opposite of what I want from a game company, to be honest. Take feedback, but develop rules independently and give them to us when they're ready. Not doing so prior to Mk3 launch didn't necessitate the cumbersome solution they've settled on now and it's a huge turnoff to every casual player I've talked to about it (I'm strictly a casual player, myself, but it was my and my gaming group's main game for years - almost all as casual play).

I think MK3 has been a massive improvement over Mk2 in every regard with the exception of how the playerbase reacted to it.

 RiTides wrote:

 Valander wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
I feel like MK3 launched with a pretty massive reduction in mega-combos and the playerbase absolutely revolted.

That's quite possible. I did drop out right before the launch of Mk 3, which was actually a surprise when it came out 3 months or so later since that was the first I'd heard of it. And from what I heard, the Skorne players had every right to revolt, and not just because some combos were removed.

Very interesting that as an Infernal you hadn't heard of MK3 just three months before launch (even if you were retiring at the time). I definitely recognize you from the forums, thank you very much for chiming in here!

Honestly, it may have been more than 3 months, I don't remember the exact time line. I do remember a buddy who was still into it asking me "how come you didn't let me know it was coming?" when it released, and I told him "because I hadn't heard of it. Besides, even if I had I wouldn't have been able to tell you." It's possible they weren't telling any outsiders (all Infernals were volunteers, not company employees), but the Infernal group was really tight knit (there were 3 of us when I retired), and I know that no leak ever came from one of the Infernals. Different story with some of the PT groups, though.

Regardless of all that, I still feel the focus on tournament play and uber-competitiveness is what drove down the adoption of the game overall. So for a Mk 4, I would like to see it be a lot less "this is professional sports/masters level chess" and more of a, you know, fun game. In the final days I was playing, "fun" was only had when I was playing with close friends, which would've had fun regardless of what we were playing. Pick up games with random (or even semi-random) players at the LGS were distinctly non-fun for me, as games inevitably boiled down to micro-management of movement, and nit-picking of rules to try to eek out the way to do the wombo combo one shot to win. That is what would need to change in Mk 4 to re-interest me, and I think a lot of other people might feel the same. Of course, there are also many quite happy with how it is, and that's cool; people are free to like different things. It's also ok to not like a thing.

Makes sense! Like I said, really appreciate you contributing here . To be one of only three Infernals near the end of MK2 is a pretty big deal lol.

LunarSol, I've had friends who still play tell me similar things (although to be fair, they're also the most competitively minded, and the only ones I personally know who stuck with the game). The problem with that is, I actually Did play at the start of MK3, for almost a year. And I don't think you can explain away the problems by something like "In beta testing you probably couldn't target your own models". It's insane how non-working some of the interactions were (throwing in particular) and the debacle of the Skorne rules is well documented.

Maybe they arrived at a good place... but it was far too late, and far too public of a playtesting process to get there. I really hope they take almost the opposite approach to Mk4 development...

 RiTides wrote:
I really hope they take almost the opposite approach to Mk4 development...

I doubt they'd do as big of an open playtest as they did for Mk 2. I heard absolute horror stories for that (I became an Infernal juuuust after Mk 2 release). That said, I do think the playtest group for Mk 3 was clearly too insulated, given the large amount of immediate errata needed. In some ways I think their CID kind of works, but unfortunately it also gives the strongest voices to the hardcore players, IMO to the detriment of the game overall.

Open playtesting is really hard. You get so much variance in feedback, and the number of conflicting opinions on the same rule/model is pretty crazy. At the same time, too closed and you wind up with an internal bias that gets overlooked since it's easy for a small group to know "the intent" of a rule, and overlook how it's actually worded, thus missing some crazy interaction that gets spotted very quickly once released to thousands more eyes (and to be fair, this is not just a PP problem; every game has that issue). Anyway, kind of going off topic.

Edited to add:
To be clear, I have no ill will or anything like that towards PP. I retired as an Infernal more to pursue some of my own things.

 RiTides wrote:
Makes sense! Like I said, really appreciate you contributing here . To be one of only three Infernals near the end of MK2 is a pretty big deal lol.

LunarSol, I've had friends who still play tell me similar things (although to be fair, they're also the most competitively minded, and the only ones I personally know who stuck with the game). The problem with that is, I actually Did play at the start of MK3, for almost a year. And I don't think you can explain away the problems by something like "In beta testing you probably couldn't target your own models". It's insane how non-working some of the interactions were (throwing in particular) and the debacle of the Skorne rules is well documented.

Maybe they arrived at a good place... but it was far too late, and far too public of a playtesting process to get there. I really hope they take almost the opposite approach to Mk4 development...

Honestly, I never thought Skorne was that bad off; it was just totally different. Hordes in general lost too much fury economy, and Skorne really suffered as for most MK2 players they expected to play a beast herd and ignore the infantry. Early MK3 Karax were fairly crazy for their cost and really shined with with certain casters. It was just all stuff that wasn't popular in MK2. That said, I think the Skorne update was a great improvement; I just didn't think it was as bad as the community made it out to be either. For me, the big stinker of MK3 was the Battle Engine errata. They just cranked those things to such a ridiculous level of speed and damage that recreated the worst of the "enter the zone and lose your army or stay out and lose the game" style of play the game.

I really felt a lot of that first year felt like screaming over things that just weren't what they were in MK2. Banes weren't as absurdly powerful, you could advance out of your deployment zone without being shot off the board against Legion; stuff like that. There were new problems but PP was fixing them way faster than the total failure to ever really fix Haley or Gaspy in MK2. It was frustrating that it wasn't perfect, but by the standards people held MK3 to, MK2 wasn't really any better. It's mostly just that people had invested heavily in the MK2 version of that stuff. Honestly, the speed at which the community stopped complaining as soon as they broke Cryx again kend of soured me on the community as a whole.

Well, I think we agree about the path forward at least . My experience with the start of Mk3 was different, though - with things like the throw rules absurdly broken. Funny that they broke Battle Engines later, though I didn't know that!

And to be honest, if the community has issues (with which I could agree), then they Really shouldn't use them for CID rules development

Valander - Makes total sense! I too started in Mk2 so missed all that.

 RiTides wrote:
Well, I think we agree about the path forward at least . My experience with the start of Mk3 was different, though - with things like the throw rules absurdly broken. Funny that they broke Battle Engines later, though I didn't know that!

And to be honest, if the community has issues (with which I could agree), then they Really shouldn't use them for CID rules development

Valander - Makes total sense! I too started in Mk2 so missed all that.

Oh, I played a lot of Mk 1. I just wasn't an infernal until Mk 2.

 RiTides wrote:
Well, I think we agree about the path forward at least . My experience with the start of Mk3 was different, though - with things like the throw rules absurdly broken. Funny that they broke Battle Engines later, though I didn't know that!

And to be honest, if the community has issues (with which I could agree), then they Really shouldn't use them for CID rules development

Valander - Makes total sense! I too started in Mk2 so missed all that.

So my experiance was that Mk3 was great right until faction themese came along and i saw that you had to pretty much own everything in triplicate in some ways.
The whole two lists thing is insane too.
I have said it before, if your game requires two lists because you can run into something that is such a hard counter to your list.....its broken
And things being worse than GW pricing made it bad..

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
Well, I think we agree about the path forward at least . My experience with the start of Mk3 was different, though - with things like the throw rules absurdly broken. Funny that they broke Battle Engines later, though I didn't know that!

And to be honest, if the community has issues (with which I could agree), then they Really shouldn't use them for CID rules development

Valander - Makes total sense! I too started in Mk2 so missed all that.

So my experiance was that Mk3 was great right until faction themese came along and i saw that you had to pretty much own everything in triplicate in some ways.
The whole two lists thing is insane too.
I have said it before, if your game requires two lists because you can run into something that is such a hard counter to your list.....its broken
And things being worse than GW pricing made it bad..

Yeah that's a steamroller thing. i don't play steamroller or tournaments. i have 2 lists because i have more than enough points to play 50. so i swap out a few things but that.s more for fun than a requirement.

Funny that they broke Battle Engines later, though

Actually they didn't, they just made them worth taking for their points/money costs by giving them a bit more life and punch considering how easy they are to hit/hurt the only one that got shafted was the cygnar one... but it's cygnar so i am not really feeling any pity for them.

Am I the only one here thinking Mk 4 will come after another company picks up the rights from PP's bankruptcy?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Am I the only one here thinking Mk 4 will come after another company picks up the rights from PP's bankruptcy?

Yeah, PP was trying to set itself up as the cool indie game compnany that goes against the establishment(GW) and is all hardcore and stuff. With Brushes and paints too.
They need to come up with their own identity now, like right now.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Am I the only one here thinking Mk 4 will come after another company picks up the rights from PP's bankruptcy?

PP demise and ruination has been predicted from Mk1. 10-15 odd years later it is still here and releasing new and exciting games that seem to be doing fairly well (although personally i don't play RQ and have no interested in Warcaster). I wouldn't expect it to go out of business any time soon. That is not to say it doesn't have issues. But "the sky is falling" has associated doom mongering been a topic year in year out. I know because I have been a doom monger in the past. Im still here and playing.

This seems a particularly precarious time as they seemed to be rather in flux and utilizing Kickstarter more often before the pandemic.

 Eldarain wrote:
This seems a particularly precarious time as they seemed to be rather in flux and utilizing Kickstarter more often before the pandemic.

So far they've used it twice for wargames - once for an artbook and once for launching a new game.

The artbook is just the sort of thing KS was made for. Something that the company can do, but which comes with a big cost and a risk so having a pre-order through KS generates a big lump sum to pay for it.


Meanwhile Warmaster they are basically ready to go. The KS is providing much needed money, but its clear that even without it they would have tooled up and been ready to launch come the mid-year. If they were strapped for cash in a really bad way then it would have had a year or more to deliver.

I agree that their use of it independently doesn't spell doom. Just not sure that they're in a great place to weather thus particular storm.

Still KS allows them to be holden to players with an interest in the game instead of be holden to share holders who only see PP as a ticker number as the big game runner has done.

 Eldarain wrote:
I agree that their use of it independently doesn't spell doom. Just not sure that they're in a great place to weather thus particular storm.

True, but that's the same of almost any company that isn't sitting on no debt and recent high volume sales. That siad hobbies tend to do well in bad times and right now the miniatures market is going pretty good if you can keep your factories and mail order running. Thsoe with government pay-outs or work from home are still earning. Plus people can't go out - fuel, restaurants, trips out e tc.... are all not happening. The customers are stuck at home so if anything its almost an ideal time for a "stay at home hobby" (at least for build and painting phases).

It's less about the money and more about distribution from what I've seen. Quite a few companies have been struggling with getting their products in stores in recent years and have tried to shift customers and stores to more direct distribution. This new small kickstarter model seems to be using the platform for similar purposes. I think the measure of its success will have less to do with how many players backed it and how many retail pledges they sold.

As @LunarSol said, the KS was about getting around the supply chain. However, im seeing quite a bit comments on the cost of postage and shipping for the packages for Warcaster.

In terms of retail, 32 people/stores backed the retail sample pack and 53 people/stores backed the main retail pack on the KS so that 85 stores that were willing to take the plunge to the level of stocking Warcaster out the gate.

Im certain that PP and other companies will use KS as a distro method for releases to mitigate some of the financial risks for new products. Whether they would use that approach for any Mk4 releases? Time will tell.

Sunno wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Am I the only one here thinking Mk 4 will come after another company picks up the rights from PP's bankruptcy?

PP demise and ruination has been predicted from Mk1. 10-15 odd years later it is still here and releasing new and exciting games that seem to be doing fairly well (although personally i don't play RQ and have no interested in Warcaster). I wouldn't expect it to go out of business any time soon. That is not to say it doesn't have issues. But "the sky is falling" has associated doom mongering been a topic year in year out. I know because I have been a doom monger in the past. Im still here and playing.

The difference for me is that people I know with expertise in the market are now saying it, before mk 3 they never did.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Sunno wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Am I the only one here thinking Mk 4 will come after another company picks up the rights from PP's bankruptcy?

PP demise and ruination has been predicted from Mk1. 10-15 odd years later it is still here and releasing new and exciting games that seem to be doing fairly well (although personally i don't play RQ and have no interested in Warcaster). I wouldn't expect it to go out of business any time soon. That is not to say it doesn't have issues. But "the sky is falling" has associated doom mongering been a topic year in year out. I know because I have been a doom monger in the past. Im still here and playing.

The difference for me is that people I know with expertise in the market are now saying it, before mk 3 they never did.

Genuinely interested, what have they been saying?

(also aware that saying "genuinely interested" makes it sound like your anything but. But I am genuinely making that enquiry)

At some point I'd like to get back to talking about Mk4 but I do think the KS of Warcaster right before the pandemic hit can, in hindsight, only be a good thing for the company - brought in a ton of preorders right before everything closed down.

I'm very hopeful they'll stay healthy, and put out a sweet Mk4...

If anything, Warcaster shows that they can do more with metal/resin/restic in-house than outsourcing for "meh" plastics.

From the sounds of things, they have been able to condense waves 1-4 into effectively waves 1 and 2? Haven't been following much beyond Warjack Wednesdays to be honest.

In house production has always been their strong suit. I still maintain their resin is my favorite in the business and really helps them capture the exaggerated, larger than life art style. The main problem is that its just prohibitively expensive for 10 man units.

I think Riot Quest, Minicrate and MonPoc have really helped the company find its niche again. Big, fun, larger than life characters that are downright burdened with bits and details. Their main challenge is figuring out what to do with Warmachine, which is a great game with a rabid fanbase in a fantastic world that.... just doesn't play to the strengths of the company or even the industry as a whole. In many ways its stuck in the same place WHFB was. Nobody wants it to change, most of all the people playing, but nobody wants to really buy anything for it anymore either.

My gut says the game needs to be smaller, even if the option to play games at the current size still exist. It's just a matter of finding a way to get everyone to downsize.

 RiTides wrote:
At some point I'd like to get back to talking about Mk4 but I do think the KS of Warcaster right before the pandemic hit can, in hindsight, only be a good thing for the company - brought in a ton of preorders right before everything closed down.

I'm very hopeful they'll stay healthy, and put out a sweet Mk4...

It wouldn't surprise me to see Mk 4 looking at KS, but a lot depends on where they are going to take it and if new models/starters will be brought in the game.

I sort of feel that the 9Ed of 40K will force many companies to do something in the next month or so as all the Gaming media will be focused on the new GW hotness.

Whether PP has the resources or ability to respond to this will be interesting to watch. Will there be any interest in Warcaster beyond the initial KS backers now there is going to be an unending flurry of new 40K stuff will be interesting to see.

Is there really that much overlap between people that play 40k and people that play other games?

Locally, i have seen quite a large percentage of WM/H players move from WM/H to 40K, AoS or other games since Mk3. Or picking up those games alongside WM/H.

We have seen some come the other way as well. A few 40K player pick up WM/h and really like it, despite the various issues that have been discussed over the course of this thread.

But thats one guy talking about one local view. Is it a wider trend? I dont know.

Nurglitch wrote:
Is there really that much overlap between people that play 40k and people that play other games?

Newer players? probably not since 40K is such a money drain, as well as the fact the other systems/companies do not have the advertising reach GW does.

Most people who have been playing for more than 5 years have enough of a collection that they start branching out into other games. of course it also helps if those alternate options are promoted at the FLGS. it is one of the reasons why press gangers worked so well.

I actually started out with classic battletech and B5 wars, which i still play, played 40K pretty heavy and exclusive from 3rd -5th and then started getting into other systems. i was an early adopter of infinity, in the last couple years i have gone heavy into DUST and WM/H but i also have about 7 other systems not mentioned that i have forces and rules for.

Most of the regulars at the FLGS are the same with a mix of systems they like to play.

As an outspoken critic of Warmachine, Privateer Press has earned itself back into my good graces with Monsterpocalypse. I even ordered Riot Quest and I think I'll be on board with Warcaster. At this point, if PP can fix the competitive mindset problem and the restic crap models, I don't think it would be impossible for me to come back (I admit, I was tempted with the Infernals army box). Just wanted to comment on a few things brought up in this thread:

- Getting rid of models - Against. I think Warmachine has really amazing looking models that I've had a lot of fun painting, and I'd hate for models to disappear. SKU bloat is a real problem, but with resin, PP can make models to order and there's no reason why they can't move a majority of their catalog to their web store while keeping a core set of items available at retail. Of course, they'd need to remake a bunch of old crappy restic models.

- Side boards - For. In MonPoc, you get 20 units, and since you rarely use all 20 simultaneously, it allows you to keep specialized units in the pocket for situational use. This allows models that are used very rarely to retain their value and use, giving a larger number of models a reason to exist. Amphibious units would have value if you could choose them after you saw what table you were playing on, for example. For me, bringing out the right model at just the right time is as exciting as pulling off a combo. I think it would fit well into the appeal of WMH, though a spawning mechanic would fundamentally change the game (although, doesn't Warcaster use it?)

- Few models on the board - Absolutely for. The most fun I have playing WMH is battlebox+ games. All the WMH players I played with would absolutely disagree, but I think the game works better with fewer models on the table. And as a personal preference, I hate painting large units but love painting warjacks.

- Remove facing - For. The way WMH is typically played, with minimal terrain and objectives in the middle, the armies generally only clash face on. For me, facing really only came into play while one model occupied my guy while another walked around him and hit from the back. Minutia in facing felt too important, tactically, and generally speaking, I feel like minutia should never be game winning (I'm also against toeing forest lines).

- Streamlining the rules - Neither for or against. I don't think the challenge of WMH is necessarily the rules, but instead the institutional knowledge necessary to set up combos (and defend against them). I think new players can pick up WMH fairly quickly, but they drop the game the second their opponent caster kills them in the first round ("clubbing baby seals", I think someone said).

- I'd like to add a suggestion: neoprene mats. Both MonPoc and Riot Quest have neoprene maps that fundamentally change the nature of the game you play. The Riot Quest ones are really thematic and wonderful to look at (the Hullgrinder map is 100% why I ordered Riot Quest). WMH might put too much into the hands of the players, who are all too happy to play on barren tables with one or two terrain features set up on the side, out of the way. Creating thematic "levels" with terrain combinations you don't typically see would go a long way to making WMH look nicer on the table and more varied to play again. I also wouldn't complain if terrain was made a first order participant in the game, like buildings are in MonPoc, being part of your army building and strategy.

Nurglitch wrote:
Is there really that much overlap between people that play 40k and people that play other games?

I think at my local club almost all the 'other' game players 40k'd at some point and a fair few still could slap an army on the table if that was the only game in town

 Sqorgar wrote:
- Few models on the board - Absolutely for. The most fun I have playing WMH is battlebox+ games. All the WMH players I played with would absolutely disagree, but I think the game works better with fewer models on the table. And as a personal preference, I hate painting large units but love painting warjacks.

- Streamlining the rules - Neither for or against. I don't think the challenge of WMH is necessarily the rules, but instead the institutional knowledge necessary to set up combos (and defend against them). I think new players can pick up WMH fairly quickly, but they drop the game the second their opponent caster kills them in the first round ("clubbing baby seals", I think someone said).

As a note, the rules won't need a lot of streamlining if there are few models on the board. Where it starts bogging down is once you pass the 50 point marker, and even the 50 point marker is straining the edges of the system. Not saying the game can't be epic, but if they want to keep the model count at the current 75 point level, or go larger, than streamlining the rules will need to happen.

That being said, most people are looking at games they can enjoy with small model counts, currently. X-Wing is a big hit, but I've rarely seen a game over 7 models on both sides. Infinity is noted for taking a couple small squads and going at it. Warcry and Kill Team are having some large successes, even. I would also the new hero games of Batman and Marvel Crisis Protocol, or even the MonPoc someone mentioned, to those lists as well.

 Charistoph wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
- Few models on the board - Absolutely for. The most fun I have playing WMH is battlebox+ games. All the WMH players I played with would absolutely disagree, but I think the game works better with fewer models on the table. And as a personal preference, I hate painting large units but love painting warjacks.

- Streamlining the rules - Neither for or against. I don't think the challenge of WMH is necessarily the rules, but instead the institutional knowledge necessary to set up combos (and defend against them). I think new players can pick up WMH fairly quickly, but they drop the game the second their opponent caster kills them in the first round ("clubbing baby seals", I think someone said).

As a note, the rules won't need a lot of streamlining if there are few models on the board. Where it starts bogging down is once you pass the 50 point marker, and even the 50 point marker is straining the edges of the system. Not saying the game can't be epic, but if they want to keep the model count at the current 75 point level, or go larger, than streamlining the rules will need to happen.

That being said, most people are looking at games they can enjoy with small model counts, currently. X-Wing is a big hit, but I've rarely seen a game over 7 models on both sides. Infinity is noted for taking a couple small squads and going at it. Warcry and Kill Team are having some large successes, even. I would also the new hero games of Batman and Marvel Crisis Protocol, or even the MonPoc someone mentioned, to those lists as well.

Id agree with your last bit that many people are looking for smaller games these days. Due to time, investment etc but for companies, unless your established its actaully pretty hard to put out and support a large scale/model wargame in a world where GW exists. TBH i think the only companies that could do it would be the likes of FFG and Asmode.

WM/H is my large scale game. Malifaux is my small scale game. 54mm Inq is my side passion......

i would add mantic and warlord games to that list

Both do lines in complete plastic than run the gambit from large to small scale games. the minis may not be as crazy detailed as GWs but the quality is still very good and they are fantastically easy to assemble. not to mention the pricing is far less than GW charges for similar. 3 custodus jet bikes were $66 last time i looked but i can get 4 warpath jet bikes from mantic for $20

 Charistoph wrote:
That being said, most people are looking at games they can enjoy with small model counts, currently. X-Wing is a big hit, but I've rarely seen a game over 7 models on both sides. Infinity is noted for taking a couple small squads and going at it. Warcry and Kill Team are having some large successes, even. I would also the new hero games of Batman and Marvel Crisis Protocol, or even the MonPoc someone mentioned, to those lists as well.

There's a lot of reasons to prefer small model counts - table size, storage needs for hundreds of models, quickness of play, amount of painting, cost, etc. But I think most of those can be achieved by simply using a smaller scale. Going 10mm or 15mm can allow you to have that huge scale without all the consequences of having many models. Going by Joan of Arc's 15mm models, the quality can be quite good and paint up real nice.

Small scale games lack the cool toy factor though and lets be honest, if we were a practical people, we'd be happy to play with cardboard tokens .

 LunarSol wrote:
...if we were a practical people, we'd be happy to play with cardboard tokens .

Most of the people I played Warmachine with were... They'd make wreck markers by cutting out circles from the Amazon boxes their models came in.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
That being said, most people are looking at games they can enjoy with small model counts, currently. X-Wing is a big hit, but I've rarely seen a game over 7 models on both sides. Infinity is noted for taking a couple small squads and going at it. Warcry and Kill Team are having some large successes, even. I would also the new hero games of Batman and Marvel Crisis Protocol, or even the MonPoc someone mentioned, to those lists as well.

There's a lot of reasons to prefer small model counts - table size, storage needs for hundreds of models, quickness of play, amount of painting, cost, etc. But I think most of those can be achieved by simply using a smaller scale. Going 10mm or 15mm can allow you to have that huge scale without all the consequences of having many models. Going by Joan of Arc's 15mm models, the quality can be quite good and paint up real nice.

Yes and no. I've gotten into Team Yankee (15mm Flames of War derivative) lately, and it really isn't that much easier to transport or quick to play/paint than 28mm games I've played. You could make a smaller game by making the models smaller, but you also need to keep the model count under control.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Yes and no. I've gotten into Team Yankee (15mm Flames of War derivative) lately, and it really isn't that much easier to transport or quick to play/paint than 28mm games I've played. You could make a smaller game by making the models smaller, but you also need to keep the model count under control.

Yes, but 15mm is so adorable. I'd totally play a 15mm Warmachine.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I'd like to add a suggestion: neoprene mats. Both MonPoc and Riot Quest have neoprene maps that fundamentally change the nature of the game you play. The Riot Quest ones are really thematic and wonderful to look at (the Hullgrinder map is 100% why I ordered Riot Quest). WMH might put too much into the hands of the players, who are all too happy to play on barren tables with one or two terrain features set up on the side, out of the way. Creating thematic "levels" with terrain combinations you don't typically see would go a long way to making WMH look nicer on the table and more varied to play again. I also wouldn't complain if terrain was made a first order participant in the game, like buildings are in MonPoc, being part of your army building and strategy.

This is a great suggestion. Occasionally I've wondered why GW doesn't make its terrain more like the Monsterpocalypse buildings where they're an active part of the game like the other miniatures players bring. I think that's a great idea. Plus the mats bring a certain colour and quality to the game.

Nurglitch wrote:
Occasionally I've wondered why GW doesn't make its terrain more like the Monsterpocalypse buildings where they're an active part of the game like the other miniatures players bring.

GW didn't really make terrain until a few years ago. I think the reason why 40k is getting better terrain rules in 9th is because GW now sells terrain. Since they started making terrain, they have made it more and more fundamental to the games: faction terrain, killzones, and Warcry has terrain as a fundamental gameplay element. They even tried neoprene mats (briefly) before settling on the hard boards that KillTeam and Warcry use. I think "smart" terrain is where GW is really going with their games, and I think AoS 3.0 will probably make it a first order participant.

But I think, getting back on Warmachine, that Warcaster is getting a neoprene mat as a Kickstarter stretch goal. With MonPoc, RiotQuest, and Warcaster getting mats (and PP making mats an increasing part of their games, and their business), I think WMH Mk4 has a pretty good chance of seeing them. They may not be integrated into the game directly, but we'll probably see a few. If not, we can probably just play on the RiotQuest mats anyway.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Yes and no. I've gotten into Team Yankee (15mm Flames of War derivative) lately, and it really isn't that much easier to transport or quick to play/paint than 28mm games I've played. You could make a smaller game by making the models smaller, but you also need to keep the model count under control.

Yes, but 15mm is so adorable. I'd totally play a 15mm Warmachine.

Now I kind of want to hybridize this suggestion with the people suggesting an Adeptus Titanicus-scale version of Imperial Knight Renegade up in that thread. 3d-print some 15mm-scale Warhammer Knights and adapt the Warmachine rules to let them throw each other around.


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 Sqorgar wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
Occasionally I've wondered why GW doesn't make its terrain more like the Monsterpocalypse buildings where they're an active part of the game like the other miniatures players bring.

GW didn't really make terrain until a few years ago. I think the reason why 40k is getting better terrain rules in 9th is because GW now sells terrain. Since they started making terrain, they have made it more and more fundamental to the games: faction terrain, killzones, and Warcry has terrain as a fundamental gameplay element. They even tried neoprene mats (briefly) before settling on the hard boards that KillTeam and Warcry use. I think "smart" terrain is where GW is really going with their games, and I think AoS 3.0 will probably make it a first order participant...

I think the fact that "bland terrain rules" was possibly the most complained-about part of 8e could have something to do with it.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I think the fact that "bland terrain rules" was possibly the most complained-about part of 8e could have something to do with it.

I’d sooner believe that GW did something to sell more product than them actually listening to their customers. If they really listened to their customers, they would lower prices rather than increasing them by 20% multiple times a year.

(I think Privateer Press’ prices are too high too)

 Sqorgar wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I think the fact that "bland terrain rules" was possibly the most complained-about part of 8e could have something to do with it.

I’d sooner believe that GW did something to sell more product than them actually listening to their customers. If they really listened to their customers, they would lower prices rather than increasing them by 20% multiple times a year.

(I think Privateer Press’ prices are too high too)

My general impression of 8e is that GW is listening to complaints from the fanbase to figure out what the problems are, but they're ass at fixing them and end up overcorrecting/brute-forcing things in ways that cause more problems than they solve. As opposed to PP, who in Mk.3 seems to not be paying that much attention to complaints from the fanbase but puts out competent fixes for the problems they do notice.

Well they are listening to a degree with the CID since it was a huge fix for almost all the battle engines. however the problem with the game lays more with the toxic mindset/behavior of the hardcore players and not with MK 3.


To me aside from theme list shoehorning the players into certain list builds the actual mechanics are better than in previous editions. it went from MK 1 where i wasn't even interested in playing the game to MK 3 where i have enough model to field 2 different 50 point variant lists.

It dawns on me that I haven’t even played mk3 yet (which makes discussing mk4 a bit premature). What makes mk3 such a huge upgrade compared to mk2? Is it just better balance through CID, or are there significant gameplay changes?

The theme force changes are what stopped me playing, really. I played a lot in Mk.2, and I liked both the variety of lists I could build and the fact that I could buy just one thing and adjust lists to accommodate the tweak, but in Mk.3 I have one army build I can sometimes swap the caster out in, and if I want to do anything other than the mono-build I need to go spend $300+ on a completely different selection of infantry/solos that don't overlap with what I was using.

Sunno wrote:Id agree with your last bit that many people are looking for smaller games these days. Due to time, investment etc but for companies, unless your established its actaully pretty hard to put out and support a large scale/model wargame in a world where GW exists. TBH i think the only companies that could do it would be the likes of FFG and Asmode.

Sqorgar wrote:There's a lot of reasons to prefer small model counts - table size, storage needs for hundreds of models, quickness of play, amount of painting, cost, etc. But I think most of those can be achieved by simply using a smaller scale. Going 10mm or 15mm can allow you to have that huge scale without all the consequences of having many models. Going by Joan of Arc's 15mm models, the quality can be quite good and paint up real nice.

I was merely noting a trend.

I do think that time as well as investment level on the player's part are the largest contributing factors in this trend.

I do think that WMH could be a larger model count game than it is, but in order for it to do so, it needs to look in to how other unit-based games go and focus more on having units interact as units instead of disparate models. This has applied to so many other systems and is the only way to not go to Apocalypse time level with half of 40K's model count. As it is, I think WMH's expected model count for a 75 point game is right on the edge of too much with its mechanics system.

Battletech is a game which has a high level of rules complexity, but is only expected to run up to about 8 models total for an average game length. Of course, it's still largely running with the ruleset it had in the mid-90s, but it is also about the expectation of the number of models in the game.

 Charistoph wrote:
...I do think that WMH could be a larger model count game than it is, but in order for it to do so, it needs to look in to how other unit-based games go and focus more on having units interact as units instead of disparate models. This has applied to so many other systems and is the only way to not go to Apocalypse time level with half of 40K's model count. As it is, I think WMH's expected model count for a 75 point game is right on the edge of too much with its mechanics system...

I think the biggest barrier to this happening is the $60-100 infantry units of ten models that are four different single poses (three each of three troopers and one unit leader, if you're lucky you also get one pose worth of weapon attachments). The infantry are priced like 40k models (Primaris units benchmark at $60/10 models) but aren't as well-made, have no built-in customizability, and are a lot harder to work with. Plastic models coming off a sprue require some cleaning of mould lines and a basic knowledge of glue, PP resin often requires heat-bending and they still do mixed metal/resin models that are incredibly fragile and require pinning.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The theme force changes are what stopped me playing, really. I played a lot in Mk.2, and I liked both the variety of lists I could build and the fact that I could buy just one thing and adjust lists to accommodate the tweak, but in Mk.3 I have one army build I can sometimes swap the caster out in, and if I want to do anything other than the mono-build I need to go spend $300+ on a completely different selection of infantry/solos that don't overlap with what I was using.

I've heard of the complaints about theme lists before, but can't you just, like, not use them? That is, you and your opponent choose to not use theme benefits (even if his list is otherwise theme appropriate), thus not suffering from the imbalance of themes getting extra models?

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
...I do think that WMH could be a larger model count game than it is, but in order for it to do so, it needs to look in to how other unit-based games go and focus more on having units interact as units instead of disparate models. This has applied to so many other systems and is the only way to not go to Apocalypse time level with half of 40K's model count. As it is, I think WMH's expected model count for a 75 point game is right on the edge of too much with its mechanics system...

I think the biggest barrier to this happening is the $60-100 infantry units of ten models that are four different single poses (three each of three troopers and one unit leader, if you're lucky you also get one pose worth of weapon attachments). The infantry are priced like 40k models (Primaris units benchmark at $60/10 models) but aren't as well-made, have no built-in customizability, and are a lot harder to work with. Plastic models coming off a sprue require some cleaning of mould lines and a basic knowledge of glue, PP resin often requires heat-bending and they still do mixed metal/resin models that are incredibly fragile and require pinning.

One of my first experiences with PP, during the first edition of Warmachine when I played it for a summer with pals, was with a Khador Behemoth.

How on earth they thought that was an intelligent model design, or that your average gamer had the modeling patience and skill to actually make work, is beyond me.

I mean, the model was awesome looking, and the new one looks infinitely better thought out, but boy was that first one a stupidly designed model as far as gaming pieces go

 Sqorgar wrote:
It dawns on me that I haven’t even played mk3 yet (which makes discussing mk4 a bit premature). What makes mk3 such a huge upgrade compared to mk2? Is it just better balance through CID, or are there significant gameplay changes?

Warjacks are good and fun to play and that alone makes it a far superior edition than any before it, IMO.


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 Vaktathi wrote:
One of my first experiences with PP, during the first edition of Warmachine when I played it for a summer with pals, was with a Khador Behemoth.

How on earth they thought that was an intelligent model design, or that your average gamer had the modeling patience and skill to actually make work, is beyond me.

I mean, the model was awesome looking, and the new one looks infinitely better thought out, but boy was that first one a stupidly designed model as far as gaming pieces go

It can't be THAT bad. It was like, one of the first 10 model kits I ever bought alongside the starter, Vlad1, some Widowmakers/Greylords/Winter Guard when I first got into the hobby and turned out fine.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The theme force changes are what stopped me playing, really. I played a lot in Mk.2, and I liked both the variety of lists I could build and the fact that I could buy just one thing and adjust lists to accommodate the tweak, but in Mk.3 I have one army build I can sometimes swap the caster out in, and if I want to do anything other than the mono-build I need to go spend $300+ on a completely different selection of infantry/solos that don't overlap with what I was using.

I've heard of the complaints about theme lists before, but can't you just, like, not use them? That is, you and your opponent choose to not use theme benefits (even if his list is otherwise theme appropriate), thus not suffering from the imbalance of themes getting extra models?

You can, but then you wander into the 40k problem of needing to sit down and negotiate what variant of the rules you're using before playing a game. What if my opponent doesn't think their list will work without the free models? What if the only models they have in their bag are one of the Oblivion mixed-faction theme forces that would be illegal outside of that theme? Suddenly I can't just play an as-written pick-up game anymore.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I've heard of the complaints about theme lists before, but can't you just, like, not use them? That is, you and your opponent choose to not use theme benefits (even if his list is otherwise theme appropriate), thus not suffering from the imbalance of themes getting extra models?

You can if your opponent is okay with it, but honestly, most people that play like them, and honestly I do find they make armies feel more narratively interesting and look less like a magic deck. I do think the changes to the way themes work in Oblivion removed a lot of my issues with them. It's a lot easier to play a mix of jacks and units in theme now and the whole system is a lot easier to work with.

 Sqorgar wrote:
It dawns on me that I haven’t even played mk3 yet (which makes discussing mk4 a bit premature). What makes mk3 such a huge upgrade compared to mk2? Is it just better balance through CID, or are there significant gameplay changes?

Biggest changes are that non-Cyriss warjacks generate a point of Focus every turn on their own, warcasters' bonus warjack/warbeast points are a larger percentage of the total, and infantry are proportionately more expensive, so you see a lot more warjacks on the table than you used to.

There are plenty of subtle details that change how the game plays; keywords/weapon stats have been reorganized (ex. melee weapons have a range and "reach" isn't a keyword, plenty of warjacks have 1" melee range where they used to have 0.5"), morale is gone, you only get defensive benefits in terrain if you're completely within it, and Steamroller terrain guidelines require a lot more terrain than it used to. Also speed debuffs no longer prevent you from charging so things like Krueger2 aren't as dominant as they used to be.

Main factions now have ~4-7 theme forces total (mini-factions have 2-3) instead of one per warcaster/warlock. Theme forces tend to divide the faction into several groups of models and have very little overlap (ex. Cygnar has the Trencher theme, the Sword Knights/Long Gunners theme, the Storm Knights theme, and the Arcane Tempest theme, but all of them but the Trenchers get Journeymen and the Squire), but they have one set of requirements and give you the full bonus once you meet it rather than the four-tiered limitations of Mk.II. Most Warmachine theme forces don't restrict your non-character warjacks much but some Hordes theme forces do (ex. Circle themes might be only stone beasts or only living beasts), and most theme forces let you have a Merc/Minion unit and solo.

And of course some factions have tweaks that alter what the go-to staples of old do. Circle was my tournament army back in Mk.II so I'm more familiar with the subtle details there, big ones are that the Gorax isn't the staple he used to be since the Feral now has Primal, and the addition of the Stoneshaper (mechanic solo for stone beasts) means stone beasts can see a lot more play with casters who aren't Baldur or Bradigus.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
I've heard of the complaints about theme lists before, but can't you just, like, not use them? That is, you and your opponent choose to not use theme benefits (even if his list is otherwise theme appropriate), thus not suffering from the imbalance of themes getting extra models?

You can if your opponent is okay with it, but honestly, most people that play like them, and honestly I do find they make armies feel more narratively interesting and look less like a magic deck. I do think the changes to the way themes work in Oblivion removed a lot of my issues with them. It's a lot easier to play a mix of jacks and units in theme now and the whole system is a lot easier to work with.

The rebalancing of the free units is nice, but there's still almost no overlap between themes. I used to be able to use Tharn and Druids or Skinwalkers and Druids in the same list in Mk.II, but in Mk.III since I only have one unit of Bloodtrackers and one unit of Skinwalkers I can't use either of them in a theme list unless I'm prepared to go buy a bunch more Tharn or a bunch of Reeves/Wolves, and since I don't have any Minions I don't get anything out of Secret Masters, so my options are either Bones of Orboros or a Kaya living-beast-spam list.

I'd love it if they applied as a global rule "instead of taking your mercenary/minion unit/solo you may take a faction unit/solo from outside the theme list", it'd add a huge amount of list-building freedom.

LunarSol wrote:I do think the changes to the way themes work in Oblivion removed a lot of my issues with them.

Is Oblivion worth it? Does anyone actually play the campaign in it or is it still SR-only? And can the Oblivion campaign be played with only two participants?

 AnomanderRake wrote:

I'd love it if they applied as a global rule "instead of taking your mercenary/minion unit/solo you may take a faction unit/solo from outside the theme list", it'd add a huge amount of list-building freedom.

Isn't that already the trade-off that themes use? You get extra models for being in-theme, and out-of-theme you have access to the full faction model set?

 AnomanderRake wrote:

The rebalancing of the free units is nice, but there's still almost no overlap between themes. I used to be able to use Tharn and Druids or Skinwalkers and Druids in the same list in Mk.II, but in Mk.III since I only have one unit of Bloodtrackers and one unit of Skinwalkers I can't use either of them in a theme list unless I'm prepared to go buy a bunch more Tharn or a bunch of Reeves/Wolves, and since I don't have any Minions I don't get anything out of Secret Masters, so my options are either Bones of Orboros or a Kaya living-beast-spam list.

I'd love it if they applied as a global rule "instead of taking your mercenary/minion unit/solo you may take a faction unit/solo from outside the theme list", it'd add a huge amount of list-building freedom.

In my mind, the bulk of the overlap is the battlegroup and core support models. Making it easier for those models to make up more of the points in theme was easily the biggest improvement in the system, IMO. I think they really need to consolidate some themes still as if nothing else we've seen they have more themes than the resources to give them attention. I'm not too fond of opening them up too much, but I'd really like to see PP retire a few of the model lines that just don't make any sense anymore. (Looking at you Cygnar: Heavy Metal Units).

 Sqorgar wrote:

LunarSol wrote:I do think the changes to the way themes work in Oblivion removed a lot of my issues with them.

Is Oblivion worth it? Does anyone actually play the campaign in it or is it still SR-only? And can the Oblivion campaign be played with only two participants?

 AnomanderRake wrote:

I'd love it if they applied as a global rule "instead of taking your mercenary/minion unit/solo you may take a faction unit/solo from outside the theme list", it'd add a huge amount of list-building freedom.

Isn't that already the trade-off that themes use? You get extra models for being in-theme, and out-of-theme you have access to the full faction model set?

Yeah, but the limited number of theme forces by comparison to Mk.II means that if I want to change theme forces I have to go out and buy 100% new infantry models, and the theme force restrictions often force you into really narrow mono-builds. Technically I could use almost any caster in any theme, but the nature of the caster's interaction with the units available means that a lot of the time there are only a couple of casters you ever see in theme.

I own every caster in Circle because in Mk.II I could slightly rejigger lists to get some use out of them and I could maneuver things into a tier 1-3 list for a lot of them, but in Mk.III since I haven't gone and bought two each of every Tharn model, thirty Wolves of Orboros, or a Minions army I've only got the models to play Bones of Orboros, which means I only ever use Baldur or Bradigus.

I don't see the need for the theme forces either. i play with the minis i want to play because they look cool not because they give me free units.

I only have Irusk 2 as my caster and he works just fine with the minis in my collection.

like sqogar said, just choose not to use them.

I've been here since Age of Sigmar first launched, and it seems like the one unifying behavior that belongs to all miniature game fans is that they all feel trapped into playing games in a way they don't like, and won't stop.

Trying to just say "well, why don't you just not do that thing you hate?" sometimes feels like a scene from Spinal Tap. "Why don't you just make 10 louder?" ... *confused stare* "But this one goes to 11".

AnomanderRake wrote:I think the biggest barrier to this happening is the $60-100 infantry units of ten models that are four different single poses (three each of three troopers and one unit leader, if you're lucky you also get one pose worth of weapon attachments). The infantry are priced like 40k models (Primaris units benchmark at $60/10 models) but aren't as well-made, have no built-in customizability, and are a lot harder to work with. Plastic models coming off a sprue require some cleaning of mould lines and a basic knowledge of glue, PP resin often requires heat-bending and they still do mixed metal/resin models that are incredibly fragile and require pinning.

No and yes. WarmaHordes tendency to focus on model interactions actually slows things down precipitously. A 2 'Caster/Lock game in WMH takes a considerable amount of time to play right now, and can take as long as a 3500 point 40K game because of that interaction level. I haven't even heard of people wanting to play a game big enough to justify taking 2 Battlegroup Controllers locally the entire time I've followed the game (forums are a different story). Meanwhile, there's one guy who would get a game that took half the tables up and filled the deployment zone with Imperial Guard once or twice a year (and they're all painted, too).

Now, don't get me wrong, the pricing issue does present issues in wanting people to buy above a certain minimum for a Theme, but there doesn't seem to be a desire to even try to play above the minimum in any form at all. Of course, I do think that part of it is Steamroller and most of the people left are either die-hards who haven't gotten in to something else or the hyper-competitives who get their fill in WMH more than 40K.

AnomanderRake wrote:Yeah, but the limited number of theme forces by comparison to Mk.II means that if I want to change theme forces I have to go out and buy 100% new infantry models, and the theme force restrictions often force you into really narrow mono-builds. Technically I could use almost any caster in any theme, but the nature of the caster's interaction with the units available means that a lot of the time there are only a couple of casters you ever see in theme.

I own every caster in Circle because in Mk.II I could slightly rejigger lists to get some use out of them and I could maneuver things into a tier 1-3 list for a lot of them, but in Mk.III since I haven't gone and bought two each of every Tharn model, thirty Wolves of Orboros, or a Minions army I've only got the models to play Bones of Orboros, which means I only ever use Baldur or Bradigus.

Yeah, this is both the benefit and the curse of the Themes. Really the only carryovers are the Battlegroups (though some don't cross Themes well, or simply can't in case of Mercs and Minions) and signature units like The Choir or Beasthandlers.

Sqorgar wrote:I've been here since Age of Sigmar first launched, and it seems like the one unifying behavior that belongs to all miniature game fans is that they all feel trapped into playing games in a way they don't like, and won't stop.

Trying to just say "well, why don't you just not do that thing you hate?" sometimes feels like a scene from Spinal Tap. "Why don't you just make 10 louder?" ... *confused stare* "But this one goes to 11".

Part of it is the local meta. If there are enough people in it, then you can usually find a one-off game. The smaller the WMH group you meet with, though, they are more likely to be the hyper-competitive Steamroller-only group. And that applies to many of the games that have local tournament scenes. I usually don't have to worry about it for Battletech, because they're a small group and it isn't competitive, but I've literally been told by one WMH group that "they only play Steamroller here", and have had situations where I couldn't get a 40K game because I didn't have a collection that was 1750 points (tournament standard of the time).

 Charistoph wrote:

Part of it is the local meta. If there are enough people in it, then you can usually find a one-off game. The smaller the WMH group you meet with, though, they are more likely to be the hyper-competitive Steamroller-only group. And that applies to many of the games that have local tournament scenes. I usually don't have to worry about it for Battletech, because they're a small group and it isn't competitive, but I've literally been told by one WMH group that "they only play Steamroller here", and have had situations where I couldn't get a 40K game because I didn't have a collection that was 1750 points (tournament standard of the time).

That was my experience back towards the end of Mk2, and I've always thought WMH's competitive mindset was the biggest obstacle for game. I've seen them stick new players with a full tournament army playing Steamroller for their first game. It's great that they are willing to teach new players how to play and even allow them use of an army (unpainted), but it's not exactly a beginner experience. I once brought in a battle box when I first started playing again (I was an early 1.0 adopter, but was new to Mk2) and saw the other players literally arguing over who would be forced to play me.

But like I said earlier, I've kind of moved past my animosity with WMH, and I think I'd like to give it another try (been there since 1.0 - first miniatures I ever painted were the original all metal Cryx battle box). The rigid competitiveness might still be an obstacle, but maybe there is a way to create a new player experience that even grognards would enjoy playing.

I think that more than anything else, a Mk4 version of WMH needs to move away from rigid competitive play. Being a well balanced game doesn't mean that the game has to only have a presence as a tournament system. Maybe Oblivion's release shows that PP wants to move away from that now?

The rigid competitiveness might still be an obstacle, but maybe there is a way to create a new player experience that even grognards would enjoy playing.

In my experience it is. one time i attempted to come in on an off day when i was told most WM/H players came in to play. got there early, played a quick game with the guy i usually game with on the other day..and then got completely ignored by the tryhard group. i had a table set up and armies out and they all felt content to huddle around the same table and watch each other play several games with 2d terrain even after i offered them games.

I find that bringing new players into to a group with a friendlier mindset helps the game be enjoyable. it's comparable to what the press gangers did but without the focus on hardcore steamroller play. find models you think would be fun to play/look cool. then find a caster(s) that work well with them, and roll some dice. no worried about theme, tier lists etc...

Maybe what WMH needs isn't a Mk4, but a few small adjustments to Mk3. I'm thinking primarily focusing on the new player experience.

1) Redesign the battle boxes. While they make good first steps into the game, they have the crappy restic models that are a nightmare to work with and have poor detail. Actually redesign any of the restic models. I don't say this often, but I'd rather work with resin.

2) A Battle Box game. I think you should be able to get about 10 games out of a battle box before you feel like you need to buy any more models - you'll do it anyway because you want models, but it is a complete game unto itself rather than feeling like, how fast can you get up to 75 pts so you can really play? It might be a challenge to get 10 games out of 3-4 models a side, but maybe you can get there with scenarios or a mini-campaign. If you build something around a group of 4 people, all with battle boxes, you can have a lot more variety in the games (6 different matchups, not including three or four player games). Maybe go the full CodeOne. The newbie experience needs desperate help - hell, it needs to exist, period.

3) Neoprene mats. I went into detail about this earlier, but I really think they desperately need to up the look on the table of the game. I think mats will have other uses, such as speeding up setup and giving explicit, set game experiences that maybe take rigid players out of their comfort zone. How awesome would it be to just pull out a mat and two battle boxes and be instantly ready to play with a potential new player? But part of the new player experience is getting new players interested in it, and an ugly game isn't going to draw any interest.

4) Better card/token/template management. Even if you get a nice map and paint your models, you still end up with a lot of visual clutter from things like brass rings, tokens everywhere, or the cards. If you change the playing area to be a foot shorter (only 3' instead of 4'), then each player gets a 6 inch space outside of the game to put their cards and unused tokens. We played on a table that was 8x4, with two games side by side, which meant our "stash" area was also our deployment zone. So our models started right next to the cards, unused tokens, extra dice, and so on. More offensively, they'd actually roll the dice on the table, next to (and into) the models. That isn't Warmachine's fault, but cleaning up the player areas is worthy goal. Maybe streamline token use so that it isn't as prevalent (or move the tokens off the table, onto the unit cards).

5) Cards and Books. I'm not even sure what's going on with the cards anymore. Do they still include them in the packages for the models? Why does War Room 2 still force you to buy card packs when the cards are available online for free? Is it possible to still purchase physical cards? Bring back the books that had the unit stats in them, along with some pretty pictures and unit fluff. There are models that don't have any flavor to them except their name. Tournament players don't care about fluff and are fine with using War Room exclusively, but new players need these things to get a feel for the world and their armies.

6) The website. The old website wasn't great, but it was better than what's there now. The new site has nothing and still links back to the old site half the time. I'm not even sure where to find the release schedule anymore, and the card database is linked from something, somewhere, but I can never remember where and always have trouble finding it again. And get the forum back to non-sucky condition. It takes time and effort to run a forum, but you can't just outsource discussion to private Facebook groups - not everybody has Facebook and can see private groups.The webstore doesn't even send you a confirmation email when you make purchases. I don't think I've seen a company with a worse website experience since the blink tag was depreciated.

Sqorgar wrote:I think that more than anything else, a Mk4 version of WMH needs to move away from rigid competitive play. Being a well balanced game doesn't mean that the game has to only have a presence as a tournament system. Maybe Oblivion's release shows that PP wants to move away from that now?

The odd thing is, Privateer Press has supported non-competitive avenues of play. There has been numerous narrative campaigns, including one where the development of a single solo was determined by the players. From what I understand, the Oblivion campaign even has a developing campaign which was very good.

The problem was to get people to play it. Most of the ones who would have played it regularly in my meta have moved on to other games and left WMH behind.

Sqorgar wrote:1) Redesign the battle boxes. While they make good first steps into the game, they have the crappy restic models that are a nightmare to work with and have poor detail. Actually redesign any of the restic models. I don't say this often, but I'd rather work with resin.

They're not resin, but plastic. They are quite a different material from the restic you'll find in some of the new kits.

Sqorgar wrote:2) A Battle Box game. I think you should be able to get about 10 games out of a battle box before you feel like you need to buy any more models - you'll do it anyway because you want models, but it is a complete game unto itself rather than feeling like, how fast can you get up to 75 pts so you can really play? It might be a challenge to get 10 games out of 3-4 models a side, but maybe you can get there with scenarios or a mini-campaign. If you build something around a group of 4 people, all with battle boxes, you can have a lot more variety in the games (6 different matchups, not including three or four player games). Maybe go the full CodeOne. The newbie experience needs desperate help - hell, it needs to exist, period.

It exists. But in order to play it, you need willing participants. Also consider that there is the Journeyman League which is an option to run.

Sqorgar wrote:3) Neoprene mats. I went into detail about this earlier, but I really think they desperately need to up the look on the table of the game. I think mats will have other uses, such as speeding up setup and giving explicit, set game experiences that maybe take rigid players out of their comfort zone. How awesome would it be to just pull out a mat and two battle boxes and be instantly ready to play with a potential new player? But part of the new player experience is getting new players interested in it, and an ugly game isn't going to draw any interest.

This wouldn't hurt, but I don't know how much it would help unless it matched the scenarios in the game at present. A lot of people complain about the lack of 3D terrain in general, as it is. Neoprene mats wouldn't help on this front.

Sqorgar wrote:4) Better card/token/template management. Even if you get a nice map and paint your models, you still end up with a lot of visual clutter from things like brass rings, tokens everywhere, or the cards. If you change the playing area to be a foot shorter (only 3' instead of 4'), then each player gets a 6 inch space outside of the game to put their cards and unused tokens. We played on a table that was 8x4, with two games side by side, which meant our "stash" area was also our deployment zone. So our models started right next to the cards, unused tokens, extra dice, and so on. More offensively, they'd actually roll the dice on the table, next to (and into) the models. That isn't Warmachine's fault, but cleaning up the player areas is worthy goal. Maybe streamline token use so that it isn't as prevalent (or move the tokens off the table, onto the unit cards).

True. Maybe some enterprising individual could looking in to developing a product line precisely for that?

Sqorgar wrote:5) Cards and Books. I'm not even sure what's going on with the cards anymore. Do they still include them in the packages for the models? Why does War Room 2 still force you to buy card packs when the cards are available online for free? Is it possible to still purchase physical cards? Bring back the books that had the unit stats in them, along with some pretty pictures and unit fluff. There are models that don't have any flavor to them except their name. Tournament players don't care about fluff and are fine with using War Room exclusively, but new players need these things to get a feel for the world and their armies.

New boxes and blisters do not contain cards. The War Room 2 costs cover the cost and development of the program, but does allow for the Prime units to be used for free, along with the old as well as current Battlebox models.

And while you can download the PDFs of the cards for free, the printing will cost you, one way or the other.

Sqorgar wrote:6) The website. The old website wasn't great, but it was better than what's there now. The new site has nothing and still links back to the old site half the time. I'm not even sure where to find the release schedule anymore, and the card database is linked from something, somewhere, but I can never remember where and always have trouble finding it again. And get the forum back to non-sucky condition. It takes time and effort to run a forum, but you can't just outsource discussion to private Facebook groups - not everybody has Facebook and can see private groups.The webstore doesn't even send you a confirmation email when you make purchases. I don't think I've seen a company with a worse website experience since the blink tag was depreciated.

This is very true.

 Charistoph wrote:

The odd thing is, Privateer Press has supported non-competitive avenues of play... The problem was to get people to play it.

I think non-competitive play needs to start from the new player experience. Once a norm becomes entrenched, you can't look to the people who standardized it for help supplant it.

It exists. But in order to play it, you need willing participants. Also consider that there is the Journeyman League which is an option to run.

What is the battle box new player experience? My past experiences with the game were nothing but pressures to build up to a SR full tournament army as soon as humanly possible. That's also the message that Journeyman Leagues send across. "We'll play small games for a bit, but only as long as you are working towards the REAL game".

My personal preference is that I LOVE starter sets. More than anything else. I'd rather have small forces from five or six armies than one static tournament army. In fact, I generally don't work towards tournament level games and instead buy models I like across the whole range and, if I end up sticking with the games long enough, eventually build a full army almost by accident. And it is never tournament competitive, since there was no rhyme or reason to it.

Warmachine doesn't support this style of collection and exploration AT ALL. Not in the rules, not in the products released, and not in the way the players actually engage with the game. It's not enough to simply support small games, small games have to be fun to play and feel worthwhile when you are done. The thing I hate the most are starter sets which don't even let you play the game. If your starter set just has "quick play rules" and two scenarios designed to teach movement and combat, see the $40 rulebook for how to actually play, then I will most likely never move beyond the starter set. My other turn off is $290 starter boxes, so I recognize that sacrifices have to be made - but there's no reason why a starter experience can't be a representative sample of the full game.

A lot of people complain about the lack of 3D terrain in general, as it is. Neoprene mats wouldn't help on this front.

My suggestions were largely about changing Mk3's new player experience. Since the game doesn't really have any 3D terrain rules (I hear Oblivion even removed hills), making the game 3D would probably require a Mk4 rewrite of a lot of the rules.

The War Room 2 costs cover the cost and development of the program, but does allow for the Prime units to be used for free, along with the old as well as current Battlebox models.

War Room charges like $100 to get access to all the cards. I'm not sure how much it cost to develop the program, but given how ubiquitous the program is, I'm sure they could recoup their costs easily for a tenth of the cost. Multiple other games, like Song of Ice and Fire, Infinity, Age of Sigmar, soon 40k 9th, and so on all have free apps with no additional cost for army building and model rules.

Edit: I'm not sure if the Warhammer 40k app will incur no additional costs. It is Games Workshop, after all. But they did say that buying physical books will give you digital versions for free, which is uncharacteristically generous for them.

 Sqorgar wrote:
...

It exists. But in order to play it, you need willing participants. Also consider that there is the Journeyman League which is an option to run.

What is the battle box new player experience? My past experiences with the game were nothing but pressures to build up to a SR full tournament army as soon as humanly possible. That's also the message that Journeyman Leagues send across. "We'll play small games for a bit, but only as long as you are working towards the REAL game".

My personal preference is that I LOVE starter sets. More than anything else. I'd rather have small forces from five or six armies than one static tournament army. In fact, I generally don't work towards tournament level games and instead buy models I like across the whole range and, if I end up sticking with the games long enough, eventually build a full army almost by accident. And it is never tournament competitive, since there was no rhyme or reason to it.

Warmachine doesn't support this style of collection and exploration AT ALL. Not in the rules, not in the products released, and not in the way the players actually engage with the game. It's not enough to simply support small games, small games have to be fun to play and feel worthwhile when you are done. The thing I hate the most are starter sets which don't even let you play the game. If your starter set just has "quick play rules" and two scenarios designed to teach movement and combat, see the $40 rulebook for how to actually play, then I will most likely never move beyond the starter set. My other turn off is $290 starter boxes, so I recognize that sacrifices have to be made - but there's no reason why a starter experience can't be a representative sample of the full game...

To my mind the biggest difficulty with the battle box experience in Warmachine is that there are mechanics and abilities that really don't scale down to small games well, consider feats like Thagrosh1's resurrect-a-heavy, or Ashlynn1's "I hit everything for a turn, you miss everything for a turn", or Caine2's "kill target warcaster". The battle boxes exist to be a subset of the game that is more balanced at 0pts, and it's great as a tutorial experience, but your only available force is this specific list of 3-5 models you've probably played a thousand times before in battle box games because they are the tutorial experience, which is why experienced players are reluctant to go back and play battle box games with newbies except as a tool to teach them how to play the full-sized game. And if you wanted to bring in list-building at 0pts or 15pts or whatever the problem is that warcasters are all balanced around the 50-75pt level, so some spells/feats don't have enough to interact with and don't work properly, and others are wildly overpowered because the tools to deal with it don't exist.

If you wanted to revise Mk.IV to scale down to a starter product better you'd need to do a way bigger/more comprehensive overhaul than either of the edition transitions so far.

Sqorgar wrote:I think non-competitive play needs to start from the new player experience. Once a norm becomes entrenched, you can't look to the people who standardized it for help supplant it.

But who provides the new player experience in the store? The same ones who are the problem.

Sqorgar wrote:What is the battle box new player experience? My past experiences with the game were nothing but pressures to build up to a SR full tournament army as soon as humanly possible. That's also the message that Journeyman Leagues send across. "We'll play small games for a bit, but only as long as you are working towards the REAL game".

Do you have any of the Mk 3 Battleboxes? It comes with a single player tutorial book called Basic Training to use with the materials provided in the box. The provided rulebook provides scenarios to play other players with, including the basic Mangled Metal/Tooth & Claw scenario that is for 0 point games.

You may think that the JML can have a tournament feel, and to be blunt, it is designed to encourage building up an army up to the normal limit that other players play. If YOU (or the hyper-competitive wackjobs in your group) don't consider them real games, the onus is not on Privateer Press, but the individuals involved. After all, EVERY starter set comes with the concept of, this is a small taste, but there are bigger things in store. This isn't an all-in-one board game like Risk you're dealing with here.

Sqorgar wrote:Warmachine doesn't support this style of collection and exploration AT ALL. Not in the rules, not in the products released, and not in the way the players actually engage with the game. It's not enough to simply support small games, small games have to be fun to play and feel worthwhile when you are done. The thing I hate the most are starter sets which don't even let you play the game. If your starter set just has "quick play rules" and two scenarios designed to teach movement and combat, see the $40 rulebook for how to actually play, then I will most likely never move beyond the starter set. My other turn off is $290 starter boxes, so I recognize that sacrifices have to be made - but there's no reason why a starter experience can't be a representative sample of the full game.

You are half right. Most of the players do not engage with the game very much on the narrative, build as you want, style. The Themes are not technically required, but you are hindering yourself against someone who has built their army using them.

Warmachine's Battlebox games are designed to familiarize you with the most unusual aspects of the Warmachine, the Warcaster and the Warjacks. No other tabletop system really utilizes a similar system, but this often gets brushed off. By comparison, unit and solo interactions are relatively simple.

Moving on from there, both Warmachine and Hordes both have a 2 player box which do add units to the list, and there have been All-in-One Army boxes which provided a distinct variety of options, at about $120.

The Oblivion set even comes with a build up campaign which is pretty good, from what I've heard (I don't have a lot of money to toss around, even back then). But again, the problems lie in getting other players to engage. No Quarter had a lot of ways of playing WarmaHordes, but you'd never know it talking to most of the current players, as they are either the die-hard Steamrollers, or were trained by them.

Sqorgar wrote:My suggestions were largely about changing Mk3's new player experience. Since the game doesn't really have any 3D terrain rules (I hear Oblivion even removed hills), making the game 3D would probably require a Mk4 rewrite of a lot of the rules.

Neoprene mats can be expensive, up to the price of the starter box! But the Mk3 Battleboxes do come with a terrain map (albeit one that has a hard time being flat).

Sqorgar wrote:War Room charges like $100 to get access to all the cards. I'm not sure how much it cost to develop the program, but given how ubiquitous the program is, I'm sure they could recoup their costs easily for a tenth of the cost. Multiple other games, like Song of Ice and Fire, Infinity, Age of Sigmar, soon 40k 9th, and so on all have free apps with no additional cost for army building and model rules.

Edit: I'm not sure if the Warhammer 40k app will incur no additional costs. It is Games Workshop, after all. But they did say that buying physical books will give you digital versions for free, which is uncharacteristically generous for them.

War Room 2 is technically a 3rd party application, and if you don't know how much it costs to make, and maintain, a good program, then you shouldn't complain about the costs.

Of course, there is an alternative route, don't buy all the card decks. As it is, I had to buy the Merc Deck twice because it didn't recognize when I bought it for War Room 1, or because they added so much more. As it is, the army builder sucks for Merc Themes because it can't handle how weird they can get. I mostly use it as a collection and army builder app right now because I hate using it for fights.

AnomanderRake wrote:To my mind the biggest difficulty with the battle box experience in Warmachine is that there are mechanics and abilities that really don't scale down to small games well, consider feats like Thagrosh1's resurrect-a-heavy, or Ashlynn1's "I hit everything for a turn, you miss everything for a turn", or Caine2's "kill target warcaster". The battle boxes exist to be a subset of the game that is more balanced at 0pts, and it's great as a tutorial experience, but your only available force is this specific list of 3-5 models you've probably played a thousand times before in battle box games because they are the tutorial experience, which is why experienced players are reluctant to go back and play battle box games with newbies except as a tool to teach them how to play the full-sized game. And if you wanted to bring in list-building at 0pts or 15pts or whatever the problem is that warcasters are all balanced around the 50-75pt level, so some spells/feats don't have enough to interact with and don't work properly, and others are wildly overpowered because the tools to deal with it don't exist.

To be fair, Thagrosh1, Ashlynn1, and Caine2 are technically not supposed to be in Battlebox games any more. Still, it would be nice to have Warcasters and Warlocks be set up for certain levels of play. The Battlebox Controllers get a lot of flack for being worthless, but they are actually pretty decent up to the 25 point mark, which is usually when the JML opens you up to using another Warcaster or Warlock. This would be a good direction for Mk 4 to take in terms of limiting model options, imo.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

To my mind the biggest difficulty with the battle box experience in Warmachine is that there are mechanics and abilities that really don't scale down to small games well, consider feats like Thagrosh1's resurrect-a-heavy, or Ashlynn1's "I hit everything for a turn, you miss everything for a turn", or Caine2's "kill target warcaster". The battle boxes exist to be a subset of the game that is more balanced at 0pts, and it's great as a tutorial experience, but your only available force is this specific list of 3-5 models you've probably played a thousand times before in battle box games because they are the tutorial experience, which is why experienced players are reluctant to go back and play battle box games with newbies except as a tool to teach them how to play the full-sized game. And if you wanted to bring in list-building at 0pts or 15pts or whatever the problem is that warcasters are all balanced around the 50-75pt level, so some spells/feats don't have enough to interact with and don't work properly, and others are wildly overpowered because the tools to deal with it don't exist.

That's why I'm saying that it should be something specific to the battle boxes. If I'm not mistaken, they all have new warcasters created specifically for the boxes, and are generally relatively balanced against each other. So you should be able to create some sort of set of scenarios or a mini-campaign that can make playing just battle boxes fun. I think a starter product should get you about 10 games, at least, and as a new player experience, you want existing players to be able to play with new players without feeling like they are giving up something to do it. Miniature games aren't just about building armies and getting new models - there are gameplay mechanics that can be used to get more out of what you already have (something which most WMH players apparently do not choose to use).

Honestly, I think the thing to look towards is Warcry. It does really well with set warbands. You can mix up the warbands, but the game works fine if you just buy a Warcry box and play it. With the mission and terrain cards, it randomly generates a new scenario with every game, and with a campaign system, you have a reason to play a bunch of games with the same, improving warband.

If you wanted to revise Mk.IV to scale down to a starter product better you'd need to do a way bigger/more comprehensive overhaul than either of the edition transitions so far.

Creating a small point game is a very different thing to having preset battle boxes that you use in interesting ways. There would absolutely have to be additional limitations to army building making only a subset of models available - but if you are playing themes, then you are already on board with something like that.

Moreover, I'm not sure that you'd have to change much. For instance, lower point games make warcasters far too powerful (and killing them an even more dominant strategy). If you just ignored feats, dropped the focus by half, and make it so a caster kill doesn't instantly win the game, you change their relative power to something closer to a strong solo. A few more simple changes to how armies are built (units taken at minimum size, no attachments, make field allowance 1 for everything, no themes, half your points must be warjacks, etc), you can probably make low point games less choked by minmaxing. By using different scenarios with different conditions, you can punish players who build their armies too narrowly, such that minmaxing becomes about building a well rounded army rather than just assassinating warcasters.

WMH players would never go for it (they still complain about themes, even though theme reward you greatly for using them), but that's why you have to start with the new player experience and set early the expectations that WMH is not a single sport, with one set of goals, but more like korean variety show, where one day you are solving a murder mystery and the next playing hide and seek in the national public library.

 Charistoph wrote:
But who provides the new player experience in the store? The same ones who are the problem.

I really think there's two different ways new players come into a miniature game. The first is to be brought in by players at a store, and the other is to pick up a two player starter with a friend and grow from there. I think the goal of making a good battle box game is not just to introduce players at a store, but to give those two people starting it without outside interference a way to get into the game.

My own experience starting Warmachine was before it even launched. We were given a demo game at a con in Orlando. They had tiny little 1'x1' tables with painted miniatures and nicely made terrain to demo the game on, and my wife and I played against each other while someone from PP explained the rules and walked us through it. I don't even think it was a battle box level game. Just a warcaster and one heavy jack. Between the demo tables and the painted models in the glass counter, Warmachine looked absolutely beautiful - when was the last time you heard someone say that? I think we ended joining a mailing list to be informed when the game was actually released.

So we did have a demo game, but it was a few more months before we actually had models in hand, and for the first few months, it was just the two of us painting models and playing. We brought in a few friends too. Unfortunately, my first kid was on the way, and we stopped following the game, but that first year of Warmachine's life, it was a group of 2-4 people playing with minimal models (they weren't many to get early on) - and the game worked like that. When was the last time anyone suggested that you could play Warmachine with a handful of models for months at a time?

I think the new player experience must factor in not just playing in a store, but playing on kitchen tables too.

Sqorgar wrote:Do you have any of the Mk 3 Battleboxes? It comes with a single player tutorial book called Basic Training to use with the materials provided in the box. The provided rulebook provides scenarios to play other players with, including the basic Mangled Metal/Tooth & Claw scenario that is for 0 point games.

I have a few of them, and a few other ones going back to Mk1. The Mk3 ones are a huge improvement. Including tokens and a digest rulebook makes a big difference. I don't remember the Basic Training pamphlet having a bunch of scenarios. It had a few "here's how you move" scenarios, but I don't remember any unique or fun scenarios. But I do remember a pamphlet on your faction with tips on how to expand it.

You may think that the JML can have a tournament feel, and to be blunt, it is designed to encourage building up an army up to the normal limit that other players play. If YOU (or the hyper-competitive wackjobs in your group) don't consider them real games, the onus is not on Privateer Press, but the individuals involved. After all, EVERY starter set comes with the concept of, this is a small taste, but there are bigger things in store. This isn't an all-in-one board game like Risk you're dealing with here.

It's not that I don't consider Journeyman Leagues to be real games, but I just think a new player experience should not immediate require more effort from you. By the time you read the rulebook, assemble (and possibly paint) your models, you should get a few games out of it.

There are a few terrible started games out there. Malifaux 2e and Wrath of Kings' two player starters just did not feel like you could get more than one game out of them before they got old. But Infinity and most GW games feel like two players can start off and have a lot of fun well before you need to branch out. Warcry, for example, can last you dozens or even hundreds of games on just the starter box alone.

Monsterpocalypse, assuming you use two starters, only really feels limited by only have 5 units per side - but not that limited. The game includes two maps and lots of cardboard apartment buildings, taking care of the biggest obstacles to play. It makes it so that every future MonPoc purchase feels like it meaningfully changes the game. That's a very different experience to "here's a taste, but you won't fully experience the game without spending another $600".

Neoprene mats can be expensive, up to the price of the starter box! But the Mk3 Battleboxes do come with a terrain map (albeit one that has a hard time being flat).

Both MonPoc and Riot Quest include paper maps (that are way better than the Mk3 maps, which feels like someone folded a magazine in quarters), but also make neoprene options available. It doesn't have to be neoprene (though it is a huge quality step up from paper), but a variety of map options should be available. I mean, go look at the Riot Quest maps and tell me they don't instantly make the game feel more thematic and interesting.

War Room 2 is technically a 3rd party application, and if you don't know how much it costs to make, and maintain, a good program, then you shouldn't complain about the costs.

I mean, I've developed iOS apps before. The majority of what they are doing in that app - most of which they brought over from War Room 1 - is not particularly challenging stuff, with the biggest challenge being the card images and data, which are most likely supplied by Privateer Press directly. Again, I don't know how much it cost, but I don't think it took more than one or two guys a month to make that. Hell, get me the PP data, and I'll make War Room 3 for free (well, not really, since my developer license expired, but I could do a web version). Problem is, PP doesn't make that data for free. Why should they when they can charge people $100 for it?

Of course, there is an alternative route, don't buy all the card decks.

I personally own models from every faction. If I were going to use War Room, I'd have to buy everything to play everything.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I really think there's two different ways new players come into a miniature game. The first is to be brought in by players at a store, and the other is to pick up a two player starter with a friend and grow from there. I think the goal of making a good battle box game is not just to introduce players at a store, but to give those two people starting it without outside interference a way to get into the game.

My own experience starting Warmachine was before it even launched. We were given a demo game at a con in Orlando. They had tiny little 1'x1' tables with painted miniatures and nicely made terrain to demo the game on, and my wife and I played against each other while someone from PP explained the rules and walked us through it. I don't even think it was a battle box level game. Just a warcaster and one heavy jack. Between the demo tables and the painted models in the glass counter, Warmachine looked absolutely beautiful - when was the last time you heard someone say that? I think we ended joining a mailing list to be informed when the game was actually released.

So we did have a demo game, but it was a few more months before we actually had models in hand, and for the first few months, it was just the two of us painting models and playing. We brought in a few friends too. Unfortunately, my first kid was on the way, and we stopped following the game, but that first year of Warmachine's life, it was a group of 2-4 people playing with minimal models (they weren't many to get early on) - and the game worked like that. When was the last time anyone suggested that you could play Warmachine with a handful of models for months at a time?

I think the new player experience must factor in not just playing in a store, but playing on kitchen tables too.

While it is true that starters should be looking at early development, one can get some variety out of the Battleboxes, and the current battlebox does provide a couple ways of doing that. Furthermore, PP has provided other assets to support them, they just aren't in the initial box, such as the JML first scenario as well as Oblivion's scenario, and there have been a few in No Quarter when it was live (from what I understand).

My brother-in-law and I have had a couple of rumbles with his Trollbloods and my Skorne (I changed up my group based on the Mk1 box for the second go around). His son wanted to join us for the second match so I lended him my Retribution box. My kids have shown an interest, so I got them each their chosen Battlebox, which they then painted up last Fall break. They've shown an interest in D&D, and I've been thinking up a type of D&D style scenario using their models, stats, and the WMH engine to operate the combat scenarios.

So, basically, scenarios are only as limited as the people presenting them.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I have a few of them, and a few other ones going back to Mk1. The Mk3 ones are a huge improvement. Including tokens and a digest rulebook makes a big difference. I don't remember the Basic Training pamphlet having a bunch of scenarios. It had a few "here's how you move" scenarios, but I don't remember any unique or fun scenarios. But I do remember a pamphlet on your faction with tips on how to expand it.

That's because the scenarios are in the rulebook, not the training guide. You may have missed it based on how I said it, as it kind of was tucked in without any capitalization.

 Sqorgar wrote:
It's not that I don't consider Journeyman Leagues to be real games, but I just think a new player experience should not immediate require more effort from you. By the time you read the rulebook, assemble (and possibly paint) your models, you should get a few games out of it.

I won't argue that a couple more scenarios could be added for flavor to the Battleboxes, but I mentioned the JML as an option for a path of bringing a player up to speed. The players get to decide how they proceed, and they even present options on how to slow it down for those who may not be building as quickly. As I mentioned earlier, it also provides a scenario that's in the tournament vein instead of just the smash and grab.

Unfortunately, Warcry is also as much a boardgame as it is a tabletop game. It's not really designed to be expanded beyond its own, so it needs to have more ways to play what's in the box unlike the Battlebox's expectation that you will be building beyond it for future games (aside from new Warbands). Riot Quest is the same way, which is partly why they have those map set ups to work with.

All that being said, I would not be against an array of 5 scenarios in the Training Guide that have the simple Mangled Metal, two tournament scenarios (ala the JML), and two narrative-style scenarios to give new players ideas on what to expect from the game as they build up. Of course, some things would be limited, as units are too expensive for Battleboxes at the moment.

 Sqorgar wrote:

Neoprene mats can be expensive, up to the price of the starter box! But the Mk3 Battleboxes do come with a terrain map (albeit one that has a hard time being flat).

Both MonPoc and Riot Quest include paper maps (that are way better than the Mk3 maps, which feels like someone folded a magazine in quarters), but also make neoprene options available. It doesn't have to be neoprene (though it is a huge quality step up from paper), but a variety of map options should be available. I mean, go look at the Riot Quest maps and tell me they don't instantly make the game feel more thematic and interesting.

I'm not against maps, I'm just saying that the cost of maps should be considered when looking at setting up starter sets, and neoprene ones are just too expensive for that right now.

From there, this is a tabletop game, and that usually means using other things to "create" the terrain, such as using the actual boxes to be buildings or hills (did that with my brother-in-law, actually).

But hey, I've had large collections of maps before, on that old stiff paper, too. Look up the old mapsheets for Battletech. That was my first tabletop game. Talk about your starting hurdles!

 Sqorgar wrote:
I mean, I've developed iOS apps before. The majority of what they are doing in that app - most of which they brought over from War Room 1 - is not particularly challenging stuff, with the biggest challenge being the card images and data, which are most likely supplied by Privateer Press directly. Again, I don't know how much it cost, but I don't think it took more than one or two guys a month to make that. Hell, get me the PP data, and I'll make War Room 3 for free (well, not really, since my developer license expired, but I could do a web version). Problem is, PP doesn't make that data for free. Why should they when they can charge people $100 for it?

My guess is that they are padding for the cost of updating the card database and programs for the Themes as well as providing cloud storage for army lists and collections. While the base program itself could be relatively cheap, the ongoing costs would be my concern on the company's side, so either a subscription system or a higher buy-to-play model would be the options.

I have far more complaints about War Room 2 than the pricing model, though, which is really makes me wonder at its cost (like the inability to do a battle over network).

 Sqorgar wrote:
I personally own models from every faction. If I were going to use War Room, I'd have to buy everything to play everything.

But you don't play everything all the time, right? For those you don't, you don't buy the pack and use the card database. You can still army build with packs you don't own, after all.

 Charistoph wrote:
So, basically, scenarios are only as limited as the people presenting them.

Arguably, that's kind of Warmachine's biggest flaw. That's why I think that broadening the new player experience is how you fight that. The problem is really when certain attitudes become entrenched.

MonPoc 1.0 was a game that had Warmachine's problem of being too tournament focused, but it seems like 2.0 has largely avoided that fate. There's several potential reasons for this. One of the big ones is that early in the lifespan of a product line, the limited number of options make the tournament mindset more difficult. It is hard to minmax when you only have 4 models in your faction (some factions have 1 model). Tournament players are never the early adopters, and they couldn't bring their 1.0 army forward. Couple this with resurrecting a dead game long after the fact, this gave MonPoc 2.0 a chance to push a broader mindset among its players. The Smashville campaign and Monster Mashup coop packs just came out on Friday.

Warmachine has it difficult because the entrenched have all the models already. A new Mk4 version comes out, and they'll try out their favorite army and complain that it isn't as good as it used to be, thus Mk4 is a worse game than Mk3. Worse still, any attempts to expand Mk4 with stuff like Oblivion or the like will be seen as frittering away goodwill, as their army is still bad and they need to fix that flaw before the game adds new content. It's like PP needed to create the CID in order for Mk3 to ever release new models under the guise of a balance pass.

That's why you got to get to the new players. They have no expectation of what the game should be, so you can offer them more potential experiences than the entrenched. And Warmachine is a game which just does not have any new players, period, giving the entrenched even more power over the direction of the game.

I won't argue that a couple more scenarios could be added for flavor to the Battleboxes, but I mentioned the JML as an option for a path of bringing a player up to speed.

I fundamentally reject the premise that Warmachine is not a full experience until you reach 75 pts (or 50 pts). The idea that playing JML is to "bring a player up to speed" is, I think, part of the problem. I think the new player experience of playing a game, getting curb stomped, told what to buy next if they want a chance at winning, and not feeling like they are up to speed until they spend another $500 is a bit of a turn off. It isn't just a Warmachine problem, but I think Warmachine takes it to the extreme edges of the problem. Some games feel like every new purchase fundamentally contributes to their experience, but games like Warmachine make buying those first models into a chore that you have to live through before you are having fun. I think they can do more with the battle box experience without requiring more models to be purchased, or to graduate to units and solos or whatever.

But you don't play everything all the time, right? For those you don't, you don't buy the pack and use the card database. You can still army build with packs you don't own, after all.

I do generally play everything all the time. When I played Mk2, I brought a different army (from a different faction) every week. I hate painting models that are too similar, all in a row. After I painted my Spriggan, the last thing I wanted to do is paint another red model. So what good is using an app for only one or two armies and not the other five or six I have?

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
So, basically, scenarios are only as limited as the people presenting them.

Arguably, that's kind of Warmachine's biggest flaw. That's why I think that broadening the new player experience is how you fight that. The problem is really when certain attitudes become entrenched.

You can have all the scenarios you want in a starter box, but if the people in a meta are determined to go after a competitive mean, they will.

For those outside of a competitive meta, there is still the options and considerations I mentioned. Really you're putting an onus on the wrong group of people at this point, especially when I've said that PP has partially addressed this (though, not as fully or in the formats we might desire).

 Sqorgar wrote:
MonPoc 1.0 was a game that had Warmachine's problem of being too tournament focused, but it seems like 2.0 has largely avoided that fate. There's several potential reasons for this. One of the big ones is that early in the lifespan of a product line, the limited number of options make the tournament mindset more difficult. It is hard to minmax when you only have 4 models in your faction (some factions have 1 model). Tournament players are never the early adopters, and they couldn't bring their 1.0 army forward. Couple this with resurrecting a dead game long after the fact, this gave MonPoc 2.0 a chance to push a broader mindset among its players. The Smashville campaign and Monster Mashup coop packs just came out on Friday.

A poor comparison. MonPoc was a dead game when 2.0 came out. WMH will need to be completely dropped for over 5 years to have a chance of accomplishing this. The alternative is completely dropping every model from the line and starting anew. Talk about developing bad will.

Of course, there is one alternative, and one that I don't see PP doing: Completely drop Steamroller and not introducing any other tournament formats. The problem being is that groups will develop their own format for it, probably based on the last Steamroller packet that was released. Games Workshop hadn't had a tournament packet for years, but we see the ITC and ETC doing it anyway. GW brought out a Matched Play ruleset, but ITC still insists on their FAQs and adjustments despite them.

 Sqorgar wrote:

I won't argue that a couple more scenarios could be added for flavor to the Battleboxes, but I mentioned the JML as an option for a path of bringing a player up to speed.

I fundamentally reject the premise that Warmachine is not a full experience until you reach 75 pts (or 50 pts). The idea that playing JML is to "bring a player up to speed" is, I think, part of the problem. I think the new player experience of playing a game, getting curb stomped, told what to buy next if they want a chance at winning, and not feeling like they are up to speed until they spend another $500 is a bit of a turn off. It isn't just a Warmachine problem, but I think Warmachine takes it to the extreme edges of the problem. Some games feel like every new purchase fundamentally contributes to their experience, but games like Warmachine make buying those first models into a chore that you have to live through before you are having fun. I think they can do more with the battle box experience without requiring more models to be purchased, or to graduate to units and solos or whatever.

I didn't say it was a full experience, I said to bring a player up to speed. Honestly, in order for a true full experience, you should be looking at multi-caster games for that. You also seemed to completely ignore that I agreed that more scenarios could be introduced with the purpose of bring the different facets of tabletop gaming in mind.

That being said, and as I said before, 75 points is right about the upper limit the current system can handle without being too far bogged down, and the game is balanced at that point set. That is why JML has it an end point and Steamrollers operate at that level. It is a good point where you can bring in a good collection of every model type without having to cut yourself off from any specific one.

I enjoyed playing at 25 points, and had people tell me they enjoyed the game at 35 and 50 points, too. Do not think that I am as limited as the Steamrollers. You seem to be, though, in the opposite direction.

 Sqorgar wrote:

But you don't play everything all the time, right? For those you don't, you don't buy the pack and use the card database. You can still army build with packs you don't own, after all.

I do generally play everything all the time. When I played Mk2, I brought a different army (from a different faction) every week. I hate painting models that are too similar, all in a row. After I painted my Spriggan, the last thing I wanted to do is paint another red model. So what good is using an app for only one or two armies and not the other five or six I have?

I don't see how having armies to paint and armies you play equate to the same thing. I have 7 Battleboxes in my garage specifically so people can have options to try the game out with (2 of which are my children's), but the only ones I want to play with any regularity are Mercenaries and Skorne, which are the only decks I have. And even then, 5-6 packs cost less than all of them. While more expensive in the long run, it is easier to handle buying the packs of what you actively play rather than everything you own.

 Charistoph wrote:

You can have all the scenarios you want in a starter box, but if the people in a meta are determined to go after a competitive mean, they will.

I don't think the meta applies to new players. Most of them want to try out a new game, not invest in it fully. I don't think most players are planning out their next two dozen purchases after a single game.

And I think Warmachine has a lack of new players coming in, or at least staying in, and I think addressing the new player experience is probably pretty important to keeping Warmachine successful over the long haul. And since I can't convince tournament players to not be tournament players, I don't think we can ever address the albatross hanging around the neck of WMH directly. Instead, we create a welcoming, fun experience that players can have with minimal investment that doesn't unnecessarily push them towards tournament play before their first game.

A poor comparison. MonPoc was a dead game when 2.0 came out. WMH will need to be completely dropped for over 5 years to have a chance of accomplishing this. The alternative is completely dropping every model from the line and starting anew. Talk about developing bad will.

I don't think we need to go that far. I really think keeping new players will solve the problem. A rising tide raises all boats, as they say. It will be an uphill battle digging out the entrenched norms, but you don't have to get rid of it, just make it one voice of many.

GW did a really genius thing when they came up with that "Three Ways to Play" thing, but made a crucial mistake. It is good to remind people that tournament play is but one way to play the game, and that there are other equally valid ways to play. But I don't think GW managed to identify and codify the right three ways to play. Match play is the only one which is remotely accurate, with narrative and open play being so broad and eclectic as to be practically worthless as categories.

I enjoyed playing at 25 points, and had people tell me they enjoyed the game at 35 and 50 points, too. Do not think that I am as limited as the Steamrollers. You seem to be, though, in the opposite direction.

To be specific here, I'm talking about the new player experience, which I think you'll agree, isn't an appropriate place for Streamroller-style play, or even 25-50 pt games. I want new players to start the game, I want them to enjoy their first games, and I want them to stick around when those games are over. That's what happened to me with Mk1, but I had the exact opposite experience with Mk2.

I WANT to like Warmachine. I have fond memories of its early days. It was literally my first miniatures game. How can Warmachine turn away an eager and determined player, high on nostalgia and hype? It's the weirdest thing, but it did. It didn't just turn me away, at times, it felt like it actively hated me. It's so weird because I've never experienced that with another miniature game (40k players have been less than welcoming, but the game itself is overly welcoming... to those with money).

I don't see how having armies to paint and armies you play equate to the same thing.

Why not? I enjoy painting and I enjoy playing. When I play, I want to paint, and when I paint, I want to play. I get a new model, I want to both paint and play. It's all one experience for me. I don't even stick to one game.

While more expensive in the long run, it is easier to handle buying the packs of what you actively play rather than everything you own.

I want to play with everything I own, which is why I own it. War Room 2 is just not a welcoming way to manage the game for me, and feels like it is actively punishing people for going outside their designated lines. If you play 3 factions, War Room 2 costs more than if you play 2 factions. I own and would play 8 factions (not including a few mercenaries), and if I come back to the game, I would probably add Circle and Infernals to the list too, because I like the models and that's what drives me. Using War Room is now prohibitively expensive because, instead of having a lot of models from one faction, I have few models from every faction.

It only adds insult to injury that cards are available for free online, while stupidly expensive for War Room - how hard would it be to have an app which literally just downloads the cards you want from PP's website, stores them offline, and cuts them out into virtual cards that you can flip through and write on with a virtual marker?

I had WarRoom2 for Mk2 and so got something of a discount when Mk3 came around. I paid at the start of Mk3 and have had every card and update for free since. So i feel like i have got my money out of it over the last few years.

However.........

I also play Malifaux and the app for that is free and provides all the functions that Warrom does but for Malifaux. Its mostly without bug, works smoothly. And its free..... As are the companion apps for things like Infinity and other such games. Just a sign of how PP has become out of touch.

I really LOVE WM/H. And we have been able to get some new players into our basement group. But that because we are VERY casual with it and are all happy playing smaller point games and to teach. or to play the Oblivion campaign or scenarios over a beer rather than grinding for the next SR, 2 list pairing win. And we had some armies kicking about that people who have left the game just left us without any attempt to sell or recoop money.

Right now, I would struggle to recommend that a persons invests into WM/H in a big way over say, Malifaux due to the direction of the community and the company. Or at least I would make sure that they know what they were getting into.

Im really hot and cold on PP. Hot on the game and rules, cold on the companies strategy and direction. Also wary of much of the communities focus and direction.

Sunno, what kind of device do you have or use? Finding a list of supported devices for War Room 2 is a nightmare, I just know that while they will take my money, I cannot get the most recent updates on my Kindle.

 Sqorgar wrote:
War Room charges like $100 to get access to all the cards. I'm not sure how much it cost to develop the program, but given how ubiquitous the program is, I'm sure they could recoup their costs easily for a tenth of the cost. Multiple other games, like Song of Ice and Fire, Infinity, Age of Sigmar, soon 40k 9th, and so on all have free apps with no additional cost for army building and model rules.

Edit: I'm not sure if the Warhammer 40k app will incur no additional costs. It is Games Workshop, after all. But they did say that buying physical books will give you digital versions for free, which is uncharacteristically generous for them.

Age of Sigmar definitely isn't free. It feels like it is, but you need to buy something if you want to know what the relics and spells and battlegroups do. For the sake of completion, Malfaux and Guild Ball also have excellent 1st party apps.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Charistoph wrote:

The odd thing is, Privateer Press has supported non-competitive avenues of play. There has been numerous narrative campaigns, including one where the development of a single solo was determined by the players. From what I understand, the Oblivion campaign even has a developing campaign which was very good.

It's worth noting that PP has ALWAYS supported these things. I've run them from years with the associated prize support and the works. The problem has just been that nobody really seems to like playing the game that way. Even my group of players that insist the game is too competitive and that we need to run these things sputter out around the second week and go back to Steamroller.

I think it comes back to the primary issue with the game. It takes a lot of effort to get a good tense game. Those games are an absolutely spectacular experience, but it takes thousands of games to weed out all the one sided blowouts and get a force that really works. There's just too much stuff, both for players and PP itself, and while there's vastly more options that are competitive than most players believe, few players are willing to stomp through the weeds to figure it out on their own.

 LunarSol wrote:

Age of Sigmar definitely isn't free. It feels like it is, but you need to buy something if you want to know what the relics and spells and battlegroups do.

Fair enough, though all the unit warscrolls are free in it. At the very least, you can browse what they do, so you can plan future purchases or check what a new model your opponent puts on the table does. But the AoS app is not great, and there are much better examples.

By the time they really supported casual play, they'd already driven away casual players.

And don't start with battle boxes, those are the biggest misleading representation of Warmachine in existence.

But, Mk4 is already here, it's called Warcaster, and you can expect changes from that to trickle into Warmachine if it turns out to be a success.

 Vertrucio wrote:
By the time they really supported casual play, they'd already driven away casual players.

I didn't play in MK1, but the entirety of MK2 had at least one often 2-3 narrative league events a year with unique prize support that were definitely not aimed at the competitive crowd. PP always supported it, the community just didn't. Why that is is worth a discussion, but the support has always been there.

 LunarSol wrote:
I didn't play in MK1, but the entirety of MK2 had at least one often 2-3 narrative league events a year with unique prize support that were definitely not aimed at the competitive crowd. PP always supported it, the community just didn't. Why that is is worth a discussion, but the support has always been there.

They supported it in Mk1 as well. If I remember correctly, the second book they released (Escalation, maybe?) spent about half the book dedicated to a campaign.

As far as I'm concerned, not doing the book releases anymore was the big change in the game. Part of it was, they started releasing the units before the books, so for competitive players, there was little worthwhile for when the books were actually released. And I think they probably thought No Quarter was an acceptable substitute for getting content out to players (good luck trying to find the back issue that had the one alternate play mode that you want, much less a new player knowing that it exists). I think they spread themselves too thin and diluted their messaging to potential players, leaving only competitive content readily accessible.

Sqorgar wrote:I don't think the meta applies to new players. Most of them want to try out a new game, not invest in it fully. I don't think most players are planning out their next two dozen purchases after a single game.

Unless you have no meta, they will always apply to new players. They will be the ones playing all the fancy toys in engaging ways to attract new players in the first place. They will largely be the ones to train new players and help them learn how to play the game.

So, trying to ignore the meta (aka the local groups) would actually not work. The hard part is getting the meta to engage in the new player experience, but far too many of them can't or won't. And I'm speaking from a "new player" position. While I have collected for some time now, the number of actual games has been remarkably low. I'm just more in the know of the past than the average "new player".

This albatross NEEDS to be addressed and considered when creating the new player experience. Without addressing it, the new player situation will never change until the game dies.

Sqorgar wrote:I don't think we need to go that far. I really think keeping new players will solve the problem. A rising tide raises all boats, as they say. It will be an uphill battle digging out the entrenched norms, but you don't have to get rid of it, just make it one voice of many.

GW did a really genius thing when they came up with that "Three Ways to Play" thing, but made a crucial mistake. It is good to remind people that tournament play is but one way to play the game, and that there are other equally valid ways to play. But I don't think GW managed to identify and codify the right three ways to play. Match play is the only one which is remotely accurate, with narrative and open play being so broad and eclectic as to be practically worthless as categories.

It really wasn't that genius when you consider the fact that they've always existed and it was something that had been talked about numerous times on numerous forums (including their own when they existed). You want to know what the other funny thing is, even though a lot of people TALK about wanting the different ways to play (which actually was just different ways of creating your army, actually), they almost always go back to doing Matched Play here in the States or using TC rules if there is something coming up. This is why it is such an Albatross on the neck of the game.

Age of Sigmar (which was the alpha ruleset for 40K 8th Edition, really) pretty much didn't exist here until the points in the first General's Handbook came out. You know the point values which are used to create armies for Matched Play? The only reason other people even knew it existed is the old Fantasy Battle people were using 9th Age more than they ever used Fantasy Battles!

Sqorgar wrote:To be specific here, I'm talking about the new player experience, which I think you'll agree, isn't an appropriate place for Streamroller-style play, or even 25-50 pt games. I want new players to start the game, I want them to enjoy their first games, and I want them to stick around when those games are over. That's what happened to me with Mk1, but I had the exact opposite experience with Mk2.

I know you are talking about the NPE and not the Steamroller, which is why I said you are in the opposite direction. Part of the problem is that the Steamroller is as much a part of the full WMH experience as the Battlebox, Oblivion, and Company of Iron options are. Just as the Steamroller-exclusive players are ignoring those other aspects, you are ignoring everything but the Battlebox.

The NPE NEEDS to consider the possibility that the new player wants to build up to Steamroller. To which we point them towards the JML. The new player may just want to fiddle around with the Battlebox till they get the Warcaster/Warlord mechanics down, which is fine, and the meta needs to help them. The new player may want to work with just the story, so I'd direct them to the Oblivion campaign, which does have scenarios at the low model count level. And others may not want to fiddle with Focus and Fury, and just play with units, to which we would direct them to Company of Iron.

The problem is getting the local groups to support these initiatives, and frankly, most are too small and locked in to their Steamroller to move past it.

Sqorgar wrote:I WANT to like Warmachine. I have fond memories of its early days. It was literally my first miniatures game. How can Warmachine turn away an eager and determined player, high on nostalgia and hype? It's the weirdest thing, but it did. It didn't just turn me away, at times, it felt like it actively hated me. It's so weird because I've never experienced that with another miniature game (40k players have been less than welcoming, but the game itself is overly welcoming... to those with money).

You've never had to argue on how Independent Characters work, have you? I've even had arguments on how Flying Monstrous Creatures were different from Flying Vehicles! This is because the rules were bogus.

Sqorgar wrote:

I don't see how having armies to paint and armies you play equate to the same thing.

Why not? I enjoy painting and I enjoy playing. When I play, I want to paint, and when I paint, I want to play. I get a new model, I want to both paint and play. It's all one experience for me. I don't even stick to one game.

I know a lot of people who collect just to paint. So just saying you're buying to paint doesn't necessarily mean that you are buying to play. I like how Circle and Legion models look, but I don't like their play style (give me my hephalumps and woosels in Skorne, any day). So, I would collect them and paint them, but I probably won't PLAY with them outside of the Battlebox experience.

Sqorgar wrote:It only adds insult to injury that cards are available for free online, while stupidly expensive for War Room - how hard would it be to have an app which literally just downloads the cards you want from PP's website, stores them offline, and cuts them out into virtual cards that you can flip through and write on with a virtual marker?

So make it. As I said, the costs of War Room aren't all in card system itself, but the cloud it maintains. It used to have a battle feature, too, but I could never get it to work, and apparently, they had a hard time, too, as they dropped its online battle function.

Vertrucio wrote:By the time they really supported casual play, they'd already driven away casual players.

Not really. There were a lot of casual play options in Mk2, and most of the casual players in my group were driven away by the Themepocalypse of Mk 3. They either went back to SimpleHammer 40K or off to X-Wing. Heck, a lot of the competitive players ran off to X-Wing, including one person who particularly enjoyed not having to paint the models.

Vertrucio wrote:And don't start with battle boxes, those are the biggest misleading representation of Warmachine in existence.

I rather disagree. It's meant to be a training ground for WMH's unique system. Company of Iron certainly doesn't do it, that's for sure.

Vertrucio wrote:But, Mk4 is already here, it's called Warcaster, and you can expect changes from that to trickle into Warmachine if it turns out to be a success.

Not quite. I don't see them getting rid of the Warcaster or Warlock piece from the table. I can't say much more about it, as I haven't perused the rules too much, but I don't think we'll be teleporting units and Warjacks on to the table as a side note.

Sqorgar wrote:As far as I'm concerned, not doing the book releases anymore was the big change in the game. Part of it was, they started releasing the units before the books, so for competitive players, there was little worthwhile for when the books were actually released. And I think they probably thought No Quarter was an acceptable substitute for getting content out to players (good luck trying to find the back issue that had the one alternate play mode that you want, much less a new player knowing that it exists). I think they spread themselves too thin and diluted their messaging to potential players, leaving only competitive content readily accessible.

Not really. They did a book release at the beginning of Mk 3, but nobody was buying them because people were already starting to drop out of the game. Same thing happened to the No Quarter magazine which held a lot of that narrative options, which went down from a monthly release to a quarterly release, and then was just stopped. I think they're still trying to figure out how to monetize such options, or they are limiting them to model releases.

Themepocalypse was what did it for most of the people I know of, and the reason for that was that it seemed to double down on what nearly killed 40K in 7th Edtion: the Themes were the same as Formations, offering free models and "forcing" people to build a certain way. If they were just left to helpful guides in collection, it may have not been so bad, but the added special rules and models without points were the clinchers.

40K 8th Edition did away with all of 7th Edition's Formations and free models and restructured army building to be a more simple system. They've made adjustments which are almost Themelike since then, interestingly enough. You don't have to build a certain way, but you gain access to an army's special rules and Strategems if you do. This right here is what PP needs to consider for the next Mark release as well as army size and how heavy of a ruleset they want to roll with.

It's a shame No Quarter Prime didn't work out. It was a really excellent publication better in step with the way models were actually released. As much as people liked the books they got stuck making promises that Chinese manufacturing often failed to keep. A lot of stuff in them came out 2+ years after the rules were first spoiled if it was made out of plastic.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In terms of new players, I honestly thought the theme boxes were a good idea, but they just couldn't revamp their product line around them effectively. I think we got like 2-3 before they gave up on them, though its worth noting how much better the design worked as starter boxes for the limited factions. I'd love it if everyone could get a box set like Grymkin/Crucible Guard/Infernals.

 Charistoph wrote:
Unless you have no meta, they will always apply to new players. They will be the ones playing all the fancy toys in engaging ways to attract new players in the first place. They will largely be the ones to train new players and help them learn how to play the game.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think every new player enters a game via a grognard, and I think we can reach those players before community standards get to them.

It really wasn't that genius when you consider the fact that they've always existed and it was something that had been talked about numerous times on numerous forums (including their own when they existed).

The genius part was codifying it into the game, thus forever ending the argument over who "owns" the game. I can remember seeing multiple Warmachine discussions which basically amounted to "this is a competitive game, and people who don't want to be competitive, get out" (spoiler alert: they did).

You want to know what the other funny thing is, even though a lot of people TALK about wanting the different ways to play (which actually was just different ways of creating your army, actually), they almost always go back to doing Matched Play here in the States or using TC rules if there is something coming up.

I feel this is the case for the larger games, mainly because tournaments tend to be such visible parts of the overall community. It is used for advice on how to build armies, what armies are good, whether the game is balanced or not, etc.

But I think smaller games without much of a tournament scene do not greatly suffer the tournament mindset (for obvious reasons). Also, campaign games like Frostgrave and Necromunda intentionally eschew minmaxing because it ruins the experience. And I think Warcry is probably more narrative than matched due to matched play being an intentionally restricted, lesser version of the game. Kill Team, however, went full competitive almost instantly due to the narrative elements being so slight and inconsequential.

Just as the Steamroller-exclusive players are ignoring those other aspects, you are ignoring everything but the Battlebox.

Well, yeah. I think the unfortunate transition to SR-exclusive player happens before the buy their first non-battle box model. Those first few games are going to be formative, and if they spend them hearing the typical Warmachine advice of "you'll lose your first 10 games", "you will lose if you don't build your army right", "the game is only balanced for 75 pts", or "we won't play anything but SR", they are quickly going to take on idea that SR is the only way to play. But if those first few games are done with "play a few games of this, then try maybe adding a unit or switching out a warcaster", or "there's plenty to enjoy at all point levels", or "buy the models you like, play the way you like"...

I know a lot of people who collect just to paint. So just saying you're buying to paint doesn't necessarily mean that you are buying to play. I like how Circle and Legion models look, but I don't like their play style (give me my hephalumps and woosels in Skorne, any day). So, I would collect them and paint them, but I probably won't PLAY with them outside of the Battlebox experience.

I like variety. I'm, I guess you could say, an explorer. I want to do everything once, nothing twice. The more factions I have, the more variety of games I can experience.

 carldooley wrote:
Sunno, what kind of device do you have or use? Finding a list of supported devices for War Room 2 is a nightmare, I just know that while they will take my money, I cannot get the most recent updates on my Kindle.

I have a Samsung tablet and a Smartphone. Its run fine on there. There was the issue late last year i think where lots of devices couldn't update so i was stuck without warroom for weeks. But apart from that its work "fine". Is it as good as other apps? No. But this far into Mk3, with all the CID and releases, I feel like iv got my money from it. Rather than having to download and print cards all the time.

I felt for my friend who bought the Khador card deck at the launch of Mk3 only to have lots of it change shortly after....

 Sqorgar wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I think the fact that "bland terrain rules" was possibly the most complained-about part of 8e could have something to do with it.

I’d sooner believe that GW did something to sell more product than them actually listening to their customers. If they really listened to their customers, they would lower prices rather than increasing them by 20% multiple times a year.

(I think Privateer Press’ prices are too high too)

It's one thing listening on rules for terrain where changing only helps selling more terrain than listening where profits would drop. DUCY?

 Sqorgar wrote:
Well, yeah. I think the unfortunate transition to SR-exclusive player happens before the buy their first non-battle box model. Those first few games are going to be formative, and if they spend them hearing the typical Warmachine advice of "you'll lose your first 10 games", "you will lose if you don't build your army right", "the game is only balanced for 75 pts", or "we won't play anything but SR", they are quickly going to take on idea that SR is the only way to play. But if those first few games are done with "play a few games of this, then try maybe adding a unit or switching out a warcaster", or "there's plenty to enjoy at all point levels", or "buy the models you like, play the way you like"...

I feel like this is where the community skips a few steps in logic and ends up missing the problem. I actually kind of agree with some of these statements like "the game is only balanced for 75 pts", or "we won't play anything but SR" but the why matters. Players think this way because most of them started out with more of the "play a few games of this, then try maybe adding a unit or switching out a warcaster", or "there's plenty to enjoy at all point levels", or "buy the models you like, play the way you like" kind of experiences and they learn a few truths the lead to those conclusions, but aren't quite right. I think the real issue is the following:

"The game is only balanced for scenario"
"The only balanced scenarios are in SR"
"The scenarios in SR only really work at 75 points"

I think only the first statement there HAS to be true, but the second and third are issues PP needs to address. I think they're aware of it too. Hungerford strongly considered making the new SR packet 50 points instead of 75, but asked on Facebook and the community rioted, as the Warmachine community has essentially determined is their default state these days.

 LunarSol wrote:

"The game is only balanced for scenario"
"The only balanced scenarios are in SR"
"The scenarios in SR only really work at 75 points"

I think only the first statement there HAS to be true, but the second and third are issues PP needs to address.

Well, I don't think the first HAS to be true. I think balance naturally formulates around the goal or goals. So, if your goal is to kill a caster or table your opponent, the value of things that directly contributes to that goal changes compared to if your goal is to hold an objective or to defend against respawning enemies. Because tournaments were primarily driven by SR at 75 pts, that's where the balance was most obviously identified, codified, and reinforced. The CID is primarily driven by tournaments, isn't it?

That's not to say that the game isn't balanced at 50 points with narrative scenarios - it's just that there isn't enough experience with 50 pt narrative scenarios to be able to identify when it is or isn't balanced. Narrative scenarios tend not to be balanced by design, and if people immediately glom onto this fact, it may set up sour expectations that prevents them from playing the scenario multiple times. The end result is that they gravitate towards the existing balanced equilibrium and avoid the stuff that they see as inferior by example.

I hate to keep bringing up Warcry, but the scenario generation tools that it has can create extremely unbalanced, one sided scenarios. That's okay, because there is little penalty for losing and you can still gain glory points for losing, but if you worship at the altar of perfect balance and think winning is the only reason to play a game, that can be quite frustrating. And we saw that, as competitive players were outright offended by Warcry's balance. I haven't checked in a few months, but I doubt the competitive players have taken over that game by now.

Maybe what Warmachine needs most is a reason to lose. Some way to make the game rewarding, even in the face of a second turn caster kill. New players, especially, will lose a lot of early games in a spectacularly frustrating way. It's really difficult to get over the feeling of hopelessness that engenders. Maybe I'll add "losing should be fun too" to the list of messages new players should hear, and old players should work towards.

I think they're aware of it too. Hungerford strongly considered making the new SR packet 50 points instead of 75, but asked on Facebook and the community rioted, as the Warmachine community has essentially determined is their default state these days.

That's interesting, and kind of depressing, but not surprising. If I'm not mistaken, Hungerford is relatively new to being the primary lead on Warmachine (I watched a warcaster interview where he said something to that effect), and I think it is interesting that he even dared broach the topic with the players. That actually gives me a little hope.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Well, I don't think the first HAS to be true. I think balance naturally formulates around the goal or goals. So, if your goal is to kill a caster or table your opponent, the value of things that directly contributes to that goal changes compared to if your goal is to hold an objective or to defend against respawning enemies. Because tournaments were primarily driven by SR at 75 pts, that's where the balance was most obviously identified, codified, and reinforced. The CID is primarily driven by tournaments, isn't it?

The game definitely needs an element of scenario to force engagement. The game does well with limited ranges, but not so well that kiting won't win games in the long run without the need to move towards the center. Caine1 remains completely capable of tabling an army on his own without at least killbox in play. A great many games of the past have relied on the good faith of players to attack one another, but they pretty much all far apart as soon as someone realizes they can just move backwards.

 Sqorgar wrote:

I hate to keep bringing up Warcry, but the scenario generation tools that it has can create extremely unbalanced, one sided scenarios. That's okay, because there is little penalty for losing and you can still gain glory points for losing, but if you worship at the altar of perfect balance and think winning is the only reason to play a game, that can be quite frustrating. And we saw that, as competitive players were outright offended by Warcry's balance. I haven't checked in a few months, but I doubt the competitive players have taken over that game by now.

There's zero penalty for losing in Warmachine. There's zero reward for winning as well. It's all a question of what value you ascribe to it. I think the primary distinction is investment. Warcry's investment is incredibly low in terms of model purchases, hobby time and play time. Those are the things you can feel like you "lost" to a game and Warmachine can definitely demand a lot of all of those things with low odds of success if that's your primary goal. I haven't played a lot of Warcry, but my intro game could have literally been "roll 4d6 at the start of the game to find out there was no way to win" which I found.... kind of insulting, but its a quick game with cool models that I painted over a weekend and got to do cool, if inconsequential things with, so.... whatever; I'd play again, even if there's other games I'd rather focus on. I don't really feel bad losing in Warmachine either exactly, but an army is a good months worth of work that requires dedicated transportation to set up and play all night to the point where even if a game ends early, people rarely want to try again.

I think there's a LOT to gain from 50 point games. I've certainly tried to drag things in that direction but I keep running into the scenario problem. In an attempt to keep them meaningful, they've just kept spreading them wider and making ignoring them more costly. That's fine at 75 points, but when you play 50 there's just not enough stuff on the table to interact with it all, and one side quickly collapses and can't recover. Smaller, simpler scenarios with more impactful terrain would do the game a world of good.

 Sqorgar wrote:
...I hate to keep bringing up Warcry, but the scenario generation tools that it has can create extremely unbalanced, one sided scenarios. That's okay, because there is little penalty for losing and you can still gain glory points for losing, but if you worship at the altar of perfect balance and think winning is the only reason to play a game, that can be quite frustrating. And we saw that, as competitive players were outright offended by Warcry's balance. I haven't checked in a few months, but I doubt the competitive players have taken over that game by now...

I think the competitive players realized they could predict with 100% accuracy who would win based on forces and mission, got bored, and decided to go play something else.

 LunarSol wrote:
There's zero penalty for losing in Warmachine.

As someone who had to sit there with nothing to do for 15 minutes while my opponent just decimated my units on the second turn, I beg to differ. At the very least, when the game is that one sided, it feels like a complete waste of time, is not fun, and you don't even walk away having learned anything or gotten better at the game.

Even more than that, there should be tangible benefits for playing a game in which you lose - especially for a game in which you will lose A LOT during that crucial early learning stage where you are still deciding whether the game is fun or not. Yeah, the grognards could handicap themselves to make it easier for the newbie to win, but I've seen plenty of discussions back over on Lormahordes that indicate to me that this is not on the table. Having tangible benefits for loss doesn't just benefit the newbies, but also gives the grognards a reason to go easy on the newbies, even losing on occasion.

There's zero reward for winning as well.

I think we both know that's not true, or do you not consider the social or self esteem rewards for being seen as the better player? WMH players, being rather competitive, tend to tier themselves based on winning games - so much so that they ultimately believe that bullying new players is an appropriate behavior. I don't really believe in the tyranny of meritocracy, but WMH does present a compelling case for it.

I haven't played a lot of Warcry, but my intro game could have literally been "roll 4d6 at the start of the game to find out there was no way to win" which I found.... kind of insulting...

In my experience, it may seem like that, but because the game has really swingy dice rolls and unpredictable tactics, there's almost always a way to win. It might be unlikely, but it is more like a 15% chance to win rather than a 0% chance. I've definitely lost games that I thought were impossible to lose, and I've won games that seemed impossible to win.

(It's also worth noting that Warcry's system is a simple variation of the one that is used in RuneWars and Star Wars Legion. I'm not sure why Warcry gets singled out here, except that the terrain is also randomly chosen)

As far as rewarding a loss, with the campaign mode, you still move forward, even when you lose. You get the most glory points for winning a match, but you also get them for killing the enemy leader, killing half his models, and even just showing up to play or fighting a battle against a stronger opponent. You won't progress as quickly or efficiently without winning, but you'll get there in the end. You only technically need to win three specific battles to complete a campaign, but those are explicitly shown to you beforehand, so you can army build and plan accordingly.

I think there's a LOT to gain from 50 point games. I've certainly tried to drag things in that direction but I keep running into the scenario problem. In an attempt to keep them meaningful, they've just kept spreading them wider and making ignoring them more costly.

Not being a master tactician at Warmachine, I can only guess at how random warcaster abilities would screw everything up at the most inopportune times. I'd probably focus on scenarios that work most of the time, knowing that some segment of Warmachine players would find that very, very offensive. And this may be obvious, but have you considered reducing the size of the table to 3'x3' or smaller?

Smaller, simpler scenarios with more impactful terrain would do the game a world of good.

I think having decent terrain rules would help with that. I think that, like 40k, being a large scale unit-based game, having strong terrain rules might bog the game down too much - but with minimal terrain rules, you get the problem of nobody really having interesting tables filled with any terrain. If you shrink the game down, maybe to 50 pts or 35 pts or whatever, it'll make more complicated terrain into something timely and fun. So you don't get terrain unless you drop the points, but you can't drop the points without better terrain. Catch 22.

Sqorgar wrote:I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think every new player enters a game via a grognard, and I think we can reach those players before community standards get to them.

And I'm not saying that new players only get in to the game via a grognard, but I am saying that there are quite a few that do, and ignoring that would be just as much a detriment as it would be ignoring the new players starting in a vacuum. That's something you do not seem willing to consider or acknowledge.

Sqorgar wrote:The genius part was codifying it into the game, thus forever ending the argument over who "owns" the game. I can remember seeing multiple Warmachine discussions which basically amounted to "this is a competitive game, and people who don't want to be competitive, get out" (spoiler alert: they did).

Then you, like the Steamrollers, have both missed out on the aspects that they are just as codified in Warmachine, and far better, too, imo. You also missed a considerable point in what I said. It doesn't matter that they codified it when everything else is ignored in favor of the Matched Play/Tournament Circuit/Steamroller by the people playing it.

Sqorgar wrote:But I think smaller games without much of a tournament scene do not greatly suffer the tournament mindset (for obvious reasons). Also, campaign games like Frostgrave and Necromunda intentionally eschew minmaxing because it ruins the experience. And I think Warcry is probably more narrative than matched due to matched play being an intentionally restricted, lesser version of the game. Kill Team, however, went full competitive almost instantly due to the narrative elements being so slight and inconsequential.

I think it it is more the fact that the people who organize most of the tournaments also play Kill Team and avoided Warcry because they organized a lot of 40K games and saw it as competitive while they haven't done so for Age of Sigmar, or even Fantasy Battles for even longer.

Sqorgar wrote:Well, yeah. I think the unfortunate transition to SR-exclusive player happens before the buy their first non-battle box model. Those first few games are going to be formative, and if they spend them hearing the typical Warmachine advice of "you'll lose your first 10 games", "you will lose if you don't build your army right", "the game is only balanced for 75 pts", or "we won't play anything but SR", they are quickly going to take on idea that SR is the only way to play. But if those first few games are done with "play a few games of this, then try maybe adding a unit or switching out a warcaster", or "there's plenty to enjoy at all point levels", or "buy the models you like, play the way you like"...

I wouldn't bet on that, necessarily. There are quite a few people who get in to the game with the goal of getting in to tournaments, and that is before they buy their first model, starter or not. I have literally seen a player introducing a player playing his 3rd or 4th game as a Steamroller, but he indicated that is what he was seeking to get in to.

Of course, when I played those 25 point games last year, we were playing Steamroller scenarios (because that is how the maps were laid out for earlier games), and it was hard to get around some of the limitations involved. Those scenarios weren't designed for the limited model count of 25 points, but the extensive groups of model availability that 75 points operates at.

Currently, if you want scenarios optimized for fewer models, one needs to look up old No Quarter magazines, JML, or look in to the Oblivion scenarios.

AnomanderRake wrote:I think the competitive players realized they could predict with 100% accuracy who would win based on forces and mission, got bored, and decided to go play something else.

I've seen people do this with Warhammer and Warmachine, so I don't think it is that unique to Warcry.

 Charistoph wrote:

AnomanderRake wrote:I think the competitive players realized they could predict with 100% accuracy who would win based on forces and mission, got bored, and decided to go play something else.

I've seen people do this with Warhammer and Warmachine, so I don't think it is that unique to Warcry.

Not unique, certainly, but in my experience it's a rarer phenomenon in Warhammer/Warmachine usually based on a specific matchup going one way (and is almost totally eliminated by the two-list competitive standard in Warmachine), while with Warcry it's every single game because of how little it's possible to compensate for a bad matchup or unfavorable mission.

 Sqorgar wrote:

I haven't played a lot of Warcry, but my intro game could have literally been "roll 4d6 at the start of the game to find out there was no way to win" which I found.... kind of insulting...

In my experience, it may seem like that, but because the game has really swingy dice rolls and unpredictable tactics, there's almost always a way to win. It might be unlikely, but it is more like a 15% chance to win rather than a 0% chance. I've definitely lost games that I thought were impossible to lose, and I've won games that seemed impossible to win.

I had to defend a point for 4 turns, getting D6 points -1 for each enemy model on the point, winning if I got at least 12. I tabled my opponent by the end of turn 3 without him getting a single model to the objective, and rolled 3, 3, 4, 1 at the end of my turns. Again, I'm not really complaining; my opponent actually conceded when he was out of models, but I wanted to roll it out when I realized I could still lose and had a good laugh at that single pip. I had a lot of fun with the game and its quick and easy to just play again, but it was also jarring to realize that my decision making had zero affect on the outcome.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
...I hate to keep bringing up Warcry, but the scenario generation tools that it has can create extremely unbalanced, one sided scenarios. That's okay, because there is little penalty for losing and you can still gain glory points for losing, but if you worship at the altar of perfect balance and think winning is the only reason to play a game, that can be quite frustrating. And we saw that, as competitive players were outright offended by Warcry's balance. I haven't checked in a few months, but I doubt the competitive players have taken over that game by now...

I think the competitive players realized they could predict with 100% accuracy who would win based on forces and mission, got bored, and decided to go play something else.

Not to thread-jack, but it occurred to me that campaign rewards would be better in wargames in general if they were generated by actions that were at a tangent to actions that help win individual games.

I'm actually really interested in seeing how the Monsterpocalypse campaign set turns out. Tying the campaign to base building seems like it works surprisingly well in a system that doesn't seem like it would be an obvious fit for a campaign.

I’d just like to see availability of their product again.
Nothing new has been available at any of my usual places of purchase, so even if there was a MK4, it would be nigh impossible to find up here.
The shipping to anywhere but in the US being reasonable has stifled PPs ability to capture very much interest outside the US market these days, what with almost their entire product line only being available direct.
I have yet to see anything besides the two initial starters for MonPoc, and have yet to see anything at all up here with regard to Riot Quest.

So before there is even a MK4, PP needs to do something about their availability, or at the least provide better and cheaper shipping options. Because right now I have no desire to seek out anything from them due to the scarcity of the product.
And I’m only looking to play stuff with my kid, and it’s not like I need a local meta or anything - just product availability without astronomical shipping costs. NeoMechanica was the same (super costly for both the pledges and shipping), which put me off even buying a single model to paint.

Nurglitch wrote:Not to thread-jack, but it occurred to me that campaign rewards would be better in wargames in general if they were generated by actions that were at a tangent to actions that help win individual games.

Not sure how easy it would be to get competitive players to actually play campaigns. Seems like PUGs and tournaments against strangers are their preferred mode of play (they seem to always swipe right), and the perceived imbalances that come from campaign upgrades tickle them harshly in the "unfair" spot. Not to mention that they are deeply distrustful of each other and believe that their opponents could just lie about their upgrades... which might be justified, because competitive players are more likely to cheat at the game than someone just having fun with his friends.

LunarSol wrote:I'm actually really interested in seeing how the Monsterpocalypse campaign set turns out. Tying the campaign to base building seems like it works surprisingly well in a system that doesn't seem like it would be an obvious fit for a campaign.

I've got it on order, but Miniature Market is taking its damn sweet time getting it. PP did recently do a blog on it. It does seem like each player in the campaign will need their own Smashville box (at the very least) to play.

LunarSol wrote:I had to defend a point for 4 turns, getting D6 points -1 for each enemy model on the point, winning if I got at least 12. I tabled my opponent by the end of turn 3 without him getting a single model to the objective, and rolled 3, 3, 4, 1 at the end of my turns. Again, I'm not really complaining; my opponent actually conceded when he was out of models, but I wanted to roll it out when I realized I could still lose and had a good laugh at that single pip. I had a lot of fun with the game and its quick and easy to just play again, but it was also jarring to realize that my decision making had zero affect on the outcome.

Well, no, your decisions made a huge difference to the outcome. If your opponent had defeated more of your units or was better about getting his units near the target, you would've had a much larger chance of losing. For instance, you could've won on the second turn with a roll of two sixes, but if your opponent had gotten at least one model in range, you had to play at least three turns, minimum. If you had rolled a 1 early on, your opponent might've decided that he could be more careful in his attack and stayed back, attacking from a distance or hoping for a better initiative roll next turn.

Yeah, you still lost, even though you feel like you played the best you could've, but it was unlikely (just like it is unlikely that you win on round two with two sixes). It's like a dice roll where you have to roll a 2+ on a twenty sided die. How you play changes that modifier (play poorly, and you might need to roll a 14+), but it doesn't change that it is a dice roll and you might roll a 1. Saying you had zero effect on the outcome is incorrect.

 Sqorgar wrote:

LunarSol wrote:I had to defend a point for 4 turns, getting D6 points -1 for each enemy model on the point, winning if I got at least 12. I tabled my opponent by the end of turn 3 without him getting a single model to the objective, and rolled 3, 3, 4, 1 at the end of my turns. Again, I'm not really complaining; my opponent actually conceded when he was out of models, but I wanted to roll it out when I realized I could still lose and had a good laugh at that single pip. I had a lot of fun with the game and its quick and easy to just play again, but it was also jarring to realize that my decision making had zero affect on the outcome.

Well, no, your decisions made a huge difference to the outcome. If your opponent had defeated more of your units or was better about getting his units near the target, you would've had a much larger chance of losing. For instance, you could've won on the second turn with a roll of two sixes, but if your opponent had gotten at least one model in range, you had to play at least three turns, minimum. If you had rolled a 1 early on, your opponent might've decided that he could be more careful in his attack and stayed back, attacking from a distance or hoping for a better initiative roll next turn.

Yeah, you still lost, even though you feel like you played the best you could've, but it was unlikely (just like it is unlikely that you win on round two with two sixes). It's like a dice roll where you have to roll a 2+ on a twenty sided die. How you play changes that modifier (play poorly, and you might need to roll a 14+), but it doesn't change that it is a dice roll and you might roll a 1. Saying you had zero effect on the outcome is incorrect.

~24% chance of rolling 11 or less on 4d6. Nearly a quarter of games are literally unwinnable for the defender. The point stands that no decision I made could have resulted in victory nor should knowing how well you're doing affect how aggressively you defend the objective.

 LunarSol wrote:
~24% chance of rolling 11 or less on 4d6. Nearly a quarter of games are literally unwinnable for the defender. The point stands that no decision I made could have resulted in victory nor should knowing how well you're doing affect how aggressively you defend the objective.

I found the victory card, and you have to exceed 12, so you actually have a 34% chance of losing. So you have a 66% of winning in the 4th round, and a 26% chance of winning in the 3rd round, and you cannot win in the first or second round, period - assuming the attacking player fails to lower it further.

But you also have to understand that this number changes after you roll the first die. If you roll a 6 the first round, there's a 91% chance you'll win (through the ritual rolls), while if you roll a 1, there's only a 37% chance you'll win. (6=91%, 5=84%, 4=74%, 3=63%, 2=50%, 1=37% - so you have a 66% chance that your chance to win will go up or stay roughly the same in the second round). Rolling two 6s means you can't lose, two 3s means you are at 58%, and two 1s puts you at an 8% chance of winning. But if you roll a 1 and a 6, you are back up to 72% chance of victory. This will inform what you need to do in round 3.

Long story short, what is rolled will change the direction of the game. If it immediately becomes unlikely that the defender will get the glory points for the win, it is more prudent to go on the offense and attempt to take down the enemy leader or a third/half of the enemy's forces. He might be too focused on the target to realize what you are doing (he's gonna focus on getting 3 people really close to you), and not only can you get some glory points from this, you can force injury rolls for your opponent, possibly causing them to lose rerolls and artifacts. Meanwhile, defender rolls a 5-6 on that first roll and the attacker needs to go offensive because he's now incredibly likely to lose if he doesn't.

Basically, the game doesn't truly start until the second round, and while you may have to be content with secondary objectives over winning, you don't have to walk away empty handed. Also worth pointing out that this scenario is not a matched play one, so it was already deemed an "unfair" scenario.

We're pretty massively off topic here, particularly since the original point was that being unable to win is less of a problem for a game as short and simple as Warcry compared to a similar situation in a game as long and involved as Warmachine.

That said, 34% is pretty extreme, particularly since there's no way to improve it. Fine I guess in the context of a campaign, but I think even that would be pretty harsh if the game was a 2 hour plus affair. Personally, I'm of the mindset that reacts to failure with a need to try again. Being able to do so immediately is very different from waiting a week for a shot at redemption.

I just want to say that I bought a couple Warmachine starter sets (Skorne, Cryx) from PP's webstore sale (they even came with nifty faction pins). I'm not looking forward to putting together those crappy plastic models, but I know that if I take care and then prime them matte, they'll lose that cheap "I found this in a box of cereal" look. I haven't decided to full go back to the game (and thus paint everything in these boxes), so I'm thinking of spraying them in similar colors to the plastic, keeping that faction color thing it has going on.

Since I've never done Mk3, I really want to get the full new player experience, so I've taken the time to look through the stuff I just ignored last time. The basic training book is interesting in that it doesn't actually use any models - you cut out cards and tokens from the book and go through a dozen missions intended to walk you through the most basic elements using fake model profiles and the like. On one hand, this means you can do those missions without building any models first, but the other, it is much harder to get excited. Even with the aim of getting the full new player experience, I'm having trouble mustering up the energy to go through the basic training.

I've never been a fan of tutorials that act like you've never heard of a miniature game before. Fallout Wasteland Warfare had a similar tutorial approach of "this is how you measure walking, here's a mission to walk from point A to point B". Including the full rulebook helps, but there's such a huge gulf between a 100 page rulebook and a "here's two pages describing what an inch is". As far as starter sets go, Infinity is still the gold standard. You are playing a real game after 3 pages of rules, albeit a very abbreviated one. Each scenario afterwards adds a new model and new rules, so it always feels like the game is growing with you, rather than patronizing you. It'd be better if Infinity included a full rulebook, but that might be even more terrifying than Warmachine's.

On the bright side, I was surprised to find that the paper maps that came with the boxes had different maps on them. Since neither of them look like the map I previously got, there are at least three different maps in the boxes. One has a hill and the other has a stone head in the dirt. I think the map I had previously only had some trees and crater. It's a nice touch. So is including stacking focus tokens. There's also some sort of spell token that I guess you are supposed to write on, but seem too dark to be able to see anything. The spell tokens I used in Mk2 were not nearly as dark.

My main worry right now is how outdated this is. I know they released an updated rulebook with Oblivion. I'm not sure how much I'll have to relearn to get up to date on the game. Similarly, I'm sure the cards included in the boxes are out of date, and I'll need to print new ones from PP's page. I can't decide whether I should go with the built in rulebooks and cards or update now...

Yeah, all those barriers to entry (needing to print cards or pay for the app, not having an updated physical rulebook, etc) are big problems.

Not to mention the power creep... in updating my list recently I realized it'd almost always be way better to take the various types of new Archons, instead of whatever other support I was considering. This is obviously true in many games, but really strikingly apparent with the latest wave of warmahordes releases...

 Sqorgar wrote:

My main worry right now is how outdated this is. I know they released an updated rulebook with Oblivion. I'm not sure how much I'll have to relearn to get up to date on the game. Similarly, I'm sure the cards included in the boxes are out of date, and I'll need to print new ones from PP's page. I can't decide whether I should go with the built in rulebooks and cards or update now...

I don't think anything too significant has changed in the rulebook. The Oblivion update had more to do with theme forces and didn't change much in the actual rules. The big one off the top of my head is that you can't target friendly models with power attacks anymore.

The battlebox models haven't changed very intentionally as far as I'm aware. A few of them had their points redone, but it was always in tandem with other models in the box to ensure things added up to 0 total. I don't think any of them have had actual rules changes.

I've got Oblivion coming sometime this week (depending on the mail fairies). I'm going to just wait and use that rulebook. It might not be too different, but it feels like a waste to learn a bunch of minutiae only to immediately have to unlearn it.

In general, I just think that maybe it is time for new battlegroup boxes. The plastic models are pretty bad and could use an update, the rulebook is out of date, the cards are out of date - I think they were decent starter sets for Mk3, but Mk3 kind of left them behind. Doesn't seem like PP is reprinting them either, as the Circle battlegroup is extremely difficult to find and even PP's own webstore only had a few of the possible boxes.

Speaking of Circle, I'm probably most interested in doing Circle. Never played them before, but both the constructs and the Tharn are appealing to me - unfortunately, they don't overlap in themes (not that it would stop me). Even worse, the Circle battlegroup has neither barbarians nor golems. I heard someone suggest an alternate battlegroup with Baldur1, Wold Guardian, and Woldwarden - any opinions on this?

 Sqorgar wrote:
I've got Oblivion coming sometime this week (depending on the mail fairies). I'm going to just wait and use that rulebook. It might not be too different, but it feels like a waste to learn a bunch of minutiae only to immediately have to unlearn it.

In general, I just think that maybe it is time for new battlegroup boxes. The plastic models are pretty bad and could use an update, the rulebook is out of date, the cards are out of date - I think they were decent starter sets for Mk3, but Mk3 kind of left them behind. Doesn't seem like PP is reprinting them either, as the Circle battlegroup is extremely difficult to find and even PP's own webstore only had a few of the possible boxes.

Speaking of Circle, I'm probably most interested in doing Circle. Never played them before, but both the constructs and the Tharn are appealing to me - unfortunately, they don't overlap in themes (not that it would stop me). Even worse, the Circle battlegroup has neither barbarians nor golems. I heard someone suggest an alternate battlegroup with Baldur1, Wold Guardian, and Woldwarden - any opinions on this?

They are not re-printing any cards because they are all digital now

https://cards.privateerpress.com/

 aphyon wrote:

They are not re-printing any cards because they are all digital now

https://cards.privateerpress.com/

Oh, that might have been too ambiguous. I know the cards are digital now. I meant that they aren't reprinting (restocking?) the battlegroup boxes as a whole.

I think they ended their partnership with the plastic manufacturers and are likely looking into what to do next. My gut says that Warmachine is a bit on the backburner while they set up logistics for a relaunch or something similar.

They are pushing toward their new sci-fi game.

I think Warmachine needs to perhaps be reborn as less of a skirmish and more ofa war game coupled to a reduction of model boxes perhaps with cheaper combined sets of models like thecurrent theme forces they do; but with high grade plastic to lower the cost to the customer.

Their biggest issue is likely either finding a reliable plastic caster or trying to afford the machines themselves (which might be near impossible for them at present).


Personally I hope that PP rises from the ashes once again - they've got so much potential I'd hat for them to vanish

LunarSol wrote:I think they ended their partnership with the plastic manufacturers and are likely looking into what to do next. My gut says that Warmachine is a bit on the backburner while they set up logistics for a relaunch or something similar.

I was watching an interview with Hungerford about Warcaster, and he was talking how the design team works on all the different games, but individual members take lead on individual ones. Anyway, he said that he had become lead on Warmachine fairly recently and that the Warmachine stuff planned for the end of 2020 was the first batch of stuff with him as lead. Warmachine is definitely on the back burner because they are launching Warcaster (which is also why we won't see a Mk4 anytime soon), but it could also have something to do with a change in leadership.

Overread wrote:I think Warmachine needs to perhaps be reborn as less of a skirmish and more ofa war game coupled to a reduction of model boxes perhaps with cheaper combined sets of models like thecurrent theme forces they do; but with high grade plastic to lower the cost to the customer.

Honestly, they don't really need to make Warmachine into that - the models are the expensive part, so they only really need to provide an alternate ruleset (similar to Kill Team and 40k). They did make a half assed effort with Company of Iron, but they made the mistake of thinking that people would want to play a version of Warmachine without warcasters or warjacks. I think they even charged for cards in WarRoom, because third tier games with minimal support definitely do better when you nickel and dime.

What they need is a Kill Team which is just warcasters and warjacks. But at the skirmish level, you need more granular terrain rules and generally need to avoid the combo-heavy gameplay that Warmachine thrives on. But this should be a separate thing from Warmachine, mainly because I love the colossal models and they would have no place in a skirmish game.

Personally I hope that PP rises from the ashes once again - they've got so much potential I'd hat for them to vanish

I think PP spread themselves too thin with their board game initiative (the bodgers games, level 7, undercity). They seem to do better with fully supported lifestyle games. I'm not sure if Riot Quest is a good game or not yet (PP's store hasn't shipped my starter yet, likely because I also ordered the neoprene mat) - but the support it is getting has convinced me to give it a try. And Monsterpocalypse might be my favorite miniature game. Warmachine might not be as popular as it used to be, but I think I'm happier with PP now than I was a few years ago.

I really hope Warcaster does well - budget reasons meant I had to pull out of the KS (that and I couldn't decide on a faction); I really hope it keeps doing well and hopefully goes from strength to strength. It's an intresting way to market the game.

I do wonder if PP will eventually do the KS fundraisers in-house so that they don't lose a portion to KS; but then again sometimes having a website with all the back-end stuff setup in advance for you is actually a big saving rather than trying to setup that whole system yourself. Plus being on KS is a big marketing boon and makes it mcuh easier to get people on board.

They did make a half assed effort with Company of Iron, but they made the mistake of thinking that people would want to play a version of Warmachine without warcasters or warjacks

I love playing a full version of warmachine at 50 points without warcasters and only jacks run by jack marshals in the vain of company of iron. it makes it a full table army game not centered around one figure. it is how most battles in the universe would happen since warcasters are incredibly rare.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I think PP spread themselves too thin with their board game initiative (the bodgers games, level 7, undercity). They seem to do better with fully supported lifestyle games. I'm not sure if Riot Quest is a good game or not yet (PP's store hasn't shipped my starter yet, likely because I also ordered the neoprene mat) - but the support it is getting has convinced me to give it a try. And Monsterpocalypse might be my favorite miniature game. Warmachine might not be as popular as it used to be, but I think I'm happier with PP now than I was a few years ago.

A lot of their side projects are just ways to deal with creative burnout. Minicrate essentially exists for the same reason. Creative types are hard to keep if you don't let them try out their own ideas from time to time, which is why you often see people leave to design for other games.

EDIT: On the subject of Riot Quest, I think its a solid, fun chaotic game. It definitely requires a more reactive mindset as there are a lot of elements out of your control, but the decisions you make during your turn are interesting enough to feel like they matter. My one big gripe is that the base game mat is a little too spread out and combined with randomized spawning, creates situations where a character comes into play away from anything worthwhile and gets kind of stuck there as moving costs resources. I'd really like to play it on some of the new maps or even the base one with things brought a little closer to the center.

 LunarSol wrote:
A lot of their side projects are just ways to deal with creative burnout. Minicrate essentially exists for the same reason. Creative types are hard to keep if you don't let them try out their own ideas from time to time, which is why you often see people leave to design for other games.

Not sure that makes sense as a company imperative though. I mean, it takes resources to make these games, ship them, and sell them. And of the ones I've played, they don't really stack up to the competition on the market (I've heard good things about Level 7 though). I mean, High Command was just kind of there, battling in the deck building genre which is saturated as hell and filled with some big name, high rated games. It's possible that they didn't want to fill their miniature pipeline with side projects and focus on Warmachine, but PP seems to do a lot better in the miniature field than the board game one (even when they consider Riot Quest and MonPoc to be board games).

EDIT: On the subject of Riot Quest, I think its a solid, fun chaotic game. It definitely requires a more reactive mindset as there are a lot of elements out of your control, but the decisions you make during your turn are interesting enough to feel like they matter. My one big gripe is that the base game mat is a little too spread out and combined with randomized spawning, creates situations where a character comes into play away from anything worthwhile and gets kind of stuck there as moving costs resources. I'd really like to play it on some of the new maps or even the base one with things brought a little closer to the center.

The maps are what initially drew me to Riot Quest. Actually, I saw the starter map and thought it was kind of boring - made me think of Aristeia's open, generic arenas. Seeing the Hullgrinder map, I was kind of blown away how cool it looked. The Temple of Concord map is almost as cool, and with new gimmicks as well. I'm kind of reminded of Super Bomberman.

I really hope the Monsterpocalypse maps start approaching the level of Riot Quest's, though I guess MonPoc really makes the player-brought buildings into the stars of the map.

Paper mats - a sign in this day and age that you’re too cheap to invest in a ‘real’ board for your game(s).
That’s what really bothers me the most about their side games - the paper mats. It’s essential for play, and ends up being unfolded, transported, and refolded a lot. And paper does not hold up to repeated use.

Sure they have the neoprene mats, but why a real game board isn’t included in Riot Quest or MonPoc, especially at the price point they’re at, to me is just cheapening your product.

 Ghool wrote:
Paper mats - a sign in this day and age that you’re too cheap to invest in a ‘real’ board for your game(s).
That’s what really bothers me the most about their side games - the paper mats. It’s essential for play, and ends up being unfolded, transported, and refolded a lot. And paper does not hold up to repeated use.

Sure they have the neoprene mats, but why a real game board isn’t included in Riot Quest or MonPoc, especially at the price point they’re at, to me is just cheapening your product.

I'm sure there are many logistical issues at play here. For one, I don't think you can create a $40 starter set with $70 worth of content (they really are good deals at the price point they're at) and still put in an expensive $15-$20 board. The maps for these games are quite large, and the boxes quite small. They'd have to significantly increase the size and weight of the box (which means more costs in storage and shipping) - it's not like Warhammer Underworlds where it is two tiny boards. And a starter set isn't intended to be the fully pimped out game experience - MonPoc includes a bunch of cardboard apartment buildings too. MonPoc and Riot Quest both have new maps coming out only in neoprene, with paper mats being limited to just the starter.

Ultimately, I think players have shown that they don't mind paper mats, especially when options exist to replace them with something better. Aeronautica Imperialis came with a paper mat and nobody complained. Let's see, Walking Dead: All Out War used paper mats with separate neoprene versions. Fallout Wasteland Warfare too. Necromunda: Dark Uprising was $290 with paper mats. Deadzone 2.0 has paper mats in the big boxes. The 40k/AoS starter sets came with paper mats. Warmachine too. Infinity's excellent operation boxes with nice cardboard terrain, paper mats.

In fact, it is harder to name miniature games that don't have paper mats. Warcry/Kill Team, Warhammer Underworlds, Blood Bowl, and Aristeia have hard boards. Dust 1947 starters have neoprene mats in them (and are expensive as hell). The original Deadzone too. Most other games don't have mats at all, paper or otherwise.

I'm not sure why minis companies seem to have a gap when it comes to solid boards. It's paper or all the way up to neoprene. I suspect its because they don't have the expertise to deal with tile warping, but I do find it curious.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm not sure why minis companies seem to have a gap when it comes to solid boards. It's paper or all the way up to neoprene. I suspect its because they don't have the expertise to deal with tile warping, but I do find it curious.

Probably to avoid the "board game" feel. Some things are not done due to cultural concerns rather than any cost or practicality.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm not sure why minis companies seem to have a gap when it comes to solid boards. It's paper or all the way up to neoprene. I suspect its because they don't have the expertise to deal with tile warping, but I do find it curious.

It's probably because boards would get scuffed up and dented. One of my Warcry boards has a bunch of dents in it from when the sprues rubbed up against it in the box. Boards cost about 2/3rds of a neoprene mat, but I don't think they'd survive nearly as long with heavy use. I almost feel like I need to put neoprene on the bottoms of my miniatures to protect the board from them. Plus, I feel like the cushioning from neoprene might protect my models (and their paint jobs) better should they get knocked over.

We need some sort of PoD for neoprene boards.

As for mats i have 2 lovely 4X4 mouse pad quality mats, a city and a desert. where they really need some quality mats is monster apocalypse most of the big mat suppliers have the 4X4 covered. including some that include all the zone markers overlayed on the mat surface.

 aphyon wrote:
As for mats i have 2 lovely 4X4 mouse pad quality mats, a city and a desert. where they really need some quality mats is monster apocalypse most of the big mat suppliers have the 4X4 covered. including some that include all the zone markers overlayed on the mat surface.

I don't think there's a question when it comes to free form terrain and model placement. Neoprene is definitely the way to go. It's a little more of an issue with games like Riot Quest and MonPoc where multiple maps are a big part of the gameplay variety.

From the various games that I've purchased that had minis plus cardboard/cardstock boards, I think the big issue is that you have to design the packaging to keep the minis from contacting the cardboard. So you end up with these huge air filled boxes with inserts and dividers. (* The Ogre collector's box did the really neat thing where they put a plastic tray inside the box to hold the assembled contents. But the end result was that they had to ship about half of the cardboard -outside- of the game box. And that's with a game box approaching the size of an automotive tire.)

-Then- you have to deal with warping.

I'm going to be really honest and say that im not completely convinced that PP will make it to see WM/H MKIV. I hope so, but I've a relatively bad feeling about it.

They made nearly half a million from a KS for a brand new game where they basically charged near retail value for the sets rather than a steep discount (which is often more common with KS). That's still a very significant chunk of money and since they weren't offering vast discounts it means they've also been able to take more income from it rather than purely cover manufacture costs alone (plus they've already got the machines for working metal and resin).

If their new sci-fi game does well this summer and winter then I can well see them getting an even greater sum of money with the second KS. They should get most of those who backed first time around; plus their friends; plus with a greater number of models on show faction identity and styles become more apparent which often helps get more people to jump in and support.

 Overread wrote:
They made nearly half a million from a KS for a brand new game where they basically charged near retail value for the sets rather than a steep discount (which is often more common with KS). That's still a very significant chunk of money and since they weren't offering vast discounts it means they've also been able to take more income from it rather than purely cover manufacture costs alone (plus they've already got the machines for working metal and resin).

If their new sci-fi game does well this summer and winter then I can well see them getting an even greater sum of money with the second KS. They should get most of those who backed first time around; plus their friends; plus with a greater number of models on show faction identity and styles become more apparent which often helps get more people to jump in and support.

500,000 dollars isn't a lot of money. had it hit 7 figures, I would feel a bit better about it, tbh. I don't want to be the doomsayer, (though I know I am) but I'm quite concerned.

I think the dollar amount raised for Warcaster is less telling than the number of backers, which was 2,330.
If we assume that they get enough late pledges to bring the total up to 3,000 backers/players, that’s still an abysmally low number of players worldwide. Especially for a company of PP’s size, which employs around 30 people. Half a million is probably just enough to keep the lights on with that many staff.

Even if all of those players were contained within the US alone, that’s not a very large, nor robust player base. Nor is it a very large player base to keep a company as large as PP making the margins they need.

If we assume that 75% of those backing the game stay with it and keep playing and buying stuff with each new KS, they are still going to experience diminishing returns.
I don’t see Warcaster as being the saviour for PP that some seem to think it’s going to be.
Not even 2500 backers worldwide translates into less than 2000 that will continue to collect and play. While that’s enough to support a small, 5 person operation (maybe), it’s certainly not very sustainable.

I have my doubts we will see PP bounce back to what they were before, and unless they do something drastic, or at retail Warcaster makes serious bank, I don’t see them being able to ride it out more than a few more years.
I want them to survive of course. They make the best paint.

I think some of those backers were retailers.

Nurglitch wrote:
I think some of those backers were retailers.

85 pledges were retailers.
Like I said, even with those retail pledges, you’re looking at a maximum of 3000 players.
With a staff of 30 people, they need to be making around $2 million a year to support that.
And that’s a bare minimum. If they want to continue to expand the line, and keep WM/H going, that’s barely enough to keep themselves on life support. I ran a business for several years, and had 25 staff, most of which were minimum wage workers. $1 million a year was enough to keep the business running, but it wasn’t enough to expand it beyond the single location. My margins were 28-35%, which didn’t translate to expanding the business at all. And with PP having slimmer margins than that (and they do) is what I find most concerning about their current level of popularity. If it was a smaller company with much smaller staff, I wouldn’t be very worried.

 Ghool wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
I think some of those backers were retailers.

85 pledges were retailers.
Like I said, even with those retail pledges, you’re looking at a maximum of 3000 players.

Those two facts alone are "interesting". Given that PP has a worldwide player base, Americas, UK/Europe, Asia and Pacific, only 85 retailers in the world felt that they could back the KS. I admit to knowing NOTHING about retail. So it could be that many stores are just waiting for general release to get stuff on their shelves. Iv never heard of a games store there in the UK backing a KS. But still that is quite a shallow level of market penetration (or whatever it called).

3000 KS backers worldwide is also quite a small number. Nobody in our area or meta is remotely interested in it. But tbf its probably not aimed at us.

But PP set the limits of the KS themselves and had a min level to make it viable which thy exceeded many times over. So we have to assume that PP have got what they want out of the KS and it gives them a good basis move forward alongside all the RiotQuest, MonPoc and WM/H stuff they are also producing. But with the Covid19 lock-down putting a halt to things like CID for now and with GW launching 9th Ed 40K with full fanfare despite the lock-down you can't but help wonder how much momentum market PP may have lost over this time.

 Ghool wrote:

85 pledges were retailers.
Like I said, even with those retail pledges, you’re looking at a maximum of 3000 players.
With a staff of 30 people, they need to be making around $2 million a year to support that.
And that’s a bare minimum. If they want to continue to expand the line, and keep WM/H going, that’s barely enough to keep themselves on life support. I ran a business for several years, and had 25 staff, most of which were minimum wage workers. $1 million a year was enough to keep the business running, but it wasn’t enough to expand it beyond the single location. My margins were 28-35%, which didn’t translate to expanding the business at all. And with PP having slimmer margins than that (and they do) is what I find most concerning about their current level of popularity. If it was a smaller company with much smaller staff, I wouldn’t be very worried.

I admit complete ignorance in the financial aspects of running a company, but PP currently has three tentpole product lines (MonPoc, RiotQuest, and WMH) and are currently preparing to expand to a fourth. They must have enough confidence that they can support all four games, whether it is through expanding the company or just better management of their current capabilities. I'm not sure if they want to grow larger as a company, or need to. I'm less worried about Warcaster than I am about COVID-19 shutting down gaming clubs and retail - the latter was a significant and unplanned complication, while the former was in the works for years.

Also, using the Kickstarter numbers as the equivalent of a pre-order campaign seems a bit wrong. There's a lot of reasons why someone might choose not to use Kickstarter. I won't use Kickstarter, but I'm planning on getting Warcaster when it hits retail. It's probably fair to assume that Warcaster will follow the early adopter curve - the 3000 kickstarters would be the tiny start to the bell curve, with the majority of players not coming until there is a presence for the game. 3000 early adopters is more than enough to begin the process of community building, setting up facilities like Warmachine University, providing player guidance and support, and generating a presence at gaming clubs - the things necessary for a miniature game to move past the early adopter phase. I'd be surprised if any miniature game (not by GW) has much more than 3000 early adopters. And PP has said that RiotQuest was very successful, despite there appearing to be absolutely no presence for the game (I assume its primary community is limited to a private Facebook group, which is worthless and self defeating).

The main problem would be if the Warcaster community becomes too tournament-focused, like Warmachine did. Elitism is very offputting to new players, and without new players, you don't have a game.

A preorder Kickstarter is a tried and true way to gauge player interest - if your pre order numbers are low (even a KS), then it’s not likely that a game is going to have much presence at retail either. That’s why so many companies utilize KS - you get a very good idea of how popular your product is going to be.
With the marketing clout of Kickstarter, and the exposure it brings to your product, worldwide exposure, how does a small company get more exposure than that to their primary audience? And without any sort of push in the retail landscape like Press Gangers, or champions of the game in stores?

Of all the miniature game projects launched on Kickstarter, how many of them are still going?
By that I mean, still releasing new product, expanding the game and the player base?
And how many of those that had around 3000 backers or less, have a retail presence? That means, how many game stores can you walk into and see the product on the shelves, and customers playing in the store a single day/night of the week?
I can’t think of any. If there are any that have a decent presence and/or player base that were Kickstarted, I’d like to know.

I think what we’re seeing with the success of Warcaster, is the Old Guard that are willing to support and buy just about anything PP makes. That doesn’t necessarily mean there are a ton of new players checking out their games. That tiny number of backers is indicative of exactly that - the player base is very small and well-established with very few new players taking the plunge.

Despite the supposed popularity of MonPoc and Riot Quest, I have yet to see them in my LGS. And my local store carries EVERYTHING.
If I can’t find gaming product at my store, is a very telling sign that nobody new is willing to buy the stuff.
The only MonPoc product they had were the starters, which didn’t sell, and are now sitting on the clearance shelf, and still no one is willing to buy into it, regardless of what is said on the internet.

 Ghool wrote:
A preorder Kickstarter is a tried and true way to gauge player interest - if your pre order numbers are low (even a KS), then it’s not likely that a game is going to have much presence at retail either. That’s why so many companies utilize KS - you get a very good idea of how popular your product is going to be.

I think CMON did better with Wrath of Kings Kickstarter, and it was a dead game basically from the moment it hit retail. Kickstarter is a good deal for board games that are relatively self contained, but I don't think they are representative for the launches of new ongoing miniature lines.

With the marketing clout of Kickstarter, and the exposure it brings to your product, worldwide exposure, how does a small company get more exposure than that to their primary audience? And without any sort of push in the retail landscape like Press Gangers, or champions of the game in stores?

Well, PP has a built in core audience of Warmachine players, ex-Warmachine players, and fans of PP's other games. It should be relatively easy to reach those players through traditional channels established by the Warmachine community. I mean, I doubt there are many active Warmachine players who don't know what Warcaster is.

As for retail - I don't think it is that important. For one thing, I don't think that Warmachine ever really had a huge retail presence in FLGS. When I started with Mk1, I never saw it. I was ecstatic when my local FLGS got some starters - but they were the starters that I already had, so I didn't buy them... and neither did anyone else, apparently. When I came back in the tail end of Mk2, it had SOME presence, but it was still a handful of boxes. Don't think I saw any Mk3 starters, but I was out by then. But we had a sizeable Warmachine group. They just bought all their Warmachine stuff off the WarStore and Miniature Market. They supported the store in other ways, but not buying miniatures.

Plus, with COVID-19 likely causing many premature closures, and the comic book industry dying (my FLGS is a comic book store first), the entire concept of a FLGS might be a thing of the past for many communities. I think it would be a massive mistake to design a business plan around their continued popularity and operation.

Of all the miniature game projects launched on Kickstarter, how many of them are still going?

Song of Ice and Fire. Some of the Mantic ones (Kings of War, Vanguard, Deadzone, Walking Dead). Guild Ball (SFG also did Godtear, but it is too soon to tell). Kingdom Death Monster. Probably others I can't think of. Not sure where you stand on hybrid stuff like Shadows of Brimstone, Batman/Conan, Mythic Battles: Pantheon, etc. Or board games made by miniature companies like Dark Souls/Resident Evil or Infinity: Defiance.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there are a ton of new players checking out their games. That tiny number of backers is indicative of exactly that - the player base is very small and well-established with very few new players taking the plunge.

Strictly speaking, it doesn't really matter how many players you have, if each player is spending more money on the product. For instance, I have several hundred dollars invested in Monsterpocalypse because I love the game and models. I'm more than willing to spend several hundred more dollars (in fact, I'm waiting on the Obliteration Boulevard mat to release so my preorder with Smashville, Leviathron, and Krakenoctus will ship).

And because I enjoyed MonPoc so much, I willingly bought into RiotQuest to a significant degree (two starters, three neoprene mats, and 5 more figures). I also bought a couple Warmachine starters and intend to play Mk3 for the first time soon. And when Warcaster releases, I'll buy two starters of that as well.

Good will generates loyalty and passion. It's not just that the player base will buy any old crap because it is PP (though this exists, and I personally know someone like that). But loyalty and passion will get you farther than anything else. The reason why Mk2 was popular is because of the loyalty and passion of its players, bringing in new players (some of which even stayed!). The reason why Mk3 wasn't popular is because that loyalty and passion disappeared, partly from the balance issues associated with Mk3's launch, and partly because GW was starting to steal that loyalty and passion by making good moves when PP was dumping press gangers and deleting their forums. Of course, GW didn't really change its spots, so who knows how long they'll keep their players' eyes from wandering...

Despite the supposed popularity of MonPoc and Riot Quest, I have yet to see them in my LGS.

I'm not surprised. At for MonPoc, you don't need a constant stream of other players to keep of the variety of playing the game. Warmachine needs other players to share in the financial burden of supporting multiple armies. MonPoc changes significantly with the addition of a single $25 model. Warmachine requires several hours for a game and a 4x4 table. MonPoc takes 30m to 1hr to play and fits on my dining room table - then we play something else. A single person can ably handle the burden of MonPoc for an entire group of players (including painting), so I'd rather invite my friends over to play with my copy than pack everything up and go play with strangers. Even GW has seen which way the wind is blowing, and putting more resources into kitchen tabletop experiences.

I think that's pressure from the board-gaming market, which is considerably larger than the war-gaming market. There's pretty intense pressure on that side of things to make games as short as humanly possible, and minimalism is prized.

Nurglitch wrote:
I think that's pressure from the board-gaming market, which is considerably larger than the war-gaming market. There's pretty intense pressure on that side of things to make games as short as humanly possible, and minimalism is prized.

I don't know about that. Some of the board games I play take longer than miniature games. When my daughter pulls out Root, I suddenly find excuses to be somewhere else. I mean, I'm up for a good three hour board game every once in a while, but not every weekend.

I just think 45m-1h is the sweet spot, since it gives everybody a natural break point to decide to play one more or call it a night. I feel like the longer a game is, the more susceptible it is to runaway leader syndrome, and then you end up with a player checking out early. We stopped playing 5+ player games because it always came down to two players actually playing and 3+ players checking their phones or having to be called back in to do their turns.

I've played more than a few Warmachine Mk2 games where I checked out after the 2nd round and basically just went through the motions of playing because there was no way I could win. I'd even forfeit, but they wanted to keep playing to see how well their combo worked out or to see by how much they won or something else. I'd put my warcaster in the middle of the field and they'd get angry at me and tell me to "play for real". This happened to me several times. In a 45m game, by the time I've realized that I have no hope, it's almost over anyway.

 Sqorgar wrote:
But loyalty and passion will get you farther than anything else.

Can we have a whip round and get this carved on some sort of ancient stone tablets and sent to PP HQ?

The reason why Mk2 was popular is because of the loyalty and passion of its players, bringing in new players (some of which even stayed!). The reason why Mk3 wasn't popular is because that loyalty and passion disappeared, partly from the balance issues associated with Mk3's launch, and partly because GW was starting to steal that loyalty and passion by making good moves when PP was dumping press gangers and deleting their forums. Of course, GW didn't really change its spots, so who knows how long they'll keep their players' eyes from wandering...

^^^This perfectly describes how we as a small games group and many of the stores that we know viewed PP. The trust, buy in and most importantly, good will has gone. MK3 and may of PPs moves and decisions has been a like a cheese grater on the face of the community, slowly shaving off player. Players view PP with some suspicion and most store that I have spoken to, even the bigger ones that still stock PP, say that PP has pretty much burnt all their bridges with them. PP needs to work out how to attract new players of all types and keep them.

That being said, i have seen more discussions around this and Podcasts addressing it which seems to show that even the uber competitive focused players are starting to realise that the game needs new blood and that just focusing on big SR comps is actually detrimental to the overall health of the game. This could be a great opportunity for PP and the community. If both parties are willing to take it.

Sorry. A bit late to this but Warmahordes does have neoprene mats.

They're all licensed by 3rd parties but there are several:

https://tablewar.com/collections/fatmats/the-f-a-t-mat%C2%AE-privateer-press-branded-f-a-t-mat

https://store.frontlinegaming.org/gaming-mats/privateer-press-mats/

aphyon wrote:

They did make a half assed effort with Company of Iron, but they made the mistake of thinking that people would want to play a version of Warmachine without warcasters or warjacks

I love playing a full version of warmachine at 50 points without warcasters and only jacks run by jack marshals in the vain of company of iron. it makes it a full table army game not centered around one figure. it is how most battles in the universe would happen since warcasters are incredibly rare.

I'm one that really wanted to like company of iron as I don't really care for warcasters. They're fine fluff wise but I think things are more interesting when they're not around. I wouldn't mind them taking another stab at a CoI style game.

Unfortunately as far as i know they don't have any of those mats for monpoc at present, just the paper ones from PP.

I mentioned the Noprene as that had been a discussion for quite some time related tothe look of the game.

MonPoc has fabric mats but privateer is sold out atm.

https://store.privateerpress.com/games/monsterpocalypse/monsterpocalypse-carnage-corners-fabric-playmat

I was talking specifically about neoprene, i am not interested in fabric, but at least that's a little better than paper

the wm community is toxic as hell. I've played off and on since warmachine came out and to see it devolve in the way it has is pretty sad. I could go on about my own experiences with the game but bottom line is they need to roll the dice and risk alienating the few people that are still playing in order to make a more approachable game and bring people back. Ultimately I really only care about their paint though too.

 Monkeysloth wrote:

I'm one that really wanted to like company of iron as I don't really care for warcasters. They're fine fluff wise but I think things are more interesting when they're not around. I wouldn't mind them taking another stab at a CoI style game.

I think the problem with games that try to take a unit based game and turn it into a skirmish is just that beyond the initial novelty you don't see these games getting models that keep players coming back. The initial buy in is great, but then the game needs to grow somewhere, but there's not a good way to add 1-2 amazing new models and grunt units just don't keep drawing in players like the centerpiece models of the bigger game does. That's a big reason why the Elites and HQ expansions are so crucial to making Kill Team more than a flash in the pan.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kommisar wrote:
the wm community is toxic as hell.

It's sad to me, because when I first started the game at the dawn of MK2, the big appeal of the game was how amazing the community was. I would literally drag my army wherever I was going and show up at a random game night and make friends. It was a super friendly and welcoming community. Streaming games towards the end of MK2 is where people started treating everyone like the enemy and when MK3 wasn't perfect, the community just devoured itself in petty nonsense. I have so many good friends I've made through the game, but the sense of comraderie with strangers the game once promised is just kind of gone these days.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:

I'm one that really wanted to like company of iron as I don't really care for warcasters. They're fine fluff wise but I think things are more interesting when they're not around. I wouldn't mind them taking another stab at a CoI style game.

I think the problem with games that try to take a unit based game and turn it into a skirmish is just that beyond the initial novelty you don't see these games getting models that keep players coming back. The initial buy in is great, but then the game needs to grow somewhere, but there's not a good way to add 1-2 amazing new models and grunt units just don't keep drawing in players like the centerpiece models of the bigger game does. That's a big reason why the Elites and HQ expansions are so crucial to making Kill Team more than a flash in the pan.

I think this is why they moved to Riot Quest. Having a bunch of unique solos that look cool is easier to sell. I wouldn't even care if they did another boxed game but fixing some of the clunkiness of CoI and opening up list building to more possibilities even as just something in a No Quarter (if that was still around) would be fine enough. Like a 1.5 ruleset would be good enough for me.

The main game I've never had fun with as overtime I've played (back in the MK2 days) it ended up looking like a civil war reenactment with just lines of troops sanding there not moving and just shooting. Several friends were pretty into the game and play a lot (all three ended up as writers for privateer's fiction line too) but I never found anything fun about the game. Love the setting and minis though.

 Kommisar wrote:
the wm community is toxic as hell.

You know, I used to think so too - but I've started to realize that it isn't really Warmachine's fault. It's social media's. A game like Warmachine is a big umbrella, and all sorts of players can fit underneath it, but because social media gives so much power to the biggest bullies and whiners, that's eventually what all communities devolve into.

Anybody who didn't fit the very narrow definition of what the Warmachine community considered to be a model player was bullied into silence, or outright leaving. Only certain kinds of people became press gangers, only certain kinds of people became facebook group moderators, only certain kinds of people were actively sought out to join the Warmachine community. It gave the illusion of consensus because an active effort was not made to listen to the players of every viewpoint. I mean, they probably weren't even the minority of players - they were probably the majority by a country mile, but because they didn't dominate the visible parts of the community nor actively imposed their will upon it, they were unseen and unheard.

This is a problem that I think all online communities share, and I think it gets worse over time. I started on Dakka when Age of Sigmar first launched, and let me tell you, Warmachine's community could not compare to the toxicity one received for the simple opinion of "I don't mind the game not having points" or liking what AoS was doing. I was not a part of the wargaming community at the time, so I didn't know which opinions were allowed to be shared. I think it is absurd that someone couldn't say that on Dakka without getting called names or insulted (probably still can't). It's not a coincidence that the major AoS communities did not spring up in the places where the Warhammer communities previously existed. They had to go somewhere else to start their own communities, because nobody else welcomed them into theirs.

Warmachine's community is not beyond saving, but it will require an effort from the unheard voices to finally be heard. The collapse of the community may ultimately make room for a new, less toxic community to grow in its place. The real question is whether anybody like Warmachine enough right now to go through the effort.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I wouldn't even care if they did another boxed game but fixing some of the clunkiness of CoI and opening up list building to more possibilities even as just something in a No Quarter (if that was still around) would be fine enough. Like a 1.5 ruleset would be good enough for me.

The interview I saw with Hungerford said that they weren't done with Companies of Iron, but that it probably wouldn't see a major change in the next year or two.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I wouldn't even care if they did another boxed game but fixing some of the clunkiness of CoI and opening up list building to more possibilities even as just something in a No Quarter (if that was still around) would be fine enough. Like a 1.5 ruleset would be good enough for me.

The interview I saw with Hungerford said that they weren't done with Companies of Iron, but that it probably wouldn't see a major change in the next year or two.

 Kommisar wrote:
the wm community is toxic as hell. I've played off and on since warmachine came out and to see it devolve in the way it has is pretty sad. I could go on about my own experiences with the game but the bottom line is they need to roll the dice and risk alienating the few people that are still playing in order to make a more approachable game and bring people back. Ultimately I really only care about their paint though too.

To be fair, for as much frustration i have with PP, it's not just privateer press.
Ive been saying for a long time, whether it was on Muse, or on L2, but if you want to enjoy a miniatures game, the first thing you need to do is get away from the internet. Even look at dakka. When someone new starts a tabletop game, like WH40k or WMH, the first thing I do is tell them not to go to Reddit, do not go to dakka, and do not go to social media. I tell them about our local gaming chats and get them connected with players that play the same factions or like the same things. Trust me, it saves players in the long run. It's like a mentoring process, but instead of having a mentor to guide you and help you grow, it's more like having a life coach warning you that what you are about to do is hazardous to your enjoyment of your new hobby.

Dakka and Reddit are particularly awful. I don't know why, but for whatever reason, the communities on these sites just seem to really enjoy just gaking on whatever game they are playing. I hang around and post sometimes when I'm excited about something, or if I think something cool is happening, or a topic grabs my attention, and I CERTAINLY love hanging around for the hobby stuff, but the average player on dakka is more toxic than a DOTA2 tournament held in an old chemical factory.

Dakka has, or had, a pretty bad reputation on other tabletop sites. When I first started coming here a few years ago I didn't even post for months as I was worried about getting attacked because everyone would talk about being a horrid place.

It's really not, at least News and Rumors where I spend most of my time, as I think the difference is the Mods aren't those type of people (or at least do a good job pretending to not be) but dumb stuff does come up from time to time like pointing out to GW people that every once and a while the pricing they're complaining about isn't actually expensive compared to other popular games. That will get you some angry replies.

It's also hard to not take it personally when you're talking about some new game/product up in N&R and someone stops in just to post a sentence about how dumb it is a then leaves as opposed to any useful criticism as for some reason liking something they don't is a crime. But that's just is a reflection on the internet in general.

I do find that sites/groups that are dedicated to one game tend to be just painful to be in and make me hate the game. Had to leave some infinity fan groups on Facebook and the official forums because it was just tiring and that made me think less of CB and the game for quite some time even though I know they had very little to do with it.

One issue with online groups is that you can more easily retain a large portion of the population who are not engaging with the hobby any more.

In the real world if you get bored of playing 40K you will generally stop turning up to the 40K game night at the club. You might pop around now and then, but by and large if you're not playing and not otherwise engaging with that area of the hobby, you'll stop going and start going to other things.

With an online group though, it doesn't take any effort or cost to turn up. Its just part of your online routine to check in on things. Because there's no barrier or "cost" you can more easily hang around. What can happen then is you can develop a bundle of users who are engaging with hobby discussions when they've "moved on" for whatever reason.


Now when that reason is something like "had a child not got the money to game" its a neutral sitaution; but when its "I hate the company;models;prices;rules" then suddenly you've got someone with a very negative connection to the hobby hanging around and engaging with the community.
Even if their points are valid, the issue is they bring a toxicity with them even though they don't realise it. Get enough of them together and they can reinforce each other which creates a toxic atmosphere that they don't even realise that they are creating.


Because often as not they are not "wrong", they are just disgruntled and focusing on negative aspects. At the same time they aren't reinforcing the good aspects so they gain a very negative tone that can bring things down. And in the end people who are on the enjoyment side of things, whilst being able to respect negative aspects, they don't want them thrust before them in every single conversation. Or every single conversation about certain topics.

As much as many negative people say that they loath "positive echo chambers" they themselves often produce as "negative echo chamber" and seek to create one. In the end the former are often far more enjoyable than the latter.

when its "I hate the company;models;prices;rules" then suddenly you've got someone with a very negative connection to the hobby hanging around and engaging

Those would be legitimate concerns to voice, i think what everybody is talking about WM wise is player attitude about what the game should be.

When you expect everybody to be "super hardcore, steamroller all the time, every time" or i won't notice you exist .

It becomes a problem for building and supporting a community of players who may not all want the same things out of the game.

The old saying that a room of people can't even agree on Pizza toppings. Ya. Large communities are never going to want the same thing out of a game.

It's OK to not like things, it's OK to say you don't like stuff, but it sucks when people don't like people disagreeing with them.

 Overread wrote:
One issue with online groups is that you can more easily retain a large portion of the population who are not engaging with the hobby any more.

This has definitely been the worst aspect about MK3. I mean, the edition was released 4 years ago and most of the complaints you hear to this day are stuff from the first 6 months or so that have long since been resolved.

 LunarSol wrote:
This has definitely been the worst aspect about MK3. I mean, the edition was released 4 years ago and most of the complaints you hear to this day are stuff from the first 6 months or so that have long since been resolved.

Other than balance, what other complaints have there been with Mk3?

 Sqorgar wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
This has definitely been the worst aspect about MK3. I mean, the edition was released 4 years ago and most of the complaints you hear to this day are stuff from the first 6 months or so that have long since been resolved.

Other than balance, what other complaints have there been with Mk3?

My main complaint is that everything needed to actually play the game is digital.
The only physical component I can buy anymore are models.
I want books, cards, magazines, and stuff I can hold in my hands.
Balance has never been a strong point of any war game, so complaining about that is moot.
I want my books and magazines back.

 Overread wrote:
One issue with online groups is that you can more easily retain a large portion of the population who are not engaging with the hobby any more.

In the real world if you get bored of playing 40K you will generally stop turning up to the 40K game night at the club. You might pop around now and then, but by and large if you're not playing and not otherwise engaging with that area of the hobby, you'll stop going and start going to other things.

With an online group though, it doesn't take any effort or cost to turn up. Its just part of your online routine to check in on things. Because there's no barrier or "cost" you can more easily hang around. What can happen then is you can develop a bundle of users who are engaging with hobby discussions when they've "moved on" for whatever reason.


Now when that reason is something like "had a child not got the money to game" its a neutral situation; but when its "I hate the company;models;prices;rules" then suddenly you've got someone with a very negative connection to the hobby hanging around and engaging with the community.
Even if their points are valid, the issue is they bring a toxicity with them even though they don't realise it. Get enough of them together and they can reinforce each other which creates a toxic atmosphere that they don't even realise that they are creating.


Because often as not they are not "wrong", they are just disgruntled and focusing on negative aspects. At the same time they aren't reinforcing the good aspects so they gain a very negative tone that can bring things down. And in the end people who are on the enjoyment side of things, whilst being able to respect negative aspects, they don't want them thrust before them in every single conversation. Or every single conversation about certain topics.

As much as many negative people say that they loath "positive echo chambers" they themselves often produce as "negative echo chamber" and seek to create one. In the end the former are often far more enjoyable than the latter.

This is true; I'm not engaged with Warhammer anymore and I never was with WMH. Posting here is a habit I'm working on overcoming, and especially posting negatively.

 Ghool wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
This has definitely been the worst aspect about MK3. I mean, the edition was released 4 years ago and most of the complaints you hear to this day are stuff from the first 6 months or so that have long since been resolved.

Other than balance, what other complaints have there been with Mk3?

My main complaint is that everything needed to actually play the game is digital.
The only physical component I can buy anymore are models.
I want books, cards, magazines, and stuff I can hold in my hands.
Balance has never been a strong point of any war game, so complaining about that is moot.
I want my books and magazines back.

Its such a double edged sword, isnt it? On one hand, its really hard for a company to justify the cost to produce that content, but on the other hand, we really want it. Then the company creates it and no one buys it, and they are left scratching their heads wondering if its worth it.

It feels, in a lot of ways, like a no win scenario for everyone involved. I could point to PP and say that its kind of their fault, because their printed material really isnt that good and doesnt advance anything anymore. But on the other hand, it was chock full of wonderful photos, stories, and painting guides, so its hard to say that they couldnt have done anything else to make it better.

I think this is a really hard time for wargaming in general, and doubly so for PP. the story, and the characters we attach ourselves to mean something to the players. Hell, many times, it's one of the reasons why we choose to like who we like and play the armies that we do. It's one of the driving forces behind what we play and collect. But if no one is buying it, what choice does a smaller company as PP have?

I really don't think there is a right answer. On one hand, I really do feel for them, as it looks like PP has just had to make concession after concession time after time, but on the other hand, I can't really absolve them from their failures either.

 Ghool wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
This has definitely been the worst aspect about MK3. I mean, the edition was released 4 years ago and most of the complaints you hear to this day are stuff from the first 6 months or so that have long since been resolved.

Other than balance, what other complaints have there been with Mk3?

My main complaint is that everything needed to actually play the game is digital.
The only physical component I can buy anymore are models.
I want books, cards, magazines, and stuff I can hold in my hands.
Balance has never been a strong point of any war game, so complaining about that is moot.
I want my books and magazines back.

The problem is all of those these are a waste in physically form. How many stores are just sitting on old edition books, cards and such for various games (especially warmachine) that they'll never sell? This just isn't a privateer issue but if I owned a store why would I ever want to stock anything like that? Especially with so many companies replacing their rules every 3 years it seams like? Cards are the worst as that means you can never update or adjust figures unless you print more cards that will just sit around never selling. And Magazines are very hard to be profitable. I'm sure privateer never made any direct money off of No Quarter and was just there to help boost sales of other items and even then it seams like it stopped being able to do that as the internet is 1000x better for what the magazine did. For this hobby everything you listed is better in digital form. And this is from someone that has hundreds of RPG books as I understand wanting physically things but when they way wargaming update cycles are digital is better.

One of the reasons they switched to digital was so that they could more easily release updates to model profiles, and not have the issue of having to do updated card decks, having boxes with out of date cards, etc.

One could easily make the argument that if they did sufficient playtesting, the frequency of updates wouldn't be required, and thus the quickly outdated hardcopy material wouldn't be such a burden. In fact, I am making that argument.

One of the things that really turned me off was the constant updates due to the CID program, and generally bending to listen to the biggest complainers (who happen to be mostly SR players, you know, the "Hard Core!" folks), which had, in my opinion, a pretty negative impact on the overall health of the game. Warmachine/Hordes were already relatively complex games with respect to the wide number of various special rules around, and had a big, big learning curve. Constant churn on updating rules makes that even worse: you must make sure you keep up to date on all the FAQ/Errata and any updates they put out via the CID. It's too much for most people. And that's a major barrier for more adoption.

Having to get all the digital stuff is yet another barrier. You either have to download and print stuff at home, or have a reasonably good smart phone or tablet with you when you want to play. Not everyone has that, or, more importantly, wants that. And yeah, yeah, "it's the 21st century, everyone has a smartphone" is something I hear people say in response to that, but even if the majority do, tack on the data charges or even network availability, and it's still a big pain the the buttocks in comparison to just having the cards with the info you need so you can roll dice and push around toy soldiers.

Overread wrote:One issue with online groups is that you can more easily retain a large portion of the population who are not engaging with the hobby any more.

I don't know that this is a bad thing. Perhaps the reason they are engaging and not playing is because there is something about the game they are not enjoying, but would come back if this thing was changed. For instance, I haven't played Warmachine since Mk2 - and I admit to being quite negative about it (and the WMH community) when I quit - but I still continued with discussions about it long after I stopped... and now I'm back because my two main complaints about the game are alleviated.

For the record, the two complaints were the crappy model quality (MonPoc's models are great, so I'm on board with metal and resin models) and the community (it is lighter than it was, but I definitely get the impression that the players left are less steamroller-only). My third major complaint is that the game looks terrible on the table, so I'd like to advocate for more terrain, painted models, neoprene mats, and less tokens.

Ghool wrote:My main complaint is that everything needed to actually play the game is digital.

You are preaching to the choir. I love video games, but I come to miniature gaming to explicitly not have video games. I don't want to have to update apps or download patches. I don't want to have an update break something for a week, or a formatting error that only seems to affect my iPad. Give me something physical that I can hold, where I don't have to deal with the inconvenience of modern computing.

Monkeysloth wrote:The problem is all of those these are a waste in physically form.

Absolutely not. My physical books and magazines are treasures. My binders full of cards are treasures. Just like all my miniatures are treasures. When I picked up a bunch of WMH starters recently, I also got all the Forces books (on clearance) - completely worthless for gaming, since they are universally out of date, but I love reading the fluff and looking at pictures of the models. I wish we got stuff like that for MonPoc.

Warmachine used to be able to sustain No Quarter and book releases just fine. It's just that the Warmachine audience shrunk after the release of Mk3 and PP likely decided to prioritize quick balance turnaround, which means that published stats immediately became outdated. Plus, PP did just release Oblivion.

Ghool wrote:My main complaint is that everything needed to actually play the game is digital.
The only physical component I can buy anymore are models.

Unfortunately, the books and magazine weren't selling well enough to even consider it a loss leader. No Quarter even went quarterly to defray costs and it wasn't enough. So the faults there are with the community, not with the company.

As for being digital, I can say the same thing that everything needed for playing 40K and AoS is digital as well. At least you aren't required to print out a whole book with PP (I admit a ", yet" should be added there). Both the Oblivion set and each starter set comes with the rules, and you can print out the erratas and cards just like one will with 40K.

Valander wrote:Having to get all the digital stuff is yet another barrier. You either have to download and print stuff at home, or have a reasonably good smart phone or tablet with you when you want to play.

I just run down to FedEx Office/Kinko's to print out the cards I want. They even have a handy cutter you can use to get them nice and clean. Then I just fold them around the old cards and stick them in to a card protector I already am using, and I'm good to go. Took me all of 15 minutes, including logging in to one of their computers, downloading the file, and then going to one of the copiers. That was getting cards for Alexia1, Boomer1, Galleon, Cryx Starter, and Legion Starter which I had acquired at the local gamer garage sale.

Of course, I have a little knowledge on how to do that, having spent 8 years setting up their store's systems.

Sqorgar wrote:Warmachine used to be able to sustain No Quarter and book releases just fine. It's just that the Warmachine audience shrunk after the release of Mk3 and PP likely decided to prioritize quick balance turnaround, which means that published stats immediately became outdated. Plus, PP did just release Oblivion.

Numbers for No Quarter were already low when Mk 3 hit. They went Quarterly with No Quarter all too soon after Mk3's launch for it to be just Mk3's drop.

 Charistoph wrote:
Numbers for No Quarter were already low when Mk 3 hit. They went Quarterly with No Quarter all too soon after Mk3's launch for it to be just Mk3's drop.

Wasn't really there for the launch of Mk3, so I didn't know the timeline. There's probably a lot of reasons to drop the magazine beyond low numbers. It's probably difficult to justify in the face of daily website article updates, and PP's output probably couldn't support a bi-monthly magazine anyway.

I've noticed with MonPoc and Riot Quest that PP no longer even shows painted new releases in previews or even on retail packaging. It's probably difficult to run a magazine when PP no longer bothers to paint their own models...

 Sqorgar wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
This has definitely been the worst aspect about MK3. I mean, the edition was released 4 years ago and most of the complaints you hear to this day are stuff from the first 6 months or so that have long since been resolved.

Other than balance, what other complaints have there been with Mk3?

Note - these are not all necessarily my issues - these would be the most frequently mentioned things I've seen. Some small, some large.

From a game/hobby POV?

Getting rid of the books (including skull island, and pp digital - I lost all my back catalogue of nq)
Balance /change issues.
Too much bloat in the game.
Getting rid of the press gangers.
Getting rid of the forums.
Getting rid of no quarter.
Getting rid of cards - bigger digital requirements.
CID issues - too much chaos from changes, too little, changes in the wrong places etc.
Lack of support for other projects e.g. Company of iron etc

Price of models is ridiculous. (5 everblight chosen for a hundred quid? I'll take gw, thanks!)I've been told a competitive infernals army can cost nearly a grande.

Also, and probsbly cruciallyThey implemented a lot of retailer-hostile decisions in terms of stock and support that really turned people's backs up. There was also the black anchor fiasco where pp sell their own high margin things and don't loop in retailers.To the point where a lot of retailers. simply got fed up with them and stopped stocking. For a company without a retail arm, and relied on third parties this was a self inflicted kneecapping.

I hear what some people are saying about wanting less digital elements of their hobby. I have a friend who is the same. However, with love, that is massively out of step with the general trend and what most of the community want.

Physical cards and to a certain extent, rule books are redundant in a game and age where most games are now operating under a “living rules” method. Rules, stats and units get adjusted all the time so as soon as a card deck can be printed, its out of date and largely useless. This is why many stores got stuck with Mk3 card decks shortly after launch when PP had to make adjustments. It’s a dead product. One of my mates purchased a Khador deck only to have all the point values and other things changed almost as soon as he purchased it. That why the solution and future is accompanying apps print at home online card decks.

People forget that when PP launched WarRoom back in the day, it may have been one of, if not the first wargame to have such a app. The were ahead of the curve or if not, close to the front in that regards.

The issue with WarRoom, much like many things with PP, its hasn’t evolved and moved beyond its initial model. WarRoom now is overpriced and often hit by bugs and most other wargames have superior app that are often free. PP has not moved with the times. If War Room were free and worked as well as others, players would be less reluctant to use it.

Price of models is ridiculous. (5 everblight chosen for a hundred quid? I'll take gw, thanks!)I've been told a competitive infernals army can cost nearly a grande.

This remains one of my huge issues with the game and why im not investing all that much if not at all in new models right now. The game costs for many of the new WM/H units is ridiculous. To build on you example I believe that one 5 model unit of Infernal Howlers is over £85. For 5 medium based models that are not even that detailed. Its stupid. Iv got most of my Trollbloods from online shop sales, ebay/FB sellers or at one or two UK conventions where stores were selling off PP as very low prices. PP really need to rethink their pricing

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Numbers for No Quarter were already low when Mk 3 hit. They went Quarterly with No Quarter all too soon after Mk3's launch for it to be just Mk3's drop.

Wasn't really there for the launch of Mk3, so I didn't know the timeline. There's probably a lot of reasons to drop the magazine beyond low numbers. It's probably difficult to justify in the face of daily website article updates, and PP's output probably couldn't support a bi-monthly magazine anyway.

Whatever your theories may accuse them of, the reasons given for No Quarter's reduction and stoppage was due to lack of interest. Translated that means that not enough people were buying the periodical, either from them or the stores which bought their product. While I can't address the world, much less the nation, I noticed that usually only one person would buy the periodical locally and everyone in the group used that.

In the end, I get people accusing PP of not providing sufficient content outside of the competitive market, even though almost all that content was in the No Quarter periodical. That's like accusing a fast food join of not providing breakfast, but you never go there before 2pm, yet they open at 6am.

Sunno wrote:

Price of models is ridiculous. (5 everblight chosen for a hundred quid? I'll take gw, thanks!)I've been told a competitive infernals army can cost nearly a grande.

This remains one of my huge issues with the game and why im not investing all that much if not at all in new models right now. The game costs for many of the new WM/H units is ridiculous. To build on you example I believe that one 5 model unit of Infernal Howlers is over £85. For 5 medium based models that are not even that detailed. Its stupid. Iv got most of my Trollbloods from online shop sales, ebay/FB sellers or at one or two UK conventions where stores were selling off PP as very low prices. PP really need to rethink their pricing

Something that's hasn't really been brought up is how much the MSRP enforcement hurt them. I know some other publishers were doing this at the same time, Asmodee for example, but it really did appear to hurt Privateer more then anyone else. Discount Game inc having the ability to sell PP stuff cheaper then they're supposed to (if you send them an email first) is I sign, I believe, that Privateer realizes that but don't want to walk it back for fear that they might actually burn whatever bridges with game stores they have left.

Charistoph wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Numbers for No Quarter were already low when Mk 3 hit. They went Quarterly with No Quarter all too soon after Mk3's launch for it to be just Mk3's drop.

Wasn't really there for the launch of Mk3, so I didn't know the timeline. There's probably a lot of reasons to drop the magazine beyond low numbers. It's probably difficult to justify in the face of daily website article updates, and PP's output probably couldn't support a bi-monthly magazine anyway.

Whatever your theories may accuse them of, the reasons given for No Quarter's reduction and stoppage was due to lack of interest. Translated that means that not enough people were buying the periodical, either from them or the stores which bought their product. While I can't address the world, much less the nation, I noticed that usually only one person would buy the periodical locally and everyone in the group used that.

In the end, I get people accusing PP of not providing sufficient content outside of the competitive market, even though almost all that content was in the No Quarter periodical. That's like accusing a fast food join of not providing breakfast, but you never go there before 2pm, yet they open at 6am.

I think the editor of NQ also left around this time which caused some issues with PP being able to put it out as often. I know the Skull Island Expedition editor left before MK3 and they handed the rains of that to the guy over NQ but he had no interest in doing any more books (even though the sales were pretty decent) nor did he really know how to work with authors based off of what I've been told by people that use to write for them. Then I thought I heard he left as well but I could be mistaken.

 Monkeysloth wrote:

I think the editor of NQ also left around this time which caused some issues with PP being able to put it out as often. I know the Skull Island Expedition editor left before MK3 and they handed the rains of that to the guy over NQ but he had no interest in doing any more books (even though the sales were pretty decent) nor did he really know how to work with authors based off of what I've been told by people that use to write for them. Then I thought I heard he left as well but I could be mistaken.

This would not surprise me in the slightest.

Afaik, didn't pp haemorrhage most of their staff over the last few years as well? They lost most of the big development names and for me, when Seacat left, that felt like a bit of a death knell. He was the iron kingdoms. I heard they're down to something like thirty employees from a peak of a hundred. That kind of rapid turnover in staff has consequences, especially with loss of experience and knowledge.

Deadnight wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:

I think the editor of NQ also left around this time which caused some issues with PP being able to put it out as often. I know the Skull Island Expedition editor left before MK3 and they handed the rains of that to the guy over NQ but he had no interest in doing any more books (even though the sales were pretty decent) nor did he really know how to work with authors based off of what I've been told by people that use to write for them. Then I thought I heard he left as well but I could be mistaken.

This would not surprise me in the slightest.

Afaik, didn't pp haemorrhage most of their staff over the last few years as well? They lost most of the big development names and for me, when Seacat left, that felt like a bit of a death knell. He was the iron kingdoms. I heard they're down to something like thirty employees from a peak of a hundred. That kind of rapid turnover in staff has consequences, especially with loss of experience and knowledge.

They did loose a lot of people recently but the stuff I mentioned before were years before that -- like when PP was going pretty strong.

A chunk that left went to go work on the Marvel Game that FFG/Atomic Mass put out. Seacat left to go work on getting books published, but stull does contract work for PP -- which I believe some of the others that left do as well like Matt Goetz (SP?). It's hard to tell if the reason everyone left was because of financial issues with PP, direction the company was going they disagreed with or other opportunities that arose all around the same time. Whatever it is most that did leave seam to still seam to have a good relationship with PP.

Contractual work is pretty common even GW uses contracts for some design jobs. PP might have grown fat on employees as they grew, only to find that their output wasn't actually turning out to be great enough to warrant full time creative staff. Things slowed down so instead of retaining staff that would bleed them dry whilst also being left with too little work; they might have simply shifted back toward short term contract work.

Releasing staff would help lower their continual overheads. Granted hiring contract staff can end up costing more in the long run, but it also means that PP can balance their needs against investment. If they hit if off well they can hire in more staff; if things slow up again and they have to shift directions once more, they can lower demands on certain titles for new creative content without leaving themselves with long term staff wages to damage their overall financial position.


Letting staff go is often a sign of the market and company income contracting, however it doesn't have to be a bad thing; done at the right time it can save a company from falling apart. Letting them ride out rougher times and prepare to rebuild for a better times.

 Overread wrote:
Contractual work is pretty common even GW uses contracts for some design jobs. PP might have grown fat on employees as they grew, only to find that their output wasn't actually turning out to be great enough to warrant full time creative staff. Things slowed down so instead of retaining staff that would bleed them dry whilst also being left with too little work; they might have simply shifted back toward short term contract work.

Releasing staff would help lower their continual overheads. Granted hiring contract staff can end up costing more in the long run, but it also means that PP can balance their needs against investment. If they hit if off well they can hire in more staff; if things slow up again and they have to shift directions once more, they can lower demands on certain titles for new creative content without leaving themselves with long term staff wages to damage their overall financial position.


Letting staff go is often a sign of the market and company income contracting, however it doesn't have to be a bad thing; done at the right time it can save a company from falling apart. Letting them ride out rougher times and prepare to rebuild for a better times.

With as much amazing talent thats out there for sculpting and painting, I'm really surprised that companies still try to keep on hand sculptors and painters. I know there are obvious advantages to this, but the cost savings has to be real.

I also agree on the reduction in the workforce. People often view it as a sign of the end times, but it really isn't. Companies are a lot like people, they grow, experience financial gain, and then they tend to get a little too much fat around the belly line. When times come where they have to then cut back on all of the red meat and go to a chicken-based diet, it's actually healthier for them, even if they don't like it (And no, this has nothing to do with a 188 overall cholesterol level in my analogy ). (Keep in mind, I'm not saying its a good thing for employees, its not, but it is for the company).

Seabass wrote:
With as much amazing talent thats out there for sculpting and painting, I'm really surprised that companies still try to keep on hand sculptors and painters. I know there are obvious advantages to this, but the cost savings has to be real.

I think PP does use contract sculptors. Or at least, I remember one posting about working on MonPoc over on BGG around when it launched.

I also agree on the reduction in the workforce. People often view it as a sign of the end times, but it really isn't.

I sort of feel like PP's was a direct result of Games Workshop's failure. This kind of caused Warmachine's popularity to be artificially inflated, and unsustainable in a market with actual competition. I think X-Wing was really the first challenger to Warmachine, and I remember losing several players to it during Mk2.

I mean, PP did a lot of anti-consumer stuff which pissed off a bunch of players. And Mk3 wasn't a great launch (though I've seen worse). PP got screwed hard on the original Monsterpocalypse. I'm not saying that PP is blameless. I'm just not sure Warmachine would've gotten as popular as it did if there were real alternatives. I feel like it is more niche than it appears - or maybe the miniature gaming market has grown broader and more mainstream (and WMH failed to grow with it). To be fair, some of that growth can be directly attributable to Warmachine.

I feel like PP is in a better place with multiple tentpole product lines, built on fewer, more unique miniatures. I mean, $90 for a unit of 10 metal miniatures is on the extreme side. Riot Quest's and MonPoc's miniatures are a bit on the expensive side too, but they come with unique gameplay mechanics that can greatly change the game - and you don't need many of them. Warcaster is looking similar. PP's metal and resin can be created on demand, and sold at profit at lower numbers, so PP can make more money by releasing less, and the customers can feel like they get more with less as well.

I think PP is also letting the plastic models slip into obscurity. I know they aren't remaking out of print starter sets, and there's a bunch of models using the old crappy plastic that probably will need to be remade using their current production pipeline. How much of Warmachine's back catalogue is outsourced plastic models, and how badly hurt would Warmachine be without them?

I think only outsourced plastics are the HIPs warjacks and engines and the battleboxes. The restic that you, and others, dislike was in house as it's just spin cast resin like Mantic uses.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I think only outsourced plastics are the HIPs warjacks and engines and the battleboxes. The restic that you, and others, dislike was in house as it's just spin cast resin like Mantic uses.

No, not at all.
All PP plastics were outsourced to Chinese manufacturing.
PP has not made any plastic in house now, or ever. That’s why there were such massive delays.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
The restic that you, and others, dislike...

You make that sound like folks exist that don't dislike it...

Ghool wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I think only outsourced plastics are the HIPs warjacks and engines and the battleboxes. The restic that you, and others, dislike was in house as it's just spin cast resin like Mantic uses.

No, not at all.
All PP plastics were outsourced to Chinese manufacturing.
PP has not made any plastic in house now, or ever. That’s why there were such massive delays.

But restic isn't plastic so I'm confused to what else was as the stuff from them I have is clearly similar mantic's. maybe there's another set of material they used I'm not aware of, I have lots of PP stuff but I'm not an regular purchaser. The most recent thing I've assembled is Grymkin Hollowmen and that, to me, is clearly a spin cast resin.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
The restic that you, and others, dislike...

You make that sound like folks exist that don't dislike it...

Me. I have had bad restic but I haven't had a bad one from Privateer but I only have a few kits I've assembled I'm fine with. I also like PVC minis and not the biggest fan of metal so there you go.

PP has had 4 materials for models. White metal, which was/is done in house. Polyurethane resin ("regular resin") also done in house. The PVC based "restic" stuff, which was all done from outside in China (probably the same facility that did CMON's stuff, but unconfirmed). Confirmed "Made in China" on one of the Battle Boxes I just grabbed off my shelf that has been gathering dust. And more recently HIPS for a few kits I believe, likely also from China but I don't have any to confirm.

Wow. You're right. I dug up one of the boxes and it clearly says produced in china. That's pretty surprising as generally the reason to use restic is it can be produced similar to metal minis.

It might be at the time they just didn't have any experience in-house with it or that their in-house machines were already running at heavy capacity so outsourcing was an option they chose to try and increase production without large costs in new machines and perhaps even new factory space to put those machines in.

Thread over on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Warmachine/comments/he0vds/warmachine_discontinued/

TLDR: Basically a new player in Canada can't find anything to buy. Had at least one gamestore tell him PP discontinued Warmachine. Not a lot off good info but a bit of discussion on how hard it is to start up due to poor availability of things a new player would want.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
Thread over on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Warmachine/comments/he0vds/warmachine_discontinued/

TLDR: Basically a new player in Canada can't find anything to buy. Had at least one gamestore tell him PP discontinued Warmachine. Not a lot off good info but a bit of discussion on how hard it is to start up due to poor availability of things a new player would want.

My nearest LGS went from having half their back wall being Warmachine, down to two sections, down to an end cap. Problem was a lack of purchasing interest.

My LGS before I moved across town, however, still kept up a lot of stuff, and even expanded a little here and there. But part of it may be that he knows some of the staff, having played Warhammer with them way back when. Even with that, he did a clearance sale.

Right now WMH just isn't having a lot of strong interest and there is a glut of second-hand on the market right now, so only new stuff sells (if even that). It seems the games with the most interest have a much smaller model count are leading the fore, if it's not the much simplified 40K franchise. Then when you have something like Star Wars coming along and selling kits with the same number of models for less, it is hard to get an interest going.

It seems that reddit thread is mostly about the plastic models disappearing (which we talked about here). PP is doing their Lock and Load keynote soon. I'd wait until after that before declaring WMH discontinued. I'm pretty sure I heard Hungerford say that more WMH stuff was coming at the end of 2020.

My out of left field prediction? Mk3.5 relaunch in 2021. Not new rules (they wouldn't have made the new digest rulebook for just Oblivion), but new starter sets in a post-Infernals timeline, which will cull a bunch of models from the lineup.

They need to inject some new life into Warmachine/hordes. That said I can see it as a struggle until they can get some kind of outreach program to help GROW their market rather than relying heavily on the existing.

This whole thread I’ve been stating that PP doesn’t really distribute outside the US anymore. And buying direct is crazy shipping costs to get stuff to Canada.
It’s the main reason I’ve lost interest in their games - availability and ridiculous prices.

You think they could at least get stuff to canada. It's like a 2 hour drive from their warehouse.

 Ghool wrote:
This whole thread I’ve been stating that PP doesn’t really distribute outside the US anymore. And buying direct is crazy shipping costs to get stuff to Canada.
It’s the main reason I’ve lost interest in their games - availability and ridiculous prices.

They do, but stores now need to manage their relationship directly with PP. As far as I know there is really only 1 store in the UK that has formed a direct relationship with PP. all the rest either use the normal distribution channels which makes it really hard to get product and orders turn up really slowly.

If I buy new, the I get my WM/H from this one store. Talking to other major stores, it seems that they feel that PP is too hard to work with, doesn't sell enough for them to keep on the shelves and based on many stores getting burnt at the start of Mk3, all the good will and desire to build bridges with the company is totally gone.

So you can get PP products outside the US if your a store, but you have to want to set up and manage that link outside of the normal 1 or 2 large importers and distributors so that is an overhead. Most stores seems to have taken the view that its not worth it and so dont.

But if you want stuff in the UK I can recommend Patriot Games based in Leeds. But the fact that it took me years to find this out and its like super secret information known only to those within the competitive core of the UK Comp Scene is also part of the issue.

 RiTides wrote:
Hey guys,

So this occurred to me, after mulling over what wasn't gelling with me about joining in with the local group to start up playing Hordes again. And it's that I think they really just do need to re-boot. Mk3 clearly lost a ton of fans, but there's a chance to win those same fans back with a new edition, and maybe also make an easier way for folks to start.

The reason this hit me, too, was thinking about Warcaster. Obviously, starting a new game gets it out from some of the problems of the old (namely, no design space left for new releases!). But in the end, it would end up in the very same place, imo. And to be completely honest, I've got a really awesome Hordes minions army converted and painted, and would like to use at least part of it!

What do you think, is there any chance of a Mk4 on the horizon? What would it take to get folks to try out Warmachine and Hordes?

Cheers for any thoughts / ideas

After playing Monsterpocalypse and see Warcaster rules shape up, I think Warmachine in Mk4 need to start emulating those in house IP systems. It puts alot of the math behind the dice instead of in front of them and would make the game more accessible to people. Right now Mk 1-3 use a modified d20 system and I think most of the new generation don't have the patience for it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Sunno wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
This whole thread I’ve been stating that PP doesn’t really distribute outside the US anymore. And buying direct is crazy shipping costs to get stuff to Canada.
It’s the main reason I’ve lost interest in their games - availability and ridiculous prices.

They do, but stores now need to manage their relationship directly with PP. As far as I know there is really only 1 store in the UK that has formed a direct relationship with PP. all the rest either use the normal distribution channels which makes it really hard to get product and orders turn up really slowly.

If I buy new, the I get my WM/H from this one store. Talking to other major stores, it seems that they feel that PP is too hard to work with, doesn't sell enough for them to keep on the shelves and based on many stores getting burnt at the start of Mk3, all the good will and desire to build bridges with the company is totally gone.

So you can get PP products outside the US if your a store, but you have to want to set up and manage that link outside of the normal 1 or 2 large importers and distributors so that is an overhead. Most stores seems to have taken the view that its not worth it and so dont.

But if you want stuff in the UK I can recommend Patriot Games based in Leeds. But the fact that it took me years to find this out and its like super secret information known only to those within the competitive core of the UK Comp Scene is also part of the issue.

After seeing DC seperate from Diamond and I would be surprised if we see the same thing with Alliance.