Warmachine vs Age of Sigmar

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**auticus**

7th was definitely more "scripted" in that after deployment was finished but before the first turn, any one with any length of experience with the game could tell you the likely decisions that were going to be made, the statistical probability of said decisions and the likely outcome with a high degree of accuracy.

So when I say "scripted" I mean often after deployment finished and you knew the entire set of forces on the table you knew how the game was going to play out and barring wildly hot or cold dice knew the end result.

8th was also sort of like this but had more random elements in it which made it a bit more unpredictable (and is why I liked it much better over 7th because the games seemed less scripted) but it also had its "meta" and you knew before the game started what you'd likely face given the army selection of your opponent, and the game was going to play out similarly to most games with the exception that the dice had much more of an impact, so you had to have some backup plans in place whereas in 7th edition that was largely unnecessary again barring wildly swingy dice.

Much like chess patterns. Knight moves here, you know to counter with bishop here, and then you know opponent will move rook to check there and you should counter with this etc etc until someone makes a mistake.

Those games are fun for a lot of people but I'm not one of those people (I do play chess, and enjoy chess for what it is but I don't want all of my games like that)

But I also use tabletop wargaming to tell stories and thats why my perspective is what it is.

In any version of WHFB, lists were a huge thing, just like 40k. The army list would often win the game for you because people play to extremes and so it was indeed paper/rock/scissors much of the time and 40k is this much of the time today as well.

**jonolikespie**

8th I found very tactical because of movement shenanigans and, well, abuse of the movement phase rules. Meta says X deathstar should beat me, but it won't if the entire game it is trying to move it's way around my 3 units of 5 wolves that keep blocking it's charge lanes and angle themselves so that the deathstar's back will be to my hammer units if it does charge and overrun the wolves.

40k I consider to be tactically shallow because way too much of it comes down to target priority. Whatever you shoot at you're hitting on 3s, so all you need to do is pick out the unit that whatever gun you're holding will kill most efficiently, or pick out the unit most capable of killing you back. Movement is irrelevant except for moving into range of your target and taking objectives.

AoS when I was demo'd it felt very much like the latter, moving forwards at each other with flanks/facing/positioning being relatively unimportant.

**Meowstalker**

jonolikespie wrote:
8th I found very tactical because of movement shenanigans and, well, abuse of the movement phase rules. Meta says X deathstar should beat me, but it won't if the entire game it is trying to move it's way around my 3 units of 5 wolves that keep blocking it's charge lanes and angle themselves so that the deathstar's back will be to my hammer units if it does charge and overrun the wolves.

It happened since 6th edition, iirc.

**Plumbumbarum**

Sqorgar wrote:
RoperPG wrote:
Idle curiosity, but what unit of measurement is 'depth' in a wargaming discussion?
Complexity or volume of rules?
Amount of decision making? Significance?

If you look at a game as a series of decisions, you can graph these decisions as a tree structure. These tree structures have both breadth (how wide they are) and depth (how deep they go). Or, to put it more succinctly, a game's breadth is the number of choices available to you while a game's depth is how much it affects the game state down the line. Chess, for example, is considered an extremely deep game because of the huge number of game states that each choice creates or eliminates. Age of Sigmar is a broad game because of the huge number of choices available with regards to creating each scenario, even though the choices are largely not that meaningful.

Warmachine is a game that attempts to be both wide (lots of options) and deep (importance of options), but that rarely works out in practice. When there are a lot of important options, it usually turns out that some options are more important than others, creating a dominant strategy - that is, a choice which is objectively superior to another choice. When a choice becomes obvious, it ceases to be a choice. The end result is that even though Warmachine technically has a bunch of branches available, only a limited subset of those choices become viable strategies. The less fruitful branches are effectively pruned. In my opinion, Warmachine has far too few fruitful choices available, with specific scenarios, builds, and tactics becoming dominant choices that ultimately remove much needed breadth from the game.

There is also the complication that with broad trees, people who seek mastery of the system are faced with too many meaningful choices and they seek to intentionally reduce the problem set to something more manageable. With everything you have to know and remember about Warmachine and its various strategies, just playing Steamroller rules has a rather unmanageable choice graph. But if you factor in that the graph basically doubles if you also play a second scenario (like Heavy Metal, jacks only), with a completely different set of choice pressures (certain tactics stop working, others change in effectiveness, new tactics appear), then you end up with something completely unwieldy. This is why many Warmachine players self-impose limitations on the breadth of the game in order to make it manageable (also known as "the meta").

Age of Sigmar is a breadth-first game, which means that while it has mostly shallow decisions to make, it has an epic ton of them. A shallow decision is fine to make once or twice, but it can become tedious to keep making it. Thankfully, in Age of Sigmar, you never have to make the same decision twice. There are so many options with regard to how to you build the game that variety is enough to keep the game interesting for years or decades. I'm actually reminded of the board game Super Dungeon Explore, which has the reputation that the game is only replayable if you keep buying new expansions to keep it fresh. The problem with AoS, for some players, is that because the decisions are largely shallow, there is simply less to master about the game, and some people would prefer to pick one army and one strategy and focus on that - which is going to be unsatisfying for the reasons listed.

Note though that I said that Age of Sigmar has "mostly" shallow decisions to make. There are a bunch of decisions which are quite deep indeed, and I don't think AoS gets nearly enough credit for them. But AoS is rather selective about when it decides to be deep and most certainly has chosen breadth as its focus over depth.

Good post.

As for Warmachine though, before the dominant strategy emerges, you have to figure it out, not to mention that the deeper the ruleset, the more the chance that there is something better to do waiting to be discovered.

Also changing scenarios/ lists/ terrain is key, it's not the game's fault that players choose to limit themselves and noone says you have to as well. My gaming circle flat out refuses to play the same battle twice and the conditions constantly change ( in general mind you not particularly wm), I would like to switch sides sometimes to check the balance but it's rare that it happens.

It is like playing only one mission in Space Hulk and complaining it got predictable, you just don't do that.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Sqorgar wrote:
RoperPG wrote:

Of course random elements of the game add to unpredictability, that's a given.
What I've found is that the standardisation of hit/wound rolls toward the 4+/4+ everyone keeps bemoaning removes a number of 'dead cert' situations.
Yes, a Bloodthirster is *always* going to lay waste to a unit of basic infantry.
But charging a unit of cavalry or elite troops into a mob of grunts isn't the foregone conclusion it was in WFB, or is pretty much in WMH.
Yes, unit special rules will have effects, but the best you can hope for a lot of the time in AoS is "I'll do that this turn and see what happens".
That's the unpredictability. In WFB and WMH I've seen plenty of games where rolling the dice was pretty much a formality, AoS I've never been able to count on a unit to get a job done like I could in WFB. It's why I've found AoS plays a lot more reactively than stuff I've played before because you can't rely on your plan holding for more than a couple of turns at the absolute most.

With regard to randomness, it's effect on the decision tree is rather interesting. What it does is increase breadth by decreasing depth. That is, it increases the number and complexity of the choices available to you (you now have performing an action, almost performing an action, and failing an action, all resulting in different game states, with the percentage chance of happening allowing you to decide how much emphasis to give to each possibility). However, because it makes the game non-deterministic, it becomes impossible to predict the game state the further into the predictive future you go. You can guess what you're opponent will do in the next turn, but not in three or four turns.

The end result is that Age of Sigmar is more tactical than strategic, more reactionary. You are concerned less about achieving goals, and more concerned about moving towards the direction of achieving goals. To quote Al Pacino from Any Given Sunday, it's a game of inches. Perhaps literally as well.

While randomness can indeed shift the weight from list building to the table, excessive use of it ruins both. Also in the more reactionary game, it's still good to have deep mechanics, something that AoS fails at. You make rather simple decisions, randomness shakes it up and you have to react with another simple decision.