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George Spiggott wrote:Part of the problem there is scale. When Evolution was released the number of units available to each faction doubled overnight. Now Warmachine has five books and the MkII rebalance. It will be quite some time before that problem reoccurs, if it ever does.

Seriously, when it was at its worst there were only one or two 'must' have units per year. How 'must' they were depends upon your gaming environment.

I don't know about other factions but all the Prime units for Cryx are good. There are no duffers in Prime.

I played Cryx as my first army. My list rarely changed from Biles, Mech Thralls, bone jacks, bane thralls, and caster as a core. Oh, and Pistol Wraiths. I still had to change constantly in tactics and swapping out certain items to deal with all the new additions other people were taking. Filthy, filthy Alexia Ciannor...

Ah, Alexia.

She's still gross. Just not as gross.

I play Cryx, she's toned down just fine in MKII. In MkI she made the Withershadow Combine an auto-include against Cygnar, Mercenaries and Khador.

I'm not sure I'd be comfortable comparing the rulesets for 40k and WarmaHordes. They're doing completely different things with totally different aims in mind.

I will say this: WarmaHordes' ruleset is much more concise and precise. Fewer abilities are rule-breaking or contradictory and the Forces books provide preventative FAQs, if you will, for abilities like Dispel or Hellmouth that can have unintuitive effects. It's not a perfect ruleset, but it's very well thought out.

But direct comparison of the games isn't going to work. The scales are totally different, for example. WH games are played at the individual level -- each action for every model is rolled. Individual models are targeted. Models are, overall, hardier and face less firepower. 40K models are more abstract and represent bodies on a field, not actual, individual troopers. WH has a stronger sense of real-time maneuvering, where every individual attack is more important. 40K gets to see more huge and awesome things like Trygons and focused battalion fire.

In the end, it's fair to say that PP's ruleset is significantly clearer, but the two games are doing totally different things. If you're playing table-top wargames to see 54 Space Marines gun down 200 Gaunts while coordinating Leman Russes with Heavy Weapons teams to blow the gak out of flanking Trygons, you may be underwhelmed by WH, no matter how tight the rules are.

MisterMoon wrote:I have a buddy who swears that Warmachine doesn't have a single broken rule, and the rules are crystal clear. I haven't gotten fully into Warmachine/Horde but I find this very difficult to believe (I've found broken or dubious rules in every table top game I've played).

The only thing I usually think of when he says it, is that I really don't think the two games are all that simmilar. Sure they are table top, but the whole premise of play in WM/Horde seems very unique imo.

thoughts?

Tell your buddy to stop drinking the Kool Aid.

Between the two games, they are completly different and not even a conversation about better. My opinion is the same as yours, they are two different games that are both fun.

They both have issues, such as the codex creep, price creep, and nulification of older units, but it goes without saying, we are talking about two companies that want to sell product. I play them and have several different of each army, and do so easily because I like the flavor and the gameplay aspects of both.

Grot 6 wrote:
such as the codex creep

There is no real codex creep in WM/H. I am still using models from every Mk1 release book.

Grot 6 wrote:
price creep

They are getting more expensive, but PP does not have a history of yearly price hikes.

Grot 6 wrote:
and nulification of older units

This has never happened in WM/H. As has been noted above, Prime units, solos and warcasters are still useuful. Due to this, however, they had the deadly-but-never-quite-accomplished "model bloat" where you start drowning in choices and their many interacting rules start to suffocate the game. This was starting to happen in Mk1, which is why we got Mk2.

Kool-aid drinkers in WM/H are typically those that claim that every model is an excellent choice in enough scenarios to warrant buying them. This is not always the case. There are useful models from every release, but there are also models that have so spesific usefulness ranges that they only rarely see play. And there are hidden gems. Dominar Rasheth was widely poo-poeed when he came out with the FoH: Skorne book, but I have seen him doing decently as a tournament warlock - played as the spell slinger he is. Of course, he has to stay out of close combat or the fat man carried by baby elephants is going to spend a lot of time running in panic.

Proliferation and overlap of special rules from codexes is one of the problems with 40K.

You have a basic combat mechanism of wounding, and you have various sorts of saves, the best of which is invulnerables.
Then you have weapons which ignore invulnerables.
Then you have Feel No Pain, which is an extra save if your ++ save doesn't work.
Then you have weapons which negate FNP, and cause Instant Death.
Then there is Eternal Warrior, which allows you to ignore ID.
Maybe there are some special units or weapons that negate EW?

Some Tyranid units can use 15 different special rules, which are described on a dozen different pages of the codex and the rulebook.

Bits of things change whenever a new codex is released.

I have only read / watched tutorials about warmahordes.. but i can immediately see that it's way easier to learn than 40k & there's way less confusion as to how powers affect the game / rules are implemented. Pretty much everything you need to know is on your bloody card. Simple.

wh40k has lots of little special rules, USR, rules on weapons, rules about deployment, ect ect. It's not easy to remember them all for most people, and for newbs ect it takes a lot of wearing them in. Factor in the YMDC-ishness of a lot of rules interactions, and you have yourself a games system that doesn't function that smoothly when questions arise.

I haven't played WM yet, but of all the rambling i've heard about it none of it was rules arguments. I really can't say that about 40k.

I'm not saying either one is better than the other, but as far as rules go, It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Warmahordes has a tighter ruleset.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh and one more thing:
Has ANY WM unit ever been retconned out of existence, or out one gen and back in later? As far as i have seen, no. Correct me if i'm wrong

Kilkrazy wrote:Maybe there are some special units or weapons that negate EW?

Don't Strength 'D' weapons from Apocalypse ignore Eternal Warrior?

Mukkin'About wrote:Oh and one more thing:
Has ANY WM unit ever been retconned out of existence, or out one gen and back in later? As far as i have seen, no. Correct me if i'm wrong

No this has never happened with Warmachine or Hordes. It has also been stated as a design principle that it won't ever happen.

A few models have changed type but you have never been is a position where you cannot field as many of them as you could previously.

^ that is what I wish GW didn't do. retconning fluff and units has always been really disappointing to me.
Props to PP for making units and keeping them in the game no matter what

Ya, my 13th company, and LaTD armies still irk me. Theres still no real reason GW ever put forth about why they got dropped- just seems like laziness on thier part.

When I heard MkII was coming out- I was thinking 'Here we go again! The models I got a couple years ago are about to get flushed!'.

But then I saw the MKII test rules, and not only were the old units still usable- they were even competitive as thier points cost was very well balanced.

All in all, Warmachine and hordes have taken all the things I dont like in 40k- and made them good fun rules in thier own game.

Yes, its a slightly smaller scale than 40k is now. But if people remember back to 2nd Edition, the armies used to be smaller then too. The drive to sell sell sell has enlarged the armies, driven down the points cost of most every unit, and upped the size of the average tournament. Its getting to the point where its like 'isnt this what Epic was for?'

And- another peeve- tournaments. 40k tournaments are set on time limits for each round. This lets some players control the pace of the game for thier benefit -aka slowplaying. Anywhere else in the world, in competitve endeavors that are based on turns, a set number of turns are played out. Like baseball and its nine innings. Imagine how lopsided it could be if one team could go out there and be like 'theres 15 minutes left! we're up by 2 so lets just drag our feet and we'll win!'

So, the advent of timed play for Warmahordes games seems like an incredible levelling tool in terms of fairness.

Another factor to mention- theres been lots of posts on dakka about dice cheating in 40k. Usually involving people slipping in some extra dice to the handfuls that are often rolled.

Thats not going to happen in WM- since the base roll uses 2 dice, and then modifiers add to that. But its always clear why additional dice are rolled.