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 Overread wrote:
Sqor that's the same issue Magic the Gathering has and that has even more insane combos to the point where some are totally unbeatable - you basically win or lose based on the draw of the opponents deck. And yet Magic is utterly huge and seems to retain its population well. Granted a much lower buy-in-cost helps and the game can trickle feed better (even though in the long run you can pay way more than a miniatures game if you are keeping up with the current meta and you don't only buy select cards on ebay).

I don't understand. Are you trying to defend this behavior? Or trying to say it shouldn't be a problem because a bigger game gets away with it?

Magic is the #1 tournament game out there by a wide, wide margin that is relatively cheap and easy for new players to get into and play - especially if they just play casually with their friends (like the boys at my children's school). Warmachine is not the #1 game by a wide, wide margin and is expensive as crap and extremely time consuming to get into (not to mention a wicked learning curve). There's no such thing as a casual WMH player. If a Magic player doesn't survive the Spartan trials, there's fifty more waiting to replace them. If the community drives away a WMH player, they've lost a rare player with the time, money, and capability to play WMH.

For a population to remain healthy, new players must come in at a rate equal to or greater than the rate in which they lose old players. WMH has a very slow trickle of new players and older players have been leaving. The community is shrinking. It doesn't matter where everybody went, only why nobody is waiting in line to be let in.

 LunarSol wrote:
The thing is, themes are intended to be the way the game is played at a competitive level now. It's how PP has chosen to break up their factions into more manageable chunks to design and balance around. Free build lists are essentially paying the ally tax people so desperately clamor for, and its very much an intended design.

I don't think people have caught on to the idea that the factions advertised are actually around now 3-5 sub factions similar to the way Mercenaries worked in MK2. I personally think its great and has done wonders for the game's appearance and sense of playstyle, but the conversation around the game definitely hasn't caught up.

I love the mini faction within faction approach, I got my Kaya beast list, Wurmwood bucket of infantry list and working on Rock list (and the Chikken Likken list that shall not be played)

Sqorgar I'm saying that MTG manages to achieve a high recruitment and retention rate despite having even worse power level variation. Ergo that Warmachine and Hordes might be doing something else wrong other than game balance in order to be resulting in a loss of players at both ends. I'd say the panic scrapping of the PG scheme coupled with them nuking their own forums really hasn't helped PP retain a good community connection.

GW can get away without a local group of officially supported fans because GW has its own stores and staff; nearly any other miniatures game that I see which does well tends to have its own group of supported fans who help introduce new players and such. The whole MTG court case that I think sparked PP dropping their own scheme was a worry for them, but at the same time I think they do need to bring that back in some form.


I'm not defending vast power differences and indeed its one big gripe I have with MGT in that a casual and competitive player are almost impossible to put together since the competitive deck might well win nearly every time unless its user gets a really bad draw of cards. However I'm saying that if a game with a vastly bigger power level curve can survive then Warmachine/Hordes has to be doing more than just its balance to be losing players.

I will say, the community has always been really bad about playing anything other than tournament games. I'm not saying the problem is in the lack of narrative content by that, but just that much of the time you'll see players unwilling to even play 50 point games against someone who doesn't own a full 75 point army. I used to think that was primarily the fault of the game's need for scenarios and the steamroller packet just not scaling well (because it doesn't) but the community has so thoroughly rejected even official variants to Masters that I've come around to the idea that its a deeper issue than something that can be solved simply by PP providing support for smaller point games.

I sort of concur with Lunar, I also think the 1.21 gigawatt explosion of other options in recent years has taken its toll, prior to that it was largely the Geedubs or PP but now there a massive range of other choices

 Overread wrote:
Sqorgar I'm saying that MTG manages to achieve a high recruitment and retention rate despite having even worse power level variation. Ergo that Warmachine and Hordes might be doing something else wrong other than game balance in order to be resulting in a loss of players at both ends. I'd say the panic scrapping of the PG scheme coupled with them nuking their own forums really hasn't helped PP retain a good community connection.

I admit that losing the forums and PGs were probably did a lot of immediate harm, but I think people are greatly overestimating their value. These are tasks the community is easily capable of compensating for, if they wanted to. I'm not sure they were a universal good either, as the forums were kind of a poor place for new players and at least my local PG was one of the people who wouldn't play new players because he was only interested in running the tournament scenario at full points.

From what my brother-in-law has said (he's played since first edition), mk3 was only sort of damaging, but for his group, the launch of 40k 8th edition is what made the biggest impact. He said the majority of players in the WMH group were lapsed 40k players, and once GW started being kind of awesome again (and PP making lots of bad decisions), they hopped ship back. He also said that X-Wing was big competition for players and that the 2nd edition could potentially drag a few lapsed X-Wing players away.

GW can get away without a local group of officially supported fans because GW has its own stores and staff; nearly any other miniatures game that I see which does well tends to have its own group of supported fans who help introduce new players and such. The whole MTG court case that I think sparked PP dropping their own scheme was a worry for them, but at the same time I think they do need to bring that back in some form.

In the US, in many places, Warhammer stores are kind of hard to come by. My nearest one is about 5 hours away by car. But I walked into a 40k tournament in progress once and there must've been 50 people participating (I honestly didn't know there were more than 10 miniature gamers in town). The only thing that even remotely counts as support around here is a Facebook group.

I'm not defending vast power differences and indeed its one big gripe I have with MGT in that a casual and competitive player are almost impossible to put together since the competitive deck might well win nearly every time unless its user gets a really bad draw of cards. However I'm saying that if a game with a vastly bigger power level curve can survive then Warmachine/Hordes has to be doing more than just its balance to be losing players.

It's definitely a culmination of things. I think most potential WMH players are lost before they even get their first battle box (or shortly after attempting to assemble one - ugh).

You know what a typical WMH game looks like? A flat green table with a couple flat circles and rectangles on it, some brass rings, and some or most of the figures unpainted (only occasionally primed). It looks like a geometry exam. What potential player is going to see that and think, wow! How do I get me some of that?

Meanwhile, I've seen pure grey armies of 40k go after each other, but the board had 3D terrain, and the grey armies had a wide variety of profiles, from giant mechs to tanks to hordes of infantry to giant centerpiece models. Even unpainted, 40k still looks impressive. I tried to find a YouTube video to demonstrate this, but for the life of me, I couldn't find a single one with unpainted models. The local 40k tournament I stumbled into had some amazing, AMAZING tables too that really blew me away. WMH players have no interest in the pageantry of miniature games. How do you sell a game experience that looks like a math test to new players?

Let's say that they do pick up a battle box. Maybe they watched one of the good YouTube battle reports, or maybe PP did a decent job of selling the pageantry of the game. Heck, let's say they even get through assembling a battle box without thinking, "gee, this is some terrible quality bs right here". They show up for a game and the first thing they are told is "you are going to lose a lot before you can think about winning". Almost nobody will play their battle box sized game and they are told exactly how to build their 75 pt army before they bother to come back. So they go buy a few hundred dollars worth of models, assemble them, email PP for replacement parts because their models are missing bits, finish assembling them, and come back to the table with their new army - and problem get curb stomped in the most brutal way possible, getting assassinated on the second turn while still referencing the rulebook on how to allocate focus points.

The WMH community is outright hostile to new players and they blame the game. It is too complex, too top heavy, too challenging to master. It isn't the game.

I definitely think the PP community needs to get over their obsession with 2D terrain. I get how we got here. Legion in MK2 was able to really abuse large terrain and give an overwhelming advantage to an already powerful faction. Terrain mitigation was ubiquitous enough on already powerful models that most of it didn't matter except to make things that struggled already even worse. There's also just a lot of physical model issues at stake, with PP's stuff mocking the base borders but being very reliant on precise positioning near walls and buildings. The explosion of the tournament scene really killed table quality though, as it became all to easy to conveniently set up 40-50 tables with a couple hundred mousepads that fit in a shoebox.

It's bad though. I think WMH games look great with models on the table, as its still in my mind the only large scale game that drives to the middle and produces an impressive looking scrum, but walking through convention halls before players arrive looking at tables is pretty horrifying. MK3 demands better looking tables, but players are still hesitant to even put a tree on their forest template to put a little life in things.

I think MK3 supports the best looking games of any edition of Warmachine though. Mitigation is much less common and more evenly spread and the scenarios are significantly more designed towards heavy terrain. Themes really up the cohesion of armies and the added battlegroup requirements (and ability to run them) give a good mix of size and scale across the battlefield. The tournament crowd definitely isn't rushing to show off the game's potential though. Hopefully we'll see that change as affordable prepainted terrain becomes more common. I really hope we see an end to absolutely abysmal WMH tables soon.

 LunarSol wrote:
I will say, the community has always been really bad about playing anything other than tournament games. I'm not saying the problem is in the lack of narrative content by that, but just that much of the time you'll see players unwilling to even play 50 point games against someone who doesn't own a full 75 point army. I used to think that was primarily the fault of the game's need for scenarios and the steamroller packet just not scaling well (because it doesn't) but the community has so thoroughly rejected even official variants to Masters that I've come around to the idea that its a deeper issue than something that can be solved simply by PP providing support for smaller point games.

This... so much........ is what totally destroyed my local community who had to travel an hour away to get games in at the end. Not everyone in the world wants to play 75 point steamrollers. Sadly that's all people seem to care to for. A group of people actually made fun of my crew mid game for playing a 35 point game. That happened to sadly be the final straw for most of my group which has never recovered which really sucks

Vakruz wrote:
This... so much........ is what totally destroyed my local community who had to travel an hour away to get games in at the end. Not everyone in the world wants to play 75 point steamrollers. Sadly that's all people seem to care to for. A group of people actually made fun of my crew mid game for playing a 35 point game. That happened to sadly be the final straw for most of my group which has never recovered which really sucks

I know someone with a very similar story. It is eerily common with WMH. The WMH community should be listening to these sorts of stories, but they don't. Or if they do, they come up with excuses (but Magic does it!) rather than address it.

 Sqorgar wrote:
It's weird to see people so against themes. .

The biggest problem with themes for me is that I have to buy and clean up multiple units of the same expensive, second rate infantry models. That got old very quickly. At least I had been cleaning up different PITA PVC units.

I think so much of it has to do with the quality of PP minis. I have to admit they are so far behind GW. Very little customization, still using metal, few extra bits, 2 or 3 identical poses in a box, cruddy resin, etc.

If they made plastic kits like those GW kits, it would go a long way.

The Kharadons, Daughters of Khaine and Deepkin releases all made us want to buy those armies or at least some units. The box GW games are a great value.

Throw in new competitors such as X-Wing, Imperial Assault and Infiniti (which really isn’t new but dynamic minis) and PP has a smaller base given we all have limited resources.

Whilst a lot of the mini's are at best functional a shift towards overbusy rank and file a la GW wouldn't be a step forward, mono-pose jacks and beasts is a minor issue but GW Dreads and lots of monsters are equally fairly static

I'm putting together a Cygnar battlebox right now, and holy crap are these models terrible. They don't fit together without some serious work, there's mould lines going through details (and in the most impossible to clean places), and large pegs to cut off, wedged between rivets. A lot of the detail is extremely soft and the plastic is inconsistently mixed (you can see swirls of color in it and remnants of bubbles). After cleaning it and priming the Khador one, it does look a lot better, but it is still far, far, far, far, far.... far behind the quality of every other miniature game I've seen recently. GW's plastic miniatures are without equals, but even stuff from CMON or FFG is leagues ahead of this. You know those bags of little green toy soldiers you can get for a dollar? They are better.

In all fairness, I heard the battlebox models are the absolute worst and it does get better with metal/resin, and when I pick up the Man-O-War theme box (which I'm considering not getting now), I'll see for sure. But holy crap, Warmachine doesn't just have bad models. It has literally the worst models. It's like they were an after thought. A miniatures game where nobody, not even the creators, actually care about the miniatures.

The battlebox minis are some of the worst examples of their resin. Some of their more recent has some pretty nicely detailed metal/resin minis. A lot of the older factions all have really awful looking models that have been around from 2007 or before. It's worth noting that any of the models they have produced that are made of the same style of plastic as the GW minis look incredible! They assemble so easily and look great too. The mold lines are also very minimal. I believe the Cygnar Stormclad resculpt is one of these models.

I'll definitely check out that Stormclad. Looks like Khador has a few plastic models as well - but only a few. In fact, it doesn't look like PP have released any in 2018 at all. The Crucible Guard seems to be getting one. But that still takes us through August with only a single sprue-based model released total. Doesn't make me think that PP is moving towards that sort of future.

Looks like the Man-O-War box is all resin/metal, and I'm seriously reconsidering my pre-order. The Man-O-Wars were my second favorite models in Warmachine back in the metal days (with the Spriggan being number one), but I haven't seen them in non-metal yet. As enticing as an all Man-O-War army is to me, I really do feel very concerned about model quality.

All of the Man O War unit models are the old, crummy plastic, fyi. It's some of the better results they got out of the material, but just be warned Shocktroopers, Demo Corp, and Bombardiers are all made out of the stuff.

The big thing to be aware of is that PP's range has models that run most of its 15 year history at this point and at times that shows. Knowing when a kit was made can really help understand its quality. A quick primer on the history of their materials:

2003-2009: Metal. Their metals have always been pretty good, though newer stuff is generally nicer. While initially everything was metal, beyond 2009 they scaled it back so that metal was mostly reserved for single figure sculpts; Warcaster, Solos, Attachments and the like. These models are pretty good across the range.

2010-2016(?): Restic plastic. Unfortunately, PP bought in to the Restic promises as a way to keep their hulky, top heavy designs and move to plastic as metal went out of fashion. Some of the later kits are.... okay... sorta, but this is the stuff where you'll find the garbage models. Unfortunately, they launched this line with the baseline jacks for battleboxes, and those first Restic molds (while somewhat improved) are still the basis for the current battleboxes and why they suck so very very bad. Sadly, a LOT of 10 man units were redone in this stuff, and PP has just in the last year or two perfected replacements, so I think it will be a good 5 years before we see them phased out.

2015-Present: Sprue plastic. They've done a little bit of this over the last few years, but it's not their preferred material. In general, their sculpts are just too busy to work with the undercut limitations here without losing the oversized look that dominates the line. They had a pretty massive failure last year trying to do an organic in the stuff and have mostly decided to stick to machines in the stuff. Expect it to only get used for Warjacks, Colossals, and Battle Engines.

Present: Resin with metal bits. They seem to have finally found their footing again with Resin. They've been slowing improving it since 2011, but in the last 2-3 years they seem to have gotten it to where they can make the kind of big detail laden models that worked for them in metal. Pretty much everything not made out of Sprue plastic is resin these days and I've been generally quite happy with the quality of the models again. I think they've still got a lot of problems with the model line to work out, but a lot of the kits I'm unhappy with lately have more to do with the 2013 release date than anything I hope.

That was really helpful. I'm disappointed that the Man-O-Wars are the crappy sort of models (I love my metal ones), but I'm willing to give the sprue and resin/metal models a chance before writing WMH off (again). I assume updated Man-O-War models are not planned for the near future?

PP hasn't announced any resculpts of the existing restic line; they've just sort of quietly stopped making new stuff in it (I think Grymkin was the last of it). I suspect they'll do so eventually, but they also probably need to recoup some of the cost on those molds that were supposed to last forever, so I'm not expecting an immediate change.

I would be sad if PP went under. I liked their setting, but even in the early days when it came out, it was clear that the game was going to be combotastic so I stopped collecting. That impression has stayed with me and has me wondering if 8th ed 40K is really diving into this direction.

I'd be shocked if they went under considering that Warmachine is still the second name to GW and Warhammer. Granted the market is FAR more messy today and a lot of the smaller companies have to fight to hold their corner; but the market is also much broader and there's a chance to survive.

The biggest risk I see is that Warmachine is continuing to expand their armies instead of resculpting; GW has for years kept many of their armies quite small and done resculpts which have often generated new sales and release hype, whilst not actually broadening the army size itself.

I don't think PP is in any danger of going under, but they are definitely mishandling their game in several big, obvious ways. Their corner of the market would be smaller anyway, now that 40k is once again a force to be reckoned with, but I feel like it is even smaller than that because of the model quality, expense, their community and online policies, and the way they've let the fans define the game (and the new player experience). Paying $80 to get all the (free) model rules in War Room is six kinds of bs too.

If I was PP, I'd focus first on improving the model quality. Apparently, they've been doing that, but the crap models still make up the majority of core units for each faction. Then, I'd do something about the community. WMH players are downright abusive to new players and can not be trusted to introduce new players to the game without frustrating them or scaring them off, and their inability to play anything outside of tournament scenarios limits the pool of players who could be interested in WMH to a very specific, deliberate group of people.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Paying $80 to get all the (free) model rules in War Room is six kinds of bs too.

FWIW, I'd drop this again in a heartbeat if GW offered it for 40k.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Paying $80 to get all the (free) model rules in War Room is six kinds of bs too.

FWIW, I'd drop this again in a heartbeat if GW offered it for 40k.

40k doesn't have free rules though. War Room was already annoying when the rules weren't free, but they are free now and it feels especially egregious. Especially since they are constantly updating the cards such that digitally is the only place you can get up to date rules, they've made it so that their premiere digital distribution platform is offensively expensive. And they print the card PDFs with half the rules upside down, so you can't even get basic free rules in a clean and readable way. How hard would it have been to add a checkmark to flip the card backs when building a PDF?

Do they even include cards anymore? Will my Man-O-War theme box preorder require me to make my own cards or buy the rules in War Room?

I have a fully painted everblight army. It takes me 35 mins to get to the closest store and about 2 hours to play a 35-point game and I do one game a week and I just can't take another game of getting my face pushed into the dirt (and before anyone says it, NO, I don't want to play Lylyth3 or Throne of Everblight.).

Not that I have much reason to buy anything now, it's been months since I TALKED or SEEN another warmahordes player. Today I went and looked at the new Khador Man-o-War Tanker solo stats, and, well I think maybe time to look for another game.

Well finally my local store has had an uptick of Warmachine players. Enough for me to start two new armies.

Thankfully, both Khador and Cryx have had almost every single model I wanted made in metal at one point in time. So that made building my armies with quality models far easier.

Parts of our local 40k crowd seems to be getting pretty fed up with the 8th edition (myself included), and have begun branching out into Infinity and Warmachine.

 Sqorgar wrote:

- and problem get curb stomped in the most brutal way possible, getting assassinated on the second turn while still referencing the rulebook on how to allocate focus points.

The WMH community is outright hostile to new players and they blame the game. It is too complex, too top heavy, too challenging to master. It isn't the game.

The issue with WMH isn't that it's a hard game - for a lot of people that was a huge plus - that it took hard earned skill to be good at the game, and the steep learning curve was a draw. When you earned your wings and started getting wins, its was because you'd earned them, and not just bought the top-build-of-the-moment, as is often the case in 40ks tournament scene.

That said, there is a difference between playing hard, and playing relatively hard, especially against someone who is new to the game, who wants to learn and who can't yet fully read the game. In other words, dropping a Haley 3 power build against the latter is a dick move. You don't need to hold their hands, but you dont need to come down like a ton of bricks like a tourney try hard - at the level of playin the new guy, that's seal clubbing and I still basically just a giant middle finger of 'feth off, you're not welcome here'. You are partly correct when you blame the community. But partly wrong also. It's not necessarily the community. It's the community that is left playing the game.

That said, I do agree with you for a large part. The game now is too complex, too top heavy and too challenging to master. When I got into it at the end of mk1/start of mk2, it was a far more manageable game. Now, seven or eight years later, the game has bloated to a level where unless you played all this time and stayed abreast of all the changes, you're overwhelmed. And each new release just makes it harder. The final nail in the coffin was hearing pp was planning a new faction every year from now on. That was me - out. And it guts me to say that - I loved the game. But I only played occasionally for a few years due to life stuff, and each time I wanted to get back in, the hurdle just seemed higher and higher. Now, it's just not worth bothering with. The amount of time it would take in terms of game time to get up to date with the game is simply not worth it for me. I'm seriously of the opinion that pp needs to gut the game out, kill off half the casters, purge a lot of the units and jacks, and even remove a few factions and then you might have a game that is manageable again.

I generally agree with a lot of the sentiment here. WMH is on a decline. Hmm, no. I don't think that's correct. It was a kingdom, it grew to empire, the empire fell and now it's a rump state. I think it's fairest to say WMH has retreated and retrenched, and is now played by the most hardcore followers of the last few years. The moderates have fallen away over time. I think WMH exists in a kind of bubble at this point where what happens to It and it's players is almost separate to the rest of the hobby - it has become it's very own ecosystem. I see the small rump of hardcore maintain the support. But few moderates. Few casuals. Very very little new blood. And sadly,I see pp prefer to placate the rump than seek to draw in new blood. I mean you see it here. Look at WMH traffic. Tiny. Look at 'what do I need to start' posts? Very few. Five or six years ago, you couldn't move for the sheer amount of them.

There was a time when pp could do no wrong. Everything gw did, they didn't. They offered a competitive game to people that wanted a competitive game - they came along with the right game at the right time and took off. But these days, they make a lot of the same decisions/mistakes gw did. I had no issue with them killing their forums - they were terrible, nothing but group think and ego and very little in the way of creativity. Pressgangers getting ditched was a shame. What made their gsmes great was the organised play and the excellent grass roots support. Without that, the game has withered in every meta bar the most hardcore. I though that the shift to mk3 was flawed. I didn't like the new points - I thought the less granular system was far superior. I thought a lot of the changes were cosmetic, and changed things rather than improved them - it seems reposition and tough was handed out to everything as a band aid. Then there was the skorne debacle at launch. For me, it was getting rid of the yearly expansion books. And seemingly the rpg material. I loved the ongoing story. Now I have to go to their books which whilst there are some stellar titles, there's a lot of chaff to wade through (anything with Stryker and Haley especially!). Now there is the shift to no quarter prime. Which here in the U.K, is almost impossible to source. It's harder and harder to maintain a grip on the hobby. And the game balance, for all the changes, isn't better. Pp have shifted to a codex-in-all-but-name approach with themes. What were factions are basically model ranges now. The real factions are the themes, and a handful dominate over everything else.

Model quality I can't comment on. I've never had any issues with anything I bought, or missing parts.price however is a thing. Some of the unit things prices are nothing short of extortionate - the legion ogre-centaur unit as one example. I cannot justify paying that unless they were cast in solidly gold.

In terms of resale value - it's the same here's. You cannot give it away. I recently put my retribution army and a good chunk of my circle up for sale. For months, no interest (and apparently, retribution have meagre themes...). A friend has now offered to buy the rest when he gets the cash together for a reasonable price, but the difficulty in moving stuff stunned me. 3 years ago, me and the wife moved to our own flat and I decided to get rid of a bunch of my superfluous stuff. It ran out the door, didn't matter what it was. All WMH odds and ends, gone. No issues going from that to this seriously suggest serious problems in the market in terms of player interest.

It's sad. It really is. There's no one thing that has caused this, but really, just an accumulation of a lot of gripes and minor issues.

I still put the brunt of the blame on the community. WMH is not a bad game, but it is played in a bad way, and the people left playing it like it that way. Mk3 actually addressed a lot of issues I had with the game (no terrain, unclear 3D gameplay rules, toeing terrain, warjacks not useful, limited variety in army building), but I saw that a lot of people are still trying to play it like Mk2, with all the worst habits still the standard.

On a different note, I picked up a Stormclad with the nice sprues and put it together. The model is significantly better than the crap plastic they were using, but still several steps below GW's models. It most reminded me of putting together the Shadows of Brimstone miniatures. Things didn't quite fit together that well, there were about twice as many pieces as necessary, and there was a little bit of awkwardness to assembling it. All said though, the model came out fine, with good detail, and looks like it will be a lot of fun to paint. If this were the standard of quality (and price, it was $26 on Amazon) for all WMH figures, I'd be pretty satisfied. Haven't seen a resin model in person yet.

I keep going back and forth on cancelling my Man-O-War theme box preorder. I feel like it is really expensive for what it is and not that great a deal. Moreover, though I'd love to paint those models, I just don't see myself playing WMH anymore due to the expectations of the other players. In my experience. WMH players are very kind people (not WAAC at all), but take the game very seriously in all the ways that I don't, and I'm not sure that there's a middle ground where we can play an enjoyable game together.

I will say, one of the reasons that the game is often hard to play with players is just that its kind of a burden to carry around a lot of excess stuff. I often simply don't have battlebox contents and playing lower point games isn't as simple as cutting stuff from your list to make it. I still think that for the most part the entrenched need to understand that beating Timmy doesn't require much in the way of optimization, but its still awkward to cut down to lower points for a lot of what players have on hand.

 Sqorgar wrote:
How do you sell a game experience that looks like a math test to new players?

Let's say that they do pick up a battle box. Maybe they watched one of the good YouTube battle reports, or maybe PP did a decent job of selling the pageantry of the game. Heck, let's say they even get through assembling a battle box without thinking, "gee, this is some terrible quality bs right here". They show up for a game and the first thing they are told is "you are going to lose a lot before you can think about winning". Almost nobody will play their battle box sized game and they are told exactly how to build their 75 pt army before they bother to come back. So they go buy a few hundred dollars worth of models, assemble them, email PP for replacement parts because their models are missing bits, finish assembling them, and come back to the table with their new army - and problem get curb stomped in the most brutal way possible, getting assassinated on the second turn while still referencing the rulebook on how to allocate focus points.

The WMH community is outright hostile to new players and they blame the game. It is too complex, too top heavy, too challenging to master. It isn't the game.

Actually, it *is* the game.

As I understand it, WMH currently requires high memorization and listbuilding, with a relatively low luck factor in-game. That particular combination guarantees that newbies don't stand a sliver of chance against experienced players. They won't have good lists, they won't know the game, and they won't have random luck to turn things around.

Contrast with GW, where luck is a very huge factor in their current games - luck that allows a newbie to outright win in certain cases, almost regardless of what they actually brought to the table. And when they don't win, the swinginess of things ensures something amazing happens for them on the tabletop. That high level of lucky creates things that brings newbies back to the table for more!

Fortnite does something similar, where the drops and guns are much more random than something like PUBG.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

As I understand it, WMH currently requires high memorization and listbuilding, with a relatively low luck factor in-game. That particular combination guarantees that newbies don't stand a sliver of chance against experienced players. They won't have good lists, they won't know the game, and they won't have random luck to turn things around.

Contrast with GW, where luck is a very huge factor in their current games - luck that allows a newbie to outright win in certain cases, almost regardless of what they actually brought to the table. And when they don't win, the swinginess of things ensures something amazing happens for them on the tabletop. That high level of lucky creates things that brings newbies back to the table for more!

There is a high luck factor to WMH too. It may actually be worse than 40k, since you rarely roll more than 2 or 3 D6s, meaning that each action you take can be very swingy.

The thing about WMH is that there are VERY powerful combos that you can pull off. They can be difficult to trigger, but once they go off, you've won the game. But the combos tend to have hard counters that can stop or even reverse a combo. This makes the game all about knowing the synergies between units, what to set up, and what to counter. The game takes a long time to learn because you pretty much have to know your opponent's army better than he does. The luck comes into play with whether you can trigger a combo, but the effect and nature of the combos are perfectly predictable.

One of the reason why new players have such a difficult time with the game is because the general playerbase builds around tournament rules, and thus their armies are built around triggering these devastating combos. I've had several games where I lost before the first turn, and the game was basically just watching my opponent go through the motions of curb stomping me. And even if you can convince them to try their non-tournament army, they'll end up trying out a different combo-based army that they read about on the internet. Because triggering those combos is the money shot. Moving miniatures around is just the foreplay.

But the thing is, a lot of those combos are conditional on playing a very specific way. At lower point values, there are fewer combos with different effectiveness. If you use a lot of terrain and 3D environments, that changes things. If you play a different scenario besides the Steamroller one, things change yet again. And because of this, WMH players WON'T PLAY IT. They claim that the game isn't balanced playing another way, but that's not it at all. Without the money shot, the game is worthless to them. So they've built the game entirely around getting to that money shot as efficiently and effectively as possible.

WMH is actually a pretty broad game with a lot of possibilities (which the No Quarter magazines often promote but which never see play). But the typical WMH player is just using it as the quickest way to get their rocks off. WMH is the Flesh Light of miniature gaming.

(This is a gross simplification, by try not to think it when you see WMH players discuss the game)