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Warpath is awesome!

Wow that warboss is a monster, didn't realise the model was quite that big.

Sorry bunkertube,
I was excited to see a Warpath battle report, but If you want me to even consider sitting through a 13 minute game video, you need to paint your miniatures.

Eilif wrote:Sorry bunkertube,
I was excited to see a Warpath battle report, but If you want me to even consider sitting through a 13 minute game video, you need to paint your miniatures.

I was more discouraged by my inability to understand half of what they were saying, and the glaring oversight in the Warpath rules about removing your damned casualties. Ruins the game for me.

warpcrafter wrote: the glaring oversight in the Warpath rules about removing your damned casualties. Ruins the game for me.

I've been reading over the rules the past few days and while for someone like me (and yourself I assume) who come from a 40k background, it feels strange that casualties aren't removed, it's not an entirely unknown mechanic in the wargaming world.

Though using individually based 28mm figures usually associated with a Squad-based Platoon-level game, Warpath has many elements of a batalion level tactical game where the lowest level of unit is the squad. For the most part, Squads fire as one, move as a blob, and take damage as if it was one miniature with hit points rather than a group of miniatures. They seem to do this across the board as a way of simplifying the rules while at the same time getting you to buy lots and lots of figures. This is opposed to 40k which also gets you to buy lots of figures, but is nominally squad based and while the squad attacks together, each trooper has it's own attack dice. Where Warpath really differs is that games with damage mechanics such as Warpath usually use a smaller scale of figures (20mm, 15mm or 6mm) and base a squad of figures on one base, a'la Flames of War.

Not a defense of the mechanism, just a few thoughts about it.

In order to truly criticize the game, you need to look at why Mantic did what they did, albeit it was initially for Kings of War. Mantic does what they do for the simplicity it brings along, while keeping the strategy. Having played the game to test it out, though I rather enjoyed it, it's at a point where you can use movement trays and you won't be severely punished. You may find moving models through terrain difficult, but oh well. Mantic does a decent job at giving the army lists lots of different tactical options for use on the battlefield. Another thing Alessio was trying to cut down on was time wasted rolling dice. In a BoW video he said that in GW tournaments a player can easily slow the game down by wasting their opponents time. That's a big reason for the whole only roll dice during your turn and how easy the game can be put to a chess clock type device. The rules seem to work a bit better in Kings of War, which the core rules were initially written for. Also the game is meant to flow fast and not have lots of little rules making the game go on and on taking hours.

I agree with you almost 100%. I just found it interesting that in order to streamline the rules and shorten the game, the designers used so many design elements that would normally be associated with games that use smaller size figs and multiple figs per base.

I've read through the rules several times and am looking forward to trying it out with my club in January. It should prove a fun way to get my old 40k armies on the table for a quick mass battle. I have my doubts about whether I'd collect a 28mm army just to play Warpath, but we'll see how I feel after playing it.

My feeling right now is if I was going to play it more often, I'd be tempted to drop 1/3 to 1/5 of the cash and just play it in 15, 10 or 6mm.

It works for and is designed for 28mm. The distances work fine. It's mostly to either use your current models, or use their models to play both Warpath and 40k. That's kinda what Mantic is designed around as a company. There are a few cool rules that 40k doesn't use. Mostly being Flyers. I tried using a flier, and it was fun. Got shot to pieces and was destroyed after one turn of shooting, but still. I totally suggest playing it at its 28mm scale. I find it lots of fun.

I've also turned around on this game. When it first came out, I *heavily* criticized it for the lack of model removal. Now I can't really fault it as I now realize that it truly is a unit vs unit game which isn't worried about tracking individual models.

Not removing miniatures complicates the game, because you have to place a die by every unit that has suffered damage and update it any time they suffer additional damage. It would be much easier to just take away your dead. That's not unique to GW games.

Changing a D20 aint hard. As fast if not faster than taking away models

I am also not a fan or counters or dice next to units for damage tracking. My club never plays with unpainted figures, so we certaintly don't want to clutter up the battlefield if we can avoid it.

Rather, for a game like warpath I would prefer to just have my record pages in plastic sleeves and mark with a dry erase marker. This is a fairly efficient method and is similar to what Mech Attack, Battletech, and many other games with damage points/profiles do, either with unit cards or unit sheets.

The stats for Warpath are so simple you could have your entire force listed on one page or a couple of playing card sized sheets.

Eilif, you could easily do that. Just put a number on the base of either every model in the unit, or the leader and do as you said. The D20s don't clutter the board up too much. Its basically like having an extra model in the back. I think treating individual models can complicate things. That's one of the big things that I don't like about GW games as individual models count and you have to spend time maximizing contact and counting the number of guys that can fight; whereas, if its unit v unit, the unit has a set number of attacks, and its simple.

I think I'm going to make explosion type markers like GW introduced with Epic back in the 1990s.

Little craters/smoke puffs count as one
Medium craters/explosions count as five
Huge craters/explosions count as ten

That said, the roster with a dry erase would be a nice counter free way to do things.

If you're arguing for or against counters, cards would technically count as counters, just a big closer to the player in terms of place on the table.

Definitely. When I play warmachine, in a big game they can take up a good portion of my deployment zone.

m14 wrote:If you're arguing for or against counters, cards would technically count as counters, just a big closer to the player in terms of place on the table.

Not true. There's a pretty big difference in the visual impact of counters or dice amongst your troops and a line of cards or sheets sitting with your rulebooks at the end of the table or even off the playing area if your table is big enough. This is especially true if -like us- you like to take a fair number of uncluttered narrative pictures about your battles. If you look at pictures of our club's wargames you will see little or no counters used. For Tomorrow's War, a ruleset that tracks the Kill/Seriously-Wound/Flesh-Wound status of individual troops, one member even went so far as to make irregularly shaped tiny blood markers that could be sticky tacked to the edges of bases so that figure status can be tracked with as little visual impact as possible. The other major exception is modeled smoke/flames from painted steel wool marking destroyed vehicles which adds to the visuals of the game rather than detracts.

If counters work for you, that's great, but it's not at all the same thing.

I don't think you need counters of any kind for Warpath. The roster/cards/dry erase idea would totally work. Also, there's nothing stopping anyone from putting the roster sheet on a clip board and not having a single thing on the table.

I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have something to tell the opponent the information they need at a glance though. Hopefully explosion/blast markers will work well for that.

These mini skull tokens from litko work out pretty well, and there's numerous other solutions that can be used that don't look too bad on the table. They also do explosion markers, I mainly like the skulls for nostalgia reasons from old WD battle reports where they would have turn-by-turn maps with little white skulls showing casualties.




Ideally, mantic should provide the tokens, most of their KoW range comes with corpses on the sprues to use, but warpath doesn't due to the lack of plastic components (if there's a problem with tooling new sets of legs, then there sure isn't going to be room to make corpses).

Also, if you want to play the game by removing models instead of adding damage markers, there is very little to stop you from just going ahead and doing this except in the case of things like heroes and vehicles (which require "paperwork" in 40k anyway).

It's really not as much of a big deal as it seems once you start playing the game though. People tend to expect the mantic rules to clone GW's because the models do, and while there are some superficial similarities in the structure of the game (move, shoot, assault phases), the bulk of it is totally different.

There is one main benefit that can't be denied though - the games can be played in less than half the time it takes to play a GW game of the same size. It's really great for cutting down the gaming time to 30-60 minutes but still getting a great, full-sized game in... and it makes insanely massive, (but tactically interesting and balanced) battles between 2 players within the space of an afternoon a more realistic prospect.

We had a four player, 2 a side battle using warpath and a ton of random 40k minis. That was more fun than any GW I have played to date. the lack of removing casualties makes the battlefield look like it is teeming with soldiers (some people hate clustering, I love it!) just like GW said it should in it's stories and artwork, despite the fact it cannot be a achieved in a normal game. The game is so much fun, and its a lot easier to create your own armies for it like we did. Who needs Forge Fathers and Marauders when the Galactic Federation and the Commerce Unions can take their place with masses of clones, cyborgs and aliens?

Lord of Timbraxia brings up a good point on army building. Warpath is super chill when it comes to building an army. Only requiring a single squad of 10 guys to allow one of every other type of unit to be purchased is awesome. It allows you to create a really unique army.

Yeah, and the units we did create were fantastic! Bloody Shield-bot APCs. Spent two turns turning those Cyborg phalanxes to mulch, and they go and just drive in there as reserves, filling the expanse where 3 platoons of cyorgs had stood with about 7 rhino APCs!