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I think calling Warcry's gameplay as "mediocre" is a bit too harsh. If we don't need fanboyism, we also don't need the other extreme end that is commonly seen on Dakka. You know what I'm talking about, I believe.

One thing is for sure : games like Mordheim and Necromunda weren't as rich at the beginning and it needed a few years before the content they got was plenty enough to enjoy ourselves for a lifetime. This is the same for others games like Frostgrave : first book was nice but the options it presented had their limits as well, and I doubt people could play for years with just it alone. It had extensions since (including some other ways to play) and it got richer thanks to that as well. Vanguard is still a bit too young, but it is the same thing (especially when the other warbands will join the fray and we'll get other campaign books).

Warcry won't be any different here.

Path to Glory is awesome, the only kind of league my group plays anymore.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Path to Glory is awesome, the only kind of league my group plays anymore.

I actually thought of you as I was typing, as I know you enjoy it from reading your posts. To each their own. Enjoy!

I won’t need an explanation, unlike some.

I dont make anything up. There is not a thing ive ever posted thats fabricated.

And the reason to ask why people voted 10:10 is to generate discussion on a discussion forum to understand why people think the way they do to help me understand their perspective.

Villifying people who are discussing why or asking why you like or not like something, on a discussion board whose sole purpose for existing should be discussing (not just seal clapping everything or hating everything) seems rather inane.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
“Mediocre” is not negative. It means a flat 5/10. The gameplay in warcry is straight up middle of the road to me. I dont think thats being too harsh at all. It doesnt for the most part make me curse through my teeth like aos core rules do with double turn or dudes summoning upwards of 50% of their army, but neither is it wowing me or offering some type of gameplay component that just makes gameplay great either.

I understand black knighting is equally bad but black knighting is not calling something middle of the road.

Its saying everything sucks all the time, every aspect is bad all the time. I have many times offered up the things that i like.

 auticus wrote:

Villifying people who are discussing why or asking why you like or not like something, on a discussion board whose sole purpose for existing should be discussing (not just seal clapping everything or hating everything) seems rather inane

I seem to remember similar sentiments being posted by AoS bashers when it first launched.

I mean, that's not to diminish your opinion and all - this thread is for sharing opinions on the game - but it can get kind of exhausting trying to parse those opinions when the thread is dominated by a single, overly negative one. There's been 64 posts in this thread so far, and 16 of them were by you. That's a full 25% of all the posts are a single opinion. When that single opinion is negative, it can really drain the momentum from the thread.

(I do it too. Heck, I may be the absolute worst poster when it comes to this sort of thing. Maybe second worst, behind Peregrine. So, I'm not trying to throw stones from my glass house here. I just know how easy it is to get swept away in a discussion and forget to let a conversation breathe. Heck, having typed this, I realize that I've been doing that in the tournament thread, so I need to probably step back there, myself).

I don't know, I am honestly having more fun playing with GW minis using Age of Fantasy:Skirmish by One Page Games, rather than any recent official GW publication. Even if I were going to use official rules it would have to be an amalgamation of Skirmish, Hinterlands, and official warscrolls (which is a pain to have everything spread out) to give me what I was hoping Warcry was going to be.

Warcry could have worked great with the rules being replaced with an official adaptation and expansion of Hinterlands. Although the pessimist in me feels like GW would never give legitimacy to something that didn't originate completely in-house from the get-go.

I seem to remember similar sentiments being posted by AoS bashers when it first launched.

Funny enough when AOS released I was banned from warseer for supporting it (as that was considered "Trolling" by the moderator staff there and supporting AOS at all had posters that hated that opinion reporting those that supported it for trolling them).

There's been 64 posts in this thread so far, and 16 of them were by you. That's a full 25% of all the posts are a single opinion. When that single opinion is negative, it can really drain the momentum from the thread.

Couple things there.

1) a lot of my posts are responding to other posts.

2) forums of all types, be them political, religious, and gaming, have all devolved into an echo chamber pit, where if you are posting counter to what the majority want to hear (so here, if you are an AOS "fanboy" you don't want to hear negativity at all, and most of my contemporaries that support what I have to say don't come to AOS forums because they won't give it any of their time because people hate houseruling) then you are considered "toxic" and "draining".

Because what used to be a place to go to discuss your thoughts both pro and con has turned into something that has been relegated to a rarity, and now we have "why do you feel it should be rated so high?" "why does it matter why I feel it should be rated so high?"

Everything is a personal stance like a political party or religious affiliation these days and to dislike an opinion or to dislike a way of playing a game these days is equivalent in many cases as a personal attack or dislike of an entire individual (same as if you don't like my political party or disagree with my religion).

"You don't like that I like this game? That means you are trying to say I'm wrong, that I'm doing something bad, that I am bad or wrong."

I find those things to be dangerous and that our entire forum of communication along those lines to make me sad.

Ultimately what is being said is "if I like this game, I don't want to log into a forum and read you saying negative things about it", and some people take that a step further with "and if you don't like this game that I like that means you think my choices are wrong and I don't like you for that and will attack you every chance I get".

Ok guys, I think you are both getting a bit harsh here. Maybe take a break from this thread for a day?

Here's my question for those of you that have the game in-hand:

If the game doesn't seem deep enough, especially in the "Mordheim-esque" angles that some of us want a skirmish game to scratch, what needs to be done to improve it by the players? Because that's the thing that really makes me balk at Warcry. If I need to add a bunch of stuff to it to make it a deep-fulfilling skirmish (as opposed to quick filler games), then I don't want to drop $170 for a game when there are alternatives (that even support using GW figures) that while aren't 100% of what I want from a skirmish game, are damned admirable and notable for getting close, especially those that are nearly free to play other than the figures involved.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Here's my question for those of you that have the game in-hand:

If the game doesn't seem deep enough, especially in the "Mordheim-esque" angles that some of us want a skirmish game to scratch, what needs to be done to improve it by the players? Because that's the thing that really makes me balk at Warcry. If I need to add a bunch of stuff to it to make it a deep-fulfilling skirmish (as opposed to quick filler games), then I don't want to drop $170 for a game when there are alternatives (that even support using GW figures) that while aren't 100% of what I want from a skirmish game, are damned admirable and notable for getting close, especially those that are nearly free to play other than the figures involved.

IMHO, I would just work on the campaign system.

First thing is not to allow to refill your roster warband whenever and however you want. I would rather ask the players to build a roster with 1500 points of value in total at the beginning - it gives a few reserves in case of some losses. Then I would add a possibility to convert glory points into "permanent warband points", so that you can add more warriors to your roster after the games. I would base myself on the reinforcements options for spending glory points on that matter.

Just that already makes deaths matter, but I would also to rethink the trauma table so that it includes some kind of "permanent wounds" other than just "remove a destiny level".

I think I would also remove the immortality from the leader, but add the possibility for another warrior to become a leader if he dies.

I would also try an experience system, with the possibility to improve the profile of your warrior - or maybe to "upgrade" a basic warrior into a more advanced one (like the Unmade, who progress on the Path of Agony by removing their limbs and replacing them with weapons - would be nice if an Awakened One was rewarded to become an Ascended One and so on). It would be paired with the "deeper" trauma table - progression rewards only makes sense if there is a real danger for your warriors. I'm also thinking about linking the progressions / permanent wounds to an up / down in points so that there is stilll a fair use in both ways (if you warrior is crippled, it would be nice not to penalize you twice by keeping him in your warband while he would be clearly less efficient than a "fresh one", for example).

Would also love to add more random events like in Mordheim for the search roll after the game, and not just put lesser artifacts in them. Maybe add thematic tables for the various places of the eight points, so that it immerses even more the players about the differences (and the dangers) of these lands.

But yeah, doing all of this will ask for some work. I think I will do this gradually and see if it's not too bothersome to play with.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Here's my question for those of you that have the game in-hand:

If the game doesn't seem deep enough, especially in the "Mordheim-esque" angles that some of us want a skirmish game to scratch, what needs to be done to improve it by the players? Because that's the thing that really makes me balk at Warcry. If I need to add a bunch of stuff to it to make it a deep-fulfilling skirmish (as opposed to quick filler games), then I don't want to drop $170 for a game when there are alternatives (that even support using GW figures) that while aren't 100% of what I want from a skirmish game, are damned admirable and notable for getting close, especially those that are nearly free to play other than the figures involved.

Warcry isn't ever going to be "deep". I mean, it's not going to be something like Infinity, with a hundred model states, ammo types, weapons, whatever - based on the stats that are in Warcry, you can move and you can attack. It's the bare minimum you can have, but it seems that there's enough breadth there that a tiny fast guy is going to feel different than a big slow guy . But Frostgrave isn't deep either, but it has sustain two spin offs and a dozen different books, just by filling it with new unit types, scenarios, treasure, and campaigns. The depth of Frostgrave doesn't come from one book, it comes from all of them.

I think Warcry is going to aim for depth through breadth. That is, it's going to give you a lot of different toys to play with that are very simple, but because there are a lot of them, it will have a lot of variety of things to do. For instance, there's 36 terrain cards per ravaged land; 108 as of the Stormvault. Mixed with 36 scenario cards, 36 twist cards, and 36 deployment cards, that's an epic ton of missions you can play - each one just different enough to keep things novel. And there will be more (it looks like an Azyrite Ruins land is coming).

You've got 6 core warbands, 2 incoming, and 12(?) AoS warbands. There will be more. You can stick up to 20 guys in your roster, so you can make up your playable warband from different unit types. There will be more. That's a lot of different matchups. Each of the campaign quests has a different selection of items to unlock, each one specific to a single faction. There will be more. There's two different groups of chaos beasts to encounter as neutral opponents, or to include in your own warband. There will be more.

Ultimately, it is kind of like Magic the Gathering. Each one of these things is like a card - it makes a very small difference to the game by itself. Perhaps even imperceptible. But putting them together in interesting and unique ways can have a surprising and occasionally awe inspiring effect on the game. Nobody accuses Magic of being a shallow game because people don't judge it by its individual cards. It is judged by decks of cards. For some reason, people are judging Warcry by its cards.

Of course, GW could royally screw it up. They didn't do so great with Necromunda, and Kill Team's support just completely fizzled out for a long time. With a game built on the premise of having lots of little things add up, not having enough little things means that it won't add up to much. I think the second I'll be convinced that Warcry is going to work out is if they release more models for each of the core warbands. More minions, named heroes, mercenaries, whatever. Right now, the roster sheet is way too limited to predict how the game will ultimately turn out.

Well said.

The campaign system needs worked. Worked pretty intensely.

Right now it plays out a lot like a warcraft game. You are on some quest. Your opponent is on some unrelated quest. You meet to fight, because warhammer. You go on your separate ways. If you die... meh. It doesn't really hurt you, you can just basically hand waive through some mechanics, so there is no negative to fighting at all and no repercussions. A great chunk of the tale comes from toasting the passing of powerful heroes and the rebuilding that goes on after that. (and again this has me scared of what they are going to do to blood bowl and turn injuries, etc... into hand waives as well as there are rumors that a new blood bowl edition is forthcoming)

What I would like to see would be a combination of path to glory advancement tables, and unified quest chains where there is a reason you are fighting your opponent other than "its warhammer, we're here today at the game store to fight, so we fight". That works great for tournaments or pick up games, but campaigns are battles fought with an end goal in mind, antagonists trying to stop you from that goal, and a story that winds its way to the conclusion involving everyone.

I'd like to see character advancements, a risk system where you can actually die and it means something, and gaining items through quest chains that are unified and not everyone's on their own different quest for whatever reason.

I'd probably break it down further than that to include borders, lands, and things that exist concretely in the game world that can be had as well, but those are just extra things that I don't think are really mandatory.

I'd like to see a nemesis system. If you play the same players a lot, you'll probably end up with a few models that constant end up in combat with each other. I'd like to see a building animosity between the units, represented by some sort of advantage when fighting them, or perhaps a disadvantage fighting someone else while your nemesis is on the board (these guys want to fight, need to fight).

Then once you've achieved maximum animosity, there is a final battle where, if one of the two models defeats the other one, that model is dead and the winning model gets some sort of permanent morale boost against that particular enemy team.

I'd also like to see some sort of home turf advantage. Like, maybe you can claim a particular terrain card as your home turf. Then, if that card shows up, you get some sort of boost for playing on it. There should also be a structure on it - a totem or something - that the enemy can destroy to your morale. You came into MY house and destroyed MY giant Sigmar head? You bastard!

Seems like the terrain cards could make a map-based campaign pretty easy. Grab a few of those 9-pocket card sheets and put the terrain cards in, building a large map made up of smaller battlefields. Grab some stickers to put points of interest on it (this battlefield allows you to raise livestock, has a bunch of chaos beasts on it, and owning it increasing the size of your roster. This battlefield is a watchtower which gives you an extra model if an adjacent zone of yours is invaded. Etc). Then have players fight over the various landmarks in the various battlefield, trying to push in and conquer the enemy's headquarters. It'd be even better if they made cards for the campaign items you can find, then you can stick them in the pockets and collect them when you conquer the zone for the first time.

If you made sure to alternate the terrain cards so that no two Ravaged Lands were next to each other, you could make it so that invading from zone A into zone B could be set up together, on a larger playing field that is built from both terrain cards. Then, not only which battlefield you invade would matter, but also from which battlefield.

I wish you didn't have to buy a $90 Ravaged Lands set to get the terrain cards, because I'd love to mark them up. Put little symbols on them representing enemy models to create AI encounters. The game could probably be played with the dumb-AI that is used in games like Walking Dead: All Out War, Frostgrave, or Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. Combined with the 9-pocket maps, creating a solo campaign would be super easy.

Anyway, just some random, non-standard ideas for ways to spruce up the game...

Yes, I think the quests would gain much more character if they are actually linked and open to all warbands at the same time - a bit like Mordheim, special scenarios you can play and have a bigger reward. Rather than putting the antagonists of these quests in the background, I would put them as actual NPCs/monsters in the scenario - so Korrgad's mercenaries would be an actual band different from the players, with Korrgad himself to fight and defeat on the board to win the game. Or putting Cicatrignis as an actual monster (maybe not as massive as described in the original quest background ) to hunt, attacking anyone coming closer.

I agree it would defeat the original purpose - to make campaigns easier for anyone to come in and join at any time - but it would, IMHO, give a much stronger impression in the minds of the players.

Nemesis system sounds a bit too restrictive to me - that's something that would be better if you roleplay it, I believe.

Otherwise, it's possible to make an "Eternal Campaign" mode by using just the cards for random missions (I actually like a lot this system, it's cleverly made, especially with the cards separated in symetric/asymetric terrains and victory conditions).

I wonder if putting more restrictions on how you choose your warband roster would be good or not. You know, like for Iron Golems, saying only 1 Signifer max per warband and maybe more than one Ogor Breacher if there is an Armator in the roster, and so on. I wish there were more descriptions about each warrior type in the core book, really...

I used to have a fun campaign in an old Reaper Warlord book, where you take a city and overlay a grid or hex pattern over it to track territories gained or lost during the campaign. Not much of a new idea, but the twist was that you kept track of what/how the terrain was laid out like every time a new map portion was fought over on a separate sheet of paper, so that from then on every battle in that hex had terrain set up exactly the same, so hard-contested areas gained a little bit of character as the neighborhood or section of farmland was fought over several times. Also each section of the city had a key which dictated the type of terrain that could be placed there at all.

You could probably do that with the terrain cards from Warcry, and part of the strategy of fighting over a section of the map is that the attacker knows the terrain after the first time it's been fought over. But it doesn't really seem like Warcry supports that type of "every warband in the same sandbox" type of campaign.

EDIT: It is a toolkit to be tweaked at one's pleasure, IMO. A solid toolkit, mind you.

I like the rules a lot.

What I am not sure is if it is fun to play. As that is a very different questions to weather the rules are good. I need to get more games inn with it.

I like the sixs factions so far. Although the beastmasters needs a second copy to get one more tiger. They need two of them as they have 2 stratgems that affect them.

Lord Kragan wrote:
EDIT: It is a toolkit to be tweaked at one's pleasure, IMO. A solid toolkit, mind you.

That doesn't work in an environment that is very much against houserules and wants to play the game out of the box with no changes. In that environment the only tweaking you can do is if you are solo playing at home by yourself.

 auticus wrote:

Lord Kragan wrote:
EDIT: It is a toolkit to be tweaked at one's pleasure, IMO. A solid toolkit, mind you.

That doesn't work in an environment that is very much against houserules and wants to play the game out of the box with no changes. In that environment the only tweaking you can do is if you are solo playing at home by yourself.

It's clear GW did restrain a lot of things in this game - the warbands aren't that modular and are clearly meant to be played with the specific sets on the miniatures. You can convert them, of course, but the lack of options in the kits so far is speaking by itself.

On the other hand, reason why Mordheim is still played nowadays is precisely because players didn't just play the game out of the box with no changes.

So I believe there is still room for fanmade content, even in Warcry. It's true this is a solid toolkit to work as base. Random tables...it's actually easy to modify/put in, in the end. Changing the core rules ? It's another whole story.

 Sarouan wrote:

On the other hand, reason why Mordheim is still played nowadays is precisely because players didn't just play the game out of the box with no changes.

Mordheim really needs house rules. do you want skavens? because thats how you get skavens.

also i recall mordhime being pretty terrible mid to late campaign with a few runaways and everyone else being dumpster-ed on.

Warcry also at the least gives people the opportunity to just play pick up games.

That is the issue with characters dying; having a character with a lot invested suddenly die sells realism and lethality of setting, but it's still a game. It's easy to lose such a character and be set back so far it's unrecoverable and the campaign is basically over. That's why point increases for buffs and point decreases for debuffs need to be a thing to level out a more dangerous campaign setup. Yeah some people will enjoy it without that, but a lot of people just want their hobby warband to be more forgiving than real life is. Figuring such a system out is a whole extra layer that needs to be calculated and balanced.

The best way I have seen is to have a different injury table for the plebs than the warband leader/hero level members, where the warband leader is more likely to accrue debuffing injuries than death, because the run of the mill troops are easier to replace without it being a giant setback.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The best way I have seen is to have a different injury table for the plebs than the warband leader/hero level members, where the warband leader is more likely to accrue debuffing injuries than death, because the run of the mill troops are easier to replace without it being a giant setback.

Why a different table ? It's not like death matters that much in Warcry, you can instantly recruit the same warrior for no cost, because of how you manage the warband roster in the campaign rules.

If you're talking about Mordheim, that's already the case and it brings a whole different set of problems. Because in Mordheim, only heroes matter for long term campaign - the others are just here to take the hits in their place. That also means if all the heroes are out of action, the band itself loses basically all of its rolls in the aftergame phase - and thus is unable to gain more money to replace their losses, that can be leading to a band wipe and starting over again.

That's the negative loop they were talking about in the Stormcast interview with Sam Pearson : if you lose hard, you tend to keep losing harder.

And yes, Warcry core rules are solid and make the game easy to play on pickup. You don't have to play it narratively. It's just that on long term, it's the narrative players who stick around with campaign system and bring new content. Death is always a tragedy when you lose your key character with skills and equipment, indeed...and that's why it makes games memorable. If nothing matters, you will tend not to remember it as vividly or fondly. Extremes are sure dangerous, but they spark the fire of passion.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Figuring such a system out is a whole extra layer that needs to be calculated and balanced.

Yes, it's a lot of work. You have also to remember not to balance it too much, or it becomes predictable and boring. That's why I love the two sets of cards with symetric/asymetric terrains, deployments and victory conditions in Warcry. It's really clever to mix the two, and let the players choose what set they want to play (or even both !).

I think tinkering with the level of death is fun. I get that losing a leader can make someone go into "game over" mode. But it needs to be something that can happen, even if its rare.

In Blood Bowl, you have a 1 in 6 chance of a player death when the injury table gets rolled on.

In a campaign with your general, I'd think a 2-3 on 2d6 would be about fine.

Frostgrave deals with death ok for me. Ragnarok is very unforgiving with its injury system, but intentionally so as the game is supposed to be brutal.

But having NO penalty for death is way too far the other way.

 auticus wrote:

Lord Kragan wrote:
EDIT: It is a toolkit to be tweaked at one's pleasure, IMO. A solid toolkit, mind you.

That doesn't work in an environment that is very much against houserules and wants to play the game out of the box with no changes. In that environment the only tweaking you can do is if you are solo playing at home by yourself.

Your community is nowhere close to the norm.

How does Warcry compare to Kill Team?

Lord Kragan wrote:

 auticus wrote:

Lord Kragan wrote:
EDIT: It is a toolkit to be tweaked at one's pleasure, IMO. A solid toolkit, mind you.

That doesn't work in an environment that is very much against houserules and wants to play the game out of the box with no changes. In that environment the only tweaking you can do is if you are solo playing at home by yourself.

Your community is nowhere close to the norm.

Thats just simply not true. I've been to all five cities near mine and all five cities have the same style of groups that do not like houserules and you have to politic hard to get the groups to accept deviations from the rules. I've had numerous people on this forum concur that their community was similar.

I can agree my community, in the USA, is different from your community, in Europe, because the two cultures are very different.

How does Warcry compare to Kill Team?

They both utilize just a handful of models.

Let me rephrase that, if you were to give Warcry a score of X out of 10, what you give Kill Team in comparison?

Roughly the same. Because of campaign reasons. As a skirmish game I'd give it a 6 out of 10 for gameplay. If you're after something to play skirmish with in a pickup or league environment, I would say its not bad and could enjoy myself there.

As a campaign skirmish game I give them both a 4 out of 10.