I found it for ya. Lazy auticus
"The fantasy warband games - comparing the new Warlords of Erehwon to whats currently out there.
With the release of Warlords, I was able to gouge through the rulebook and get my take on how the rules operate. The biggst questions I had were how does this game compare with the other warband games?
There are five commercial warband games that I'm going to use here:
Age of Sigmar, Middle Earth SBG, Dragon Rampant, Warmachine, and Warlords. All of these operate under the same basic scale of operation, that being an average of around 30-50 models (though
AOS can have upwards of 150 to 200 models depending on if you want to play hords, though it is still sharing in
th movement style that all five possesses)
Other games are also similar such as Saga, but these are games rooted more in fantasy whereas Saga is largely historical and thus can have a different appeal to different people.
When I get into a tabletop game there are largely six main factors that I consider. I am scoring these on a value of 1 to 5, where 3 is a median value. We all have differing likes and dislikes when it comes to games, and where I enjoy more military science in my game, others really enjoy building wombo-combos that maximize synergy like a card game. Neither is wrong. This is just how I see where the five games above fall in line.
1) Model line. First, is it required that I use a game's models to play. Second, are those models high quality? Appearance and immersion are huge things for me.
The only real game that I have played that absolutely required the company's model line was Warmachine. All of the other games you can run whatever models you wish. Warlords of Erehwon is no exception, in fact Rick Priestly discusses that you can use any type of base you want as well, from square to round to pill shaped, and it doesn't matter.
I leave no score here because you really have liberty to use whatever models you find attractive and one man's awesome model is another's trash.
2) Narrative. Does the game have its own fantasy world? How immersive is it? How supported is it? I prefer telling stories with my tabletop games, so I am naturally more drawn to games with a huge depth for telling tales.
AOS: 3
LOTR: 5
Warlords: 1
Dragon Rampant: 1
War Machine: 4
Lord of the Rings has probably the largest in depth narrative you can find right now. Everyone has seen the movies, and there are volumes of information that Tolkien wrote that can be used.
This is also the game's weakness. Most games focus on the events in the movies, so deviating from that can be a difficult chore for many groups.
Warmachine actually has quite a solid set of narrative, with a full series of
RPG books in the Iron Kingdoms that really delve deep into the lore. Its a shame that most of the players are more tournament focused and didn't care about the lore, but if you are requiring some deep story telling, don't let the tournament focus of the Warmachine crowd fool you. You can find it in this game.
AOS has the support of Black Library. And while they have a number of novels, I gave it a 3 because the lore and stories are disjointed and all over the place. There are no real set places, because the realms are infinite. While this does give the authors quite a bit of leverage in being able to do pretty much whatever they want, it also means that battles taking place wherever have very little emotional impact on the players or readers because an important city falling somewhere to chaos means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Both Warlords and Dragon Rampant have no world and no narrative. They are designed to be able to pick up any model collection at all in any setting at all and have at it.
The plus is that means you can use the rules in the realms, the old world of
WHFB, Middle Earth, or a world of your own devising. The downside is that ... you have to use a setting that is set somewhere else, which can be a downer if you are into narrative and fluff and want something more than just plopping down models and fighting in a pickup game.
3) Game balance. If I show up with 2000 points and you show up with 2000 points, are we going to have to make a social contract to not be cheese weasels? Is 2000 points really not indicative of power at all and the min/maxers among us can take 2000 points and turn it into effectively 4000 points? This demonstrates in my opinion a game's abilities to be min/maxed and require a social contract with my opponent to get a decent game in without a one-sided tabling on either side of the table.
AOS: 1 or 3*
LOTR: 3
Warlords: ?
Dragon Rampant: 5
Warmachine: 3
Balance is a sticky subject, because its word means different things to different people. I gave my opinion on what balance means to me above and the scores I give are relative to that definition.
AOS is the worst balanced of the bunch which is why I gave it a score of 1. It really requires a social contract between you and your opponent, and it is all too easy to get a pickup game and have one side have a tournament optimized netlist facing off against a casual list and having the game end in a turn or two. Those aren't very fun games.
The 3 astericked is that if you are following the social contract, and playing either at a casual level together or a powergame tournament level together, the game can be at least somewhat balanced enough for a score of a 3 ("ok").
There are still a lot of false choices and traps in
AOS and if balance is your gig then you will be annoyed with
AOS.
Middle Earth I gave a 3. Its balance is for the most part ok. As is Warmachine. There are definitely wombo combos in either game that will trash casual lists, so with a score of 3 that still means you need to follow a form of social contract to have an enjoyable game.
Dragon Rampant I scored a max of 5 because everything is so generic in that game and built off of the same pieces that its a lot like chess. You aren't playing Dragon Rampant to be cunning in the list building phase for the most part.
Warlords I can't give a score to because simply I have not really seen it played in person. On paper there aren't too many things that scream broken like you can find when opening up certain
AOS books which leads me to believe that the score will fall between a 3 and a 4, but until I have played I will not be able to comment on this.
4) Complexity of rules. How simple are the rules? Do they require a lot of reference material?
AOS: 2
LOTR: 3
Warlords: 4
Dragon Rampant: 2
War Machine: 4
Things have changed in the past 20-25 years, where once games were for the most part always complex, the push now to make things streamlined and very small has been a rallying cry by the current main generation of gamers.
AOS and Dragon Rampant both lead the way in these games as having the simplest set of rules.
AOS would actually score a 1 here, being very simple, if not for the fact that you have to own like 3-5 books to play a game and have to bounce between books to find a paragraph, which is highly annoying.
Middle Earth is a step above
AOS in complexity but really once you get the heroic actions down, the core mechanics are also pretty easy to remember.
Warmachine and Warlords both hail from a more complicated time. Warlords was definitely written with that 5th edition
WHFB flair, to the point where I noticed a lot of paragraphs in Priestly's work very similar to the same paragraphs in my
WHFB 5th and 6th ed rulebooks.
Warlords takes some reference material to remember a lot of smaller fiddly rules. That can be annoying if you are used to something basic like
AOS.
5) Immersion and Intuitive rules. If my models go behind a wall, and they don't get any form of cover, that is not immersive. Indeed, if I can blow dragon fire onto a swirling melee and only hit my enemies, that is not immersive, nor is it intuitive. This scores how much the rules make sense during game play, with very intuitive rules borderlining simulation on one end and very gamey
CCG style mechanics on the other.
AOS: 2
LOTR: 3
Warlords: 4
Dragon Rampant: 3
War Machine: 4
AOS being very simple also has the least intuitive ruleset of the bunch. This is hailed as a huge strong point by the community.
AOS is a paradox, wanting to cater to the cinematic, but also giving rules that are the most non intuitive. It attracts largely those that are more interested in gamey elements over simulation elements. If you enjoy tapping your warrior card to do 5 points of damage to your opponent without needing to mess with things like maneuver to get to do that, then
AOS will feel right at home because many units can either teleport to where they want and charge in on turn 1, or can cross the entire table in a single turn and engage in combat in turn 1 with terrain and the like offering no hindrance at all.
They threw a bone in 2.0 by doing things like letting forests block line of sight and adjusting how cover works a little. However there are still a lot of
WTF moments in
AOS where intuition would say a situation would do one thing, but
AOS embraces the gamey Collectible Card Game backbone that its built off with another. As I mention above, that is a huge plus to the people that love
AOS (and those people are not a minority by any means).
Middle Earth takes that one step up and actually has some terrain rules that feel better. However, with Middle Earth you can sometimes have situations where five guys are striking at one and that one just happens to have a better melee skill by a point and rolls a 6 on the dice and beats all five down with that one roll. It does emphasize things you'd see in the movies a lot, so its totally in character with Aragorn or Legolas beating down a troop of orcs single handedly, but it also can rankle if you are more of a simulationist and expect a gang of five orcs to get a bone thrown to them.
Dragon Rampant also has very basic rules which can lead to some very odd moments where they expect you to just figure it out on your own with your opponent. Unfortunately when you have to figure things out on your own with your opponent, disagreements can arise.
Warlords and Warmachine both have more complexity which gives them more intuitive rulesets. If guys are in cover, they indeed get a bonus.
Warlords also has the ability to actually have a form of overwatch that isn't just a waste of time, and lets you create traps and ambushes where you cannot do that in the other games.
So in this department, the more realism is going to go to warlords. The more gamey is going to reside with
AOS and to a degree Middle Earth.
6) Listbuilding. How important is the listbuilding in the game? Is the name of the game to out build your opponent and come to the table and win by virtue of a superior list? Or do you need to actually play the game most of the time?
AOS: 5
LOTR: 4
Warlords: 3
Dragon Rampant: 2
Warmachine: 4
AOS is largely all about listbuilding. As mentioned above, if you enjoy games where you solve puzzles by finding the most effective combos,
AOS is king, and Warmachine close behind (I consider
AOS to be brother systems to Warmachine, it is apparent to me that the designers of
AOS were huge fans of warmachine and games like it when they rewrote the
whfb system)
Middle Earth's list building is also pretty heavy. There are some pretty slanted trap units and false choices present within the system that you have to either avoid, or social contract with your opponent to not exploit if you like certain units.
Warlords the system appears on the surface to be pretty generic. The unit choices share a lot of similarities so it would seem (again without playing the game yet) that the game is going to reside more in how well you play on the table over how well you use Excel to figure out your power coefficients, but I'd say its definitely going to have mismatches if you build poorly. Enough to rank it a 3 where listbuilding is somewhat important, but playing the game is equally as important.
Dragon Rampant takes the generic and turns it up to max. As such, the lists are really secondary to playing the game.
Neither Warlords nor Dragon Rampant really have the wombo combos in them that you are trying to chain off and exploit. They are games that rely on your ability to out think and out maneuver your opponent.
AOS and Warmachine can and often are won at the excel spreadsheet level, and Middle Earth can be that way as well. Walking through Adepticon and seeing the Middle Earth lists showed me that.
So in summary Warlords is a game with no narrative or fluff that requires you and your friends to either play in a world that is already made, or not care about the setting at all and focus on just gameplay. The rules are fairly complex and will require a few read throughs and reference sheets to master, which can be a turn off in this day and age of simple is better.
You gain a lot more immersion and intuition with those rules, at the expense of gamey combos and gamist elements, and have a game where your maneuvering and playing is just as important as your ability to calculate power coefficients in Excel.
Next: a summary of Warlords of Erehwon - how it plays - what I find cool about it. What I find that could be offputting."