ph34r wrote:The minis look decent, especially considering how many of them you get, it's just a shame that there is nothing that can be pressed into service in 40k like Space Hulk's models.

Today we take a deeper look at the mechanics of Horus Heresy, the two player board game set during the epic Battle of Terra, where the Warmaster Horus revealed the depths of his betrayal of the Emperor with an all out assault on the Imperial Palace. To date we've detailed the opening scene with the Bombardment and Corruption phases, and continued with a look at how units and Heroes are represented in the game. Today we're going to examine exactly how you command your units and Heroes into battle, whether your legions are racing towards a pivotal strategic objective or pressing forward with a relentless attack against the enemy. In Horus Heresy, all of these operations are managed by issuing and executing Orders.

Each player is given an Order deck of 40 cards that covers everything from simple troop movements to the building of defensive fortifications, from frenzied assaults against your opponent to brutal orbital bombardments. Although the specific set of orders available to the Imperial and Chaos player may differ, the information as presented on each card is organized in the exact same way.

Pictured at the right is an order card from the Imperial player's deck. This is a great example of the basic information found on every card, starting with the name of the order at top and followed by the card's effect – a description of exactly what the player may do at the time this order is executed. For this card it should be obvious that the Imperial player will gain two new Tank Divisions and may bring them onto the board in a friendly or neutral factory area.

The final important detail is the pair of skull icons pictured at the left edge, which denotes this order's Initiative cost of 2. Every order has an Initiative cost that will range between zero and three skull icons. We'll explore Initiative in a future article, but for the moment I'll reveal only that Initiative is a primary mechanism in Horus Heresy, and one that introduces an unprecedented layer of strategic gameplay. Not only does Initiative have a huge impact on the choices you will make as you command forth your forces, but it does so in an exciting and uniquely challenging way. You will need every last shred of your strategic ability to prevail!

Let's continue with today's discussion and look at the Chaos order "Assemble," which includes additional details you will find on cards from both factions.

At the bottom left you'll find the green Starting Order icon. Both players begin the game with a small number of key orders at the ready, and the Starting Order icon marks every card that starts in your hand rather than in your order deck. Of course you will have many opportunities throughout the game to draw additional orders into your hand, gaining ever more exciting and impactful options as the battle rages on.

At the very bottom center of this card is the recycle symbol. Normally, once an order is executed it is then placed on your order card discard pile. However, if an order is marked by the recycle symbol you instead place it face-up into your Reserve, rather than discarding it.

During future Action phases you may choose to recycle an order from this pool, rather than drawing a fresh card from your Orders deck. This can have a tremendous impact late in the game, especially if you've planned a strategy that requires a certain well-timed order to succeed, and that card happens to sit conveniently in your Reserve pool!

The last bit of new information we're going to cover today is called the Strategic Effect. An order's Strategic Effect will always be beneficial to you in some way, but it requires that you become a craftier player and start to consider your future plans. Let's see how this all comes together during game play.

The board in Horus Heresy depicts the environs of the Imperial Palace and its surrounding terrain, split up into individual areas equivalent to the spaces into which you put your playing pieces. At the right edge of the board is a smaller version of the surface of Terra that is divided instead into "regions," and it includes positions for placing Order cards. Every area on the main map is therefore easily identified as belonging to a specific region.

This abstracted depiction of Terra is known as the Strategic Map, and it's one of two ways to deliver orders to your units and Heroes. Each Round you may choose to play an order directly from your hand and execute it at the card's full Initiative cost, or you might instead place that Order on the Strategic map in preparation for a future round at a cost of 1.

There are two potential benefits gained from playing to the Strategic Map: you can execute an expensive Order for lessthan the printed cost in this way, and more importantly it's the only way to gain the Strategic Effect for that order. You'll soon come to appreciate the effectiveness of planning a long-term strategy rather than impetuously issuing orders at whim. The benefits to be gained by establishing a deliberate course of action and making full use of the Strategic Effects of your orders are substantial enough to alter the future of the Imperium, whether for good or ill.

However, the greatest challenges with long-term plans will arise from your opponent. When you play to the Strategic Map you are opting to take advantage of your card in a future round, rather than immediately. The conditions of the battlefield and hence your priorities may have changed by the time you can execute that order. Also, as both you and your opponent can make use of the same Strategic Map, what happens when both players have an order in the same region? We'll continue to examine initiative, activation, and orders in more depth in upcoming articles.
Keep your long-term goals clear in your mind as you act or you'll quickly find yourself overrun by a more judicious opponent. Horus Heresy places you and your opponent at the heart of the legendary Battle for Terra. This is war – and whether you play as the Emperor or as the Warmaster Horus, your forces await your command!

BrassScorpion wrote:

Alpharius wrote:Or, buy the game and realize that you might not be able to use the miniatures in 40K?
Seriously, this is a HUGE upgrade from the cardboard tokens that the original came with, in my opinion.
This looks to be a LOT of fun, and I can't wait for more details and, more importantly, a release date!

I'm with you on those comments. This is not a miniatures game per se, the "minis" are game tokens for a board game and I think they look cool. I just went through the FFG pages on this game and didn't see a release date. I'm going to be checking back there regularly till I see one. If the list price on this is about $100 US then it's also worth checking Amazon.com for this because Amazon often carries FFG games when they are first released at a huge discount. I got Chaos In The Old World for 37% off the list price from Amazon and with free shipping.

CrazyThang wrote:Well, plenty of their other games are kind of expensive. Arkham Horror for example. Great game, but if IIRC it was somewhere between $50 - $75 when it came out, with the expansions being around $20 - $30 each. And all that is is a bunch of cardboard and cards (with a tiny bit of plastic in the form of bases).

My friend and I used to joke it was so expensive because of the high quality cardboard they used.

Cruentus wrote:Not to make this about price, but why is this retailing for $100 when Axis and Allies:1942 edition goes for $30, and has 350 playing pieces?

gil gerard wrote:Anyone know what the price tag is?

It is time once again for us to return to Holy Terra, birthplace of the human race and the heart of the sprawling Imperium of man, at the time of the 31st millennium. As we hurtle down through the churning atmosphere the clouds quickly thin to reveal a battle raging across a crevasse latticed landscape, centered about the magnificence of the Imperial Palace itself. Within its baroque and immense bastions the shining light and hope for the future of mankind stands nobly in his inner chambers, surrounded by a cadre of the most elite of all protectors, the Adeptus Custodes.


The Emperor observes the catastrophic unraveling of Terra, with massive orbital bombardments searing their cataclysm across entire divisions of tanks and platoons of the Imperial army, recklessly attempting to blow through the imposing plasteel fortifications that shield the Palace itself. He senses how at this very moment, legions of the once loyal are revealing the depths of their own depravity, turning on their brothers in search of blood, driven to insanity by the insidious whisperings of the forces of Chaos.

After so many centuries of progress beyond the darkest days of humanity and the Age of Strife, it has come now to this – the once celebrated Warmaster Horus has returned home bringing naught but hatred and madness. He has cast aside his soul by this most blasphemous act of treachery, choosing to unite in spirit with the ruinous powers of strife and destruction. The Warmaster has brought his warship Vengeful Spirit into orbit and from the command center he prepares for battle, along with legions of Traitor Space Marines, gibbering Daemon hordes, and other unspeakable evils. This is the final stand for both the forces of the Imperium and for Chaos - there will be no turning back. Welcome to the Horus Heresy!



In our last sneak peek we began to explore how you command your myriad forces and heroes into action. We learned how you each draw from a deck of order cards, those accumulated opportunities and manoeuvres that become available over the course of the conflict. We also discovered that you begin the game with a starting hand of these cards, and that by playing these cards you can execute commands to move your troops, launch attacks, build fortifications and much more.

We also saw that there is more than one way to execute an order. If you play your order card to the strategic map rather than directly from your hand, you can create opportunities where an order is less costly and sometimes gain a strategic benefit as well.

Today we are going to unravel the mystery of initiative, which we talked about briefly but haven’t explored in any depth. We’re also finally going to understand how and when activation comes into play, as well as how this will affect your game. Let’s dive right in.

Horus Heresy is played in rounds. At any point in time only one player, called the current player, will have the initiative. As the current player you can take a single action whether playing an order card straight from your hand, or executing an existing order from the strategic map. If you understand that an order card represents potential energy and activity on the battlefield, know that the action step is when those possibilities finally manifest.

The heartbeat for everything in Horus Heresy, the conductor that sets the pace and the ebb and flow of all actions, is the initiative track that runs along one entire edge of the game board. Each player has an initiative marker on the track that is moved in accordance with the orders you choose to execute.

During each game round the player whose marker is closest to the start of the Initiative track is called the current player. If both markers ever rest on the same space they are stacked, and whoever has their marker on top will gain the initiative that round. At the start of the game, the Chaos player’s marker actually begins on top of the Imperial marker on the first spot of the initiative track.



As we've seen before, every order card has an initiative cost that ranges from 0 to 3. You pay this cost by moving your initiative marker forward along the track each time you take an action. After you've finished moving your marker, you redetermine who has initiative. If you're still the closest to the start, you remain the current player and can take yet another action in the following round.

This cycle continues, one round at a time, until your initiative marker passes that of your opponent. When your opponent’s marker is closest to the start of the initiative track, there is a change of initiative and your opponent becomes the current player. Over the course of a battle both initiative markers will pulse ahead and behind of each other, in response to the choices you each make. This rhythmic sequence is the crux of the entire initiative system, and makes for exciting and incredibly fun game play.

As the supreme commander of a monumental array of forces, you're faced with the challenge of weighing the short-term benefits of taking an action against the risks of granting your opponent too much of an opportunity to respond. Here's an example that should make this dynamic process more clear, as well as offer some insight into the rich strategic possibilities to be found in Horus Heresy.



For this example imagine that you are playing as the Emperor, and in your hand are the three Imperial order cards pictured above. At the moment, your initiative marker is exactly two spaces behind that of your opponent. Since you are closest to the start of the initiative track, you are the current player. No matter how you choose to execute these orders, once the Assault is played your initiative marker will move forward three spaces, therefore passing your opponent's marker and causing a change of initiative.



However, perhaps you'll choose to execute one of the initiative 1 cards first. As pictured below, you can even play a 1 cost card, then another 1 cost card to end up on top of the Chaos player's initiative marker. Since the player on top is always the current player by default, you would still be able to issue a final order, even one with an initiative cost of 3! By playing your Assault card last you can ensure that all three commands occur before the impending change of initiative.

You are always free to act within your limits, but your actions need to do more than just afford you some desirable result. The choices you make will also grant your opponent more or less of an opportunity to respond. In the picture below, you might have been successful executing three simultaneous orders, but now your opponent is three spaces behind you. What orders do they currently have in hand? Do you realize that in the picture below, the Chaos player could conceivably execute 6 points worth of orders before you have initiative once again? What price is worth taking action and when is that cost too high? I hope you're up for the challenge!



There is one last thing we introduced in the last article that will have a powerful impact on the game, and that is activation. Each player is given a pile of activation markers that are used to quickly denote an area where your units have taken an action. Most order cards explicitly state which areas are activated after it executes.

Take a look at the order card pictured to the left. It should be fairly clear that you will need to activate the destination area after executing the order. However, the bottom half of the card reveals that when you execute the same order from the strategic map and gain the card's strategic effect, you actually do not activate the destination area. Perhaps you are wondering why you need to be concerned with activation at all?

The importance of activation is devastatingly simple: if your units are in an area that you have already activated, they may not execute any further orders. In other words, any units within an activated area will remain wholly inert. That area will remain so marked until the next refresh phase, at which time both players can remove all their activation tokens from all areas on the board. Refresh phases are clearly marked on the initiative track and are triggered by the first player to move into that space.

The activation system will force you to consider your entire combined force, rather than over-relying on any single unit. These innovative order and initiative systems should hopefully cause you to weigh your options carefully. The question of which areas to activate is a decision you must not take lightly, especially if you plan on keeping particular units ready to move.

These are but a few of the unique mechanics found in Horus Heresy that will infuse your games with the visceral thrill of large-scale strategic combat. You alone are responsible for successfully leading your forces into the fray, while keeping a clear eye focused on the primary objectives of your campaign. In a future article we will take this conversation down to ground level, as we familiarize ourselves with the nuanced yet white-knuckled tactical demands of combat in Horus Heresy!

legoburner wrote:What issue was the battle barge expansion in btw?

Alpharius wrote:
According to this site:

http://www.gamehobby.net/white_dwarf_magazine/white_dwarf_161.html

It was WD 161.

Hope that helps!

legoburner wrote:

Alpharius wrote:
According to this site:

http://www.gamehobby.net/white_dwarf_magazine/white_dwarf_161.html

It was WD 161.

Hope that helps!

Great, thanks. I have the back issue (thanks to an old ebay auction) but not the card inserts, ah well! That would be why I was not familiar with it. Great issue though, man o war battle report and many pages of horus heresy goodness.