Glad to hear you liked it overall!
As for the issues you had:
str00dles1 wrote:It desperately needs a quick reference sheet like how most minis games have, and to really blow it out of the park, a page number by the rule for easy reference. I was told this is in the works, but I wanted to state it for the sake of completeness.
The first one will be a weapon/summary page for each faction (so all the weapons for the Epirians on one side of a page and their unit abilities on the other side, and the same thing for the Karists). Then we'll also be putting out some form of summary checklist with reference page numbers for stuff that has multiple steps (like a round of shooting or setting up to play a game, etc.).
A weapons table. I did this myself in excel for each faction. A lot of copy/paste of weapons from book into it to make a sheet for reference. I get that many weapons are only on a few pages, but the less book flipping I need to do and the more I can just reference on single sheets the better. It really saves time
Yep, we are definitely working on those right now, and should have them out before (or close to the same time) the models ship out, at the very latest. We'll post a
KS update when they're ready as well so you'll know to go and find them on our website.
The amount of variation. I know its very new and this isn't an already established company for years and years with a large team, but it needs more units and factions bad. I like the two, don't get me wrong and for the first few games I can see not using all the unit as you don't want to get over whelmed but after the first few games I can see it getting really stale fast without more options
We hear you loud and clear and internally we all feel the same way. We love variety in both factions and variety of units within each faction. However, the reality is that there is no magic button we can push to make this happen. Especially when making hard plastic models, there are no shortcuts in the time it takes to design and produce them. The only reason why it can sometime seem like bigger companies are able to crank out tons of plastic models is because they have this massive backlog of stuff they're working on at any given time, so you'd never actually know how long the kit actually took to make from the ground-up. Ultimately, all I can say is that we know its an issue, and we are working to make more models, but there isn't anyway we can make production go any faster than it takes.
When it comes to different way to field a force with a single faction, as we do get more models out the door, we will constantly be trying to address giving players more options on variable ways to build their force. The Epirians, right out of the box, do a much better job of allowing for multiple builds, because of the Scarecrow being able to be taken as a Command unit if desired, and in general their units having more flexibility of unit options. While we definitely would have loved for the Karists to have this same kind of flexibility with its initial forces, we also didn't want to force rules onto models/units that didn't make sense with the background that they had been developed with. We are keenly aware that the Karists in particular have limited ways to build a force, and are specifically looking to come out with models for them in the future that will help address this somewhat.
It is also a long-term goal to hopefully create models akin to special characters in
40k or casters in Warmachine, where taking them in your force will kind of give your force construction a twist, and some of these characters might also have their own 'faction objective' (to replace the faction's standard faction objective), which means that a force led by that character will also have slightly different goals than when playing the 'standard' version of that faction.
Close combat. I mean this in the most constructive way, but it is horrible. Please correct me if I'm wrong though as id rather know if we screwed it up that bad. Melee shots should just be a characteristic on the stat card. Speed +str+will halved rounded up? That's insane. Yea its easy math, but its so highly unneeded to be a formula each time I want to melee. Its a huge turn off from ever using melee or melee units. I know no other game that makes you calculate how many attacks you get in such a complicated way, and would never want to play it. Just add that column on the stat card please.
This point was brought up during playtesting as well and it was a tough call as to whether or not we wanted to add a melee attacks characteristic at the last second or not. The reasons this 'issue' even exists are because this rules system places much less emphasis on CQ fighting than you see in, say,
40k. On top of that, when firing pistols in CQ fighting, you still use the SHO characteristic of the weapon (not the model's stats at all). Combining those two factors, we initially thought, that there was much less of a need for a dedicated melee attacks characteristic, so went with a more simplified characteristic profile, that didn't include a dedicated melee attacks characteristic.
The other positive benefit of doing a calculation based of off the model's characteristics to get a # of melee attacks is that when a model's characteristics are improved or reduced, that naturally increases or decreases the amount of attacks they make with melee weapons. For example, large models (like a Hunter or Angel) that have a high 'FOR' characteristic, will slowly lose a 1-2 attacks as they suffer damage and lose their 'FOR'. Similarly, when the Kaddar Nova uses his Kinetic boost to double his 'EVS' this can give him additional melee attacks (which makes sense, as he would be moving way faster than normal in that case).
Of course, we also could have simulated similar effects even with a dedicated melee attacks characteristic simply by specifically writing them into those particular rules (saying that models lose a melee attack when they lose 'FOR' and/or giving a Kaddar Nova +1 melee attack when using his Kinetic Boost). If/when we ever get to a second edition of the rules, a melee attacks characteristic will definitely be at the top of the list of things to consider revising/streamlining.
In the meantime, perhaps on the next printing of the unit cards we will look for places to add a 'base melee attacks' for reference.
Also in the example on page 63 with the green arrows, I'm guessing I roll each of my guys separate to see if they kill the guy in base contact? Or do I just roll all of them and they take saves, then if any guys left they fight back. What about guys in the unit that were not in base contact for close combat? After the defensive fire do they sit there if no one is in base contact? Trying to understand it better
CQ fighting in this game is much more abstracted than some other games you might play, especially the current edition of
40k. Solkan did a really good job of highlighting how it works, so I'm not going to repeat most of what he already wrote. To answer your specific questions: base contact doesn't matter much at all in this game, except where it is specifically mentioned. So while you must attempt to get your models into base contact when charging, if some models end up not being in base contact (due to defensive fire or just not being able to reach), it makes no difference. In our "mind's eye" we can imagine that the two units are fighting in close quarters, even if the models themselves are not specifically in base contact with each other.
But yeah, there is no pile-in or anything like that. If neither side retreats after the CQ fighting, the two units sit where they are. Being that movement and facing are such a big deal in this game, any rules we tried that allowed additional movement after a round of CQ shooting ended up being just too powerful. Ultimately, since the game is alternating activation, if you end up wiping out your foe with CQ fighting and your unit is left in a bad position, then it behooves you to activate that unit ASAP in the next turn and move them to safety immediately!
solkan wrote:Theoretically, I think that means that you'd see a few silly or absurd combat results if had huge, table spanning Ork hordes charging units, where the models in the back of the mob would be making their CQ shooting even though they're nowhere near the enemy unit. But I don't think the rules are intended to apply to huge, table spanning hordes yet. The biggest unit I've been able to make out of the current cards is pack of six angel minnows, with a lot of the other units being able to put five models together, so at worst that's something for the future to address if the game size expands.
Edit: And, after double checking the unit coherency rules, the requirement to be within 3" of the squad leader in order to be in coherency, and the requirement that the charge move ends in coherency to be valid put a really big limit on the situation getting out of hand.
You've totally nailed it. These rules were written specifically to cover small 'fire teams' of 1-6 models per unit. There is no plan to ever really go beyond that with this ruleset (because, at the very least, the 3" coherency from a squad leader model would break down pretty quickly once you had bigger units).
So a lot of times we were looking to add rules to prevent abuses that could occur from stringing out huge units of models and then we had to remind ourselves: because we're dealing with tiny squads and have a pretty restrictive coherency rule, we ultimately don't need to add a lot of preventative measures into the rules, because those restrictions are naturally in place already!
