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Let's say I wanted to give Warmachine a shot... which would be a good Starter Box/Set to start with?  [RSS] Share on facebook Share on Twitter Submit to Reddit
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Made in us
Shas'ui with Bonding Knife






Just wondering. If I wanted to get a start in this hobby, which would be a good starter kit to start with. I honestly know nothing about Warmachine (I'm a Warhammer person). Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

SG

40K - T'au Empire
Kill Team - T'au Empire, Death Guard
Warhammer Underworlds - Garrek’s Reavers

*** I only play for fun. I do not play competitively. *** 
   
Made in at
Boom! Leman Russ Commander





I think it depends on what faction would interest you.

There is a two-player starter box with Cygnar and Cryx models. Pretty standard stuff you'd expect; few models, dice, ruler, mini-rulebook, etc. Found here, and you can pick it up most places.

Failing that, there's the Battle Groups for each faction (barring a couple of the advanced ones).
   
Made in ca
Enigmatic Chaos Sorcerer





British Columbia

Number one thing is go find the people you will be playing with and watch them play. Ask to try a demo game.

Based on your signature you should make sure it's a game you'll enjoy. It is very competitive and full of chaining activations and synergies which creates quite the learning curve at the beginning as you figure out all the ways you can suddenly lose the game.

It's very fun and scratches a much different itch than GW games but isn't always for everyone (and who you play with while learning is key)

 BlaxicanX wrote:
A young business man named Tom Kirby, who was a pupil of mine until he turned greedy, helped the capitalists hunt down and destroy the wargamers. He betrayed and murdered Games Workshop.


 
   
Made in us
Second Story Man





Astonished of Heck

Also check out the Hordes side, too. The game style may fit you better. The differences between them are resource management vs risk management.

But for a beginner, unless you are absolutely dead set on the looks of the army, avoid the Mercenaries, Minions, Convergence, and Grymkin. They play very differently from the norm and are a bit harder to get the hang of.

From the armies listed in your signature, you could probably do well with almost any of the normal armies, and they all come with a Battlebox or another..

Are you a Wolf, a Sheep, or a Hound?
Megavolt wrote:They called me crazy…they called me insane…THEY CALLED ME LOONEY!! and boy, were they right.
 
   
Made in us
Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter







Kind of hard to recommend one based on the information we've got. Warmachine/Hordes don't work like Warhammer where you've got good/bad and hard/easy factions, that argument tends to come once you get to the warcasters within a faction.

With that in mind I will second Charistoph's recommendation to avoid Mercs/Minions/Convergence/Grymkin; the first two are expensive (very few plastic models), Convergence is new, tiny, and requires a lot of wonky extra rules, and last I checked Grymkin are technically in beta and I have no idea how they work.

(Sidebar on the difference between Warmachine and Hordes: In Warmachine your warcaster passes out Focus to the warjacks at the beginning of the turn, which the warjacks use to do things. In Hordes your warbeasts generate Fury by doing things, which your warlock removes from them at the beginning of the turn to prevent them from going berserk and attacking something you didn't want them to. Warmachine is more reliable, has more guns, warjacks tend to be easier to hit and harder to damage, and since your warjacks only need to be in your control area at the start of your turn you can spread out more, Hordes spikes a lot higher, has higher speeds/more move tricks, your warbeasts' animi effectively expand your spell list, and it's a lot easier to heal your warbeasts so they don't have to run into battle crippled. Warcasters (Warmachine) also tend to have more Focus than Warlocks (Hordes) have Fury, so they can cast more spells and generally do more on their own. Otherwise the rules are exactly the same, the games are cross-compatible and cross-balanced, and there are terms that are so interchangeable "warnoun" has entered common parlance. Usually to mean "warlock/warcaster" rather than "warbeast/warjack", though.)

Factions in Warmachine/Hordes also have a broader/deeper personality and are harder to define than those in Warhammer (you don't get "the shooty faction" (Tau) or "the speedy faction" (DE)), and as a secondary problem a lot of them have warcasters that break the mould to one degree or another, but I shall do my best to summarize:

Cygnar: Dressed in blue, protagonist-y faction, Anglo-American cultural sensibilities, but don't let that fool you, these are not Space Marines. The prime watchword for Cygnar is precision; their battle plan relies on coordinating your assets to set up a surgical strike, not on barging in and hitting everything until it falls down. Cygnar is about crippling the enemy with one solid blow, not about flailing and getting a bit of damage through here and there. People will tell you they are the "shooty" faction and in a sense they are, but their shooting is geared towards hitting and removing support peices as opposed to blowing giant holes in stuff. Their elemental attacks favour lightning, which enables a whole bunch of nonlinear attack vectors to blow up the folks standing behind the target. The battlebox caster is Maddox, she takes a traditionally tricksy standoffish faction and gives them a strong melee toolbox still geared towards the single hammer-blow charge turn that hits the enemy so hard they can't get up to get you back before you win.

Menoth (, Protectorate Of): These may look familiar coming from 40k, what with their distaste for wizards (Warmachine was a D&D setting at one point, and technically there are both arcane and divine casters wandering about; Menoth are all divine casters) and fondness for burning heretics. The central theme of Menoth is inevitability/inexorableness; they aren't usually very fast, but their arsenal of healing, control effects, and soul trickery is going to keep them on their feet and coming for you. They're fond of fire; when you're on fire you know you're going to take damage next turn, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Their battlebox caster is Malekus, who has a pile of fire tricks that won't make that much difference in a battlebox game (most of the time) but will ruin infantry's day when the game grows larger, as well as a couple of extra control toys (auto-knockdown AoEs, debuff dispels...) to show off some of the fun the larger faction can pull.

Khador: Russia, in all its glory; a mix of Slavic mythological references (the Old Witch with her chicken-footed warjack...) and more recent historical in-jokes, seasoned liberally with dangerous forgotten magicks, a reckless disregard for human life, and a double helping of good old-fashioned aggression. A common mistake people make when looking at Khador is to look at the SPD 4 on most of their warjacks and think "Oh, Khador is slow"; they can actually be blindingly fast, between speed buffs and fast infantry. Khador is violence, and aggression; their traditional/defining battle plan is to make their whole army a game-ending threat and give their opponent the choice of which piece gets through to actually finish the job. Their literal approach to the game is incredibly flexible; you've got wizards, a solid arsenal of gunline tools, infantry, warjacks, and the simple grand old-fashioned expedient of having more axes than the other guy, but any approach will be robust and have a lot of threatening units for the other guy to contend with. Their elemental attacks favour ice, all the better to hold the other guy in place while you run up and smash him up with giant axes with. The battlebox caster is Kozlov (also called "goatlord" because it means "goat" in Russian); he's got a simple arsenal of spells to make his stuff faster and hit harder, plus an axe and Side Step to let him go beat the other guy's warcaster up himself.

Cryx: Undead and strange necromantic robots that work for a dragon that may or may not have invented undead. And probably invented dragons. Cryx is sort of the other side of the coin on Menoth; they're similar in a lot of ways (powerful 'casters, control spells, soul/corpse shenanigans to help them get stuck in without dying...), but where Menoth is slow, tough, and high-quality Cryx is fast, squishy, and high-volume. Menoth relies on buffing their own dudes, Cryx relies on debuffing the enemy. The battlebox caster is Agathia, she's one of the more difficult ones to play since she's got a lot of subtle movement tricks and her fantastic passive damage buff (/ARM debuff) requires her to get up close to the enemy and tends to end in her dying, but if you layer your support right and position carefully (...and take advantage of her ability to teleport 3" out of danger...) she can casually turn a Khador warjack into wet tissue paper.

Retribution: Elvish terrorists bent on purging the world of human wizards. Unlike normal elves these ones are frequently bald and one even has a beard. They're heavily dependent on synergy; they don't have the raw hitting power most factions can come up with and their warjacks tend to be expensive generalists with loads of special tricks and both ranged and melee weapons, but they can utterly screw up the enemy's positioning in ways pretty much nobody else can even dream of, with speed debuffs, movement restrictions, push/place effects, and knockdowns galore. Their battlegroup caster is Helynna and the battlegroup doesn't provide a lot of those fun control effects, but it does support a patient stand-offish approach where you make use of your ranged durability buff, ranged attacks, end-of-activation move, and healing to prod the enemy into getting out of position so you can pounce.

Trollbloods: The friendliest people in the Iron Kingdoms. Most factions are primarily composed of folks who come on small (30mm) bases, Trollbloods all come on medium (40mm) bases and are thus kind of odd to position. Most factions don't mind feeding troops into the meat grinder for an advantage; Trolls get less out of their troops dying and have more toys to keep them alive. They aren't quick but they are tough; their warbeasts have self-healing trickery, they've got a staple unit that is a giant rock that gives an armour buff in an aura. Most factions are also at least somewhat tied to one sort of elemental attack, which makes units that are immune to it kind of problematic, but Trolls have a toolbox of elemental light warbeasts that let them pull a lot more tricks out of their hat than the rest. Their battlebox caster is Ragnor, who comes with knockdown tricks, a targeted buff purge, and a few extra damage/durability buffs along the way; it is an odd (and slightly more difficult) battlebox, since it doesn't actually have a heavy warbeast (most battleboxes are one heavy/two lights, this one is three lights), but Troll lights are bigger, scarier, and more expensive than most lights, so the points still work out.

Circle: A secretive cult of druids out to preserve the balance between the gods of the wilderness and civilization, so one doesn't gain dominance and show up to squish us all. Unfortunately at the moment that means attempting to disassemble civilization. Circle is about getting excessive hitting power to the right place at the right time and avoiding retaliation after; they don't control you themselves, they rely on the terrain to do that. They're not really fast in general, but they can all but ignore terrain in a way that lets them find unexpected angles, generate terrain to bollox you up after they beat you to death, and teleport about just to be more confusing. A Circle opponent must be treated with caution lest he dump a Warpwolf on the other side of your front line and savage your warcaster when you least expected it. They don't have durability buffs, or a lot of healing, and their most common damage buff requires the warbeast frenzy (and become controlled by a flowchart for a turn) the turn after it's used, they rely on being where they're not supposed to be able to get to kill things. The battlebox caster is Tanith, and is probably the most difficult one to play; she doesn't hit very hard, doesn't make her beasts very fast, and her control effects can be shaken, so in battlebox games you can't really prevent the other guy from getting to you, you've got to make them waste enough Focus/Fury in getting to you that they can't really kill you.

Legion: Strange mutant critters created by the dragon Everblight, who lives in an essence container in the chest cavity of the ogryn Thagrosh, which makes Legion the only faction that can actually field their boss. (Though now that Vlad's going to be Prince-Consort Khador sort of can. And Mohsar sits on Circle's triumvirate of bosses. So...kind of?) People will tell you Legion is "the warbeast faction" and they're not entirely wrong; the issue is less that their infantry aren't good and more that their warbeast support is really strong. Legion is rabid, aggressive, and always hungry; they don't sit back and wait for the other guy to move, they just go. They invented lesser warbeasts (full-on warbeasts with their own animi and Fury stats, that just happen to sit on 30mm infantry bases and have 12-ish hitboxes (as opposed to 40mm bases and 20-24 for lights, 50mm bases and 32-34 for heavies)) so they've got a pretty wide range of them; they have tentacles, corpse-token recycling to make more lessers, and plenty of nonlinear charge vectors (though unlike Circle Legion doesn't make use of terrain to go around the shieldwall, they go over with wings or straight through with bizzare judo trickery). The battlebox caster is Kryssa, and it's also one of the harder battleboxes to play; unlike Circle (who have Controlled Warping and Primal to make the POW14 Pureblood hit at POW18 (plus an ARM debuff from Dark Shroud)) and Retribution (who can use a Focus for Force Generator to make the POW15 Manticore hit at POW18) the Neraph is actually stuck with POW15 unless it's the feat turn, so you're really going to have to use the positioning tricks (and the knockback on the Nephilim's ballista) to set up a charge lane on the enemy warcaster.

Skorne: Invaders from across the desert with a thing for pain and self-deprivation. Except for Rasheth, who just looks like Jabba the Hutt. Skorne is organized, militaristic, and highly synergized; many armies can stack buffs to make something much stronger, but Skorne has elevated it to an art form. Normally there's a limit on how much you can stack on one model/unit since they can only be affected by one upkeep spell and one animus, and there's a limit to how much Focus/Fury you have to cast them, but Skorne has a number of cheap/efficient buffs that don't draw on this pool. They're also very into close formations, with lots of shieldwall, small-AoE buffs, models that can fire over the shieldwall, that sort of thing. The battlebox caster is Xekaar, who aside from an ability that really confuses me (Witch Mark on a melee weapon?) runs on being aggressive with his battlegroup and handing the enemy enough debuffs to let the beasts do damage and avoid retaliation afterwards.

You do, however, have a lot of space to adapt within each faction, and my descriptions here are brief summaries that don't even begin to encompass all the possibilities (and which I suspect someone will disagree soon), so you may just end up being better-off grabbing the ones that look cool, but I hope you do find this information helpful.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/06/06 19:27:19


Balanced Game: Noun. A game in which all options and choices are worth using.
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