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Post by michael on Jun 26, 2019 13:46:33 GMT
... Also no more hills! Because reasons! I asked about the reasons. They are as follows: 1) Hill and elevation rules were confusing, even for experienced players. Questions about hills/elevation were the most common reason for a judge call, apparently. 2) Elevation granted Arcing Fire, essentially. But there’s already a rule for that, called Arcing Fire. Getting rid of hills prevents everything from possibly having Arcing Fire. 3) Hills caused physical problems during gameplay; stuff falls off hills. (I contend that well-made hills solve that problem 90% of the time, but whatever...) (begin editiorializing) Hills were basically the major argument for 2D terrain, with said arguments being, basically, “I don’t want my models to fall over” and “I can’t get my micrometer-precise tournament measurements easily if there’s a hill”. No hills means those arguments carry less weight. Maybe we’ll all start seeing pretty 3D terrain again instead of ugly paper-doll flat blandness... (end editorial) Will players still use hills on their tables for purely scenic purposes? Maybe. I didn’t buy that when it was posited. Heck, we have a bunch of terrain types that are perfectly legal that a lot of players seem to hate using (how frequently do you see people willingly reaching for burning earth or shallow water or rolling fog?), so I can’t imagine those same players saying “Let’s add this completely superfluous piece of terrain because it looks pretty.” But...whatever.
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Post by HighPaladin on Jun 26, 2019 13:51:11 GMT
Well, you guys are pretty convinced, so its quite possible that I'm not thinking this through entirely. I still remain relatively unconvinced that it will make a significant impact for the vast majority of themes, but I'll be happy to say that I'm wrong if that's what happens. It probably won't change the "top builds" much, because they're already optimizing. But it will be much better for the themes that are currently underrepresented due to being a weird combined arms build. It will also make some (expensive) Mercenary options viable again, because you don't lose anything by including them. Jack/Beast themes should also find it easier to include some screening units. It will almost certainly have an impact on the top lists, both immediately and long term. In the short term, they'll be far more flexible with how they spend their points - for example, my current Harbinger list bends over backwards and removes important tools to hit the 3 free card cap. Post change, the build of the list opens up drastically. Long term, this is going to change the whole meta, so the top lists will warp and adapt depending on how everything else ends up looking.
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gordo
Junior Strategist
My star is green?
Posts: 548
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Post by gordo on Jun 26, 2019 13:59:11 GMT
... Also no more hills! Because reasons! I asked about the reasons. They are as follows: 1) Hill and elevation rules were confusing, even for experienced players. Questions about hills/elevation were the most common reason for a judge call, apparently. 2) Elevation granted Arcing Fire, essentially. But there’s already a rule for that, called Arcing Fire. Getting rid of hills prevents everything from possibly having Arcing Fire. 3) Hills caused physical problems during gameplay; stuff falls off hills. (I contend that well-made hills solve that problem 90% of the time, but whatever...) (begin editiorializing) Hills were basically the major argument for 2D terrain, with said arguments being, basically, “I don’t want my models to fall over” and “I can’t get my micrometer-precise tournament measurements easily if there’s a hill”. No hills means those arguments carry less weight. Maybe we’ll all start seeing pretty 3D terrain again instead of ugly paper-doll flat blandness... (end editorial) Will players still use hills on their tables for purely scenic purposes? Maybe. I didn’t buy that when it was posited. Heck, we have a bunch of terrain types that are perfectly legal that a lot of players seem to hate using (how frequently do you see people willingly reaching for burning earth or shallow water or rolling fog?), so I can’t imagine those same players saying “Let’s add this completely superfluous piece of terrain because it looks pretty.” But...whatever. Interesting. Our meta regularly uses shallow water, burning earth, and rolling fog in our tables. Pretty much every game always has at least one water feature, though sometimes it's an acid pool, and usually at least one of burning Earth or fog bank. They make the game more fun. Always confused me that people didn't use them. I think part of the reason is that we all have forsaken 3D terrain. Like, entirely. And if you buy all the pretty "mousepad" terrain, which we do, it's much easier to find all the weirder elements like acid pools and fog banks etc. As for why we forsook 3D terrain, our meta doesn't play in stores very often, so the flat terrain is much easier to obtain, store, and transport.
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Post by ankiseth on Jun 26, 2019 14:49:56 GMT
I played a battle group teaching game with a new player last week. I set up the terrain and then as soon as we started moving, she started moving a jack toward the hill I was like “uhh hills have rules but let’s not worry about those for now” because explaining them is such a pain and it wasn’t going to have any impact on the matchup.
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Post by autocorrecthaslimits on Jun 26, 2019 19:02:21 GMT
My gaming group has been using the new 3 freebies based off current themes. Something ive noticed is casters that were rarely seen (vyros1, saeryyn, makeda1) are being brought back. We use a 2 list format as standard practice, and everyone seems to keeping spam/optimal builds for 1 list, then building more general or TAC pairings. Im not good enough at this game to forecast what the lomgterm means, but the list chickening lessened we noticed. For example, the local LotF abuser was giving us a hard time, since everyone brought 3-4 shield guard jacks and skorne/ret players used the no tough themes with heavy battlegroups to give medium infantry headaches. And today, he actually considered running large griffon swarm una2 w/ bloodpact instead of just ravengers.
Again, just my group, but maybe combined arms comes back a bit now since running a hard skew or jank could see more hardcounters. At least for the moment the meta is shaken, and creativity is flowing. Hopefully others are gonna have the same fun.
And shadows of retribution looks really good with big battlegroups and takedown/ambush infantry.
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