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Post by michael on Jul 30, 2022 14:29:20 GMT
For the first time that I can remember, there are more posts here than I can read and reply to at once! Wow! …. I don't really get it for sprays, but maybe some people were super finicky about it at tournaments or something? … Because they used templates, and because templates were all (due to manufacturing variances) were slightly different sizes, and because of the precise positioning required without judging models and changing the game state, sprays could become contentious to adjudicate and/or slow down play. (Mechanically, they were the best type of ranged attack in existence, period, for MKs II and III, because they ignored almost all defensive tech. Going back to MK I “do not ignore the in-melee bonus” helps balance them more!)
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Post by michael on Jul 30, 2022 14:55:47 GMT
I would be quite a hypocrite if I complain much about this matter. Because I've been calling for this move (granted, I did not expect/wishlist them to slash factions en-masse, just most of models and entries from each faction, but alas) since advent of MK3 that made me drop the system. I am probably supposed to be pissy about Protectorate of Menoth I gathered and painted lovingly... but I have long concluded that overall my choice of faction was wrong and gameplaywise I am into factions with extreme skews and very defined peculiarities, like Legion, not jack-of-all-traders. My painted stuff is with me still, everything else I sold, no hard feelings. Though I suspect Cryx players have a lot to say... Most of the stuff they demonstrated so far is pretty neat. I don't like the look of new Cygnar much, too heavy and bulky and Warcaster-y, Orgoth can go take a hike but Khador looks like extreme improvement, so will be waiting for more pictures. The dreaded 3d printed stuff actually looks like MK2 plastic warjack kits, but crispier, finer detailed and overall neater. Cleaning them from flash will be rectal pain, but a minor one. Not a problem, unless they bend badly. Rules look fine, on condition they are actually working on them, and not pulling another "3 years of playtesting" BS. Pricetag concerns me though. 200$ is a price of Cursed City IIRC. Initially I did not pay attention and thought it's gonna be a dual faction starter, but if it's a price for just one faction box, PP has really high expectations of what people are ready to pay for their 3d-printed reboot. Not sure if they are justified, comparisons are inevitable. Kicking major part of factions in the balls will surely lose them a chunk of playerbase, but no pain no gain I guess. I wonder what is going to be the fate of poor sods like Grymkin and Infernal. Quietly swept under the rug? Mercenaries? Still, only my best wishes to PP in this bold move, because despite ruining Page 5 to appease the PC herd, they actually had a pair to go for it. So, full speed ahead, meanwhile I will be ogling Khador intensely and making up my mind. Hard to pick out the exact items I want to address from a phone, but…! Re: model cleanup Model cleanup actually looks a million times simpler now! No more mold lines! Removing any support structures left on the kits should be trivial compared to, say, cleaning the gnarly mold lines that went straight through the details on the PVC plastic models.I don’t know the exact material name, but it is laser-hardened resin and appears— from what I have seen but not touched — to be comparable to the resin used in various resin models (think battle engines) and MonPoc models. Re: faction pseudo-retirement I strongly suspect the choice of which factions to semi-retire was based heavily on sales data. For my own part, I haven’t seen a new Protectorate, Cryx or Retribution player locally (talking pre-COVID) in literal years, like since 2017/2018 or so. The “limited release” factions (Convergence, Grymkin, Infernals, Crucible Guard) knew what they were getting into from the start. It’s not a Warhammer Fantasy dwarves / Age of Sigmar “None of your stuff exists anymore, throw it in the trash” situation, at least! All published models are still usable in the Unlimited format, so hey, that’s something! Re: cost One criticism frequently leveled against past starter boxes was the price point was not indicative of the true cost. Yes, $50 to start, it then you need to flesh out a 75-point army, and… I’m sure we can dig up approximately half a million examples of certain people on this forum incessantly complaining about price (“But I can buy 20-man rank-and-file units of middling quality Chinese plastic for this other KS game for the same price!” ). That $200 or $400 is literally “You have your entire 75-point army, complete, done, now the cost is known upfront, no guessing.” (And, that cost is 100% in line with the real cost of a MK III 75-point theme force or a “real” 2,000 point army for 40K or what have you.) Pros and cons. Everybody would love stuff to be free, but it is what it is. Privateer appears to be aiming to compete on quality (which is where they’ve always excelled anyway, in my opinion!), not price. Re: MK III “3 years of testing” It’s been 6 years; it’s okay to let it go. MK III wasn’t perfect at release, but it was a fair sight better than MK II after 7 years of releases. They don’t have infinite staff. (As an aside: it’s funny how it seems that —in general— all the same people shouting “Woe! Doom! All the good people left, nothing will be as good again!” every time there was a staffing change didn’t seem to notice that all those same infallible, gilded rockstar game devs were the same ones responsible for developing all the unbalanced and unfair parts of MK II and MK III in the first place. Short memories.) That’s all I have for now!
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Post by michael on Jul 30, 2022 16:33:52 GMT
For what I've seen so far the changes to movement are the only thing drawing a "wait, lolwut?" from me. A flat 2" penalty for rough terrain is how another system does it and it's all kinds of counter-intuitive there, and I don't like that how far an Spd 6 unit can move depends on what it is.. Warcaster uses the same rough terrain system; is that what you mean? But, for real, rough terrain and moving at half SPD has been one of the persistent rough spots since MK I. People couldn’t do math then and people apparently can’t do math now either. Seriously though: how many times has your game slowed down while both players have tried to measure some fiddly rough terrain movement? I’ve seen it plenty. Rough terrain has progressively become less and less onerous to use practice with every new edition. (Anybody else remember when Irusk1 literally said “You can’t charge my army” to 90% of the models in the game every single turn back in MK I? Pepperidge Farm remembers.) Re: unit movement A lot of the Internet chatter involves a lot of people who either don’t fully understand the new rules or are cherry-picking some pretty poor examples, such as by lining up the defender’s models the way they are lined up today, instead of thinking through how people will adapt, and crying foul. It makes about as much sense as crying about how unfair Skarre1 is if Skarre is playing by her MK I rules in MK III.
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Post by michael on Jul 30, 2022 16:38:50 GMT
The loss of Free Strikes I think is a huge change to how games will play out, as being able to just walk past front-line models changes the game a lot. I guess they are trying to remove a lot of the fiddly little details of moving physical models around with a measuring tape (no templates, no facing), but... I dunno, that stuff had it's charm, you know? Figuring out a way to squeeze past a model to get at the juicy target behind it felt great when it happened. But of course this way is faster and easier. I've seen a lot of people join the LOS Discord in the last few days saying that they are planning to pick up/get back into the game with MkIV, so that's encouraging. People will adapt. Remember that you can’t just magically disengage the entire unit penalty-free… Unless I really, really misread something! I admit that I haven’t finished the entire beta rule document yet because I have been trying to finish stuff for GenCon. But disengaging and then being like “Well okay, at minimum 33% of my unit just lost the ability to attack” as well as being unable to charge out of melee…I don’t think it’s that bad. They weren’t kidding in their “What changed?” when they said that “units move like quicksilver.”
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Post by Soul Samurai on Jul 31, 2022 7:37:50 GMT
The loss of Free Strikes I think is a huge change to how games will play out, as being able to just walk past front-line models changes the game a lot. I guess they are trying to remove a lot of the fiddly little details of moving physical models around with a measuring tape (no templates, no facing), but... I dunno, that stuff had it's charm, you know? Figuring out a way to squeeze past a model to get at the juicy target behind it felt great when it happened. But of course this way is faster and easier. I've seen a lot of people join the LOS Discord in the last few days saying that they are planning to pick up/get back into the game with MkIV, so that's encouraging. People will adapt. Remember that you can’t just magically disengage the entire unit penalty-free… Unless I really, really misread something! I admit that I haven’t finished the entire beta rule document yet because I have been trying to finish stuff for GenCon. But disengaging and then being like “Well okay, at minimum 33% of my unit just lost the ability to attack” as well as being unable to charge out of melee…I don’t think it’s that bad. They weren’t kidding in their “What changed?” when they said that “units move like quicksilver.”
If I understood it, you sacrifice your attack if you started your activation engaged. So sure, you can't just walk out of engagement and do stuff, but I'm not sure I like the flat-out "NO" that creates; walking out of engagement to attack another model was a risk/reward mechanic that created interesting decisions and game moments). Imagine an ARM 20+2 warjack with a +2 ARM buff can't walk away from a POW 8 garbage model to attack another heavy. Yes yes, you can maybe clear the engaging model with another one of your models, but maybe you can't. It just doesn't feel right that any model can lock any other model out of moving and attacking (in a vacuum), regardless of relative power levels. Free strikes feels like a more realistic and intuitive solution. Although removing the attack bonus sounds fair too.
Also, if I've understood, it doesn't stop you from walking right past a model to hit the one behind it if you didn't start engaged. Which is a big deal in current and previous editions, but might not be a big deal in MkIV, so I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm only saying that it suggests the game will be VERY different.
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Miafan
Junior Strategist
Eater of Brains
Posts: 130
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Post by Miafan on Jul 31, 2022 11:42:41 GMT
I wonder if there any chance for return of proper forums. Reboot of the system is a high time to try and rebuild that beautiful crystal palace of knowledge the old forums were, please excuse me that cheap pathos. "Go to social media and web chats" works for me like an umbrella works for a fish.
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Post by Soul Samurai on Jul 31, 2022 17:27:59 GMT
I wish. But the decline of this forum would seem to suggest that the discord happens on Discord these days. I don't even check in on the official forums anymore - and for a long time I would still go by and comment on any hobby threads at least.
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Post by droopingpuppy on Jul 31, 2022 17:49:18 GMT
I wish there is the official forum too, for I have no interest on SNS. But can the people return to there even if they do? They blow off it by themselves, after all, to shut up any 'no'.
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Cyel
Junior Strategist
Posts: 685
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Post by Cyel on Jul 31, 2022 18:43:30 GMT
Pricetag concerns me though. 200$ is a price of Cursed City IIRC. Initially I did not pay attention and thought it's gonna be a dual faction starter, but if it's a price for just one faction box, PP has really high expectations of what people are ready to pay for their 3d-printed reboot. Not sure if they are justified, comparisons are inevitable. Don't know about where you live, but brand new Cursed City here, in Poland costs ~98$.
Hard to convince people to give the game a try with such a price tag. Especially as other companies offer playable starters for much less with a lot more stuff (ASOIAF starters for example).
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Post by axehappy on Aug 1, 2022 2:28:16 GMT
I think $200 for an actually usable army at an actually supported playing point, and Sub $500 for pretty much everything for an army is pretty awesome price point.
For people who already know and like the game.
I do think they need to come up with a $50-$70 battlebox type buy in or something for new players. Just make the Gencon boxes they're doing a normal thing.
I know army boxes work for GW, even though those army boxes aren't half or less of what you need to actually play your army in a "normal" sized game, but PP isn't GW.
So, on the one hand, I'm pumped that I can drop like $500 and get everything I need/want for my armies (especially as a person who plays pretty much every faction but minions and Circle. And My wife plays Minions) and that's it. That's way less money than I've dropped on any minis game before this.
But on the other hand...$200 is a lot of money to a lot of people. They'll definitely need people to be doing demos or something to convince non players that they like the game before they will want to drop that kind of cash I feel? I dunno.
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Post by michael on Aug 1, 2022 4:26:21 GMT
The price is the price. The only way to lower it is to lower their manufacturing costs, and as we've seen, Chinese manufacturing, although the lowest cost you'll find literally on the entire planet, clearly brings with it unacceptable risks. Matt Wilson has enumerated the reasons several times, so I won't go into it here. I will say that the quality and detail of Privateer's models is leaps and bounds above many others. While a lot of people have said the same thing about "needing" a cheap starter box, I think there's a fair counterpoint to be made that a cheap starter box is doing truly new players a disservice by masking the true cost of the game. Now, the price is right there, up front. It's not the GW method of "I bought a starter and I can play this game! And now I need a book! And another book! And another book...? And another book in six months because this one will be superseded shortly...? And also I only have like 500 points of models and I really need 2,000 points to play a 'real' game." So how will it play out in practice? I dunno. But I've watched plenty of people drop $200 on board games, and way more than $200 on their "starter" GW purchases. So that's something.
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Post by Soul Samurai on Aug 1, 2022 6:21:16 GMT
How many points is the $200 starter again? Assuming a constant price-per-point based on that, how much would a full sized army cost? I guess that assumed 100 points is the "full, standard" size of course.
I was talking to a local yesterday who plays Tau. He's really not happy with 40K, and was interested in Monpoc, but is not willing to invest in any more models until he gets his existing Tau all painted up. Which is a very fair and disciplined attitude that I abandoned a long time ago. I was actually thinking of taking a photo of all my painted, assembled but unpainted, and still-unassembled PP models together. I'm not sure my camera can zoom far back enough to get them all in frame... What do you guys think, should I subject myself to that?
Well, I certainly have enough models for people to play starter games of MkIV with some "not-TOO-silly" proxies, so as long as people are interested we can give it a go without asking anyone to invest anything. I actually still have unassembled Khador and Cygnar starter set warjacks, if I magnetise those then I could probably fit the spare weapons from the new warjack kits onto them easily enough and keep using them.
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Post by droopingpuppy on Aug 1, 2022 6:49:56 GMT
By the way have you checked the units? For some remained models(banes and exemplars), they make the size of the unit smaller than before.
Simply put, 6/10 strength units are capped to 5(or 6? I can't check it right now), and 3/5 strength are capped to 3, and you have no option to expand their strength except for adding CA(or WA, if the very idea is alive).
Although it is natural for reducing the size for the new unit movement rule requires smaller size, but I have two issues. First, it means the upkeeps are less effective on the units.
And, second, more importantly, their FA stays while the unit size was reduced. To me, I have 5 active Storm Lances and 5 unpainted lances but, if it comes to the reality I can't use remaining four.... Storm Lance is not on the demo cards but there are Vengers, and you know they are FA 2 and 3/5 strength right now as well.
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Post by Soul Samurai on Aug 1, 2022 7:30:30 GMT
Do we know the FA will stay the same?
Upkeeps being less effective kind of makes sense actually; with customizeable spell lists and also command cards, there's a lot that can affect the game now, so having individual factors (like spells) be weaker arguably helps avoid OP combinations. I guess. I dunno.
It does feel like there's more stuff to keep track of in order to understand how an army works now; it used to be mainly theme and caster, now it will be army, caster, custom spells, and command cards; just a lot of variables you know? I mean, obviously there were always variables in what models were in an army, but those were fairly self-contained (each individual model has limited interactions with others) and also, you know, on the table so you are easily aware of them when you look at the table state, you don't need to remember things that aren't models on the table. With variable spell lists and command cards, you need to be aware of the models on the table, aware of what the caster does, aware of what extra spells he has, and aware of the effects of command cards (that probably aren't range-limited, so can potentially affect any part of the table)?
I dunno, I guess it will be balanced out by more limited model selections (at least initially), but on paper it feels like I might have an even harder time knowing what to expect from my opponent's army at any given moment? I'm just not sure we need command cards; when 40K added command cards it felt to me like it was trying to catch up to what WMH aready had in Warcaster spells and feats. And when WNM came out with command cards, it felt like a different take on what WMH already had in caster spells and feats. So adding it to WMH that already has a source of extra effects that are layered on top of your army? It just kind feels redundant, an un-needed level of complexity?
Bear in mind that I often forget to use my caster's feat in WMH, and I'm still getting used to using the Rack in WNM, so I'm not exactly the most "in control" player out there.
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Post by michael on Aug 1, 2022 15:27:21 GMT
Bits and bobs:
Re: FA We don’t know. We just have the examples set by the beta cards. So far warjacks now all have an FA set; that is new and is presumably to counteract spam lists.
Re: point costs per dollar I haven’t attempted to calculate this. However, PP prices models based on their costs, not on their game rules, so… I suppose it doesn’t matter much?
Re: command cards and stuff Well, this is another balancing dial they’ve turned. Now instead of particular casters being superior because they have better support spells, we have a way to help mitigate gaps in their kits. (Side note: assuming nothing else changes, holy balls, Boundless Charge is finally going to be totally sweet on Khador units, thanks to the new unit movement rules!)
Warcaster doesn’t have command cards, though? Vehicles have maneuvers, and the spell rack is what it is, so I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the secondary mission objectives?
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