Dead Scribe

True, but then they also do things like scrap a game in the middle of the night with no notice and squat factions allegedly due to poor sales. So thats something that needs considered.

I can see your point and agree. I know where I am we try and steer the new players away from the ****** armies so that they don't feel like they spent their money on a lemon.

Sure they are anecdotal, but to date none of the campaign material has sold well pretty much across everyone who responds to the question in their area. Conversely if you ask how the flesh eater courts are selling, you'll get a pretty solid majority saying that those boxes move. Enough to draw a pretty accurate opinion.

Yep. Because they are highly competitive and will help you win events. If forbidden power had things in it like that, it would sell a lot better. Hopefully GW takes note of that in their next expansion.

I think imbalance is imbalance if its 5 models, 16 models, or 100 models. Teams that are easier to play are the same to me as armies that are easier to play. Teams that are harder to play are the same to me as armies that are harder to play. I'm not sure where I can see how scale of the game lends itself better to imbalance when you get the same experience regardless of the scale.

I still have no interest in painting at all and will pay the same people that paint my tournament armies now to keep on their work but I can see how these are useful if they lower your time commitment to get the same results!

I have no idea what the majority of competitive players want. I know a lot of the ones I play with do go for the most powerful builds that are fairly one dimensional, and you can see in the tournament rankings that the lion's share of armies represented happen to also be the fairly one dimensional ones. We can take that for what we will. My own tournament army right now is Daughters of Khaine. It drives itself on the table, I don't have to do much, but I know if I show up with a more difficult list to play that I am at a huge disadvantage and my goal is winning the event. Intentional does mean something. It means that is the designer's intent. As opposed to it being an accident that they can fix and we expect them to fix.

In regards to the forbidden power release, if their intention was to market it to both tournament players and narrative casuals, they did a poor job because there is only one item in the entire box worth having for tournament play (the boat) and very few players are going to pony up the cash for the entire box to get a card and a model. They will wait for the ebay people to split it out, as has been the case in my neck of the woods.

No I don't think I'm changing my mind. They do want to appeal to everybody. They want to appeal to the people that like one dimensional easy armies. They want to appeal to the campaign players. They want to appeal to the hobbyists. They want to appeal to the people that like challenges by making armies intentionally weaker. It could be power creep, but I think the dev team is doing this intentionally. I think they want a few armies really powerful, and they want some armies really hard to play and the rest in between. Heck look at how they develop Blood Bowl which comes with a snippet in the book that they developed it with that very mindset.

I was referring more to a mindset. There is a competitive mindset in miniature tabletop gaming that is attracted to one dimensional play and they are catering to that with some of their armies. Thats what I believe anyway. I don't think it is unintentional or an accident.

Again though, I don't see that as an unintended negative bug in the system, I see that as a known and desired feature for some of their armies to possess. The same development mindset exists in magic the gathering cards. To be desirable by everyone you have to appeal to everyone, and like it or not, some people want really competitive forces without having to go through a lot to learn how to use them properly. What we'd call one dimensional gameplay. For people that want more of a challenge, other B or C tier armies exist.

But you have to wonder, if its not selling much, is GW incentivized to continue to release narrative expansions? Much like how good balance benefits both narrative and competitive players alike, it is a bit disappointing to have this release have practically nothing in terms of competitive play. I would think a combo of both narrative rules and matched play items would have been in their best interest.

My faction is weak or not that bad. Other ones are much worse.

Take away the matched play element though and you don't have very much interest from most of the community. Same was true with the firestorm campaign thing, the maligned portents book, and the original hardback campaign books. They just didn't really seem to move.

The boat spell is already seeing a lot of play in our competitive meta. Its the only thing from Forbidden Power that is being used. Its too good to not use.

I play tournament rules as written. If the tournament rules would allow it, so would I. That being said I went with option #1, but thats because all of my games are tournament games or prepping for tournament.

Heavy emphasis on this. The battleplans I've seen seem cool but if no one wants to buy the book, they won't be used anyway. Most of this could have been GHB material. Not enough for matched play to warrant using unfortunately no matter how cool the intention was.

The only thing remotely worth getting is the boat spell. That isn't enough to justify buying the box for me outright, I will just find the boat spell for sale somewhere. Everything else is either not going to be seen in tournaments anyway or is not strong enough to really warrant taking to tournaments.

I think thats what they are trying to figure out. How to have a larger scale non-skirmish sized game, but have it be able to run as fast as a skirmish-sized game.

Not defending FEC, they are easily probably the most mathematically powerful faction in the game currently and are a tournament workhorse until their book gets compensated for somehow, but I believe that the FEC and other armies that fight twice and delete the other person's army while they watch is the game working as intended / designed. I believe the polls that they take show people want fast games, but also want larger amounts of models. The only way to compensate for that is to have things die fast from the first turn.

So there are two editions being released? An older edition and a new edition?

I can see where you are coming from and agree that robbing your opponent of their turn to fight is a negative play experience. However from the competitive arena, thats a hugely useful tool and I can't see them getting rid of it because it seems aimed at the design goal of faster games by killing stuff as fast as possible.

Their main issue is that they cannot compete with the damage output of armies like DoK or skaven or the flesh eater courts to really be viable against those armies. Additionally they don't have great durability. So yeah the moon active wouldn't hurt them, but its not nearly enough to make someone want to collect that army if they are going to have to face those armies.

No one here plays the gits because they are not up to snuff competitively, but when people were trying them out here, the moon did almost nothing most of the time. It pales in comparison to things like the flesh eater throne giving free summons or the skaven knotholes.

I didn't say impossible or that there are people that can consistently lose with a great list, I'm saying that I don't see it very often at all.