Landohammer
-
Posts
810 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Gallery
Store
Downloads
Blogs
Events
Posts posted by Landohammer
-
-
36 minutes ago, Hollow said:
Funnily enough, I think that Combat Patrol and Spearhead systems appeal more to older veteran players who have money and know the game, but just don't want to invest several hours into playing a game and the potential huge amount of time and effort collecting a faction can become.
I like the idea of being able to buy a single box as a hobby project and be able to play a game with the results without any other purchases. It gives me the ability to get a flavour of a particular faction before deciding if I want to invest more time/effort and money in to the faction.
I have bought 3 different 40k Combat patrols for factions that I have always fancied but never really wanted to open the can of worms that collecting a faction can become. These were fun "one-and-done" projects that were contained and manageable.
There are several other people I know in their 30's and 40's that just have a lot going on in their lives and for each of them to be able to pick a faction, buy a box, build/paint it in a reasonable time and all be able to play with and against each other in a quick evening session is very appealing.
To me that speaks more to the success of the boxes themselves, not the actual game.
Speaking as a 30-40 year old with a lot going on in their life, nothing about combat patrol/spearhead is appealing outside of the discounts on the boxes themselves lol. If I'm going to make a trip to the local game store for a game I don't want to be done in 45 minutes. Maybe that is just me.
The spearhead/combat patrols seem more geared specifically toward young people without much disposable income, and who may not necessarily have the interest in building/painting an entire army or playing a 3 hour game.
Is that a cool idea? Yes! Is it going to work? Probably not, because combat patrol definitely hasn't. But decently priced faction starter boxes are always a welcome thing and will probably sell.
-
56 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:
I'm a little surprised spearhead has battle tactics given its supposed to be an onboarding thing. Tactics seem like an easy thing to leave out for starter games.
That said it seems fine? I really don't like the 40k system. I've only played a couple games but I still haven't wrapped my head around it completely, although thats more 40k's rules writing being frustratingly obtuse at times for no reason as it is the complexity. From a design standpoint I'm not a fan of requiring extra peripherals like decks of cards.Its less competitive by virtue of being random It is more interesting though. I'd probably take the spearhead BT system anyway though since I really dislike the core BT system.
33 minutes ago, Tonhel said:I agree, but if Spearhead actual delivers it could be competition for Warcry. The same board size and I assume the same time needed to finish a game.
Not to be a negative nancy, but as my FLGS' resident "teacher of newbies" for 40k/AOS/TOW I just don't see much value in Spearhead or Combat Patrol. I have found it just easier to teach them the entire game. Teaching a variant of the main game that they later have to unlearn just seems like a waste of time.
And I don't see why people with limited time and room wouldn't just play Warcry/KT since its designed from the ground up for that purpose. Low points of sigmar has never worked properly.
Maybe it has value for isolated groups without someone to teach them, or players with extremely limited budgets. But I just do not see any kind of material player base for Combat Patrol and I foresee Spearhead going the same way.
-
1
-
1
-
-
3 minutes ago, TechnoVampire said:
That’s definitely one of my concerns; if they’re not well balanced we may end up seeing the same few lores in every list and it becomes almost a necessity to get certain spells off to win.
Yea I guess it also boils down to just how crazy some of these get. If all of the rest of the endless spell warscrolls are roughly close to the swords and palisade in terms of power level then it shouldn't be a problem.
But I just can't imagine them giving the Krondspine a derpy profile lol.
-
1
-
-
I like the idea of endless spells you can actually interact with. However I think the success of them is going to lie on how well the universal ones are balanced.
Because if they are all free, then there won't be a points system to help mitigate stronger ones. So the highest performers will become apparent super quickly and potentially be in every army's list.
I guess the casting cost could be used as a balancing measure to some degree. I think Wizards with casting bonuses could end up being the power players this edition.
-
4
-
-
12 minutes ago, madmac said:
Did you just...not read Dawnbringers??? Fyreslayers are heavily featured there, first as a Harbringer hero with RoR rules who save Hammerhall from a GG attack, and then a second time as an AoR built around the new warcry band and dedicated Dawnbringer fiction teasing developments with their faction leader after he beats the snot out of Trugg.
Ok so i'm just referring to a comment I read so i'm not gonna die on a hill defending it, but I don't personally consider recent inclusion in Dawnbringers enough to offset the neglect fyreslayers have experienced in 2.0 and 3.0 as a whole. But hey maybe this one dude is gonna turn the whole faction/range around! I don't play fyreslayers (or really see them on the table much) so I don't really care either way.
But I also wouldn't consider a single hero and a Warcry band to be particularly substantial updates to the range. Especially considering we now know that Warcry units have a limited lifespan. (RIP my 2 year old Horns of Hashut)
Also of note, BOC were featured in the Thondian story line (along with a new hero) and Dawnbringers includes short stories about Kurnothi models which aren't even a thing yet outside of underworlds. So I wouldn't necessarily put my hope in narrative inclusion as a sign of a range refresh.
-
2
-
1
-
-
On 4/26/2024 at 2:48 PM, Grungnisson said:
Do you like playing with the battle tactics then?
Also, other solutions are available. Like hidden agendas, for example. You could draw, say, three at the start of the battle and score additional points for completing two of those.
Or you could incorporate additional scoring conditions in the battleplans. We saw these in some of the more narrative battleplans accompanying the campaign books.
There are options. Many of them, potentially better, than the battle tactics we have.
I enjoy the deck of cards system that Leviathan introduced in 40k tenth. I kinda wish we had gone that direction for 4.0 sigmar but it definitely has its downsides. Like patching/correcting the cards is logistically challenging and it creates another item to buy along with the GHB.
I'm ok with the BT system overall and it looks like its at least moving in the general right direction. Its ultimately going to ride on just how balanced the GA BTs are though. If they mess up 1-2 of those the whole system becomes unfair again.
On 4/26/2024 at 2:53 PM, Tonhel said:This!
Having 2 battle tactics for each Alliance only increase the BT pool for some factions in that Alliance. As I posted in the 4.0 Rules thread "Reclaim the Realms is so much easier to obtain for Idoneth or Sylvaneth than for Fyreslayers. This already makes the available pool of BTs to chose from bigger for those factions compared to others in the same Alliance. Thus already creating an unbalance in the same Alliance.
So one of my biggest complaints about sigmar since the beginning of 2.0 was that GW has never properly costed units for their movement and bravery. You will see units with relatively similar stats be costed the same, but one will be movement 5 and the other movement 12 lol. Same story with bravery.
They are fixing the bravery issue to some degree, but yea Fyreslayers definitely stand out as one of the most neglected armies in the game. They just don't have enough movement abilities to offset their terrible movement stat.
I read an interesting comment recently mentioning how you can draw a lot of parallels between the treatment of Beast of Chaos and Fyreslayers in recent times. Both are neglected in terms of range updates and narrative inclusion. Kind of alarming considering BOC's ultimate fate
-
1
-
1
-
-
8 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:
BTs are arguably (imo) a bad way to implement secondary scoring into the game. There’s better ways to get secondary scoring.
I don’t like winning based on kills either, a mix is needed.BTs feel like playing Yu-Gi-Oh with one hand while the other is playing AoS, yet for some reason the Yu-Gi-Oh game is more important.
Ok I can at least understand that argument. I feel like saying "hey we can do better with BTs" is a lot more reasonable of an argument than "secondaries just need to go". Those arguments are just crazy town to me.
Personally I prefer battle tactics that require you to actually engage with your opponent. Magical Dominance, Intimidate Invaders, and Surround and Destroy are the worse offenders. They reward avoiding interaction with your opponents models.
Into the Maelstrom, Bait and Trap and maybe Reprisal are better in terms of gameplay because they actually require you to commit, sacrifice, or risk units and have active counterplay.
-
3
-
-
3 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:
Forcing people to play suboptimally, or bring bad units, to score points is just taxing victory. You go from playing with 2000 points, to playing with 1600 points and 400 points of junk to score points. Just shrink the armies at that point. Honestly having BTs being stuff you want to do anyways isn't even bad design, it forces you to communicate a plan to your opponent, which lets them burn what resources they can to try to deny it. The system might be better that way, it would certainly fix the narrative issues.Ok so keep in mind that we had 8 editions of Warhammer Fantasy and 2 editions of sigmar where battle tactics weren't really a thing. What we learned from those editions is that if you make a game solely about killing power, lists become homogenized as the most lethal/survivable units become clear and the rest of the units fall to the wayside. An "ideal list" becomes obvious quite quickly. Its why we have objectives and secondaries now.
The BT system is meant to reward preparation and strategy in addition to raw killing power. You can argue that the secondary system is not good, but arguing that secondaries themselves are bad for the game is a bold argument and goes against like 20+ years of game development.
I have played game systems where you just push forward and fight and whoever gets the most kills wins. That's essentially what TOW is now (with a bit more nuisance of course). But IMHO its not what AOS is meant to be.
-
5
-
1
-
-
Just now, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
Yeah, I think that's accurate. I have been playing games with a timer recently, and 3 hours usually gets us to mid to late round 3.
I get a whole game done in 3 hours occasionally, but only against opponents who are really familiar with their lists.
AoS just takes really long. Especially for synergy armies.
I mean if you are playing against guys that only play a few times a year or are new then that is completely understandable, but for a typical matched play game among adults that is crazy to me. In the matched play games that run at my FLGS, 90% of games finish within 2.5 hours. Maybe some pickup games will run to 3 hours if the guys are goofing around and chatting.
I don't mean to yuck your yum, but that is definitely not my experience within the hobby.
-
1 minute ago, Ganigumo said:
There are substantial design problems with 3e's secondary system that weren't just tied to accessibility (faction BTs).
Obviously they dropped the ball on balancing them, as they clearly never considered army strength when they wrote them initially. A weak army, with easy BTs could make for a balanced design as an example, even if its not fun to play. The ones they patched in with battlescrolls were aimed at balance, but were also just addressing that the first few tomes had particularly bad/few BTs.
In terms of design BTs are terrible for new players, because you've got to weigh 6-10 options and don't know what any of them are.
They're bad for experienced players too, since its actually a solveable system for most armies. you do the same 5-6 every game, in roughly the same order, and makes every game feel the same since you need to get 5/5 every game to do well. This isn't even an issue of they're too easy, the top players are going to go 5/5 every game unless you make all of them very difficult to the point where newer players are going to get maybe 1 or 2 out of 5 every game.
They're pretty good if you're in the middle, where you're still figuring the system out and enjoy weighing the options.
This is a huge design problem because that's pretty much the worst demographic to target with a secondary system like this. Making it easy for new players makes onboarding easier, but makes it less effective at breaking close games (and probably boring) for competitive play, and targeting competitive players makes it bad for new players, but it becomes a great way to help break ties and decide close games.
There's also a lot of conflicting priorities when it comes to BTs as a whole. Failing BTs feels bad (git gud etc), but it just becomes busywork if everyone is going 5/5. Some BTs are given out like pity points to make games closer, but if its supposed to help decide winners shouldn't it be a win-more mechanic?
WH weekly did a fantastic show about it last year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6QyHanz-IYFor reference, my preferred system would be taking like 1-3 "Grand strategies". Then you make them difficult or easy to interact with/deny. With some being end of game checks, and others being "if you did this difficult thing at any point you score it".
If we exclusively focus on the GHB tactics, I don't agree with anything you said lol. Secondary objectives require you to build your army a certain way or to take units that excel at things besides dealing massive damage/absorbing damage. Remove them and you just end up with armies purpose built to kill with maximum efficiency.
AOS is the simplest of the big four games and I do not see new players struggle with generic BTs. Most just use those little cards that come in the GHB and may take a minute to read through them at most. I'm not saying its super easy, but its not any more complicated than learning their warscrolls/spells/allegiance abilities etc.
I play every week and I am never bored with BTs. They require planning. For example deploying so you are outside of 30" from enemy wizards for magical dominance, or positioning so you are able to get Surround and Destroy next turn.
-
Just now, Sception said:
If faction tactics go away then battle tactics lose their value as a balancing lever, which is the only thing I currently like about them. 😛
What do you want as the alternative?
Without secondary objectives, games often end up just being decided by the most lethal of the two armies. They promote building diverse lists rather than just bringing the most elite units. There is a reason secondaries are a major feature in 40k and AOS nowadays.
I think 3.0 was the best edition ever but faction battle tactics were likely the weakest part. They never quite got them balanced. My Tzeentch army can easily complete 3 faction tactics every game while my Sylvaneth army will probably never get a single one.
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
Personally I find that the first two turns of the game take 3 hours and the last 3 take 1.5 hours combined, so I am not so sure going to 4 turns will save that much time.
By turn 5 I usually have, like, three units left on the table
Are you saying that your games, on average, last 4.5 hours?
-
2 hours ago, Sception said:
Battlepacks/plans article is up.
heavy weight to battle tactics, which I as a battle tactics hater don't like.
Core rule battleplans are 4 rounds, which sounded like a good/exciting move to me, making games shorter & thus more likely to complete, but actual tournament/generals hadnbook plans are still rounds so bleh.
If the faction BTs are going away as rumoured then I am totally fine with it.
If every faction has access to the same BTs then this is a great change. The issue with BTs has always been that some armies require you to jump through crazy hoops (see Sylvaneth, Nighthaunt) while others just require you to just stand around (See Tzeentch and Slaves to Darkness)
I play/assist with tournaments every month and most games get completed. I don't think incomplete games is a wider problem, but more specific to certain players/playstyles.
-
2 minutes ago, RetconnedLegion said:
The same “rumour” also claimed Legions Imperialis was underperforming. You know, the game system that has sold out every release.
In short, I wouldn’t write Underworlds eulogy just yet.
I think the same rumour said that Bretonnians were underperforming but I also find that hard to believe considering half the kits sold out in minutes lol. So yea I am definitely taking all this with a grain of salt.
Regardless of Underworlds future, I 100% believe it will be separated from AOS though. They are clearly disinterested in making functional rules for them in AOS.
-
1 hour ago, MitGas said:
Would be interesting to know numbers for AoS in regards to 40k's trajectory back when it became big. It's really difficult to say how much of a success AoS is but I get the feeling that it is very steadily growing and thankfully GW puts enough work/assets into it. I often read something akin to "I collect 40k but am interested into getting into AoS" on Reddit and other platforms. They often got no other players though but I figure it's gotta start somewhere, at least it shows that people are definitely intrigued by it!
If I remember correctly THWG mentioned on his youtube that per his stats AOS saw a whopping 70% uptick in new players attending events during the course of 3rd edition. With that majority of those coming around the middle of the editions cycle.
My personal local AOS scene absolutely exploded. We went from 8-12 regular guys to having 25 signups for a recent league.
-
4
-
1
-
-
6 hours ago, novakai said:
Did we every get that rumor about Warhammer underworld was being retire because of low sells?
and that Warcry was also not performing as well so they are rebranding it next year with a mordheim esque setting with skaven vs city of sigmar?
Per THWG the entire company is striving to better separate their game systems so profitability of each system is more clear. This seems silly at the surface but its actually a fairly common business practice for companies with distinct departments.
It seems to be true because the wildly popular plastic leviathan dreadnought was removed from 40k and is now an HH only model. The BOC of transfer to TOW, and the widespread purge of the STD Warcry units only further supports that.
The speculative/rumour part is that some believe a large percentage of Underworld/Warcry sales are from AOS players, and overall Underworlds is not performing well. So there are rumours that underworld will be killed off and those resources diverted to other systems.
Personally i'm indifferent to underworlds bc the kits get lazy AOS rules anyway and many are out of production. But Warcry actually significantly contributes to AOS so I would hate to see it go.
-
3 minutes ago, Jeremierty said:
I totally agree with you about legends and the unspoken agreement that miniatures less than 10 years old should be considered as safe.
I'm not trying to defend GW as I don't really agree with what's been done. My reasoning was :
having a mini you painted with heart being deleted out of the game is horrible
having a miniature you painted with heart being updated with a newer sculpt is slightly less horrible
So I was just hoping it would cheer up a bit some players
Some of the purged Warcry models were released as late as May 2022. Its absolute insanity.
I wish they had included an "alternative uses" list like they did with the Cities purged units just so I have SOME kind of use for my 30 Horns of Hashut other than sitting on a shelf or going to ebay.
-
1
-
1
-
-
4 hours ago, Lucentia said:
Overall that sounds like quite a clever adjustment to list building, removing the ubiquitous of the one-drop battalions and theoretically making mid-tier hero choices more enticing if they come with interesting units attached.
I'm not sure how I feel about losing battleline restrictions entirely, feels like it could lead to new player traps where you load up on shiny elite units with no incentive to grab the basic screens and speedbumps that you really need. Buuut then again most factions in the current system have tonnes of workarounds to avoid boring battleline choices anyway, so I suppose it's not that different really!
This is how I feel. As soon you introduce the concept of elites unlocked as battleline, then it loses all value as a concept.
Of course this all depends on them properly balancing who comes with what leader. If you put cheap heroes in regiments with the best units then its not really any different that unlocking them with a subfaction.
Ideally the best units will be tied to expensive heroes and the basic units will be tied to cheap heroes.
-
1 minute ago, Gaz Taylor said:
I think it will be a zoom in on the rules to build up what has changed and we will see an example warscroll after this (similar to what they did with 40K). I'm refreshing the community site a lot at moment as I can't wait!
Off topic - I agree with that but it also depends on how it is supported. For example, I've rediscovered Warmaster and off to a tournament in May (borrowing a mates army). It has quite a good community and is well supported with regular reviews and events. So if it has a good community supporting it, then it's going to be okay. But also to add, even if the company still supports the game, if nobody is playing it, it doesn't survive! This is why GW games are so popular due to lots of people playing them.
Yea I'm sure there are pockets that can and will exist indefinitely. But those are relatively sparce and its really luck of the draw on if you are in driveable distance. I'm in the US so if a pocket doesn't exist in my state then i'm driving 7+ hours for an event which is challenging lol.
To me, the joy of a wargame comes from weekly local pickup games and monthly RTTs with fresh opponents. Without that constant community pool I personally struggle to enjoy it.
-
1
-
-
5 hours ago, EonChao said:
There are CCGs that were discontinued decades ago that still get fan made expansions released online, and even within the Warhammer Studio itself, old games are kept alive by the people working there on their own time (Inquisitor 28 is great example of this). As long as you have something that vaguely resembles the rules, something to use as models/terrain/cards, then there's nothing stopping you from continuing to enjoy the games you love long after they're no longer available.
Other than finding new opponents. 😬
/begin personal whiney story
I truly believed as you do, and tried to go this route when 8th ed fantasy died by continuing to play 8th and ultimately switching to T9A but it personally led to a lot of heartbreak.
The events stopped happening and the player pool dried up. It went from 100 guys showing up to a Brawler Bash GT, to 30, then to cancelled events. Its really frustrating, at least for me, to buy/build/paint an army just to struggle to even get local games. I think I got to the point where I was playing 1 game a month of T9A, usually vs the same person. Recruitment was virtually impossible.
So I know an unsupported game technically can be played in perpetuity, but for all practical purposes unsupported wargames are effectively dead within a year.
I ended up with a happy ending bc literally the month I picked up AOS the community sprung up around me, and I eventually learned 40k and enjoy it now as well. So I consider the years of me "clinging" to the dead edition a relative waste and the worst of my hobby career.
/end personal whiney story
-
4
-
-
7 minutes ago, KarrWolves said:
Didn't they actually change it afterwards because it created too many issues?
Yep I'm pretty sure they did. But to be crystal clear 40k 10th edition was received extremely poorly in my region. Tournaments and pickup games dropped off drastically. It was previously the dominant game system by a large margin 😬
So while i'm personally very optimistic about 4th, many in my group are quite concerned about how it will impact the playerbase.
-
25 minutes ago, michu said:
Never liked those markers too. I prefer objectives that are actual objects.
So the issue that 40k ran into at the launch of 10th was they made objectives occupy space. But this created issues with larger models where they couldn't reach their intended targets in combat, or in some cases couldn't actually navigate past the objectives.
I would actually love to have physical items to fight over rather than the mats that everyone (including myself) uses nowadays, but there are some practical issues to that.
-
10 minutes ago, Cdance93 said:
Agreed! This is one the suspicions is that your faction's endless are included in the lore. I would hope they're not their own lore but hell, who knows?
I was thinking they will just keep the current rules of only 1 endless spell per wizard, and each wizard can only cast one endless spell per turn.
So if endless spells become free, they therefore become locked behind how many wizards you bring.
-
26 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:
This is an argument for the existence of a secondary scoring system, not for the battle tactic system.
Faction battle tactics are just a balance problem.
Battle tactics themselves being an overly complex system that are battleplan agnostic and make your games feel similar by being busywork at high skill levels, and bring games to a halt at low skill levels are problems at the conceptual level.I mean yea any kind of secondary scoring system is fine. Whether you wanna call secondary objectives, battle tactics whatever. You just never want the game to become too focused on killing because there are armies who are clearly better at killing or not being killed.
Faction battle tactics are a balance problem because you will never properly balance ~200 battle tactics. Their mere existence is the problem lol.
I think you are being too hard on sigmar. If the primary scoring mechanism for the game was "busy work" or causing "halts" then it wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is.
Sigmar 3rd edition is extremely popular in my region. It has even eclipsed 40k here. It was/is a really strong edition.
The Rumour Thread
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted
You make a great case, but I am just not seeing the players materialize for combat patrol, and 40k has a larger player pool than AOS. Maybe thats just anecdotal and there are stores in other states with large players bases but so far it seems like a flop. So i'm hesitant about Spearhead really becoming a thing.
Arent Spearhead lists like completely locked? So like wouldn't you be playing the same exact list for every single game? That would drive me crazy. I'm always tinkering with my lists.