Nin Win

Podcast cancelled. I'd rather spend the editing time painting miniatures.

From what I've seen it would work with some of the cards. You'd have to pull some of the deployment cards that wouldn't work if you wanted a safe area out of which you risk your fighters by moving them forward. I'll live with my guys dying on turn 1, I just need to remind myself about it during deployment and make sure my key models are protected a bit by the grunts blocking lines of approach. It's their job to die for their betters, after all.

No, that would be a dishonest review. The bias is that the reasons he state for not liking the game are even more true of games he does like. I'm saying he's acting honestly but inconsistently. He literally tried to rate the game a 1 on set up because you have to build and paint miniatures before you can play. Think about that. I could see that rating from someone who was just into board games and prepainted miniature games like X-Wing, but the channel is about miniature games and the guy plays and paints all sorts of games with a larger table and more miniatures than Warcry. The review was honest and informative, but it was inconsistent even with their own reviewing system where a 1 is literally reserved for things that do not work at all.

My own negative review would be as follows: How fast things are into the action -- some people love stuff happening right away, I find I like a turn to maneuver in and generally like choosing to risk a given piece. In Warcry with the small board and the pretty rapid rate at which even slow models can move, combat is a given on turn 1. I'm sure I'll get used to this, but my preference is for games with a set up and risk turn. Alternating Activation and unequal model counts -- one of the strengths of alternating activations is that you don't have to wait a long time between turns. If you end up playing 12 models vs 8, you can have a period where 4 models are moved at once while the other player waits. I get that there are no good solutions to this, but I still don't like it. Battletech has this thing where it forces people to move multiple but that has damage applied in a separate phase and simultaneously. If you did something like that in Warcry you'd be giving the person with more models a huge advantage. Going last really is worse in Warcry given that damage happens in the single phase and not later, so I guess being able to move a block of guys at the end of the turn won't be that big of an advantage, so I don't think it'll be game breaking, but it might make for some unpleasant surprises with the right combination of models and abilities. You can move-counter move for everything else, but suddenly a block of guys coordinates with no reaction possible. Campaign not to everyone's expectations -- there's no winning here as people have selective memories when it comes to 90s GW campaign rules. They remember the times when blood bowl leagues finished out their seasons or when necromunda leagues played out alright and then don't really remember the fizzles and massive power imbalances late in the leagues. So I like that GW made the campaigns so that those issues won't crop up, but I think there's probably a way to make things a bit more like the older campaigns. Perhaps a later supplement with more narrative focused campaigns with set rounds will come up. I'm not really interested in doing 90s style campaigns again, but people seem to really like the idea of them and get excited for them. Massive damage swings - it's actually pretty easy to really put out the damage when you roll 4 or 5 dice needing 3+ to hit. Especially with models where the crit damage is more than double the normal. There will be times when a very rugged fighter just gets removed by a lucky roll. It'll be fine as it'll happen to both sides and the games are short, but there will definitely be moments when your guys die out of nowhere. Having guys be unkillable in a timely fashion would also be bad, but this game will definitely surprise people and sometimes that surprise is going to be really negative. Things arrive from every direction - some deployments and scenarios will have the enemy just show up behind your initial deployment. If people don't think ahead about this they'll be caught out and have a negative experience. It can also make the game seem pretty all over the place. Definitely something to watch out for. Warbands sort of incomplete - I plan on magnetizing any guys that can be built more than one way, but it also feels like you'll want some duplicates. But not all duplicates. So getting a second warband is going to produce some dead models like duplicate leaders. I have a Stormcast and Legions of Nagash army so I plan on leaning heavily on that rather than buying multiples of the new warbands. I might also convert my 2nd of given fighters for the chaos warbands I do end up playing Stormcast - Easy to build Castigators and Sequitors would have been great. They even come with a gryph hound. Concentrating on the vanguard chamber to start definitely minimizes how easily new players can jump in compared to if they had used the easy to build intro models as a basis. I have loads of positives to say about the game, but I figured I'd post a negative take given how I bashed Owen at GMG for having a bias.

I found the review incredibly biased. Ash literally had to remind Owen more than once that a 1 out of 5 means the game does not work at all in that area. And he still tried to give it a 1. And when time came to talk about the work you had to put in to get everything to a playable state, again he went for a 1. As if building and painting miniatures means it doesn't work. By their own review rules, he was not being an fair reviewer. In the actual rules review section he cited negatives that were literally true of every wargame. You move your models and act with them in every miniature game. In most wargames you don't even get to choose whether you move or fight first. And the point about there not being player interactivity is kind of laughable in a game with individual models with alternating activation. Your wait time until you get to do something is going to be at most a couple of model movements and a couple of attacks (and it will only be that long if someone uses an ability that gives more actions). I get that rolling a save makes people feel like they are doing things, but to pan it as not interactive was a bit much. Especially when he plays Warmachine/Hordes, a game where you largely do nothing at all for the entire opponents turn except tell your opponent the defense and armour of things they attack and then record damage (with the exception of some rare abilities like counter charge or a similar shooting ability). If the criteria used to evaluate Warcry was applied to games Owen actually likes, he'd have to score them incredibly low as well. When the reasons you state for not liking a game are also even more applicable to the games you do like, something is off.

I'm hoping the ways the warbands see the chaos powers as being different from the 4 named gods is given reality in the fiction. That prayers to the Devourer of Existence work. It doesn't really matter whether a specific chaos god is wearing that mask or if they are just really powerful undivided greater daemons. I'd like to see a bit of a move away from the very orderly breakdown of chaos that currently exists. A proliferation of minor powers and worshipped daemons rather than just the rigid lines between the four powers and their great game.

The numbers advantage isn't that extreme in this game. We haven't seen the grot shootas and stabbas yet, but the points costs of the plainsrunners is just too high to get the weight of numbers you need for these type of tactics to work You're going to get a turn of tying people down, lose a ton of models and then play turns 2 and 3 at a huge disadvantage. 12 guys vs 8 is not the 15+ vs 2-4 of the Kill Team situation. The 6 dudes vs 4 dudes you talk about will very quickly end up being you losing 2 of the guys tying up the 4 and then having to play the rest of the game with even numbers but with way worse guys. The other thing that cuts down the proportionate advantage is how you split things up into the dagger, shield and hammer. You'll need to think very carefully about how to weight your chaff across the 3 different groups and it will be so easy to hit a combination of deployment, scenario and objectives where you just don't get the weight of numbers available when and where you want them. I'm sure as people get more experienced they'll figure this out, but a lot of the time you might end up with even numbers fighting in one part of the board for a while but with the higher model count force to arrive. The other major issue with spamming the basic fighters is you lose access to loads of faction abilities. Without them you end up with a very low damage output per point. When your opponent can spend some 5s and do 5 additional damage over and above the damage per activation shown on the cards and you can't, it's going to push the more elite fighters ahead of the swarm. Given that this is a GW game and they always seem to produce games where a small group of lists end up being "the best" I'm sure that there will be a place in the more competitive side of the game for a high model count list, but I don't think it's anywhere nearly as strong as in KT. No doubt the points on various models will be slightly off and people will find the most efficient ones and that will be how things go for the competitive players, but I highly doubt it's going to be about bumping up your model count as high as possible. There will no doubt be a high powered list that is about having a high a model count as possible without going too far as to weaken the list. I don't know what faction it will be. Probably not the Untamed Beasts. Likely Legions of Nagash, Gitz or Nighthaunt, but it's too early to say. If I had to place a bet, I'd bet on lots of shoota grots. They'll have the numbers and their ranged attack will mean they'll be able to concentrate fire enough to ping down harder targets whereas the melee guys can only fit so many around a target and will have to leave objectives to get there. But all it takes for my prediction to be wrong will be the shootas costing a bit more on the points side than we would otherwise think.

My theory is that people have so much nostalgia for the 90s style campaign systems because they are only really remembering the times it went well. They're probably not remembering the massive number of fizzled campaigns and dropped players. Aborted Bloodbowl leagues abound and broken late campaign lists that made games a foregon conclusion were always a staple of Necromunda. Whether it's the campaign in GHB19 that's only a few games long or the six games in the AoS:Skirmish supplement campaign or now this Warcry one, one major difference between GW's 90s campaign systems and now is that the more recent ones can actually be reliably played to completion and are fun throughout for everyone.

I think the GMG reviewer was just wrong. That action economy won't be the thing that really wins out. The main reason is that the chaff truly have low wounds and bad damage out put and if you take a look at the average damage they can take and inflict per point, they're not efficient. Given GW's game designs over the last couple years, if I had to guess the real powerful thing will be synergy packages. Where you make an already great thing or two amazing with the right support. Sure you'll have a small group of basic grunts to hold objectives and do other things like that, but I think people are going to be very disappointed if they try to win by maximizing actions by taking the worst fighters. You will want to keep the tactic of tying up great things with terrible grunts in mind, but it's not going to be some universal path to victory because of how fancy the words "action economy" sound when a reviewer says them. Also, what happened when they actually tried to come up with some game breaking spam list? It had only 12 models and they could not make the few good fighters they wanted fit with all the chaff. The points just kept going over. The guy had this idea he thought would break the game and they just couldn't even come up with a list that actually did the basics of the idea. 12 models is not some great numbers advantage like you get in kill team when it's an ork swarm vs 2 custodes or whatever. The GMG review is based off of only three games played. I also don't think they ever used any of the abilities to let a model attack multiple targets, so they made all these statements about the action economy without any first hand experience of just how vulnerable the grunt fighters really can be. Citing the review as some sort of authority is probably a bad idea.

I've played hundreds and hundreds of bloodbowl games over the years (2 games a week for a decade) and I think I've experienced everything a campaign system where your guys earn experience points to learn new skills, get new stats, get injured and diminished, miss matches or even be killed has to offer. I am so happy they are not going with something like that for Warcry. I really like the faction specific campaign tracks. And how it's all simpler and less involved. And has a defined end point.

I'm in a pretty much only open and narrative gaming group and Meeting Engagement has gotten us to actually play Matched Play stuff. Even planning on all attending a local tournament in a few months that is going to be Meeting Engagement. Still expecting to lose and play each other in the bottom tables, but we're going to actually show up. 2k pitched battle? Never. I don't like building or playing against perfectly crafted synergy engines. The max unit size being reduced, 2 of each unit max meaning you can't just spam the single most points efficient unit and the breaking up of deployment into three groups makes for a very, very different experience.

Artist inks and paints tend to be more consistent than hobby stuff. I think he goes into the inks being often a single pigment source product in the video. So the burnt umber ink literally has burnt umber particles finely ground in some acrylic binder. So as long as you write down your recipes, you'll be good. I also found that Reaper and Green Stuff World both sell excellent dropper bottles for a reasonable price, but I imagine there are even cheaper options. It's also worth noting that one of the examples in that image above is made not with fancy inks, but with craft paint. And not some nice name brand, but the cheap store brand stuff. So anyone who wants to make a contrast version of an existing paint can probably just mix it 50-50 with some matte medium, add a drop or two of flow aid and get painting. I've also noticed that dishwasher rinse agent (the clear or barely blue stuff that people put in their dish washers so there's no spots if they have hard water) can be substituted for flow aid. Bear in mind though that being transparent, colours are going to be shifted. A red might make an orange or a pink when cut with matte medium. A blood red might make a good medium red. But if you're like "I need to paint all the straps on these shields and belts" and you just grab some brown and mix in some matte medium and flow aid, you'll be fine. One of the biggest strengths of GW is colour matching, but contrast paints lose this. If you put contrast paint blue on something and then mess it up later when painting a nearby area a different colour, to fix it you won't just be able to use some kantor blue or whatever and fix it. So if people take the time to actually see the colours they are using and be less reliant on GW's names, that will only be a good thing. Hopefully doing transparent paint over white primer will help some people start to actually understand the colours they are using. The first time people paint ultramarines using contrast with yellow shoulder pad trims and get green where it meets the blue, hopefully it will spark something.

Goobertown on youtube made some very convincing home made contrast paints. His basic recipe is an equal amount of acrylic ink and matte medium and a bit of flow aid. I imagine if you used fluid matte medium it would be even closer. Or a mixture of matte medium and matte varnish. Which are contrast? Which are his DIY mixture? He shows in like the next few frames.

I don't mean wrong in the technical sense of not following the procedures correctly, but in the sense of using a screwdriver held backwards to drive a nail in with the handle. And then being unhappy with how poorly the nail was driven in. If the goal going into a game was to make the game as one sided as possible, then they got what they wanted and should be happy with how it worked. It let them produce the exact experience they were looking for What I'm doing with some local tournament minded people is running a "shelf sitter" event. Bring only the models you have but you never take them because they're not good enough. We'll do a 15 FP open war generator and play three games. It's going to be a day of Shadespire/Nightvault warbands, Kharadron, Knight Questors, Wanderers and the like.

Yes, it was a rhetorical flourish. In the context of years of people bashing open play. I apologise to Dead Scribe and anyone else if it looks like I was misrepresenting what he was saying. Not my intent. As for the players doing it wrong, yes, they kinda were. They ended up with a negative experience as a direct result of intentionally seeking out imbalance. It might be the unintended consequence of taking one approach and forcing it onto another without realizing it, but I'd expect people like Dead Scribe described to know their army list construction and know that it would have been unbalanced. Now if anyone in the local store talks about using it they can point to their negative experience with it and poo poo it. So they got that out of it, so maybe it was a success after all.

I see you haven't actually read any of GW's financial reports. They actually do indeed state the things I am referring to. And that new releases represent a third of GW's sales. And a whole bunch of other things. Tournament players, by definition, attend a tournament. If you never play in a tournament, you can't really claim to be a tournament player. We're talking about a quarter of a billion pounds and the largest events being attended in the hundreds and the vast majority being 12-80ish attendees. There's just no way they're anything but a minority. GW is really smart to keep concentrating on Three Ways to Play and not making AoS matched play as the primary focus. This GHB is a perfect example of a product that shows their beliefs about the community and it's interests. Loads of stuff for everyone with lots of different things.

Yep. I can see that. But surely you agree that they used the tool incorrectly? The second they tried to game the system to get the most powerful thing possible for the roll was when things went off the rails. If you know the unit strengths well enough to know you are getting an advantage over your opponent based on your selections... just don't. Choose another unit instead. They intentionally unbalanced the game and then were unhappy the balance wasn't there. Must be something wrong with Open Play, amiright? 🤪 EDIT: Not that you are saying or implying that. Though we have heard for years about people's beefs with Open Play and how the game was at the launch.

Why would you intentionally break something and then be unhappy that it doesn't work? This makes no sense. I guess some people are the architects of their own misery.

I play every mode of play now (used to only do Open and Narrative but Meeting Engagements got me into Matched Play as well). Here are my thoughts on each section/general topic: So there's my long overview. One thing I'll say is that I hope no one tries to use everything at once. Imagine having the realm rules from the core book, the realm spells from Malign Sorcery, then use Streets of Death, Arcane Objectives, Raid & Ambush and Hidden Agendas. You could have a million things you need to remember. I really like that the GHBs are shifting to be about playing the game rather than being stand in army books for the more neglected factions. I think splitting out the matched play points is a pretty clear demonstration that this is about game supplements/expansions rather than army updates.

We used it yesterday and it worked. We had a bunch of stuff and did a 15 FP game I we ended up using about 40% of my "full sized" armies. My friend was hosting the game so he had his entire collection available to pick from. It didn't break things for him to have more options than me, but he wasn't trying to game the system and pick the best stuff to counter what he knows I have. He was picking what he wanted to field because he thought it was cool. One thing to remember is that pitched battle minimums and maximums do not apply. So if something says 5 models with X wounds and you have a unit that is 10 models with X wounds in matched play, you can put down 5 of them. Minimums and maximums and whatnot simply don't apply. The point of the system is also not balance but to pull from a collection and put it on the table. It's okay if one person's army would be worth more points if they were in matched play. Sometimes a game can be about unequal sides (it happens in matched play all the time just from army building skill or from GW never getting the points quite right).

Take any battle plan and add them. Ever want to play the missions from your battletome? Perhaps combine them with your favourite matched play scenario? Want to do Meeting Engagements in a city? Just add them on.

My absolute favorite part of this GHB is that it's very much an evergreen book. The yearly points updates are seperate and the format of play contained inside are all pretty much useful for any time and place in terms of the rules. The army generator and streets of death and meeting engagements and Alixia is all cool stuff that will be useful to play even after GHB20 comes out. The conquest unbound and yearly matched play specific stuff is getting smaller and smaller as more armies get their battletomes.

Take GW's sales numbers from their annual and half year reports, their breakdown by sales channel and come up with average sales per store (both their stores and independent stores) and count the number of tournament players and figure out just how tiny of a minority actual event attendees are. We know how many players the big events get and even a ton of the smaller ones thanks to the spread of event software and social media use. Even if every tournament player made a new army for both AoS and 40k every quarter, it would still be a drop in the bucket of their £254 million in sales for the last year. That's a quarter of a billion pounds. There is just no way tournament players are anything but a minority. They're simply the most vocal online and the most likely to show up to organized events and gaming nights at stores and clubs. The majority of GW's customers play in their own houses at at friends' places. This is why GW keeps talking about games that fit on kitchen tables and why this new GHB concentrates so much on smaller table sizes outside of the pitched battle section. Even the Meeting Engagement section is designed for kitchen table sizes. We also know from their financial reports that every single product down to the individual SKU is reviewed by the board of directors in terms of return on capital, margins and sales volumes. Only a small percentage of the total available units and a minority of new releases make it into tournament lists. The majority are simply not good enough. If the tournament players made up any significant portion of the customer base their board of directors would have noticed and stopped making the majority of their products unsuitable for the largest portion of their customer base. I think the better explanation is that competitive matched play people simply think they are the majority when they are not.

I agree. So you talk to your opponent and find out what people are into and find people who like the same sort of fun you do. And find events that support that same sort of fun. Be it a tournament or a narrative event or whatever. People just enjoy different things so if you have a mismatch with your opponent, it's going to create a problem. If someone selects their army based purely on what they want to paint and you have a tuned and tested tournament list and you crush them, what does it accomplish for anyone? One of the problems with a single way to play being solidified as the norm is that it excludes portions of the game that are not that thing. If a local club is only ever about playing narrative recreations of battles in novels, it necessarily excludes armies and units that are not in the novels. If a local group is all about tournaments and tournament practice, it excludes the majority of the units out there that are simply not good enough for a tournament list. It's okay that different people want different things from the game and understandable when they advocate a bit too vociferously for them. I know if my area went super competitive my entire collection would become shelf sitters or I'd need to get really used to losing every game. Similarly I bet if other people's regular opponents suddenly became super interested in open and narrative play, a tournament army could get relegated to the shelf as well. I think the ability to find a consensus with each opponent is a skill worth developing. Play competitive in tournaments and practice games, don't when the opponent wants a different experience. Actually talk to people to find out what's what.

100% Same for my opponent and all the terrain. There's so much good game content for small games that there's always something we can do if one of us doesn't have a large amount done. Skirmish, the Path to Glory scenarios are both excellent (even if I'm not the biggest fan of the PtG army building method as it requires way more finished models if the charts are to mean anything at all). Our club also does build-paint-play campaigns where we do skirmish at 300, PtG scenarios at 600 and Open War cards at 1000 over a 16 week period twice a year. Then we also do a 40k one (the skirmish supplement is pretty much compatible with both games but the next one will probably open up with a month of Kill Team). You don't have to paint new stuff to get in on it, but most people do.