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The thing with CoC is that 1) they are super loving cool and 2) there is a lot of potential for a very small number of releases to totally shake up the faction based on how they work, so we really should be getting more. There's also a lot of design space and I think it does scale quite well, since new jacks are limited by the casters' stats. It's not like some ultra ranged jack can show up and shore up Axis's shooting game. Anyways I'd love some more Convergence stuff. I am not very positive about it though, with the departure of DC. In general I think that was not a good thing for the company since he was by far their most competent designer (and way better than Soles).
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Jul 12, 2016 04:22
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I've said before and I'll say again Skorne's design philosophy is, uniquely among the factions, based more on what they're not allowed to have than on what they are. They've always leaned heavily on a few power models because all of the new designs are so "safe." Like, there's no reason in the world for Zaal2's DEF or SPD 3 Aradus. It often felt like their models came out the door preemptively nerfed due to PGBH, but now they're nerfed and most beasts got worse in Mk3, not better. Molik's changes were good, probably, but the reason you saw him so much was that he was the only thing the faction had that could compete with Banes, Stormwall etc in terms of effectiveness.
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Jul 15, 2016 22:47
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So what exactly is the True Sight change?
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Jul 18, 2016 23:59
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What exactly was her old feat?
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Jul 20, 2016 16:18
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man I just can't loving get enough different kings come on guys what kings are we still missing forest king swinging a giant toadstool. he has a pointy gnome hat cloud king has wings and flies around tropical king has shades and a lei city king has pieces of buildings on his back and a manhole cover shield other types of king: bog, desert, magical, cool ranch
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Dec 4, 2016 18:05
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how about a storm king with two dozer guns, two blitzer guns, and he launches storm
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Dec 4, 2016 18:07
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lucant getting the spell that actually makes one lick of god drat sense with his faction is all i wanted, and i got it
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Dec 22, 2016 05:55
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<THREAD> I'm hearing this meme that says how PP hates Cygnar, wants to burn Haley players alive etc. Guys. It's time for some wargame theory.
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Dec 27, 2016 14:51
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it's worded that way because incorp falls off if you attack so it has to keep reapplying it to function like you want it to, I think also you can upkeep it on unit a, then recast it on unit b during your activation and have two incorporeal units
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Jan 18, 2017 04:15
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gilljoy posted:Selling a largish convergence lot https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3827104&perpage=40 If you decide to part this out DM me.
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Jul 18, 2017 16:37
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I've been away from the fluff for so long, what's the casualty list? I know Goreshade is -1 there. What ended up happening with the skorne invasion of Ios?
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Jul 27, 2017 17:05
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rantmo posted:Other than Goreshade's resurrection I think the only two character casualties are Severius and Captain Lynch of the Black 13th. What happened to Lynch?
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Jul 27, 2017 17:12
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effort post incoming I've been playing since Escalation back in Mk1. My interest has come in cycles, but in 2014 I moved to an area with no wargaming meta at all and I never really recovered from that; I tried to play a bit in 2015, but in 2016/18 I was mostly Malifaux and in 2017 I was living on an island where nobody had even heard of tabletop wargames. So obviously I've missed some stuff. Like, most of Mk3. And also apparently the death of the local scene in the Boston area. I play Convergence and Skorne, since I sold my Protectorate stuff at a grotesque discount, but I'm sort of interested in getting back into it. I've heard some pretty dire things about the health of the game. Theme forces are mandatory, apparently. Faction balance all over the place, tons of models never get used. Pagani's gone, DC's been gone for a while, Lyle, Shick... Jason Soles is somehow still there despite a history of, well, everything he's done to the game. But I don't want to psych myself out too hard. I do want to come back, some of my best gaming memories are WM/H. I miss the game. I tried playing the card game, didn't like it; I kickstarted the video game and regretted it. There's no substitute for the real deal. Don't sugarcoat it: is Warmachine on life support? Is it getting better or worse? Do we get the impression that they know what's wrong and how to fix it, and what's working and how to keep it going? I have pretty limited time to play games these days, especially ones with travel time. Is this something I should be investing my time in? And does anyone still play in Boston?
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Jan 5, 2019 01:40
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One thing that I was talking about earlier today with a friend of mine who used to play (this conversation is why I made the post above) is basically: there's always been a tension at the heart of WM/H that has strained gameplay and caused challenges. On the one hand, everything about the game's fantasy and lore (and obviously the intention of the designers) is to go "tall," playing very heavy with warjacks/beasts with infantry support. But everything about the game's rules has encouraged you to go wide with infantry, from powerful buff spells working better on units to the whole "additional die of damage on charge attacks" mechanic favoring units with 10 mediocre attacks instead of warjacks with 2 powerful ones. Has that ever been meaningfully addressed? We've tossed around suggestions in our old group like "infantry get +2 or S+P on the charge." I know they added a ton of WJ/WB points in Mk3 relative to Mk2, but while people will take them if they're free, that seems like a bandaid solution. On the plus side, it's good to hear Rasheth is good now, because I played a shitload of him in Mk2 when he was kind of the butt of a lot of jokes (and, frankly, Skorne was in pretty rough shape last I checked, though I hear that's different now too). And yeah, it really seems old gee dubs is firing on all cylinders now. That's actually kind of heartening. If they can pull out of the 2013-2015 death dive they were in, anyone can.
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Jan 5, 2019 03:29
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I always liked skew lists. The best time I had in Mk2 was pSevvy, double Judicator, choir, vassals. Also I think I had another jack in there, an arc mode maybe?
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Jan 6, 2019 00:02
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I do think that WH40k’s resurgence is a major factor, and it’s one I hadn’t considered. When it’s good, it really is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, taking up all the space and choking off other games. Wargames live and die by having a critical mass of players and once they start to dip, they can spiral fast.
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Jan 7, 2019 07:13
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Ashcans posted:So the arrival of Ashlynn2 made me pay attention to Warmachine again and, uh, poo poo got really real there. Where are you finding these fluff recaps? I'm mildly curious.
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Mar 15, 2020 19:15
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Any indication as to where they are going with everything? Trying to read up on fluff recaps it seems like they've killed a number of characters, including some pretty big names in the game/lore and they're basically throwing everything in to the mix. I thought the Infernals were basically just a new faction but it seems like they're just straight-up having everyone abandon Immoren wholesale for a gate to... somewhere? It seems like they'd be headed for a fairly substantial game reboot, especially if all the dead are staying dead.
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!Klams posted:For me, the CID was a huge part of what killed it, which on paper sounded like a really good idea. The CID was a good idea, but releasing mk3 in such a state that an entire faction was unplayable and had to be redone from scratch was not. Ideally we would have gotten Mk2-quality releases which would have been fine tuned by CID; instead we got broken, hacky messes which were, perhaps, barely functional after CID.
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May 4, 2021 13:16
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the idea of rolling errata to bring outliers into line was something tournament players had floated for a long, long time (at least since mid-Mk2). mk2 balance was wacky, with asphyxious2 dominating the competitive scene even after multiple nerfs until relatively late in the edition. something had to be done. CID was executed poorly, but the idea of ongoing power level errata to tweak armies into line wasn't inherently a bad one. if we're all playing monday morning quarterback i'd pin the start of the decline on DC leaving. convergence was his baby, and after he got them out the door he felt he was done, i guess... but jason soles wasn't half the designer DC was, and it showed.
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May 4, 2021 20:23
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PP was deliberately aiming for the "hardcore tournament viable game" slot, in that they wanted a game that people could play competitively for high stakes. this was in contrast to warhammer, which while fun, was always plagued with balance issues. the problem was PP's utter unwillingness to do the work to create that kind of game, most notably by aggressively policing power level. cryx was head and shoulders above the next-best faction, and gaspy2 was so much better than the second best thing you could be doing in cryx, that the meta centralized hard around either playing him and Tartarus or beating him and Tartarus. CID was clearly a reaction to people begging for nerfs to outlying performers, but doing it faction-by-faction just ended up creating another power level merry-go-round.
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May 5, 2021 15:14
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Soles decided that because DC could create his own faction (convergence, who had been a part of the lore since the iron kingdoms was just a d20 setting, and who perfectly fit the steampunk/clockwork aesthetic of the world) that meant he could do it too (grymkin, which clash horribly with every other aspect of the setting because they’re literally just Malifaux Neverborn).
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Jun 8, 2021 19:41
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warcaster grymkin when
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Jul 25, 2021 01:43
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I always thought that the problem with cryx was less aesthetic and more the fact that one of the lead designers was an open, blatant faction partisan and consistently pushed them to be the most broken faction. yet another sin to lay at the door of jason soles
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Aug 1, 2021 03:39
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S.J. posted:You mean Ed B? He was the lead designer in Mk2 and just blatantly loved Cryx more than anyone else I thought Soles was the one pushing Asphyxious through the roof? It’s been years.
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Aug 1, 2021 04:09
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Part of the problem is that Warhammer started getting playable again around the time Mk3 came out, and when GW games are good they suck all the oxygen out of the room, but the biggest issue is that PP basically made every bad decision possible in a row. They've had serious brain drain problems for a while, starting with the loss of DC (not necessarily a mistake on their part, as people leave jobs all the time, but clearly they're either not paying enough for top talent or their workplace environment is too toxic to retain good people, and from what I've heard it's a mix of both). The Mk3 rollout was very poorly handled, with the launch of all new, low-quality plastic battleboxes that didn't really appeal to existing players. Mk3 as a whole was launched in a very bad state, with Skorne being so bad that they had to rewrite the faction from scratch. Just as it was settling, the introduction of theme forces upended the entire apple cart. Following on from that the CID carousel, far from being the "periodic balance patches" people had been begging for since early Mk2, was just a succession of game-breaking uberbuffs that destroyed any concept of balance. Simultaneously they nuked their Press Ganger program and destroyed their relationships with retailers, so the structural support the game had enjoyed vanished just as the game got bad and needed it. There are more issues: enormous roster bloat (count how many individual unit entry options Cygnar has. I dare you), the extremely weird Grymkin release was a turnoff to some people, balance has always been for poo poo and that's sat uneasily alongside Warmachine's reputation as a "competitive" miniature wargame. They blew up their whole setting with the Infernal invasion, which hurt goodwill among players who genuinely were attached to the lore. It's hard to point to one thing. I was discussing this with TrevyTheGreat (formerly of Way of the Swan) at a 40k tournament the other day. We agreed that the biggest factor was that the CID system and theme forces combined made for a game with basically no build diversity; you played theme forces or you lost, and you played theme forces that included the newest CID models because they were consistently busted, and that was it. It's not that people are turning away from wargames generally; GW just posted their most profitable year ever. Warmahordes specifically died, and it didn't die of natural causes. It was killed through neglect and mismanagement. As a postscript, I've recently picked up Malifaux again. It's incredibly good right now. It's very easy to play online on Vassal, but we're rebuilding a New England Malifaux community. They also had a Mk3 launch that was a little rocky, but that was mostly availability issues, which are steadily picking up. The game is fun, it's balanced, it has deep and competitive gameplay, it's cheap as hell to start, all the rules and cards are free online, it has the best companion app I've ever seen in a wargame. Play Malifaux. DAD LOST MY IPOD fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 13:14
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I mean, sure, it’s definitely not like PP killed the program out of spite, but they did kill it and replace it with nothing. Why it happened is immaterial to the results of it happening, which were, well, bad.
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Sep 1, 2021 04:02
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S.J. posted:The 'why' is a pretty big deal when that's what people were talking about. Like, what? I brought it up initially in the context of "why did warmahordes plummet in popularity" and in that context the demise of the PG program is absolutely a causal factor. sure, the program went away for understandable non-malicious reasons, but it going away did matter.
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Sep 1, 2021 12:56
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It would not be that hard to collapse the roster bloat tbh. Just combine similar units and have the differences be cosmetic. There’s one type of shadowy thrall, one type of iron fang, one type of trencher, etc. Maybe make jacks modular like warhammer dreadnoughts and collapse to a few chassis per faction. Can’t un-blow up your world, though, good luck with that one.
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Jul 14, 2022 21:37
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Man he really hosed ios up huh
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Jul 30, 2022 04:32
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Gencon is short for Geneva Convention apparently cause they’re doing chemical warfare
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Aug 5, 2022 20:34
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PP made a lot of bad decisions in different arenas at the start of Mk3, but I think one thing that can’t really be overstated is the degree to which non-GW wargames’ success or failure is really tied to whether GW is currently loving up or not. GW was loving up badly from 2008 or so to 2018 or so. In 2018 things started to improve and by 2019 they were doing really well. I remember from 2008-2014 I saw people playing, and stores stocking, WM/H, Malifaux, Bolt Action, Flames of War, Infinity, Dust, Dropzone Commander, Dystopian Wars, Guild Ball, Kings of War, and more. Some of those games still exist, some don’t, but I only see a few of them played anymore- in my local it’s Malifaux and GW games and that’s it.
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Aug 8, 2022 12:52
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Pyrolocutus posted:Guild Ball did get murdered by the company that made it though I have it on good authority that Guild Ball was murdered by its players, who were too competitive
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Aug 8, 2022 18:21
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a pale ghost posted:I just spent a lot of money on a Menoth army in the past few month If you don’t mind me asking… why?
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Sep 23, 2022 21:58
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a pale ghost posted:a local store has a big WMH scene. That’s pretty cool. It’s 100% dead in my area.
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Sep 24, 2022 00:34
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The best explanation I’ve read is that this is a half-hearted attempt to juice their company and make it seem like they have an active, viable product, as a step towards being purchased by some larger company (Asmodee? Hasbro?). There’s no actual plan to make Mk 4 a viable, living game over the long term. They never really recovered from DC leaving - the wound just took a few years to bleed out.
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Oct 18, 2022 18:50
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S.J. posted:For anyone in the thread who doesn't know, the manufacturer that was making PP's plastics literally just stopped communicating with them, took the molds, and started using them to sell knock off toys at gas stations and poo poo. lmao that’s insane, is that written up long form somewhere?
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Oct 24, 2022 12:56
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They won’t. Warmachine didn’t reach the dire state it was in by chance, it took years of brain drain and mismanagement. The factors that caused that brain drain and mismanagement are all still there. Nothing meaningful has changed.
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Oct 27, 2022 13:32
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!Klams posted:A thing a lot of people don't seem to realise, is that with like MOBA games, they bring out a patch every month that addresses balance issues as well as fixing bugs. This means that, the meta is constantly shifting. People say, "it's so easy to fix just stop doing X", but the constant patches and shifts in what's OP is a feature, not a bug. Constantly adjusting to the new meta is interesting. Having a dumpster tier army is kinda annoying, but when stuff randomly gets too buffed and becomes OP, having a dumpster tier army can be really exciting instead! There’s a huge difference between balance patches in a video game, where the changes are applied instantly and seamlessly behind the scenes and apply to everyone without further effort, and balance patches in a physical game where the rules have to printed on something and read. Most games have apps with the rules; most apps are bad. Warmachine has books and cards. Warhammer doesn’t even have cards! Malifaux has a very aggressive errata/balance cycle but even there players complain it’s not enough. But there’s a real cost to changing rules in a game like this, especially because the majority of players are not enfranchised enough to be posting on forums about the game. They’re reasonably likely to miss errata cycles. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, but it’s not free. There’s friction involved. Every game has to figure out how much friction it can tolerate and whether the cost of leaving stuff broken is too high. A good and widely used app helps a lot, but there’s no panacea.
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Oct 27, 2022 21:49
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People were desperate for power level errata in mk2 because gaspy2 and haley2 were so far above the power curve that they were actively destructive to the competitive metagame right up until the end of the edition. But rather than use CID to curb outliers, it became… CID
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Oct 28, 2022 01:04
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a pale ghost posted:Are Cryx and Menoth ever gonna be in the new format? Yes* *no
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Sep 3, 2023 21:51
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