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NTRabbit posted:I know the club I played KoW tournaments at was planning on doing multilayered campaigns, where a game of Vanguard would impact the starting/playing conditions of a follow up game of KoW, and there would be Armada involved too, but the pandemic killed everything and I haven't even been back to that club since 2020 I rewrote the rules for Mighty Empires to be less random, and once enough people at my group have painted their armies, we plan on running a campaign of that. It doens't include Vanguard but is KOW and Armada.
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Mar 2, 2024 06:41
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 07:01 |
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I think I genuinely hate the official Mantic model for this guy. The head on the Halfbreed is comically oversized. I get why they want to try and get utility out of the dragon body, but it just doesn't work. This, on the other hand, is very nearly a masterpiece of a sculpt. 
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Mar 2, 2024 11:49
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 800 points of Riftforged Orcs ready for my escalation league. We’re starting with Ambush in the first few rounds, so my list is starting pretty basic: 2 Regiments Riftforged Legionnaires 1 Regiment Reborn Legionnaires 1 Troop Fight Wagons 1 Stormbringer on Helstrike Manticore Not exactly powerful or optimal, but it’s a bunch of solid bricks in the form of my Legionnaires, with the Fight Wagons and Stormbringer aiming to get charges.
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Mar 12, 2024 02:09
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Great looking models. You might find that you are vulnerable to ranged fire as your list is lacking in it, but I guess if the regiments are fairly sturdy, you should be fine to cross the board in one piece.
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Mar 12, 2024 03:20
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I'm working on the Northern Alliance box, as soon as I figure out which quiver goes with which body I'll be able to finish my half elves and speed paint out those babies
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Mar 12, 2024 04:14
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NTRabbit posted:I'm working on the Northern Alliance box, as soon as I figure out which quiver goes with which body I'll be able to finish my half elves and speed paint out those babies I really like the look of Norther Alliance. I've had those models you sent me sitting in a display case for years now and they're always fun to get out as proxies for something, the snow troll I had to fix up especially.
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Mar 12, 2024 05:41
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Atlas Hugged posted:Great looking models. You might find that you are vulnerable to ranged fire as your list is lacking in it, but I guess if the regiments are fairly sturdy, you should be fine to cross the board in one piece. Yeah, the Riftforged are all 14/16, the Reborn are 15/17 and Inspiring, and they’re all Def 5+, so I’m not terribly worried at the start of things. It’s also Ambush, so slightly smaller board and having a Nimble M10 Flyer should help me out a bit. There’s also not much ranged for them, which is a bit of a pity - could do some Lightning Bolt wiz-biz on a Stormcaller, I suppose, but otherwise, my ranged options are Skulks or an Ambarox, neither of which fit in where I am now.
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Mar 12, 2024 15:32
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Amazingly we're going to be hosting our first Ambush tournament in Bangkok this weekend. This will be the first Kings of War event I think ever that we've done and marks a major return of the game to tables in Thailand. It's such a perfect format for fast games of rank and flank and I wish we had had it in second edition.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:51
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50% of KoW Vanguard and Armada at Salute - are they on the way out?
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Apr 16, 2024 16:35
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Wouldn't surprise me tbh, Mantic seem to have a habit of dropping lines they can't be bothered supporting any more. A lot of Vanguard stuff is on 'last chance to buy' on their website.
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Apr 16, 2024 18:09
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lol I kickstarted vanguard and still have my entire pledge packed in a box. I unpacked it when it arrived just to make sure I had gotten what I pledged for, and have never touched it since. Feels bad
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Apr 16, 2024 18:12
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Even the digital rules were listed in the "Last chance to buy" section, so I grabbed the Warbands, FAQ, and Roster sheet since they're all free just to have them in case I ever decide to dig the rulebook out.
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Apr 17, 2024 03:00
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Vanguard is probably preparing for a new edition, maybe the Armada sale is just a sale? It's still front and centre on the Mantic website
NTRabbit fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 04:38
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NTRabbit posted:Vanguard is probably preparing for a new edition, maybe the Armada sale is just a sale? It's still front and centre on the Mantic website I did see something from Ronnie how they don't know where Vanguard fits - Deadzone uses the same models so it's a progression from Deadzone to Firefight, but Vanguard is a bit to crunchy and doens't lead into KOW - Ambush does that. Their not sure if it needs to be it's own thing or just a fantasy Deadzone. Armarda is more likley to stick around, it's a really good game! That reminds me, when I'm done painting my sons fleet I need to take pics of that and my new Abyssal Dwarf fleet.
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Apr 17, 2024 05:53
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Grey Hunter posted:I did see something from Ronnie how they don't know where Vanguard fits - Deadzone uses the same models so it's a progression from Deadzone to Firefight, but Vanguard is a bit to crunchy and doens't lead into KOW - Ambush does that. This is exactly how I see the problem with Vanguard. When the Kickstarter was announced and they made it clear that it was not Fantasy Deadzone, I envisioned it being similar to Warlords of Erehwon in scope, taking a warband made up of squads of like 3-5 models from the Kings of War lists for each race, perhaps with a bit more granularity allowing some degree of customization or giving purpose to command models that are otherwise included but irrelevant in Kings of War proper. I remember them stuttering out of the gate and having to rework points almost immediately to get unit sizes larger because people actually wanted more of what I described than what the rules initially allowed for. They also added in some bespoke units that can't really transition into Kings of War unless you just stick them into a unit for flavor, which isn't really mechanically satisfying if that unit was a distinct thing in Vanguard (as opposed to a champion leading a unit in Vanguard, but just acting as the center point in Kings of War). It's such a shame because there's a lot of potential to go from: -a couple of heroes and a dozen or so warriors in Vanguard -warrior numbers get bulked up to troop/regiment size for Kings of War Ambush -additional regiments and centerpiece titans round you out to full Kings of War Throw in some narrative and/or campaign rules that naturally escalate from one tier to the next and you're good to go! Maybe the current version of Vanguard is totally fine, but it just doesn't seem like anyone is playing it. Maybe if we have another pandemic, I'll run a campaign with my kid. Unrelated: I am ready to play Deadzone again.  A buddy of mine had an extra Kira, so I was able to paint her up and slap her into the Eiras Contract team.  
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Apr 17, 2024 06:11
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Yeah Vanguard seems like a fine crunchy fantasy skirmish game, but it has seen very little support, and doesn't play nicely at all with KoW multibasing, which is very popular. It definitely has dedicated fans out there, but it seems clear that it's a dead end. With Halo later this year and Epic Warpath in the pipeline, I'd be very surprised to learn they're doing anything with it in the next year. Armada is a funny one - great models, good game, easy to pick up, and also kinda their guinea pig? They've been quite free with handing out the STLs through the Vault and Myminifactory, and as I understand it the resin casting process is very time consuming and hard to scale up. Could be they're just not treating it as a mainline business source like things that come in hard plastic?
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Apr 17, 2024 07:14
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Also, Dungeon Saga Origins is very, very good. Easily the best Mantic purchase I've made so far. The models are fantastic, the rules are concise and effective, and the tile boards are a welcome change from the individual room and corridor tiles of Star Saga and OG Dungeon Saga. It's kind of funny that we've circled back around to HeroQuest's presentation. It seems it really did get something right beyond the marketing.     My 8 year old has been able to get through the first four missions in the first campaign book with minimal assistance from me, though I've pulled my punches a couple of times because ultimately it's about facilitating an adventure and inspiring a love of the hobby and not proving that I can beat a child at a board game. He's really into it and he loves that his characters are slowly improving as they find new equipment and can spend their hard earned experience on new abilities. That this is all secretly a way for me to get him to read and do math and problem solve is a bonus.
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Apr 17, 2024 11:15
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I have OG Dungeon Saga, my game group attempted the first real mission twice and failed it and my sister took a deep dive into the custom character creator book and figured out stuff like: the default characters can't be built using that book, the balance is off, etc. At that point interest was gone and so I have a shitload of dungeon saga stuff in my closet. Is it relatively painless to convert to Dungeon Saga Origins? Like maybe there's a conversion pack? Even something fan-made would be a way to rescue all this stuff that is otherwise a bunch of minis and a bunch of cardboard trash.
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Apr 17, 2024 18:30
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I don't think Mantic ever intended the two games to be compatible and it's far too new as a retail product for anyone to have taken the time to figure out how to convert between the two. I don't know that it would be impossible, but it would be a pretty substantial conversion guide, to the point where I think you would effectively just be running a PDF version of DSO with the minis from OGDS. The tiles pose the first challenge since you're dealing with radically different form factors. The tile boards in the new edition let you join the boards at different points and orientations along the four sides of each board and then there are tokens representing doors, obstacles, and furniture you place on the boards to mark off paths, like in classic HeroQuest. It seems unlikely that the individual room and corridor tiles of the original would match the dimensions off any given dungeon, which are far more recursive as a result of the square boards than laying out tiles as you open doors lends itself. You'd likely be better off printing off a PDF or shading in the map on graph paper. The stats for monsters and heroes are all different as well. I can't speak directly to the OG mechanics, but I'm looking at some pictures of monster stats online and a couple of things jump out at me. In OGDS, there are multiple different things that can happen to most creatures depending on how many hits they take, such as being turned into a pile of bones. That doesn't exist in DSO. It's either alive or dead. The numbers themselves don't match for individual monsters either. A skeleton archer for instance only takes one hit to completely kill in DSO compared to the 3 it needs to truly be dead in OGDS. So you'd likely need a new card or PDF for every creature and character in the game. Did OGDS have an "Exploration" deck? When you clear a room, you have the option of exploring it, and this is handled by drawing the top card from the Exploration deck. It usually shows a reward, a trap, a wandering monster, or nothing. It's very Munchkin, but is a welcome level of abstraction that means you have some push-your-luck mechanics in the game. The standing threat of the deck also means players might voluntarily choose not to explore a room that has a bespoke piece of gear in it. In any case, if that deck doesn't exist in OGDS, or it has a different composition, you'd need the whole thing to play DSO. Finally, there are the campaigns themselves. DSO isn't just a new edition: they're whole new stories. At that point you'd need PDFs or booklets for each campaign you wanted to play. Given that you have the miniatures and the four main characters are the same, you would only really need PDFs of the tiles, cards, rules, and campaign(s). You might also need 1-2 more types of models than were included in OGDS, but those could likely be sourced from any number of collections you might have. An official "conversion kit" would likely just end up being all the new cards, the tile boards, and the campaign booklets without the minis, but nothing like that has been suggested by Mantic at this point. Fortunately, the rulebook is available for free still on the Kickstarter page, and probably Mantic's website as well, so you can read through it to see if it would even be worth the effort to figure out how to bridge the two sets. https://bit.ly/3M6JxbZ
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Apr 18, 2024 00:41
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Thanks for the rundown! It's been like 5 or 6 years since we played, but IIRC there is an explore deck like you described. Piles of bones like can be reanimated by the GM, but won't necessarily be. The main issue we had with the game is the absurdly harsh turn clock plus rolling to move meant that you were going to lose the first non-tutorial mission no matter what you did at least a fair percentage of the time, and if you didn't play super-optimally you were going to lose it more like 90% of the time. The balance was just off, and it was very surprising to see how far off it was in what should have been a relatively easy early mission. Some fiddly mechanics, and the clear case that the character builder had been written after the main game and nobody went back to make the main game's characters match them in capability, plus some odd rules choices and excruciatingly bad prose, made the whole thing feel very unfinished. That said, it was a big ol' pile of reasonably cool minis set in the same world as Kings of War, the dungeon furniture is very nice to have, and the rest of the components were reasonable quality. So yeah a conversion pack with like the new tiles and cards and printed stuff without needing new minis would be ideal. Sounds like I could get the PDF and then maybe fudge the rest if I want to put in a fair bit of effort. We'll see: my sister lives much farther away now and I haven't had a regular gaming group since covid, so what I really ought to do is savagely pare back my collection and a game like KoW feels bad to do that to because of how much I spent, but that's a sunk cost fallacy. I might pull it all out, go through it, and check ebay to see if I should sell the whole thing, or maybe just salvage the minis and recycle the cardboard.
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Apr 18, 2024 00:56
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Unless I've completely overlooked it, I think the turn counter is dropped in DSO. I've certainly not been playing with one with my son. There's also no random movement. You just go as many spaces as you have movement points for.
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Apr 18, 2024 03:57
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I think without the turn counter at all, Dungeon Saga would be an always-win for the players? But that might actually be a difficulty lever worth tweaking. In DS the turn counter is important to push the heroes to keep moving rather than just try to kill everything, and that in turn is part of the gameplay strategy: what is genuinely in our way, what can tie us down, what can we just zoom past? To me it feels bad to just arbitrarily give the heroes more turns without playtesting a bunch to decide what exactly winds up being challenging but not stupidly so, but I'm not gonna do that playtesting on a group game that we bounced off just to try to rescue it.
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Apr 18, 2024 23:50
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I think DSO is meant to be an easier overall experience. A lot of Mantic's marketing material has been calling it "family game night friendly" or "fun for all ages". The dungeon crawling genre is pretty saturated with brutal and unforgiving games, so one that's an easier point of entry isn't the worst thing in the word to be. However, I've only played four of the missions, so I can't say if it ramps up in difficulty at some point. There are four and a half campaigns (one is just a boss gauntlet apparently) to get through and they are meant to be played one after the other with experienced heroes. Maybe there are just enough monsters in each mission to give a challenge without the time clock? Speaking with limited knowledge of the mechanics of OGDS, I can't say whether "interrupt" was a thing that existed before. Between it and wandering monsters, there's a bit of pressure on the team, but it's closer to push your luck than a race against the clock. Interrupts allow the Overlord to activate any monster on the board in between player moves. They can't activate multiple models in a row, but you can easily cause havoc for the players by breaking up their planned sequence and getting some attacks in that take advantage of outnumbering or rear attacks. Player characters also have a revive token they can use after running out of HP. Once per game, they can bring themselves back to life, but in doing so they give the Overlord a new interrupt token. That means potentially, the Overlord has access to up to 8 interrupt tokens per game. A wandering monster card pulled from the Exploration deck automatically causes a new monster to join the mission within 5 squares of the offending hero, and it activates. At the end of its activation, on a 5+, a second, identical monster joins as well, but it does not activate. The wandering monster cards are drawn with some frequency in my limited experience, and being able to place them wherever you want and attack can be devastating. I have personally been pulling my punches here with how cruel I've been because I'm playing against an 8 year old and not a battle hardened gamer, but the potential is easily there to completely wreck the heroes if the Overlord is willing. Use an interrupt on the turn after 1-2 wandering monsters enter a room and your heroes can be in a lot of trouble, especially when monsters can be Dwarf Revenants or Armored Zombies in some scenarios. What this would end up translating to in my opinion is that competent hero players against an aggressive Overlord would consciously choose not to explore every room or corridor given that the risk/reward can be quite high. I mentioned this briefly as well before, but if you draw gold from the Exploration deck, this usually is accompanied by a 3+ dice roll which results in an automatic point of damage if you fail the roll. Plus, you could just draw a trap anyway and take damage from that. Cautious play to avoid this pitfalls would then snowball into the players being under equipped going into later scenarios, likely having missed key legendary items that can only be found during exploration of specific rooms (marked in the campaign books) and not having stockpiled enough gold to purchase powerful equipment between missions. My kid also got pretty lucky by drawing the "Great Axe" the first time he felt like he had enough gold to visit the merchant (the equipment the merchant carries is random), and he slapped that onto Orlaf the Barbarian immediately, which has significantly reduced the challenge of some of the tougher monsters we've run into because now all of their armor is reduced by 1. Lacking that item and me not pulling my punches could easily have swung the scenarios without the need for a turn counter keeping the pressure on players at all times. Healing can be a limited affair outside of the revive tokens as well. The wizard has a 2 HP healing spell in one of the three decks you can choose from (on "normal" difficulty, the wizard takes 2/3; hard 1/3; easy 3/3). If you don't take that deck, you don't get healing. The spell can only be cast once, unless you use the wizard's feat that lets you cast a spell a second time. Get into a bind and want to cast the same offensive spell twice? Well, you're not going to be able to heal twice. This means that the wizard has largely stayed back and acted as a healer for my son's party before nuking powerful enemies in the final chamber of each mission. While a bit boring, it's fine for my son because he plays every character. If you were playing with four people, I could see the person controlling the wizard wanting to be more engaged, taking a more offensive approach and ditching the healing deck or using the feat to cast offensive spells more frequently and healing only rarely. Aside from that, the Exploration deck will occasionally spit out a healing potion that can bump you up 1 HP, but it's not something you can rely on happening. Lastly, while I've only played the first four scenarios, at least one of them would have been impossible with a turn counter. Your party is split in half and you have to work through two micro-dungeons at the same time, uniting only in the final zombie-horde filled room at the end of the mission. I believe the wandering monsters in that were ghosts which could pass between the two dungeons unimpeded, letting the Overlord really gang up on the softer of the two parties. This was probably the scenario where my son got the closest to losing.
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Apr 19, 2024 00:45
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Like I said I'm going off my fairly unreliable memory 5 years old now, but: that interrupt mechanic sounds familiar, and so does the mechanic of getting to add monsters entering the battlefield (or spawning behind doors they can open?) with some random factor, but with a smart Overlord being able to really badly press the heroes. And this also meant stopping to open a chest is a press your luck choice. Some of the mechanics you're describing reminds me of the Conan minis game from Monolith. Which is also very hard for the players in the first scenario, but has that press-your-luck feel, the bad guy controller has some randomish but manipulatable tools for being harsh, the players really need to collaborate and have a plan, and luck plays a significant but not overwhelming role.
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Apr 20, 2024 06:45
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I have finished all the heroes in the Legendary Edition of Dungeon Saga Origins. I am quite proud of these. But that paladin's sword is pissing me off because no matter how many times I do the hot water-ice water trick, it just goes back to fully bent. 
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Apr 22, 2024 14:39
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