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Footsore are bringing out a fairly big samurai range next month, with an eye to absolutely owning the Test of Honour skirmish game type games (though ToH in particular).
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Jun 21, 2018 18:46
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A batman miniatures thread would be cool because I like the models but I have literally no clue how the game actually works and which of the different batmen you can use to make a team.
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Jun 21, 2018 18:46
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Gilgameshback posted:So this thread got me interested in the 5150 Star Army system - I bought a copy of the rules but I am really having a tough time figuring out how to set up a game. Like I kind of get the mechanics within the turn, but I have no idea how I'm supposed to build squads and start a scenario. Does anyone know of a really detailed walkthrough or battle report for this system? Hit up /awg/ on 4chan's /tg/ board, they might help. And if they do, share links :p
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Jun 21, 2018 19:58
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Thanks for the Footsore tips, my dudes, will keep an eye on them
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Jun 21, 2018 21:33
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I also bought a 5150 book this week, though I went with the RPG light one.
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Jun 22, 2018 02:00
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I picked up Five Leagues from the Borderlands from Ivan N. Weasel. Reads pretty well, perhaps I'll get a few games in over the summer. Couldn't help but notice the new "Five X" games use the same initiative system as The Black Hack/Heroic Fantasy. Whatever that means.
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Jun 23, 2018 15:25
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S.J. posted:Anyone here ever play the Heavy Gear game? I do. It's a mess, as has been said. It started out as a poorly distributed and almost unplayably complicated wargame with a dense, poorly-formatted rulebook full of ammo tracking, a million modifiers for everything and army creation that was written to be as obtuse as possible, it seemed, because it relied on walls of text and acronyms rather than nice tables of options. It got redone with a nice Kickstarter for some OK plastic minis that were significantly cheaper, and a streamlined rulebook that was honestly quite good (apart from a few consistency/formatting errors and terrible wording on the forward observation rules). It had, however, some major balance issues (mostly around the Caprice faction, whose gimmick seemed to be "accept you're playing massive loving arseholes in the lore to get unkillable, undercosted spider tanks with a list of rules exceptions"). A few balance changes were mooted about, and then Dream Pod 9 announced the newest update of the living rulebook and killed the game. It did amazing things like "completely change how a core weapon works to make sure it makes no loving sense lore or mechanics wise", "add a whole new layer of complexity to melee combat that doesn't really fix the problems with melee", "break the Armour Piercing rule completely" and "not fix Caprice spider tanks at all." People complained, some of the changes were reversed, others were implemented, nobody liked them, and the subsequent kickstarter glut from DP9 just keeps on underachieving (Let's redo Jovian Chronicles! Let's make a 3mm scale landship game that nobody asked for!) It's a real shame to see a game that was, for a brief period, very fun kind of die like that.
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Jun 24, 2018 21:31
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Bob Smith posted:I do. I've got a bunch of metals and always wanted to do some lovely mech plus lovely infantry (south has some 10-15 point mechs that are ultra terrible) but everything being 7.50 a model put me off. I did pick up a bunch when Wayland games fire saled their stock at 50% off everything, but there is no real UK scene or stockists. What's the best version of the rules to go with?
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Jun 25, 2018 07:54
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Considering how much fun This Is Not A Test was, I'm looking forward to the author's new cyberpunk game coming out through Osprey.
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Jun 25, 2018 11:04
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glitchkrieg posted:Considering how much fun This Is Not A Test was, I'm looking forward to the author's new cyberpunk game coming out through Osprey. This looks super awesome.
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Jun 25, 2018 12:44
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I never got around to This Is Not A Test, and while I love cyberpunk, I'm kind of wary of the osprey badge. Maybe it's me, but their last few sci fi wargames haven't blown me away. I'm not saying this is guaranteed poo poo, not at all. But what is it doing different from other Frostgrave style 'wizard and warband' games?
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Jun 25, 2018 14:28
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Thundercloud posted:I've got a bunch of metals and always wanted to do some lovely mech plus lovely infantry (south has some 10-15 point mechs that are ultra terrible) but everything being 7.50 a model put me off. I did pick up a bunch when Wayland games fire saled their stock at 50% off everything, but there is no real UK scene or stockists. The version I used which was mostly good (poor wording and unbalanced Caprice list excepted) was the July 2016 update of the Living Rulebook.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:22
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How are the Alpha Strike rules for Battletech?
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Jun 27, 2018 03:40
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S.J. posted:How are the Alpha Strike rules for Battletech? They’re a touch oversimplified unless you use the companion, imo, but I love them just because it makes running a lance actually doable if you want to play a game that doesn’t take all day.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:51
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That's good enough for me. Sick.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:55
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I like Horizon Wars from the one game I played. The creator has a lot of extra material at his website for adding hackers, monsters, transformers and superheavy robots.
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Jun 27, 2018 17:24
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I found the old Marvel Miniature Game starters for Brotherhood and X-men, and Sabretooth in blister, and picked them up. It's time to re-enact Saturday morning cartoons from when I was growing up using a dead game system.
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Jun 27, 2018 19:03
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Man what's the failure rate for miniature games? I feel like it has to be worse than TCGs
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Jun 27, 2018 22:49
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Len posted:Man what's the failure rate for miniature games? I feel like it has to be worse than TCGs I assume it is a lot easier for TCGs to get printed and licensed. I doubt there would have ever been a Nightmare Before Christmas minis game. That said... Anima Tactics, Endless Tactics, Brushfire, Hell Dorado, Shattered Earth (not yet, but looks to be headed that way) are the ones I have. Did Maelstrom Edge ever get traction?
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Jun 27, 2018 23:31
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LordAba posted:Did Maelstrom Edge ever get traction? They're still putting new stuff out! I like the look of the Broken faction, and have brought a few things to use as generic ragged sci-fi dudes. The Comm Guild is worth checking out, as it has regular articles on converting the existing kit to make other units and also terrain. Even if you don't play the game, it great for ideas.
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Jun 28, 2018 00:22
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This is why I'm all on board with publishers who push out different sets of rules that let me use whatever models I happen to have and manufacturers who just put out a range of models and aren't trying to support any one thing in particular. In other words, Osprey + Reaper would be ideal if not for the casual discrimination from Reaper last year.
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Jun 28, 2018 00:37
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What did Reaper do? Edit: a guy I know used to try and push Rezolution a lot and from what I played it was a neat fun cyberpunky game. But I don't think it's had any new material in like 10 years Len fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 00:40
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Len posted:What did Reaper do? One of the guys running the Bones 4 Kickstarter came out as a MAGA chud and was using some pretty gross rhetoric; off the top of my head I think it was homophobic slurs but it's been months since I thought about it and I can't remember specifically. This wouldn't be a problem if he hadn't used his real name on the forum he went on a tirade on and also used it on official Reaper stuff. People said, "Hey you're the face of Reaper, you shouldn't use this kind of language," he double-downed. When it was pointed out to Reaper he was behaving this way, they took him off the public relations side of the Kickstarter and gave a fairly tepid apology where they said his views didn't reflect theirs. No one wanted the guy to be sacked, but we wanted Reaper to do something like, "We'll donate X% of the raised funds to a related charity" or "we'll send this asshat to a sensitivity training", but it was all swept under the rug as quickly as possible and basically nothing came of it. The real issue is that this hobby is full of loving miscreants and it would be nice if the industry tried to hold its own accountable.
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Jun 28, 2018 01:03
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LashLightning posted:They're still putting new stuff out! I like the look of the Broken faction, and have brought a few things to use as generic ragged sci-fi dudes. The Comm Guild is worth checking out, as it has regular articles on converting the existing kit to make other units and also terrain. Even if you don't play the game, it great for ideas. It's amazing how better Maelstrom stuff looks than, say, Mantic.
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Jun 28, 2018 07:05
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JcDent posted:It's amazing how better Maelstrom stuff looks than, say, Mantic. I've never heard of these guys and they do look pretty slick. The Broken in particular might work as dismounted Muties in Gorkamorka.
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Jun 28, 2018 07:19
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It blows my mind how after all this time, BattleTech minis still look loving awful
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Jun 28, 2018 22:41
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JcDent posted:It's amazing how better Maelstrom stuff looks than, say, Mantic. I'd agree that it could just be the painters Mantic uses. I'm sure their Undead figures show up in the Frostgrave books and they look fine 'cause Kevin Dallimore does most of the painting for those books.
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Jun 28, 2018 23:53
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LashLightning posted:I'd agree that it could just be the painters Mantic uses. I'm sure their Undead figures show up in the Frostgrave books and they look fine 'cause Kevin Dallimore does most of the painting for those books. I have a ton of Mantic minis and I'm by no means a pro painter, but I've had people look at my minis in person and say, "Why the hell doesn't Mantic paint them like this?" Their studio photos, ostensibly to sell the drat things, are unforgivable.
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Jun 29, 2018 00:51
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S.J. posted:It blows my mind how after all this time, BattleTech minis still look loving awful The metal ones are ok, but expensive.
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Jun 29, 2018 01:18
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Cassa posted:I never got around to This Is Not A Test, and while I love cyberpunk, I'm kind of wary of the osprey badge. So, I know Joseph McGuire and I've playtested early versions of reality's edge. I don't want to give away anything that hasn't already been talked about, but it's an iterated upon version of the TNT system. The big sells for me are that hacking is intended to be a pretty core mechanic in the game, and the 'warband' setup. The current draft is you start with a leader and two assistants, who are actually members of your crew, then for each mission, you hire three others. The generation for that is still being worked on, but you don't necessarily have access to the full lineup every game, so you're both making due with what freelancers are available at the time, and also able to customize your crew to the mission a bit. The big selling point for TNT rules, in my opinion, is the activation system, in which you test against a leadership type stat to activate. On a pass, you get 2 action points. On a fail, you get one, and play passes to your opponent, and so on. It gives things a nice feeling of unpredictability and usually everyone is fully engaged in the game the whole way through, as they might be acting any second. As for the osprey publishing, Joey's still writing and making the game. I don't see Osprey impacting it much. He's mainly on board with them because he has a job and handling book distribution and such is a serious pain, especially internationally. I should write up a This is Not a Test summary for the thread. It's a quite good game.
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Jun 29, 2018 05:20
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Felime posted:
Do ittttttttttttttt. I am keen to hear more about it. When I talk about the Osprey badge, I more mean their stuff like Rogue Stars, which strike me as fine but overall inspired.
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Jun 29, 2018 05:40
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Felime posted:I should write up a This is Not a Test summary for the thread. It's a quite good game. I just looked up a Let’s Play of this game and I immediately fell in love. I would love to hear more about it, and also about what models people are using, because I want to make some weird rear end mutants!
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Jun 29, 2018 07:39
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Thanks for the info Felime, certainly has me stoked for the game!Felime posted:The big selling point for TNT rules, in my opinion, is the activation system, in which you test against a leadership type stat to activate. On a pass, you get 2 action points. On a fail, you get one, and play passes to your opponent, and so on. It gives things a nice feeling of unpredictability and usually everyone is fully engaged in the game the whole way through, as they might be acting any second. The activation system really is great. One of my favourite moments in TNT was when my opponent had initiative and was desperate to pass the turn over to me, as I had two rather big guns pointed at his group. He wanted to delay the activation of his nasty attacks-through-walls psychic mutant to go after one of them, but he ended up rolling successful activations for his entire group, until he had to play the psychic and that's when he failed and only had one action. This gave me pretty much an uninterrupted turn of positioning and reacting, which was pretty devastating. It makes the game surprisingly tense, as you never know when all of a sudden your turn's over, so you have to really think about who you're activating and why. One of the other nice elements is the drawing of playing cards for loot - the face cards all give you a little narrative event, with a choice to make, often with awful consequences if you fail. My only issue is that it takes a while to gain enough XP for your first advance, and quite often that could give you something not especially useful. Whereas if they got a combat advance, it meant they'd end up really leaping ahead. The random nature of the advances meant some gangs in our campaign ended up really mismatched, so we had a few people drop out. The new Necromunda has a lot of faults, but I really like the points buy mechanic for advances.
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Jun 29, 2018 12:26
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A while back I mentioned I wasn't blown away by the Five Parsecs system and someone mentioned the designer (the Nordic Weasel guy) did some well regarded WW 2 stuff. I looked into it and picked up Fivecore 3rd edition which is his modern/semi-futuristic military game based on his WW2 stuff. Holy crap is this a better system. Five Parsecs felt like a very old school skirmish game. I plink at the other guys, they plink at me and as one side goes down the firepower advantage just amplifies until one side was plinked to death. There wasn't a lot of point to maneuvering and not a lot of tactical considerations. Five Core makes a brilliant design decision that fixes almost all of that. Instead of weapons just taking out dudes when the dice align, weapons generate kill dice and shock dice. The first type kill on a roll of 6 and knock a figure down on a 1. The latter send figures panicking backwards on a 6 or flinching into nearby cover on a 1. Reaction fire is almost always just shock dice which sounds weird on paper but works in practice. Some weapons generate tons of shock dice which means they can suppress entire squads when fired offensively and lock down whole areas due to reaction fire. Weapons like sniper rifles generate a ton of kill dice but with hard limits of only being able to apply one of them. Weapons like flamethrowers generate kill dice for a small area and shock dice for all nearby targets who see their effects. In general, manipulating morale and causing panic is just as important as scoring kills. It makes things very simple but also really tactical and interesting - a machine gun in FiveCore, for instance, is a battlefield-defining problem. I was used to systems like Five Parsecs where machine guns are just big guns more likely to kill dudes so you just have to charge them with lots of dudes. With the way shock dice work in Five Core's reaction fire, however, there's absolutely no way to come at a machine gun head-on without having your guys dive into cover or even run backwards. Even one guy sticking his head out will draw enough fire to pin everyone near him. It's a simple system but generates cool tactics. Machine gun pinning your squad? Have someone on the periphery draw its fire so that it turns and is no longer covering your approach. Or use some grenades. Or bring up that flamethrower to scare the piss out of the gunner and have him flinch into cover. The other nice thing is that it's a very re-skinnable system. There are rules for armors out of 40k or starship troopers, and the basic rifle/pistol/shotgun/flamer/sniper/machine gun set up can just as easily be plasma guns or bolters or pipe guns in your post apocalyptic wasteland or whatever. There are also vehicle rules but I haven't tried them. In all, it's really cool and I'm glad someone suggested it. It manages to create very interesting skirmishes with simple mechanics.
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Jun 29, 2018 15:19
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Well, it's about time for some Runewars shilling: Runewars Miniatures Game by Fantasy Flight Games setting: Terrinoth, FFG's generic fantasy world which you may know from some of their board games. It's nothing too wild, but it's been chugging along for a while. size: Ranked armies, probably 30-60 models spread across 4-7 units, 28mm. mechanics: Every unit has a cardboard widget with two dials on it, which you use to lock in your action at the beginning of the round. Play proceeds in initiative order, reminiscent of X-Wing, except initiative is based on the action you choose, not static per unit. Different units do things at different points and have different options: cavalry tend to move fast and often have better shots at charging, big monsters are slow and lumbering, etc. Minor differences make a surprisingly big difference, and the spread of options and initiatives does a great job of making units FEEL the way they should. -Movement templates. Somewhere between a necessary evil for the pre-planned turns to work and a good clear way to handle ranked unit movement. -Modular movement trays. The game uses the "tray" as the base unit for everything - damage is multiplied by the number of trays in your front rank, you get rerolls for having additional ranks, etc. Each tray holds 4 infantry, 2 cavalry, or 1 hero/monster. Slightly finicky, but good clear rules. -Terrain that you are either in or not in. Too abstract for some, but so clear and quick: when you touch terrain, if it's big enough for you (based on its capacity stat, not physical dimensions, you can go in, which in effect removes your unit from the table and treats it as occupying the space of the terrain. Terrain has keywords that apply game effects, and generally blocks line of sight. models: Non-styrene plastic. Pretty solid quality and sculpting, but not exactly Jewel-Like. Emphasis on actually ranking up and being useful game pieces. cost: Depends on how much you take advantage of the starters. Core set is $100 and provides roughly 45% of two full-sized armies, so you can be playing full games for $125-200, but it shines with build variety, so expect to want new units as they're released. pros: -Rank and flank fantasy wargame -Tight rules that focus on resolving things quickly and clearly -Initiative system is very engaging, makes for big upsets and risky gambits -Mechanical representation of units' theme is very good -Dial system is very flexible, allows very diverse set of options in a simple format -Plays quick, tournament rounds are 90 minutes and that is not restrictive. -Very good player agency and ability to engage with the mechanics. -Flexible upgrade system means you can build units lots of different ways to accomplish different roles. -Ranges are short, can't sit back and gunline too hard. -Deployment, objectives, and terrain deployment are all core parts of the game, not just "do what feels right". cons: -There isn't much lore to engage with, though they did just put out a roleplaying book so this shows signs of improving. -Some of the models are really cool, but many are nothing to write home about. -Requires widgets, templates, tokens. They work well, but if you hate custom components this will bother you. -Fantasy Flight distribution methods. They have pledged to make every upgrade available within faction, but you still might fine an upgrade you really want for your knights bundled in with crossbowmen you don't want. -Only 4 factions, and with fairly shallow releases at present: by early 2019, each faction will have 3 heroes, 1 infantry unit, 1 ranged unit, 1 cavalry unit, 1 monster type, and 1 additional. More factions allegedly in playtest, but believe it when you see it. -Limited playerbase, but that's pretty much every minis game outside of the big ones. images:    Official Site https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/runewars-miniatures-game/
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Jun 29, 2018 18:42
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I really wanted to get into Rune Wars, but it was the release schedule that killed it for me. Took them way too long to bring out extra factions. That and the demon worshipping dudes have some pretty bad models. The actual gameplay is fantastic, and I'm hoping there's enough momentum for them to continue bringing another faction or two out, but that would just end up diluting the current release schedule even more.
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Jun 29, 2018 18:53
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S.J. posted:I really wanted to get into Rune Wars, but it was the release schedule that killed it for me. Took them way too long to bring out extra factions. That and the demon worshipping dudes have some pretty bad models. If their release schedule can be trusted (it can't, the current batch of releases are about six months late) now that Legion is out, we're getting a lot of product in Q3 and Q4. I am a huge, shameless fanboy, but I really believe the game has staying power on the strength of its mechanics.
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Jun 29, 2018 19:44
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I thought FFG announced they were scrapping rune wars? I've talked to companies selling their stock at a loss because of it.
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Jun 29, 2018 20:17
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Thundercloud posted:I thought FFG announced they were scrapping rune wars? Nothing official that I'm aware of. This week alone they announced 5 new releases. They sure as poo poo did sabotage it last fall with Legion though. 4 people locally that were just getting into Runewars jumped ship, and then I guess their production capacity was all booked up because releases got pushed way back. Uptake has been fairly low, but it's their own IP and the mechanics are legit good, so it serves its niche real well.
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Jun 29, 2018 20:31
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| # ? May 14, 2024 15:30 |
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Just because they are dropping it doesn't mean they won't try and sell what they have already produced though. It is a good idea, but it died day one around here.
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