Warmachine Starter!
Heya all, Dave again (You can go ahead an expect that I'm going to pop my head in here only in very random intervals) this time I wanted to talk about my First impressions with Warmachine!
Initially I was a little hesitant to pickup the game. The models were a bit on the 'cartoony' side for me and if I'm going to be honest, I had a bit of a stiff upper lip as a war-hammer player; Why would I play that when I already play the 'better' game? That changed outright when the newest faction was announced and echoed in the war gaming blogs.
Convergence of cyriss eschews the steam-punk air captain aesthetic in favor of an art-deco science fiction fanaticism. For those of you that don't have experience with art-deco scifi, take a look...
Then I happened by the game store on black Friday and saw the faction starter set on offer for 45% off; so I bought it anyway and booked some learning games.
Of course, my good friend Lennard jumped at the offer of a game, and I decided that it would be on the stakes of a slap in the face for the looser. I managed to pull of a win; but sadly for me, the first game 'didn't count, because I don't know how to play' (this was pre-arranged by both of us, and sounded like a great idea to me. I then proceeded to expose my warcaster in the second game and get smooshed in the face.
Loosing hurts us serious 40k people ;)
Sillyness aside, Id like to make mention of some reasons I think that people who poo poo other games should take a look at Warmachine.
The first and most important to me, is developer/player interaction. The producers of the game give the very strong impression that they are players of this game. I don't mean that they own and army, or have access to an army at the office that they pull off the shelves when the marketing team needs to sell a new army. I mean that the developers feel like people who queue up to play at organized events. They feel like people who want to create content that's fun because in the end they are consumers of that content. When you trawl their forums, you can see posts by the game designers and staff (and yes, they have official forums... You can even complain there without fear of them pulling their entire comunity outreach back into the bedroom) when you listen to podcasts, you can hear interviews with people who are involved with creating the game, and best of all, they actively release materials so that players can compete in events. GW stopped doing that well before I started playing 40k and its a massive shame. Before war gaming, I played quite a bit of EVE online, and seeing the developers release youtube video's where they laugh at and call whiny players out was always a treat. I don't expect a game maker to suffer stupid complaints and stand for being trolled, but neither do I want to stand outside the doors of their temple hoping they toss a wave out the window every few months.
The second big sell for me, is that Warmachine bundles rules with models. If your faction happens to get a small update you aren't expected to pay 45$ on top of the cost of the model just to be able to legally field the unit; that kind of expectation of your clients leads to piracy.
On the same token, Privateer also releases incremental rules. No army has to wait 4-12 (yes, Dark Eldar waited that long between codices at one point) for an update. Each month, the company releases a handful of models, for a handful of factions. I can't say for sure, but the attitude of tournament friendliness leads me to think that these incremental releases are done explicitly to address imbalances in the game. GW this month has done the same, however, each update requires the purchase of not only the models, but also the rules for those models (available only in English, and only to people who want to purchase them online). I bought the farsight expansion when it dropped, and it was so horrendously eddied that I had to spend almost two hours playing with the document in adobe acrobat (this is not user friendly). Furthermore, those incremental updates are a 'Christmas treat', so there's no guarantee that they will live beyond the thought of pumping more cash from the players in the future. Did I also mention, that most of those supplemental rules address EXCLUSIVELY expensive bundles that the company released recently?
For the cost of a single wraithknight, I've been able to purchase the starter box, three solo units, a second heavy vector, templates and the faction specific paint set.... A whole army plus play aides; After borrowing the core rule book from someone, I was set to play for a little under 110 bucks.
Warmachine is awesome, getting slapped in the face hurts and art Deco is sexy people. Give the game a try, and by all means, borrow an army to do it :) Privateer press is cool, I don't expect in a million years they'd have a problem with someone trying the game on for a month or two before committing to the purchase of a starter set.
Here's my halfway painted cyriss core
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