Down sizing

[calmacil]

Our group of players used to exclusively play warhammer. We've started with warmaster fairly recently, and we all love it. We're having much more games than we used to have. It suits our style of game, a lot of our warhammer games were no magic and no magic items.

I'll give it a few months, but i'm guessing i'll no longer have any need for my 28mm models or scenery. It would be nice to down size and have a little bit more space.

I was wondering if you all followed a similar pattern to me?
Once you started with warmaster you drifted away from warhammer. 

[Claus]

Definitely.

Starting drug were 40K.

Switched aftwerards to Fantasy.

Finally ended up at Warmaster.

Still have all my armies from Fantasy and kept one from 40K

Cheers
Claus

[Lex]

A lot of scenery will transfer to Warmaster too !!!   

[Stomm]

The next big switch is to Warmaster Ancients, well for me at least. I think that I'm drifting away from WMF a bit at the moment, I'm afraid that 8th ed. Warhammer has got me all excited, it's actually got some elements in it that aren't too far from Warmaster in some regards...

Anyway, I'm sure I'll still try (and probably fail) to make it to the odd tournie, and as things continue to pick up with the club I'm sure I'll be able to convert some more people into playing with 10mm figures. My only real frustrations with Warmaster at the moment are the lack of clarity that the rules currently have, IoW they've been mucked about a heck of a lot (especially the armies) since the original book came out, and the inbalance in cost and effectiveness that exists between infantry and pretty much everything else. 200pts of infantry is not equal in effectiveness to 200pts of cavalry, not by a long shot IMHO.


Other than that, Warmaster and its derivatives are still in my view the best game(s) (I must play BotFA one of these days actually) that Games Workshop have ever produced. The simplicity and clarity of the rules are like a breath of fresh air compared to pretty much everything else that isn't in a board game.

[marell le fou]

Warmaster and its derivatives are still in my view the best game(s) (I must play BotFA one of these days actually) that Games Workshop have ever produced.

Try Man O'War and a good old Space Hulk... For my parts those are the best ones.

I didn't pay attention to 8th edition. What elements makes you think to Warmaster in it ?

[pw]

I also started with 28mm Fantasy and 40K but still play all of the games which is why my WM stuff gets painted so slowly. As for the best set of rules out of GW, I vote Blood Bowl with Epic a close second (though my game of choice is WM at the moment). I don't really get the anti-cavalry thing so much so maybe I'm playing them wrong! Mine tend to get ambushed by infantry lurking in woods or the like. On a terrain-free board I can well imagine they'd be unstoppable but ours are always cluttered enough to keep cavalry feeling a little nervous!

[calmacil]

Yeah i like Blood Bowl as well, must get round to doing a league of that.

I find cavalry a problem in WM. I think it's emphasized by my friends taking a Bretonnian army, and me taking an infantry based orc army. He's not taking an unfair list, he's simply trying to increase his low break point. So he fields a lot of cavalry. We're going to try more terrain as well, i've just built a village with stone walls around and a big plywood base for a forest. So that should help.

[jchaos79]

Yep I start with 28 few years ago, then leave the hobby and when return some years ago I almost focus in 10mm.

For telling the truth, I suspect what happend to you (and to me) is one of the reasons GW do not support so much warmaster. If people discover a good system, then do not want to come back to 28mm-games (and 28mm gives a lot more money than WM). But that is just a though do not contrastated, do you think the same?

[Stomm]

Warmaster and its derivatives are still in my view the best game(s) (I must play BotFA one of these days actually) that Games Workshop have ever produced.

Try Man O'War and a good old Space Hulk... For my parts those are the best ones.

I didn't pay attention to 8th edition. What elements makes you think to Warmaster in it ?

I loved Man O'War, but it was from the Cardiferious period of GW's game design and suffered from 'sneeze and the game is ruined'. Sure you could use blu-tac, laminated cards or all sort of other tricks. But the fact remained that you needed two tables to play on, and not just a little side-table, quite often at least a 4'x4' and it could get very cluttered very quickly. And Space Hulk, well that's a board game isn't it, I'm sure I excluded board games (which also includes Blood Bowl) earlier on in my post...


As to what elements of 8th are similar to Warmaster. Well firstly they have introduced pre-measuring and totally eliminated guessing ranges, whether for artillery or for charges. This allows games to be played int he much more friendly manner in which Warmaster games can be, where you let your opponent know where everything is in relation to one another, etc... And of course the random charge ranges brings a similar sort of risk balancing to judging charges as you have in Warmaster, the fact that it's 2D6+M also adds to the Warmaster-ness of the whole thing, I've been crossing my fingers and hoping to get a charge in on the roll of 2D6 for ten years now, and finally Warhammer players can get that same thrill, etc...

[Lex]

Yeah i like Blood Bowl as well, must get round to doing a league of that.

I find cavalry a problem in WM. I think it's emphasized by my friends taking a Bretonnian army, and me taking an infantry based orc army. He's not taking an unfair list, he's simply trying to increase his low break point. So he fields a lot of cavalry. We're going to try more terrain as well, i've just built a village with stone walls around and a big plywood base for a forest. So that should help.

it is not realy big terrain features you need, but try and have lineair objects, like brroks/ditches walls/hedges etc

[spiritusXmachina]

Began 1995 with WHF, played tournaments and soon was fed up by Hero- and MagicHammer. Especially when I met Bully-Players and Rulestricksters.
Spending hours over new armylists and needing to buy all Armybooks was not my kind of game either.
Meeting a lot of unpainted opposing armies.
Terrain never was much more than a nuisance.
Tactical movement - yes, sometimes (the worst game I ever watched was 2k of Orcs vs 2k of Skaven - that was just shoving your units straight forward).
Went over to organising tournaments then and played private games against gentlemen-players.

When I met Warmaster it was love at first sight. All army-lists in one book (at that time), easy armylist-generating, terrain was an important tactical factor, movement of troops was elegant and swift (or not at all;-)), less disputable rules, greatlooking painted armies on tables with lots of good looking terrain. Heroes and magic playing an important rule but not really dominant.

From then on I never played a game of Warhammer again. (Although at the moment I guess I could afford WHF better than a 20 year old. I think you can get two laptops today for the prize of a Warhammer Fantasy Army! Crazy.)

MenoWar was a first step in the right direction, but still I think magic is much too dominant (and unbalancing) there.

Greetings,
Gerald

[Stomm]

As a side note I think that it is actually productive for Warmaster players to still play Warhammer. That way whenever you play, you can trot out lines such as my current favourite 'I really like 8th edition Warhammer, it's miles better than 7th in my view, but still falls far short of Warmaster and ultimately is little more than a bar-fight game, not a true wargame...'

Well something like that anyway. My point being that if you divorce yourself from Warhammer players then you limit your ability to convert them into playing Warmaster, or at the very least saying the likes of 'look, I've been playing your favourite game, why don't you give my favourite game a try?'

[jchaos79]

Well something like that anyway. My point being that if you divorce yourself from Warhammer players then you limit your ability to convert them into playing Warmaster, or at the very least saying the likes of 'look, I've been playing your favourite game, why don't you give my favourite game a try?'

That sounds like a very smart strategie!

[calmacil]

@lex, yeah i think i'll try and get some 10mm scale hedges. I've got some stone walls already

but still falls far short of Warmaster and ultimately is little more than a bar-fight game, not a true wargame...'

That's something i didn't like with warhammer, you could face an army that looked like a pre-battle skirmish force. I've had a battle against small fast cavalry units (5 models each) 2 big monsters (hydras) heavy cavalry units and a powerful character on a dragon. No foot troops. It didn't feel like a battle, it's as if all the elite troops had turned up on their own. Whereas warmaster has that epic clash feeling to it.

But i think that has been addressed a bit more in the new edition. I also think the new edition has become a bit more like warmaster as well. I know Rick got a polite tap on the shoulder, and was told to not invest too much time into warmaster ancients.

[spiritusXmachina]

You're right, Stomm. But I never could get myself to.
But on the other hand we are playing regularly at Club-meetings where other players around are playing WHF, WH40K, Warmachine and the like. So we always get some other players curious.