The changes from Warlord 1.X to 2.0

[Gus Landt]

'Speed of Play' was one of our 'Big 3' overall goals when designing Warlord 2.

and the other two?

Balance - previous versions of the game had balance issues on both ends. Like the all archer army was too powerful, and the BIG 200+ point monsters were never worth taking. Having all soldiers simply be soldiers (and not Grunts & Adepts) was the most visible end result of this.

 

Streamlined - getting rid of all the little rules that either came up so infrequently (e.g., retreat) or never had a big enough affect (e.g., cohesion, army construction rules) that I deemed the game better without them.

[Spike]

Army Construction in the new game is WAY better. How many Sergeants you need before taking a Captain or Warlord is right there in one simple paragraph..no charts and tables of examples required.

 

And the new way for expressing how many Grunts and Elites a Leader can take makes much more sense. I wondered why it was ever done the other way in the first place.

 

I also really like that all models get to use their #MA in Defensive Strikes too (a.k.a. everybody's a Warmaster).

[joshuaslater]

Just glad I bought two books. Thanks for all the info, Gus, and everyone.

[Preston]

Army Construction in the new game is WAY better. How many Sergeants you need before taking a Captain or Warlord is right there in one simple paragraph..no charts and tables of examples required.

 

And the new way for expressing how many Grunts and Elites a Leader can take makes much more sense. I wondered why it was ever done the other way in the first place.

 

I also really like that all models get to use their #MA in Defensive Strikes too (a.k.a. everybody's a Warmaster).

 

so how many do you need to take, I haven't played before and I don't have my rulebook yet (its on order) and am trying to plan out my purchases. :)

[Gus Landt]

Army Construction in the new game is WAY better. How many Sergeants you need before taking a Captain or Warlord is right there in one simple paragraph..no charts and tables of examples required.

 

And the new way for expressing how many Grunts and Elites a Leader can take makes much more sense. I wondered why it was ever done the other way in the first place.

 

I also really like that all models get to use their #MA in Defensive Strikes too (a.k.a. everybody's a Warmaster).

 

so how many do you need to take, I haven't played before and I don't have my rulebook yet (its on order) and am trying to plan out my purchases. :)

The rule is that if you have 3 or more Leaders in your Army, one of them needs to be either a Captain or a Warlord. That's it. So you could take 20 Sergeants and just a single Captain if you want.

 

As for the Soldier/Elite stuff, the rule is: If a Leader's Troop Capacity rating is 4-8/2, that means the Leader must take a minimum of 4 Soldiers, up to a maximum of 8 Soldiers, and a maximum of 2 Elites. Thus, that particular troop could have a minimum size of 5 models (the Leader + 4 Soldiers) up to a maximum of 11 models (the Leader, 8 Soldiers, and 2 Elites).

[Sergeant_Crunch]

I have finally finished reading it cover to cover and I really like the changes. One question, will the datacards will posted at Reapergames? If so, when do you anticipate that being completed?

[tabascojunkie]

It's already there.

[Sergeant_Crunch]

Sorry, wasn't specific, what I'd like to know is there there is going to be a pdf of all the datacards or broken up by faction.

[Shakandara]

Would it help if I used that utility to make pdfs for you?

 

EDIT: Done.

 

Crusaders

Darkspawn

Dwarves

Elves

Mercenaries

Necropolis

Nefsokar

Overlords

Reptus

Reven

 

~v

Edited August 1, 2009 by Shakandara

[Sergeant_Crunch]

Yeah, I guess I'm just going to have to play around with it some. Which I won't have time to do until the end of the month.

[rgtriplec]

After I play 15 games, I'll post and praise or complain. At present I have five games down and I think...

[Elende]

I've just receive the book this morning, and after reading it, I have a few question :

 

-I totally agree about most of the change for the game. You wanted to make the game faster, it's done. But by doing this and giving up on all those little rules, like Picking-up Objects, Looting, searching, etc. I wonder if Warlord is any longuer a skirmish game. without that, the more obvious goal in a game is to crush the opponent, or to take control of a location. Will warlord in the near future just become a Battle game ?

 

-No rules for Unit Cohesion ? If I divide my units between fights all over the board, the time to remind which minis are part of the troop I'm activating, I can totally destroy the pace of the game. I can't think about a single reason that explain you choice about that.

 

-And by far the more important : no campaign rules ?!!?

The faster the game is, the best it is for campaign. I can only hope to see a new set of campaign rules for warlord (I'll test The Brettinburg Campaign for now, but I want more ^^).

[Sharky]

No rules for Unit Cohesion ? If I divide my units between fights all over the board, the time to remind which minis are part of the troop I'm activating, I can totally destroy the pace of the game. I can't think about a single reason that explain you choice about that.

For the most part, it's best to create a troop whose members work well together in a fight, rather than scatter and not support each other. There are exceptions to this of course, such as the big scary critter with healing caddy troop (where the healer hangs back until needed), or the Elite delivery service troop.

 

I have seen some clever ways to remind yourself which troop still needs to be activated and which have been already - one way is to print the troop (and its members) on a 3X5 card and flip it over after it has had its activation for that turn. You could have a colored dot on the troop's bases that correspond with the same colored dot on the troop card.

[vejlin]

I color code my models. That way it's easy to see who is in the same troop. Especially useful when you have models of the same type in different troops.

[Shakandara]

All of my models get a white stripe on the back of their base, which I then use a roman numeral on to identify the model. This is great for when I have half a dozen of the same model in two different troops and they both meet up in the middle of the field; I can easily tell which models activate with which troop. The white stripe also served to ID their rear base, but even tho that is no longer necessary, I still find the white stripe handy for numbering.

 

And honestly, if you were familiar with Warlord 1.x, you'll know that Cohesion didn't matter the majority of the time, and even when it did, the area of Cohesion for a leader was an 18" radius... that's a 36" diameter circle, and considering Warlord is generally played on a 4'x4' table, there was very little area of the table that was not in Cohesion range. With the battlefield representing a little more than the size of a football field, it was hard to justify keeping Cohesion (which added little to the game before) at this scale for a skrimish game. The other route would have been to entirely rework what Cohesion meant and how it worked, likely to the detriment of the speed of game-play. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the biggest gripes about what Cohesion did before was opened the door for a model to be totally lost from the board (regardless of point-cost) for failing a DIS check.

 

Strength in numbers (especially since it is now more difficult to get support bonuses) is still going to be your greatest reason for keeping models somewhat close to one another. If you opponent has any speed at all on the table, if you spread too thin, he will piece-meal you to death.

 

Finally, as has been indicated several times already, what you have in your hands is *only* the core rulebook. It only contains the rules and the 10 core armies; the game had languished without a new rulebook for far too long. It could have been kept in development for another year, and we could have added all the "mini" factions, the new factions, campaign rules, stunts, and more to it, but it would have meant even more time that players would have had without the new rules. It also would have meant a massive rulebook that probably would have had a price point twice as high, which would have made it far less attractive to newcomers or to old players that had walked away from 1.x because of the instability of the game.

 

I hope this gives you the answers you are looking for regarding why some of the things worked out the way the did. Not everyone is going to like all the changes; you can't please all of the people all of the time. The design team put forth its best effort to keep the things that worked, tweak the things that were cool but just not quite right, and revamp or discard the things that didn't work at all. I think I speak for all us when I say that we just hope that you like it enough to give it chance.

~v

Edited August 6, 2009 by Shakandara