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Your 2011 Mantic Highs and Lows.

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Author Topic: Your 2011 Mantic Highs and Lows.  (Read 2295 times)
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Llew
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« Reply #15 on: January 05, 2012, 12:17:37 am »

Well, it's a mish-mash.  You've got rules that were primarily designed for a ranked-unit game being applied to a skirmish game.  However, skirmish games work best for low model counts.

Mantic's avowed purpose is huge battles.  So they did a few things to speed the game up.  Like, for instance, you draw LOS from the commander for determining if you can shoot a unit.  And you measure closest to closest to figure out range.  And if the leader has LOS, the whole unit shoots.  Nice...simple.

But then they mucked it up.  Because to determine cover saves, you have to draw LOS from models.  If over half a unit can see over half a target unit, then you have a clear shot.  This isn't bad if it's 5 models on 5 models in terrain.  But make it a good, cover-riddled battlefield and then have your platoon shoot their platoon.  You need to draw at least 101 sightlines to claim a coverless shot.  (If I'm your opponent in a timed game, I'm always taking the highest possible cover penalty, and then challenging you to show me each sight line for every shot you take.  The rules were supposed to *avoid* these sorts of issues for tournaments.)

But all BFG's do their shooting on their own...and you'll have to keep track of them within the unit.  When it's 1 in a unit, not a problem, but when you start having multiples it gets a bit hairy.

And then, when it comes to moving, you have to measure movement for each individual model.  This slows the game down yet again.

At present, the rules for how to resolve a charge and how to regroup (and the whole issue with 'locked in combat') are very kludgy.   The vehicle rules on movement felt just a bit "un" when we've tried it.  We couldn't exactly put our finger on it, but they didn't feel right -- or maybe they didn't feel like they were tactically interesting enough?

Warpath is playable...even very playable...at low model counts and small unit sizes.  It can't help but crumble at higher ones.

If I demo the game, I'm going to demo small games and push it as a great system for relatively small conflicts with a number of discreet units, but the larger units are unwieldy at best.  I can see throwing a vehicle or two, a hero or two and 25-40 models.  That's a decent sized game.  But it certainly doesn't feel like the "massive battles" that I can easily play in KoW, and it doesn't feel like a game driven by the guy behind Apocalypse. 

But if we want to debate Warpath more (which I'd be happy to do), we should probably start another thread and let this one be what it is.  Smiley
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