Gamehole.com

The completed Black 13th, now shooting you in the face in technicolor.

In other news, I made it into my FLGS today to play my first Field Test game of MKII. All in all, I was ambivalent. I don't mean that in a bad way - I just mean to say that really I don't know what all the fuss is about. It still felt like Warmachine, it still played like Warmachine, and I still had every bit as much fun playing MKII as I ever did playing MKI. Of course, that doesn't mean that every time the dice didn't go my way, I wouldn't yell "This stupid game is borken now!"

I truly play games to have fun. I'm not super-competitive, and I'm not an elite tournament player. I'm just a guy who enjoys the fluff, the mechanics, and his weekly game. So, it's less important to me that I have the uberest stats and abilities, and more important that the game is balanced, tactically diverse, challenging, and offers off lots of interesting choices. I hate games with widely known unstoppable combos... using them doesn't make you brilliant, it just means you can read forums too. I'm not saying Warmachine was there, but it was certainly getting closer.

So yes, I could feel where my units had been "nerfed." The Sword Knights are far less frightening than they used to be, but they are still plenty frightening considering their cost (they can still completely scrap one heavy, and damn near scrap a second in two turns.) While still nasty, the Black 13th has had some of their reach taken away, but they have also become much more straightforward. The Stormblades/Stormclad combo worked together very differently, but still felt very synergistic and perfectly effective (and much easier to run). Oh, and now the Charger can be really nasty under the right circumstances. All in all, I am very happy with where the game is sitting - my weak units have become more potent, while my stratospheric units have come back down to earth a little bit. In all, it just feels... well... more balanced.

From a rules standpoint, the impact of the changes was less dramatic than I expected when I first read them. The formation rules ended up not mattering that much, as I still ran all of my units inthe same way I would have under MKI, and never had a out-of-formation issue. It was nice to not worrying about spacing between each model ("Is that more than three inches?"). The new "Shake Effect" rule came in handy, allowing my to bounce back after Bart's feat, and set up the assassination run on my next turn. The rules around Warjacks and disabled systems were much improved, and for me it made the game more fun, as 'jacks felt far more resilient and dangerous.

So, yeah, it's different, but I'm okay with it. After a couple weeks of letting it sink in, and now getting a game in, I'm really starting to shift my way of looking at it - I'm starting to look at the game more as a whole system rather than a collection of individual units. When you look at it that way, you realize that while some of your units may have changed, the game on the whole still plays an awful lot like it always did, and in many ways, even better.

I'll will post a battle report with pics and all of the gory details of my first MKII game within the next few days so you can get a taste of how it went for me. Until then, get out and play.

Labels: miniatures, MKII, wargaming, Warmachine