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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Erloas's Avatar

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    Default Looking for a new miniatures wargame

    I'm more interested in something more ship/vehicle based, though I'm not going to rule out infantry, but 28mm human(iod) has been done to death, especially skirmish style.

    As much as the game itself though, I'm also very interested in the quality of the company that is making the game. GW's actions got to the point where I'm never going to be a customer of theirs again. I liked Dystopian Wars, but Spartan Games clearly had some issues. I have been following it since it was purchased by WarCradle and the more I see them the less I feel like it is a company I want to support. They ask for community involvement and then heavily moderate anything that doesn't agree with what they seem to have already planned. They took over the DW community FB group and made it official and I've seen many comments and posts disappear, not even flaming but even constructive dialogs. What I've seen of their fluff on WWX, it seems like a re-skin of every trope and cliché they could find.

    I'm already playing Battletech.
    X-Wing is an obvious option but I've heard a lot of "its a good game system but FFG is more interested in money than the health of the game." I'm also more likely to get to spend more time painting and modeling than playing and X-Wing pretty much takes away that side of things. Also the down side of not really being a new setting so not much new to explore.*

    *Although I would be good with real world base settings even though the are by definition a known.

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    LansXero's Avatar

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    Default Re: Looking for a new miniatures wargame

    WarmaHordes seems to cover several of your needs. Give it a try! :)

  3. - Top - End - #3
    Troll in the Playground
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    Default Re: Looking for a new miniatures wargame

    So, the first piece of advice I will ever give to anyone looking for mini wargames is... Case out your local area. Check the local gaming stores. If there's a Wargaming group for your region on Facebook, sign up and check in. There is pretty much no point whatsoever taking up a wargame if you don't have anyone to play against, and every part of the globe is different in terms of who plays what. Unless you're absolutely confident you can get a bunch of other people into whatever game you take up, your options should be strictly constrained to the games that at least a small group of other people in the area play, unless all you want is some pretty, nicely painted pieces of plastic to sit on a shelf somewhere. With that said...

    Dropzone Commander, and its more recent, space-based spinoff Dropfleet Commander, are personal favourites of mine that I really miss having regular opponents to play with. DzC simulates a much larger battlefield than you'd get out of something like 40k, representing an area roughly the size of a large town or city district and forces that range from relatively small rapid-response task forces of half a dozen tanks and a company of infantry to large-scale battles between entire divisions. The game is interesting in its focus on planned maneuvers and, as the name might suggest, drop ships. Most DzC armies are somewhere between completely and near completely air-mobile, deployed via transports to developing hotzones. As such, determining where to drop your forces to engage the enemy is vital, since all but the fastest ground forces are far too slow to cover a significant portion of the battlefield over the course of the game. It's heavily objective-focused and offers a lot of strategic depth for a game that is, in general, fairly simple to learn. Dropfleet Commander is a space battle game set in the same universe, with fleets duking it out in orbit over contested planets and some focus on integrating with the ground-based game, though it obviously works fine on its own. It's kind of similar to Distopian Wars in play, though obviously in space and with heavily divergent focus and mechanics. The models are stunning and it's fairly new and not too expensive, so I'd give a hearty recommendation to check it out if you like fleet battles. The company who makes both, Hawk Wargames, is pretty small but definitely don't do GW nonsense. IIRC, there's a new edition of DzC somewhere on the horizon.

    Otherwise, Infinity is a 28mm sci-fi skirmish wargame. It's great, I love it, and it's getting more and more popular pretty much everywhere in recent years (mostly as a result of people jumping ship from 40k) so the odds of finding a playerbase near you are pretty good. Plus the minis are very, very nice and you don't need more than 20-30 models to have a fully complete faction with numerous possible lists to play. Though obviously it might not be what you're looking for, considering you specifically mentioned hesitation about this style of game. Corvus Belli is pretty great, though. They've got a huge focus on keeping the game fresh and addressing any concerns from the player base, and I've got more faith in them than pretty much any other 'big' company. Plus all the rules are available for free and they have a really nice in-house army builder app that acts as a 'gold standard' for the game, keeping everything nice and consistent. Infinity really sets the bar for a company working really hard to make sure both the game and models are consistently the best they can be.

    There's always WarmaHordes, as mentioned above, if you like that kind of thing. It's not my cup of tea, and I've heard some bad things about the current rules for Warmachine from some of the people in the area who are big into it, but I know PP is always working on that stuff so I expect it's a fairly safe bet that those issues will be ironed out before too long, if they haven't been already.
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    Erloas's Avatar

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    Default Re: Looking for a new miniatures wargame

    I should say that I probably used the term skirmish a bit ambiguously, since it is often used directly towards model count, but I'm using it more it terms of movement style and unit interaction/reliance. Like I would consider 40k very skirmish in design, or at least it was when I played it last, several editions ago I believe. In that while being in the right place at the right time is important, in general move is trivial beyond being in the right general area. Pretty much complete free-form movement and facing being a non-issue for the vast majority of units. Also units are pretty well self-contained, they can do whatever job they need to do completely on their own and multi-unit coordination is not that important.
    (And I realize that is a vast generalization... trying to get the general idea across without making it a wall of text)


    WarmaHordes, I have to say I don't know much about PP, but the game always seemed like "you like WH/40K then you'll like WarmaHordes because its practically the same game, just with a few better things." Which I know is a very simplified view, there just didn't never really seemed to be anything compelling about it, it just seems like another one of the 28mm humanoid games.
    But I will admit that I don't really know much about the game. What is compelling about the gameplay and setting? What makes it special, what makes it stand out to you?


    As for players, since moving to the Seattle area... I figure if I can't find players for any given game system here then chances are there isn't going to be anyone to recommend it anyway. I also decided a long time ago that I would rather collect and follow a game I like and try to build a local community than to play a game I don't really like just because there are players around.

    Dropfleet/Dropzone I've heard of but had forgot about, which is of course why I made the thread, heard about a lot of games but don't necessarily remember them or know how they play. I'll have to check them out and see what I think.

    I've heard good things about Infinity as well, but it all seems to be from 40k players, and to me that is a very low bar to beat. What is it about the mechanics and strategy and tactics required that make it compelling to you?


    edit: So looking at Dropfleet, it seems that they collapsed under the weight of a successful kickstarter. Seems to be a much to common occurrence. They have been acquired by TTCombat. So far the quick searches I've done shows that most players seem to be good with the changes and that the majority of the Hawk development team went with the game. That it was done to free the design team up to develop the game because business was not their strong point. Which is decidedly different from Spartan/WC situation. They've also finished the kickstarter fulfillment from what I've gathered. As opposed to WC which pretty much said that anything regarding Spartan was not their problem and they have no intention of doing anything for former Spartan customers that were burned by the KS. Which of course is true from a legal standpoint but not a good way to build trust or a community.
    While it is a situation that makes me very hesitant, how they handle it will say loads about the company and no better time to see that then before I get into it.
    They've got beta rules up for Dropzone up but I haven't seen any rules for Dropfleet. I really like the Dropfleet models and they seem pretty reasonable in terms of cost.
    Last edited by Erloas; 2018-05-20 at 06:30 PM.

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