You do play wargames with scenarios right? Setting up terrain that looks like a real place, giving your units objectives and reasons to be there, even having unbalanced forces in play?
You don't just set up six pieces of terrain randomly and play army list versus army list tourney play, right?
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No no you got it all wrong, you should have started with a pic of a guy tipping and fedora and the greentext line:
>He doesn't play programmed scenarios
Delete it and try again, we'll pretend this didn't happen
>Programmed scenarios.
Those are for solo play tho.
It can mean that, but in this case I was refering to stuff like the "progammed instruction" scenarios as seen in stuff like Squad Leader, where you'd learn some of the rules, play a scenario that incorporate them, learn some more, play another scenario with the new rules, and so on until you'd played through them all and learned the game
>AFGHAN & MED TERRAIN 022.jpg
That ain't afghan terrain
And yes I have played specific historical scenarios. They don't tend to be as fun as being able to write your own army lists and playing more generic missions based on the kind of missions that would have been common in the period. When writing rules I do usually base mission ideas on real life scenarios or missions.
That looks terribly comfy OP.
Saved to my folder. I love genteel skirmish games with random miniatures like Song of Blades and Heroes.
It's from a blog called Wargaming With Silver Whistle, if you wanted more
Comfy battlefield posting
Mentioned asymmetric scenarios somewhat recently and it blew some faggots mind that balance doesn't have to come from evenly matched points. Sad.
And neither it's mediterranean. Wood and thatch as building material, tall roof and overall architectural stlye is as mediterranean as pagodas. Also, all dat hay.
OH FUCK ME, I misread the filename
I play Infinity, so no.
I really love highly populated terrain like cities and such, but it's a bitch to play in Warhammer, which is the only wargame my mates play.
How is Malifaux these days, anyways? Haven't looked at it in a while.
1. I didn't make the filename. Go yell at the guy who did.
2. You don't have to do a specific historical scenario (though there a so many that would make great wargame scenarios). The point is to give a reason why you're doing the game in order to give a bit of a story to get into and also to provide gameplay elements and variation. No one is saying use historical lists there at all. I haven't used an Army List for Warhammer, etc for years except to get the stat lines.
Works fine for me; 3rd, 6th and 7th edition all seem to work fine with large amounts of terrain on the board.
>Mentioned asymmetric scenarios somewhat recently and it blew some faggots mind that balance doesn't have to come from evenly matched points.
Unbalanced scenarios require extensive playtesting to test victory conditions, something which many publishers and players don't have.
>>Sad.
Sad but understandable. Point balanced scenarios are simply easier and faster to get on the table.
>which is the only wargame my mates play.
Get new mates. Preferably adults. WarHammer is a cancer which has been effecting wargaming for far too long.
No, I play even and fair games, and invent the narrative along with my opponent during, before or after the game and only if they want.
Your games have a SHARED narrative that your opponents enjoy and participate in creating, right OP?
You wouldn't be a troglodyte jerking off alone in your own fantasy while other players roll their eyes and pretend to care, right?
What kind of nincompoop would do that?
>Missing out on the best part of wargaming to just play fixed battle even points over and over and over and over again.
Haven't even scratched the surface of wargaming. Poor lad. I suggest you find a club and actually start doing the hobby properly.
And by story, you seem to think I meant huge sprawling backstory etc etc rather than just 'In a campaign, a chest of gold, intelligence etc was said to be in a village, while the other side had a VIP in the same town; both sides go in, unaware of why the other is there, but presuming the worst.'
Or 'The army is retreating and this one last bridge is all that stands; with a small group of forces, defend until destroyed against overwhelming odds.' That's all you need to do.
Take unfluence from films, history, books or just think of what's a logical reason, rather than just PITCHED BATTLE/MEETING ENGAGEMENT, 1500 POINTS OVER A WOOD, A RUIN AND A HILL RANDOMLY PUT OVER A TABLE.
Seriously, get some people actually into the hobby of wargaming, rather than just tourney play.
>You need to test everything to get victory conditions, etc.
No you don't. You don't need to be a genius or playtest extensively to pick up a handful of troops and give them an objective they have a chance of accomplishing. The point is having fun. Not balance. One of the best games I played had no hope of me 'winning' but the objective was to inflict as many casualties as possible on the enemy while ensuring a model got off the board.
>Pic related, what your wargaming tables probably look like.
It seems to break down when orks or IG's larger squads are a thing. For example, we had a city map where streets were just wide enough for a Chimera and a few guys, there were a lot of changes in elevation, that sort of thing. The fights on that terrain always favored whoever could pack the most firepower into as few units as possible, mostly because only a handful of units would be getting their attacks.
As an example of map, we played on terrain similar to this, except more urbanized. The rolls in the terrain blocked line of sight for a lot of direct fire weapons, and usually you might be able to maneuver a model or two into firing, but not too much more. Melee was strong on the wider parts of the map, and indirect artillery and pieplates were king.
And that's really the issue with complex terrain in wargamming, it changes the relative value of units as some improve and others get worse. A unit whose strength is a long range direct fire weapon is at its strongest on a flat table with few obstructions, and at its weakest on a busy landscape with many buildings blocking line of sight. This means at best you need an army built around the terrain where you're fighting, which gets very expensive if you're playing on multiple boards, and at worst, it can make core parts of an army or codex invalid.
Necromunda works a lot better, though.
Whoops, forgot image.
literally every store in the local Dallas area looks like this. Shitty fucking tables with the WORST looking terrain.
Have you been to Texas Toy recently? They got a bunch of custom tables done that look very nice.
My store got 5 of us together to brainstorm and create rules for a killteam type campaign with d20 rpg elements for out of battle things. We're currently running the campaign and ironing out lumps as we go.
It's nice to be able to use weapons and equipment that a unit otherwise would not be able to. Within reason of course.
I don't see that as a weakness; it just means that an army list actually has choices and it's an incentive to have a general collection rather than build to a list and expect it to excel at all times.
it's doing better than a lot of miniatures, but still struggling to sell sets in anything but big cities. So, average? It seemed to be rolling down hill last time I saw it, which was 2 years ago now.
I have a group of 6-7 people that I game with regularly, knew them back from university days so we're all pretty close, and we do exactly like you mention, a highlight;
>Formed a narrative campaign (kind of like the ones on miniwargaming) influenced by a game master and the battles we fought
>Started off with equal points army lists and then the GM would take into account previous battles and intentionally unbalance it like OP is talking about
>Nurgle CSM player won the first battle against loyal guard, traitor guard won against space marines
>Next battle, IG and space marines have been pushed back into a city - whilst they have smaller armies to represent losses, they're on the strategic defensive to balance it out
>IG and space marines narrowly force a draw, GM decides that they retain the defensive positions and the traitors besiege them
>Next match, due to siege conditions and nurgle shennanigans, plague zombies spawn randomly in city terrain to reflect what a nurgle siege would be like
OK maybe my story skills arnt quite up to making it sound exciting but it was pretty cool - much better than 1000 pts vs 1000 pts take the hill over and over
This is one of the most beautiful tables i've seen - this is what wargaming -should- look like, theres far too many green felt mats + one hill + one ruin + one shrub out there
That's why I want to run more tactics-oriented RPG sessions, if my players ever gave half a fuck about the combat
It's great in theory, but hugely fucking expensive in practice.
Assume you have an army, any wargame really. That army will most likely be affected by the terrain of the place you play at. That means, depending on the terrain, your army will be stronger or weaker, same goes for everyone else. Someone who has an army specialized for playing on a specific table will certainly preform better than one who has a generic army.
Like I said, in theory, this is a good thing, as it means a greater range of miniatures see use compared to any single terrain. If you're playing in a tightly packed urban city, you're probably going to see melee units get much stronger and high angle artillery such as mortars also be more useful than, say, large tanks that have difficulty maneuvering through cramped streets. Where this becomes an issue is that it means that as a player, you're going to be buying many, many more models and need to tailor your army to each board, and since highly detailed terrain is expensive in itself and somewhat a rarity, each FLGS might only have a handful of boards, much less private individuals. The expense of an already expensive hobby rises even further.
It'd probably be very doable if you could put boards in broad categories so people would know what to expect (IE Urban for dense city terrain, plains for open ground for tank battles, etc.) and then players could just design an army for each board, but even between those there's a lot of variation.
In my opinion, this type of terrain works the best for historical wargaming such as the Civil War and the Napoleonic era, just because there's less diversity of unit types. Once you start hitting the modern era around WWII, you run into some problems.
I like to do this, but nobody I play with (or used to) wants to do this anymore. It's all "my dudes" stuff, and while that's fine, I really at heart love playing OpFor and having to work to challenge players with a shittier force then they have, or challenge myself to not murder them outright with a superior force while keeping it suspenseful. I guess I carry my love of GMing over to wargaming too.
>Fantasy is gone
Help me decide which wargame is worth getting into. I keep seeing people shilling for Infinity and it looks like a meme game.
Infinity is great, tho.
I honestly have no idea what's good these days. GW ended Fantasy so I'm in a weird grey zone where I no longer have a frame of reference for what is on the rise.
Kings of War, if it's popular near you. Use your old miniatures and have the fun of a Fantasy game in half the time.
Alright, I'm hooked. Does it have many supplements? I'm wondering if it's caught on as much as other war games in recent years.
Just play skirmish games like Infinity, Dracula's America, or DeepWars. Much better balance along with actual tactical choices. Far cheaper to get into also.
A couple of campaign books and an extra armies book, along with the yearly "Clash of Kings" books which balance up the game even more for tournament play, if that's your kind of thing.
Or you could make terrain yourself, detail budget laser cut kits, extend the GW kits...
Plus if you play shit like Warhammer over a couple of editions you'll get a good variety of units. Even as a teenager I had enough models to get a halfway decent urban force for 40k.
I really don't understand your angle
>Meme game
what does that even mean
Malifaux and Batman Miniatures Game are pretty good.
Infinity is fun, but it has it's problems
Kings of War is supposed to actually be pretty okay, but I've not played it myself
Kings of war Vanguard is fun so far, I have been playing with a buddy using some warhammer and DnD minis. And since it is in playtest mode right now you do not even have to pay for the rules, so I think it is worth a try as a skirmish game.
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>Fucking expensive.
I spent 30 quid and a few weekends and I have a full table of fields, villages, trees, standing stones, hedges, etc all as individual terrain pieces. It's quite easy.
No you don't. I've played WWII in scales from 6mm to 28mm on boards that are built up to resemble real life stuff and it's worked fine.
>Oh no, my machineguns, tanks, etc don't have LOS across the board!
So maneuver.
Why yes, I do, actually.
>You do play wargames with scenarios right? Setting up terrain that looks like a real place, giving your units objectives and reasons to be there, even having unbalanced forces in play?
Of course.
And not pre-programmed ones like suggests, either.
The kind of 'scenarios' I prefer come along from Campaign play like for example - even if I'm playing solo. (Mythic can throw some awesome curveballs at you.)
>Mentioned asymmetric scenarios somewhat recently and it blew some faggots mind that balance doesn't have to come from evenly matched points. Sad.
This is what gets me every time.
It's like people never heard of Lanchester's Square Law - for example.
If you have 1000 points, and I have 500 points, The Law says you'll take about 250 points of losses.
So, to make it more 'balanced', I'll multiply your losses by 2 when 'calculating victory'. Piece of cake.
Another part is the Campaign itself:
Introduce supply (no matter how abstracted) and suddenly you have to detach some troops to guard it - or see your troops vanish into thin air.
Most people don't like to include it because "there's no gain from it - you're just preventing a loss" - but, IMHO, the gain is in the (at least) twice the amount of battles you get to fight if you do.
Scenarios are neat.
Can we get some pics of it?