What's missing from Warmachine/Hordes - Part 4: the Drop

[PG_netdragon]

The best definition of Dubstep I've read says: "Dubstep sounds like transformers having sex".

Although Michael Bay has made very difficult for me to enjoy the franchise (and I don't rule out that Bay makes use of Dubstep as stated before in TF4), Dubstep is a great electronic music genre that is heavily based on the drop. As defined by wikipedia, the drop is "the point in a track where a switch of rhythm or bass line occurs and usually follows a recognizable build section and break." I may add that usually this happens after a build up in sound and harmonies.

Right now, WM/H is in that build up with the "Central Big Piece" format (War Engines, Colossals) and the Regular/Epic/Legendary Characters. But what's next? Epic Colossals? Godly Characters? this escalation (pun intended) cannot sustain itself for much longer until we end up playing something closer than GW's Epic, than what WM/H was when MKII was released.

In my series of short stories "Warmachine: Decimation" (two posts somewhere in this forum, hopefully more to come) I took into this idea thinking about a time after the current game meta-story wartime. It is based into more personal storylines (one of the main reasons I enjoy the IK meta-story) in a smaller scale, where the great organization (States, Kingdoms, Empires) lie decimated after the huge war effort.

I do believe that PP has taken this into consideration, and I also know that this goes against the "more, more, more" desire of most of the player base; but as I've always said: I'm just proposing alternate development routes for a game I love and support.

regards,

ND.

[J. Beatnik]

They've expanded vertically, now they have to expand horizontally. Basically this means that they give you more ways to play. You can play big with Unbound and Colossals. You should be able to play small, some kind of kill team type of rules, possibly inside a building, or as an add on to the IKRPG. Here's a few ideas of how to play small:

Warcaster on Warcaster games: Make some rules for warcaster duels, or promote zero-cost games (Warcaster and Jack points only).
Mini-Tiers: Make some theme lists that involve certain point levels or small point games.
Expanded Scenarios: Do some city fighting, 4 6" square impassable terrain in the middle of the board, 6" apart. Multiple tier levels of buildings, expanded types of terrain, interesting stories to play out.
In Depth league play: Send out a grid map and tokens to show ownership, organize people into teams and have those teams fight over hexes. Team with the most hexes at the end of the league wins.

There's a lot of design space left in Warmachine. PP knows what they're doing, they won't disappoint.

[Marth]

The horizontal expansion approach is the route taken by G-dub. We all know what it led to: Avoiding it unless forced into pick-up games. I love the Warmachine rules set for its easy scalability from small to large, and the Unbound rules fixed the issues with really large games, without changing the rules per se. True, they could do something more detailed about structures than just the second appendix. I put more trust in PP's ability to deliver than I do in FedEx (or UPS), but everything they do will be integrated into the game as a whole, or it'll be skipped. (Cities of death was one of the best G-dub books I ever read, but I never got to play even one game of that)

Edit: I'd like to see characters DIE, though. (and with the argument "Uh, he's not /the/ Nemo, just sb. with highly similar abilities", they also already avoided any argument about making models unusable.) They could also grace us with a new storyline campaign system. The story of the IK is the real big thing behind the game, and giving it more love will not disappoint.