08/26/2008 22:07:17

Maybe you should change genres . if you played say historical like the civil war once your army is built nothing needs changing the weapons are the weapons nothing new being added to that. As for playing against the latest and greatest it still comes done to being inventive in strategy i think. Might not be a easy win but still doable in my opion.

08/26/2008 15:17:42

I agree.

While I didn't have the same experience with my mini's, I do have my Undead army and my Skaven Army, and I just got them together in a special way that I'll describe further down..  

 Magic the Gathering was where I experienced this concept.. Consumer gamers. These peopleobey the rules, research the best thing to add, buy it, paint it, and field it in battle.. But the rules are designed by a company, that has to make money, and the only way it does, is when people continuely buy their product.

I had some great MtG decks, some that kicked but in 3-5 turns, some that fielded forests of creatures, or all the merfolk that you could muster, combined with 4 lords of atlantis, 4 sunken cities, war barges and merlfolk assasins I had an unstoppable army of 12 /12s.

But as soon as the next set came out.. 6th edition, 7th edition, etc etc, alot of my 'decks' became obsolete.. unless you 'bought' more cards, you just could not keep up. great business model, sucks for the reality of the game.. who 'are' these people that keep making more rules to the spell world.. they just kept expanding the rules and making things just harder and harder to understand.. 

I expected that its the same for table top games,  and you've just confirmed it.

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We played Fanmtasy Empires? the roleplay/birthright board game, that goes with Warhammer Fantasy battle, and gives you a whole set of other rules about aquisitions of troops.. You cannot just 'get' troops buy buying and painting them, your world has to 'have' them in the first place.

When my Skaven wished to upgrade with a Warpfire cannon, I couldn;t just 'get the points' I had to invent it, use my resources, at the cost of my other troops and the loss of a few skirmishes (didn;t have enough recruits to bring in reinforcements). The 'in game cost' was another factor. Sure new mini's were great, had great ideas, but unless you could afford the in game costs too, it was just not worth it

I dont think I could go back to 'point buys based on the latest rules' kinds of games again.. I have more respect for my game worlds. 

08/26/2008 12:30:55

I moved as far away from points based games as I could. I still play a game of Warhammer 40K occasionally but all of us that play haven't changed our respective armies in a couple years. We have choices of units to field but I've been suing the old 3rd edition Tyranid codex and probably will continue to for who knows how long.
When I was having a miserable time wargaming Warhammer 40K it really came down to who I was playing with. There was one players that was Daemon Lord GloaterSulker. I mention him often as he ruined 40K for me for a good couple years. He always researched forums, bought the newest widgets for his army, etc. and would crow like he was the greatest general in the world when he was winning with his combos and tricked out army lists. This was slightly annoying, I'll admit I suck at wargames in general and losing isn't anything new to me when it comes to rolling the bones but... God forbid I actually start winning or even. Christ, once he ran his tooled up Daemon Prince into my Hive Tyrant and splattered it without taking a scratch and he began his gloating phase about how awesome he was, etc. Charging my Hive Tyrant left him within charge range of a full compliment of Genestealers who preceded to hand the Daemon Prince his own BACK-SIDE in short order. Hey, it happens so fixated on the big bad he ignored the multitudes of little big bads. So irate his "unkillable Daemon Prince" got smacked to oblivion by some genestealers he forfeited the game and went home.
I figured it was 40K, the game, rather than the player but really how much I enjoy a game depends 100% on who I'm playing with.
To get more on topic, I can't stand games that have an arms race mentality. I kind of saw that with the old Magic: The Gathering games as the cards got better and better and my basic deck with a few cards from Antiquities started losing every game and people were telling me I needed to buy some Legends expansions to keep up. I guess for me it's just about finding gamers that are both cheap and lazy that they get satisfied when we develop armies that are sort of balanced by the time of their release and not caught up in an escalating arms race.

Then again, after getting soured on 40K I kind of blew off bowing before any company IP and started playing games where I could use any of my miniatures so I could start buying what I liked rather than units I needed to be effective.

 

Not sure if that makes sense...