I played warhammer for 18 years, and about a year ago i tried warmachine/hordes for the first time, and i can say that im not coming back to warhammer any time soon. join me in the warmachine world if you want to ply a REAL game that being said, i still love the GW models. The game is perfect if you do not care who wins, and the models are beautiful as always, but if you want a game that is balanced and that you can compete in, forget warhammer and start with warmachine. probably the best gaming decision i ever made
I did it and after few moth i sold my army because the game and comunity sucks. Game has many interesting things in close combat but the problem is that you cant use it because alot of time stuff dies after being charged and the special CC moves are not worth it (special cc moves was the cause i started Hordes). Then theres the company, for GW everybody whines and critisize of book baking, thats not the point for PP, but they release new models quite often and what do you know alot of time theyre realy good and you have to buy them for competetive game. and if they will stop it they will have to bake new books to keep sales. Then theres Tournament mechanics you have to bring 2 list and yes the selling point is that you can change your lord and that will be diferent list but nobody says that that list will eat grass of the field when they will be whiped out. So to play competetive you should have 2 warhammer armys of 2500 points. Silly isnt it? Then theres models, i wont argue about the taste but the details are far away from GW and putting them together is a pain. Big monster has one posibility of putting them together, one pose, no extra stuff. Thats sad. Units has ~10 dudes with only 3 diferent poses thats uber lame. and most of the time theyre one peace so to changed you have to work hard. Mold lines are stupid. Seperate parts are idiotic, near INFINITY stupidity where you have ~1.5-2mm sword seperated... Then theres "competetivity" theres few viable buid that you have to play and thats it. and alot of games actualy are rock paper sicors. have a bad list left and your a dead man. Then theres comunity (althou this varys from places) But if you have a press ganger (the oficial from PP that build tournaments etc in your place) kick him in the face for me i hate those guys. The rules are stupid for conversions actualy you cant have anything scrach build unless you have the original model to change if oponent demands it. it kinda beats the purpouse of scrach build. then conversions are not very welcom thing, for once i wanted to convert my titan to special char, the only diference was sword and shield and to upgrade it to special char you have to buy upgrade kit wich aprox 0.5-1.5 cost of another model so i said i will better buy another model than to buy upgrade kit. The press ganger said that that was not a valid point why i would be allowed to make conversion so he said i cant do it and if i wil do it i wont be allowed to play with that figure in tournament. FOR FREAKING SWORD AND SHIELD??? That was the main point why i dropped out of Hordes. Then theres no costumization of heros/lords, theyre like special charecters all and you cant build anything for your taste. and imagine you are fighting OnG vs OnG (thats actualy quite fluffy ) and on the field meats Grimgor vs Grimgor. Stupid.... Well this is my 2 cents If the game works for you play. For me and 4 my friends it didnt work.
I tried it a few times and its true that the rules are a little tighter than GW games tend to be. I never really got into WM because I couldn't settle on a faction that I really liked the look of, the models are just nowhere near the quality of GWs current range and i'm first a painter. I guess that is why the new LM have me so buzzing, they have some of the best new models GW has made this year. I've just finished painting the new plastic skink priest and it is definitley the best plastic character yet.
I like the models too mate, but this discussion is for the "book" and its content if it was just the models I would be very happy indeed, I like all of them (except the bastiladons face, I think its too flat for an ankylosaurus ) its whats written for the new guys that dosnt add up to me..
I will concede that the book feels a bit bland, but I think a lot of that has to do with the missed opportunity of putting more spice into the Core. If WoC can have T5 Chariots with a 3+ save, and Empire can have Knights with S4 and a 1+ save, what's the harm in letting Cold One Cavalry be Core? I can guarantee that those boxes would be moving if they did. But I digress. Rules-wise... the book seems OK. I think the moaning regarding the Bastiladon is unwarranted (it's cheap as chips for something with the Monster unit type), and it does seem to have several viable playstyles going for it (Saurus Hordes, monster mash, Skink Cloud - though this one is a bit iffy at Ld5 across most of the board). That said, I'm approaching this all from a clean slate, as I am a Lizardmen opponent rather than a player. But it seems OK to play and play against.
I agree that the biggest problem with the book is the blandness of the core section, it feels a lot like the high elf book from last edition, no interesting core choices at all just means that core for lizardmen will almost always be as close to the minimum limit as possible. It's such a far cry from my other armies (tomb kings & o&g) where I can quite easily spend anything from 1/3 to 1/2 of my firce on core units (mainly savage orcs and chariots respectively) because they actually have strong and interesting units in core. I dont really want to see CoC in core because I like them at ws4, but something else for the sake of variety would have been really nice. For lizardmen core still feels like a tax we have to live with rather that the nucleus of our army.
If cold ones went in core why would they have to lose ws4. chaos warriors are ws5 for crying out loud as are their chariots and are silver helms ws4 with asf and high int.
I agree - especially with Empire Knights having WS4 to the State Troops' (mostly) WS3. Both still get used.
The neutering of our core does seem to boil down as, first of many, real issues, and they didnt add a good alternative despite plenty of chances for it. We even lost Swarms as they got interesting.
Its not about whether or not a WS 4 core unit is appropriate for the game, and it certainly isn't about what other armies have in their core sections that may or may not work well with their fluff. The point is that saurus cavalry are elite saurus warriors, which is represented by their higher WS, think of them as being like temple guard who get given a cold one and a spear instead of a skull helm and a halberd. For that reason they need to be in a more exclusive slot than saurus warriors, bringing them into core would basically mark them down just as grunt saurus, just on dinosaurs (which means they would have the grunt saurus profile), while I would much rather they stayed special and remained elite saurus on dinosaurs. And before someone suggests raising basic Saurus ws please let's not go there, below average ws has always been a lizardmen trait.
I disagree with that argument, based on how Empire treats their Knights. Basic State Troops are WS3, Knights are WS4. Knights are still thought of as elite troops compared to their foot-slogging counterparts, and yet in game terms both still see plenty of use. Why not do the same for Lizardmen?
We don't have much to go on other than the precedence set by other army books for determining if Cold One riders as core would be appropriate. Knights, as Rothgar mentioned, Chaos chariots, and Ogre Ironguts are all more elite type units for their respective armies, and yet are considered prevalent enough that they can make up the backbone (or entirety) of an army. Also, and more significantly, I want to field an infantry free cavalry/stegadon/carnosaur army, and the importance of me getting what I want has gone ignored for far too long!
I'm starting to think most the effort was put into the space marine codec so no one really cared about lizardmen. Space marines are GWs bread and butter. Lizardmen feel like a rush job they needed to do in order to not have 2 codexs back to back.
The Empire knightly orders provide good fluff reasons for their knights to be core units, especially due to the existence of more elite knights (inner circle knights, DGK) which fit in special. Neither of those reasons apply to lizardmen CoC. If temple guard cavalry were an option in special for example (or some kind of elite saurus MC) I could see saurus cav being pushed down to core (effectively what happened to silverhelms in the HE list, pushed down by dragon princes), but that doesn't really fit with temple guard fluff. At the end of the day core CoC wouldn't be very fluffy either, aside from a kroq gar only special rule there isnt really any justification for entire armies of saurus cav, they're just not common enough in the background to warrant a core slot. The obvious gap in our core selection is a light cav unit, skink horned one riders would really have fitted the bill there, but it looks like that ship has sailed for another edition. I actually feel that of all the units in our codex the one that perhaps could have been put in core that wasn't was the Bastilodon, giving us monsters at every tier of the foc, the rather basic bastiladon, moving up to the more elite steg and then further up to the ancient steg and troglodon. But I suppose they didnt think the game was quite ready for thunder-stompers in core yet, though I don't really think it would been any more game-breaking than core chaos chariots.
Fluff wise, I'd say a CoR core makes a lot of sense. Sure, proportionally there are fewer of them in the Lizardman empire, but say a threat has to be dealt with quickly, or a long range patrol has to track down some interlopers. The base composition of that force will be disproportionately more elite and fast moving. Plus, as we all know, spawnings that were once rare happen more frequently in times of crisis as the need for them increases. These are the End Times, after all... I think of it like this- In industry, few welders overall are certified to pressure vessel code. But, if you work in a power plant, having that on your cert will be the norm, since it's needed for the type of work you'll do there. I'm not sure that makes any sense, but it's the first thing that came to mind... Beyond that, I don't think CoR are powerful enough, or cheap enough, to throw our book out of line if people started running whole armies of them. In 7th ed., when cavalry reigned supreme, things were different, but there's no way it could be any more game changing now than the chaos chariots. If, for some reason, the the prerequisite for having a cavalry unit as core is to have an even more elite cavalry unit in special or rare, then by all means, lets have Horned One cavalry or Baby Carnosaur riding Temple Guard. I'm actually glad we didn't jump on the monstrous cavalry bandwagon in this edition, though, and CoR core would have added a lot of versatility and fun to our new book.
Please understand Spiney this is not specifically directed at you, but statements like this are one of the reasons army books can fall into the really bad category. The entire "fluff" for Lizardmen is summed up as dinosaur people ridding dinosaurs and using ancient technology they barely understand. That's about it. Want to have COR in core. Its as simple as either the spawning pools producing an unheard of number of riders for Mazimundi's war, or just say 'its always been this way'... which GW has done before. They ret-con more than any comic book company out there. Though with all that said, I don't think moving them to core would have made the book all that more interesting. The COR are not a very exciting unit with the loss of the banner, it at least gave them some ability to change their roll. It would be something though, I will give you that, and could have opened up things like MSU cavalry with a hoard of Temple Guard and/or Kroxigor. Pyre
Certainly they could have written a retcon into the Lizardmen background so that Saurus cavalry were as common as Saurus, they could have done that to justify just about ANY unit in core, but I for one am glad they didn't. I think it makes far better sense to have CoC as a rarer, more elite element than the basic Saurus infantry. Actually when I started Lizardmen two editions ago you could give Saurus "spawnings" sort of blessed marks from the old ones, adding one spawning moved them to special and a second moved them to rare. One of the spawning marks (blessed spawning of itzl) was required to ride a cold one or carnosaur and CoC came with this spawning inbuilt. I kind of like how that still echoes in the game by CoC staying in special. I would also stress that moving CoC to core would NOT have really made a slightest bit of difference, they are still a far less competitive choice than Saurus infantry regardless of slot and I for one probably wouldn't have considered them very often. They certainly would not have solved the issue of LM being a minimum core army.
I reckon the one thing that would have made the book better would be... A giant dinosaur that saurus ride. like a stegadon... but bigger. move swarms to core and terradons. use rippers as specials and have the ancient steg as a special but just cost a little more than he does. Then a massive lumbering dino with 4 saurus on his back.... something like a TK monster in stats... T8 or something... they are dinosaurs... come on. but make him ponderous.