A
couple of weeks ago, I went to Indianapolis to attend Gencon. I recommend it
highly. It’s a good place to meet interesting humans and play games you would never
have heard of otherwise. I can’t recommend it enough to those of you who’ve
never had a chance to attend.
The first
day of the convention was The Other Side’s Champion of Earth tournament (or
something like that. I can’t be bothered to hunt down the title.) It was a two-commander
tournament, which I haven’t had a chance to play in before. There was a pretty
clear choice for who to bring for leaders of my King’s Empire, as Kassa and
Margaret are head and shoulders (or used to be. More on that later) above Charles.
The rest of the lists were going to stay fairly set for most of the games (having
a limited model pool will do that). Two squads of Royal Rifle Corps are standard
issue. If I have Kassa then I will have the King’s Hand (plus he’s pretty good
as an anchor point.) And I’ve seen all kinds of people speaking highly of the South
Wales Borderers, so they were going to be standard as screener units and to
provide some melee punch. I painted the Field Intelligence Corps squad to use
in Set Traps. I have a pair of Motor Scouts for objective running, but they
have to get bumped out during Pitched Assault, as there aren’t that many
objectives to run and they give up 2 VPs when they die. And I have Infiltrators
for…various purposes. They’re probably one of the strangest squads in the game,
in that they have absolutely no business being as important to the outcome of games
as they are. On paper they’re…well, paper-thin. They can’t shoot for beans. Their
armor is trash. And yet, somehow, they always find themselves right in the middle
of the most important parts of the game every time. It’s bizarre.
Anyways, I got
in 3 games with the other three Allegiances over the course of the tournament,
which was pretty cool. Round one was played against Steven’s Gibbering Hordes
in Scavenge. It wasn’t as bad of a match as the last time we played at Adepticon,
but Hordes are squishy and so it’s easier to get my guys to Glory by wiping out
fireteams from his feeder squads. He got caught out in the open with his Alpha Crawler
early, who I managed to take down. Things got a little exciting when Horomatangi
suddenly appeared in my deployment zone right behind my gunline, but the Hand
managed to put enough of a scare into Steven that he had to pull him back. I
took that one down with a Crushing Victory, and I was well on my way.
Next round
put me up against Phiasco’s Abysinnians in Pitched Assault. Both of us were
looking to rely on shooting and avoiding combat, so we spent much of the first turn…not
fighting each other. I got out to an early VP lead, which was kind of a
double-edged sword as the Tactics discount paired with the Lord of Steel meant
Jon could buy his whole tactics deck on, like, turn 2 or 3. And that sucked. He
attempted to overcome the deficit by throwing one of his bikers into my line and
suiciding him with Detonate Soulstone. This is usually quite devastating, but
by circumstance he ended up not clearing whole fireteams efficiently with the
blast (though he took several chunks out of many of them) and discovered that
the scenario punishes you for sacrificing your own models, particularly ones like
the bikers that are worth 2 VP when they die. However, Jon played well the rest
of the way and was closing the gap up at the end of the game. I ended up
winning, but only just and I don’t really care for how the game was going at
that point anyways. He moved his Lord of Steel to claim one of the objectives
and I started activating Margaret Belle to flip it back before he’d decided he
was done, so he moved the Lord of Steel into the center of the marker instead
of the side to prevent it. Then I misunderstood when the round ended…it was a
shit show. I wasn’t happy with how I played it. I’ll do better next time
hopefully, but I’ve got to find something to do with Electrocutioners with
Experimental Armor. Every shot I put on them just bounced off. If anybody has
some suggestions, I’ll take them.
I still protest that these Cultists are far too cheerily painted. |
Last round
I played a Burning Man army that was very well constructed and executed. I
think. I honestly haven’t played them enough to know for sure. I mean, it wasn’t
10 Rhinos so how good could it be, right? We were playing Set Traps, so now was
the time for the Field Intel Corps. They managed to get to glory and pick up a
few points in the late turns, but were otherwise unimpressive. We called this
game for time at the end of 3 or 4, and I had been playing from behind from the
start (unsurprising, as Cult excels in this Operation). The real damage was
done with the Cult Stratagem that lets them interact without spending a Tactics
token, as it dropped on Turn 2 and catapulted them to a massive lead (and
countered my use of Capture the Flag to swap one of his markers to score for my
team.) Things were flipping the right way score-wise at the end of the game,
but I was starting to get overwhelmed on the combat front. I don’t know if I
could have saved it if we’d played to the end, but I think I could at least have
made it closer and I would have been excited to see how it turned out. In any
case, I lost but had a good time playing, which I’m fine with.
I ended up
taking 2nd in the tournament, with Phiasco winning and the Cult
player in Third, because ToS scoring is weird. I really didn’t care for that,
and hopefully they’ll fix it in the next version of the tournament rules. If
you go undefeated (as the Cult player did) you should win the tournament,
regardless of the VP situation. But I got in 3 more games of KE, found out that
I’m not as in love with the Borderers as I thought I would be (they did very
little in the tournament) and learned some things to hopefully play better next
time.
Also, I’ve reached the end of my
patience with something, and I need to get it off of my chest. I’m over people telling
me that they don’t play this game because of how the Kickstarter turned out.
Like, I get it. It sucked. It was
slow. They didn’t meet their deadlines. The models showed up with bent gun
barrels. Sometimes you got a Horomatangi instead of a King’s Hand. Things went
poorly. I get it. But for christ’s sake, all of the models from Wave 1 are out
now. You can get them if you want them badly enough (I know some of the
distributor stuff isn’t fixed yet and who knows about international shipping,
but you can find them online if you want them.) The rules set is pretty tight
outside of some model balance problems, and an errata document has now been
released to fix the major problems. rumors abound that a balance errata is
coming soon to correct some of the problems. And the game is effing fun. Like,
a lot of fun. I don’t care for army scale games generally, but I like this one
because it plays more like a skirmisher like Malifaux. In fact, it’s kind of
the best of both worlds for army and skirmish. You can play it fast. The armies
are very, very, different in play
style, so you should be able to find one you want (hell, the three commanders
from the Hordes give you three very different play styles all on their own). If
you want more complexity, the Cult will give you plenty of headaches as you try
to puzzle out what the best move is on each turn (“If I use Adeodatos to drop
my Breachling here, it’ll appear next to my Stalking portals there and then
immediately teleport again, landing in the enemy’s formation and exploding to
blast half of them to hell in one activation. Or I could just send a rhino in
there I guess.” If, like me, you sometimes appreciate not having to give
yourself a brain hemorrhage every turn, King’s Empire are effective without being
as complicated. But still, no matter how many times I hear people tell me the
models look cool, the rules sound good, the game looks awesome, still I hear “yeah
but nobody plays it around my area, and the Kickstarter really put a bad taste
in my mouth, so…”
Sigh.
The game won’t grow if people can’t
move on from this. You want to have people in your area that play? You gotta
recruit them! The game isn’t gonna build itself, and the more people cling to
this negativity, the harder that’s gonna be. Grrrr. The game stumbled out of
the gate. It’s time for the people who don’t want to play the game to move on,
and those of us who like it to step up and promote it. Cuz the game’s gonna
flounder if we don’t give it a push. So let’s push this thing for all it’s
worth, ok?
*end rant*
Anyways,
after the convention ended, a new errata document came out addressing the
balance problems the game has had with some of its models after release. Let’s
take a look at them, shall we?
-Kassa doesn’t get to draw as many cards anymore. She draws
one card from her spare parts ability when an asset flips to disabled, and then
draws another when one flips to repaired. So, essentially, it cuts her card
draw in half. Probably the way it was supposed to work in the first place.
Makes me sad, but needed to happen. Also, emergency repairs and its trigger
specifies that you’re to flip disabled assets, which means she can’t start the
card draw chain on her own. So, this will make buying Overwatch on turn 1 and
then filling my hand up with Kassa no longer an option.
-Margaret now only teleports 8” unless she spends a tactics
token. That kinda sucks, but I think she’ll still work the way I was using her
anyways. It just reduces her ability to cross the board in one turn.
-The artillery team gets to shoot without line of sight now,
which it should have had in the first place. Heavy shelling now does need Line
of Sight for…reasons. I guess. Also when it’s in Glory it has a crow trigger on
the main gun to create a 120mm marker of hazardous terrain. Cool, but it’s
gotta get to glory in the first place, which is tricky as they still have an AV
of 3 v. Df. We’ll see, but having no Line of Sight requirement on the main gun
at least gives this a chance of being useful.
-No double dipping on tactics tokens with the Keep Calm and Carry On stratagem. That seems like a change to working as intended rather than as written, so fine.
- The Mechanized Infantry’s increasing AV ability only counts for the target you were shooting at. If I’m interpreting it correctly, that means just the fireteam you’re shooting at, not the whole sqad. If I’m wrong about that let me know.
-No double dipping on tactics tokens with the Keep Calm and Carry On stratagem. That seems like a change to working as intended rather than as written, so fine.
- The Mechanized Infantry’s increasing AV ability only counts for the target you were shooting at. If I’m interpreting it correctly, that means just the fireteam you’re shooting at, not the whole sqad. If I’m wrong about that let me know.
-No more placing a portal marker in your opponent’s
deployment zone with The Approaching Convergence. Would have been nice in a
certain game I played recently.
-The rhinos got nerfed, which we all saw coming. Fire Nova only
goes out 4” instead of 6, and Consumed by Magic now reduces the value of non-Tomes
by 5 rather than just counting them as 0. Which is good. They needed it bad. I
hope it’s enough to stop them from being so whacky (and stop people from
bitching about them.)
Gibbering Hordes got the most changes, which is appropriate.
They needed the help.
-First, non-commanders that get eaten by the Horde’s
abilities don’t count for scoring anymore. This is a good thing, as they are
now playable in Pitched Assault.
-Stuff you bring back with Endless Numbers gets a Reinforcement
token to give them some increased resilience. Shoot those guys down quick
before they get a chance to reinforce, or get out of their way.
-Heavy Rains got the same treatment as the Burning Man
portals asset, so no putting a Tide Pool in the enemy’s deployment zone and
having Horomatangi pop out of it and eat my fine British Soldiers, Steven.
-Shark Tooth Necklace now lets you add suits in addition to
a plus flip for attacks, so beware the Frenzy.
-It’s not all good news. Devouring Eel Regeneration ability
now reduces damage by 1 for each token you discard, rather than auto reducing
damage to 0. Probably a good thing, as the eels were right with the Rhino in
terms of unkillability.
-Relics of Ancient Malifaux is limited to once per
activation. I’m sure there was an exploit of some kind to do it over and over
again that this is fixing.
There’s nothing
in here I disagree with, really. I didn’t think Margaret’s change was
absolutely necessary, but you can always spend the tactics token to do like you
used to. I wish they would have boosted Charles rather than nerfing the other
two, but what’re you gonna do? Lob artillery shells, I guess. The artillery
team costs 3 scrip, so I guess they may be worth at least trying out now. The
Burning Man rhinos needed to happen, and the Hordes needed boosting. All of
this is fine. I guess Abyssinia was basically perfect and balanced, so bully
for them. In any case, the balance has now been addressed. 10 Rhino lists are
not going to be a thing anymore, hopefully. Hordes are playable (they always
were, but I’m talking to the trolls in the comment threads now.) So, if you’re
reading this and you were thinking about giving the game a try, I encourage you
to do it. If you were going to sell off your stuff, maybe give it a second
chance. And if you’re still playing ToS, good for you. Now let’s get out there
and help the game grow. I like it a lot, and I don’t want to see it fail.