As of right now Steamroller says that you make your pairing from within an Army rather than a Faction and Im curious if this is the right way to go.
On the one hand, the limitation to an Army isn’t bad because it keeps balance potential tighter, the player is working on a much smaller set of potential interations.
But on the other, making a pairing is less potentially interesting because you don’t really have a large group of options to draw from to make a pairing. This is especially true if, for instance, you are playing an army where 1 of your casters simply isn’t up to snuff or as good as another caster in the Army like Madison vs Athena.
What do you guys think? Would you prefer if your pairing could be made within your faction? Or do you prefer it via Army?
For Note, I think Cygnar, Khador, etc Mk4 models would count as a different faction than legacy models.
I don’t see it changing because of the new Armies. The goal is for Cygnar and NuCygnar to not be able to work together.
It might be revisited when NuCygnar gets a second Army (Orgoth, and NuKhador too), but given their new focus I doubt it.
Yea this is a big post of it I think, since it would give some factions like Cygnar and Khador way more options than new factions like Orgothor Brinebloods or Dusk.
I think the ultimate solution to this will probably be balance updates to bring underperforming casters up to par. I do thing that a 4th caster for Mk4 Armies might ultimately be a good idea to increase variety.
It’s also possible thru do that once the new factions (including Mk4 Cygnar and Khador) have more than one Army. Since Legacy factions already have two armies doing it now would feel bad for Mk4 armies.
A benefit of doing it at Army level, is that you can have the ¿6? different Mercenary/Minions Armies at the same level of options than the rest of Armies.
The other way around you should have all the Mercs Armies to choose from.
Also, it puts the mini factions at a similar level.
I do think that a 4th caster would help a lot, and the Cadres if they are finally put in game.
I believe they mentioned in one of the primecasts that (some of?) the cadres would have a warcaster included - that’s my hope to increase the variety of choices in army building. Very much looking forward to those initial cadre releases.
I don’t know that they are doing Cadres as such anymore. All of the Legacy armies already have the support pieces built in, and when Battle Engines were introduced, they just added them to the army list.
I think that Cadres will still exist for the new armies, but we will need to see what happens.
It does seem like Cadres change a bit every time they’re mentioned. I think they probably had the idea up front that they might need a way to have models that work across armies but the exact form that may take seems to be evolving.
Yes and no? I think that Cadres will exist as a planning tool and marketing/sales concept.
For new MKIV stuff there will probably be Cadre boxes in the future, but the app will just lump them into their respective armies. Similar to how the new Mercs are.
I’d really prefer pairings be made within the Faction and not the Army for two reasons:
It allows me to build two lists that do different things so my opponent actually has to think about which list they want to drop. Right now if I want to play Devourer’s Host, both lists fundamentally do the same thing, regardless of my caster.
Trying to get old players back into the game and explaining that their Factions no longer exist and have been replaced by Armies is confusing. Last night at my LGS there were two folks interested in potentially getting back into WM who specifically asked if their old Cygnar models could possibly be used at all with the new Cygnar Storm Legion, or even if their old Cygnar models could be used with each other (like if they had Cryx, if they could use both Blackfleet and Dark Host models in the same pairing). We didn’t have a good answer for them and consequently, they were less enthused about getting back into the game.
The concept of Armies instead of Themes is clunky, especially when there is an existing concept of Faction which is still used in the rulebook. Really hoping this restriction of “Only make lists based on Army” is a temporary thing to balance the factions in process of being released. Long-term it leads to really restrictive list archetypes, as if back in MK3 players were always forced to create 2 lists from a single theme available to their faction.
A big problem with going to Faction pairings is that it’ll end up being even more confusing and uneven. Suddenly Khador and Cygnar have 50% more options than every other Legacy Faction, while Orgoth, Dusk, and Southern Kriels have 33% of the options of those two Factions. Or you have to create some new distinguisher for ‘new Khador’ and ‘new Cygnar’ that keeps Winter Korp and Storm Legion separate from the Legacy Armies, in which case you still end up with Legacy Factions having twice the options of Mk4 Factions until a second wave of Mk4 Armies releases for each Faction.
As is there’s a couple outliers (mostly Convergence IMO; Grymkin and CG have more Leaders than standard Armies but fewer of other model types than Convergence. Infernals actually is about the same size as a Mk4 Army I believe) but for the most part everyone has about the same amount of stuff. It can be a rough transition for some Legacy players depending on what models they owned, but frankly there was no way the transition was going to be smooth for everyone. At least this way is fairly even.
It won’t make it confusing, but it will definitely make some factions have the advantage of more models to choose from when building lists. Which really isn’t any different from the limited release factions like CG, Grymkin, and Convergence.
The current state is confusing where both Factions and Armies are mentioned for list construction, and in the app there are both tags for Faction and Army when looking at cards. Just have a single tag, not two.
I disagree, because of Cygnar and Khador. If Cygnar and Khador are allowed to build pairings from both their Mk4 and Legacy Armies they get a huge advantage, if not then you’re trapped in trying to explain why.
The easy way to explain the current system to Mk3 vets is “Armies are like Theme Forces with limited warcaster options, you have to build your pairing from a single Army.” If they skipped Mk2 you can cay “Armies are like Theme Forces but with 3 casters and no tier requirements, you have to build your pairing from a single Army.”
Yeah, this is 100% the best way to look at it. In a lot of ways, I wish that they had gotten rid of the Faction keyword, and just replaced it with Army instead.
I can get keeping Faction for Cadres and general aesthetic and organization, but that’s really all it is doing now.
