cordas said:
GhostWolf69 said:
I'm just saying; Not everyone will come into this game the way we did;, i.e. through buying the first wave of inf boxes and drooling at the minis, and now we're set to the teeth waiting for the "advanced" rules.
Some people will learn/hear of this game further down the road... and they might then make the easy mistake of buying the "rule book" first.
Fair enough comments, and they make a good arguement.
Oh, it's a fair comment, no question. It's just one of those arguments that I don't get. Like "all starship games must come with a construction system, or they suck": this is an extremely common meme in starship wargames, but I've never understood why. If you can have a fun game with the provided units, then it's an OK game. A construction system might be good too, but it's a question of what that displaces, in both physical rulebook space and in playtesting effort.
Here we're just dealing with rulebook space, since the playtesting obviously needs to get done anyway. But the cards are already published, and in multiple places. A summary table of unit point values and options might be nice, to aid in army construction, but I don't see paying more for cards that I've already got multiple copies of. I guess it is kind of nice in Warmachine Prime, but that meant they had to push off publishing their full campaign system for a year.
Which brings up my final point, that I don't think you want to just publish a smattering of units. Remember all those Wave 1 arguments about why the PLA would clean up against the USMC at certain point values? Now those arguments get codified in the main rulebook. I think if you're going to publish unit cards, you publish all of them; at least, all the ones you've got relatively well playtested. This lets people anticipate future releases, and play with proxies if they want (rather like the Internet release of cards, really). At worst you should go deep rather than wide: six units for two factions is better, to me, than three units for four factions. That lets people who want to test out the system actually get a feel for depth in the game, instead of being forced to play "1 USMC squad and an M1 against 2 PLA squads and a T-99" for the fifth time.
I guess I just wanted to post my view on the issue. I don't think GhostWolf is wrong; I think a lot of people probably will come at it as he says. But I also think a lot of people won't. Maybe I just felt like being a squeeky wheel today...