Thursday 17 August 2017

Warhammer 9th Ed 1.06 out now!

Some more changes here mainly meant to streamline some gameplay features a bit more. Some of these features were included in the first version of the 9th Age, and were solid enough that I think they are worth including.

  • Streamlined redirecting charges onto two fleeing enemies to "If this second unit also flees, you can instead choose to default back to charging the original fleeing unit". The original paragraph was unnecessarily convoluted.
  • Wounded Characters with Regeneration may regenerate while fleeing.
  • Parry can be used by Frenzied models, but not against Stomps (streamlines Frenzied models and makes them better with shields, while Stomps work the same as impact hits).
  • Shields no longer gives an additional bonus for infantry against missiles (fun idea, but a bit too fiddly in terms of gameplay. Feel free to houserule it if it's something you liked!).
  • Removed Stand and Fire special rule, now it's simply written under the relevant weapon entries (as it was very fiddly and too similar in name to Stand and Shoot).
  • Stomp causes D6 hits, no Initiative test is taken. This makes it on par with things like Impact Hits and template weapons that works in a similar fashion.
  • Units costing less than 50 points must all deploy at the same time - this solves the issue of players deploying cheap chaff while the opponent must deploy bigger, more expensive units. 
  • Infantry and Cavalry may be deployed on 40mm bases (in the case of Blightkings and Pegasi for example).
  • Clarified that Characters may only join a unit if they can fit in the front rank (some leftovers from 8th ed were still in there, confusing things).
  • Units with less than 25% of the unit left rally on half their Ld value, rather than double 1. This gives you a bit of better chance of rallying the remains rather than just blind luck.
  • Removed Insane Courage - while fun for the player who rolls it, it takes away some of the tactics when a superiour force fails to break a unit due to a lucky roll.
  • Overkill nerfed to a maximum of +3.
  • Characters who refuse a challenge cannot attack or use their Ld as before, but is otherwise left in the front rank. This saves the issue of having to fiddle around with moving the models while in combat, and means you cannot attempt to hide your wizards in combat. 
  • Units still in combat after a round must always maximise the number of models fighting, which means "shuffling" the smaller unit closer after reforming if necessary.
  • Fixed some layout bugs.

For future updates, I'm also planning on adding diagrams to explain different combat situations more easily, as well as art and further layout improvements to take it out of its beta-like stage.

If there are other things from 9th Age or simply things you think could be streamlined further, let me know in the comments.

Friday 11 August 2017

Choosing between 8th and 9th ed books

Update: Decided to close to poll as I have gotten plenty enough votes now. 60% preferred 9th ed compared to 40% for 8th ed, so 9th ed seems to be a quite a bit more popular. As such, all books from now on will be updated in the 9th ed format, but 8th ed books will still get rules updates in a Ravening Hordes format so people who prefer 8th Ed can still keep playing it. I won't remove the 8th ed books for the time being as they are still updated, but in the next rotation they will be replaced with Ravening Hordes versions. Thanks for everyone who voted!

Up until this point, I have been trying to make two versions of each book, but I've realised that this is causing quite a lot of issues with making future updates that does not simply involve changing the rules, as I have to fix things like layout, artwork, text additions and spelling errors twice. On top of this, the amount of books to keep updated (around 60 with both versions) means I'm likely to run out of space on my Google Drive account soon.

As such, I've decided to only make a single version of each army book. I will still support both 8th and 9th ed with rules updates (one of them will get them in a Ravening Hordes format), but only one of the editions will get a full army book. Seeing as the books themselves are pretty similar, this should not be a huge issue since you can use one for reading and one for gameplay, but it will make it a lot easier for me to keep them updated.

However, I am as of yet undecided which edition should get the full version and which should get the "lite"-version. On my part it does not really matter since the background will be the same regardless, so in that regard I'd like to get some feedback from you guys which version you prefer. Just choose one of the options to the left of the webpage. After 20 days, I will close the poll and pick the edition with the most votes.